Attributed to Michelangelo Merisi Caravaggio (1573- 1610), Ecce Homo, 1605-1609 ?, Oil on canvas, 128 x 103 cm, Palazzo Bianco, Genoa
On the evening of 29 July 1605, a young notary named Mariano Pasqualone di Accumoli staggered into the criminal court offices in Rome with a wound to the back of his head. He had been struck down, he said, near the Piazza Navona, and he was certain of his assailant: Michelangelo da Caravaggio, the painter. The cause of the attack was a woman called Lena, described in the complaint as standing in the Piazza Navona and identified bluntly as “donna di Michelangelo.” Pasqualone, who served the Cardinal Vicar, was no insignificant target, and within days Caravaggio had fled Rome by sea for Genoa, where the protection of powerful allies, among them Giovanna Colonna Doria (d. 1620), wife of Andrea II Doria (1546–1606), and the collectors Ottavio Costa (c. 1554–1639) and Vincenzo Giustiniani (1564–1637), offered a brief shelter. The painter was gone for roughly three weeks. He had signed a contract only a month earlier, on 25 June, promising the Roman nobleman Massimo Massimi a painting described as being of the same size and value as a Crowning with Thorns he had already delivered to the same patron. The subject was an Ecce Homo. The deadline was the beginning of August. Whether that painting was ever finished, and whether the canvas now in Genoa’s Palazzo Bianco has anything to do with it, remains one of the more tangled questions in Caravaggio scholarship.
The painting shows the three-figure composition compressed into a tight foreground plane: Christ, crowned with thorns and stripped of agency, stands between Pontius Pilate, dressed in contemporary black, and a young tormentor who draws a purple robe across Christ’s shoulders while looking out toward the viewer with wide, startled eyes. What is immediately unusual is the treatment of Pilate. Where convention, and Caravaggio’s own contemporaries, tended to dress the Roman governor in orientalising robes, here he appears as a sombre seventeenth-century official, his gesture of presentation carrying something closer to resignation than authority. The torturer, too, departs from type: rather than the conventional grotesque (as seen in Ludovico Cigoli’s version of the same subject, painted for the same patron in 1607 and now in the Palazzo Pitti, Florence), the figure combines cruelty with a kind of arrested vulnerability. Is this Caravaggio thinking through the Passion as a scene of shared human culpability, or a follower imitating a compositional idea without fully understanding its psychological register? That question has never been satisfactorily answered.
The attribution history of the painting is itself a story of institutional neglect and persistent disagreement. The canvas first appears in the inventories of Palazzo Bianco only in the early 1920s, recorded without provenance as ‘Lionello Spada (copy).’ As Anna Orlando has noted, the ambiguity of that notation is telling: it could mean a copy by Spada, or a copy after Spada, or, by implication, a copy after Caravaggio in Spada’s manner. In 1929 the painting, evidently thought to be of modest value, was transferred to the Villa Cambiaso, and subsequently hung in a stairwell of the city’s Nautical School, where it remained through the Second World War. It was discovered in the Palazzo Ducale in 1953 by Caterina Marcenaro (1906–1976), then Director of Fine Arts for Genoa, who recognised something in the picture beyond the capabilities of any copyist. She sent it to Rome for restoration, and the following year Roberto Longhi (1890–1970), the foremost Caravaggio scholar of his generation, published it as an autograph work. That endorsement was decisive. For a time it appeared settled.
It was not. The restoration carried out in 1954 by Pico Cellini (1905–1979) was, by later assessments, particularly invasive. The painting had suffered severe degradation; parts of the canvas were, according to some accounts, nearly rotten. Cellini had to add several inches of new cloth to all four edges during relining, and the intervention may have extended to the addition of superficial shadows in darkened areas, making it, as one account put it, ‘difficult to judge with certainty the autography of the underlying painting.’ A further restoration in 2003 by Cristina Bonavera Parodi, using X-rays, infrared reflectography, UV fluorescence, and optical microscopy, revealed features more typically associated with an original invention than with a copy: pentimenti in Christ’s hands, shoulders, and loincloth, as well as incisions used to outline and revise the composition during painting. Mina Gregori (1924–2023) and Roberta Lapucci had already identified similar technical markers in their 1991 examination. These findings strengthened the case considerably, and John Spike, in his 2013 catalogue, accepted the painting as autograph.
The sceptics, however, have had their say, and their objections are not easily dismissed. Sebastian Schütze described the composition as ‘extremely cramped’ and noted a ‘fractured’ narrative structure that sits uncomfortably alongside Caravaggio’s more fluent arrangements of figures. He also pointed to the almost caricatured facial features of Pilate, which seem closer to the work of a follower who had absorbed the outer vocabulary of Caravaggio’s style without controlling its internal drama. The hands throughout the picture are unusually large, and the preparation of the ground appears poor in relation to Caravaggio’s known practice. Several alternative names have been proposed over the years: Lionello Spada (1576–1622), whose name was attached to the painting in its earliest inventory record; Bartolomeo Manfredi (1582–1622), whose own Ecce Homo (now in the Brooks Memorial Museum, Memphis) responds to a closely related composition; and, less plausibly, Santi di Tito (1536–1603), whose death in 1603 raises obvious chronological difficulties. Keith Christiansen, curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, has been more blunt: writing in the 2024 publication accompanying the Madrid Ecce Homo, he stated plainly that he believed Longhi erred in ascribing the Genoa picture to Caravaggio. The composition examined by Gianni Papi, he argued, related to the Madrid painting, not to the one in Genoa.
The emergence in April 2021 of a second Ecce Homo, at the Ansorena auction house in Madrid, has further destabilised an already uncertain situation. That painting, misattributed to a follower of José de Ribera (1591–1652) and given a starting estimate of €1,500, was almost immediately identified as a potential Caravaggio by staff at the Museo del Prado, who alerted the Spanish Ministry of Culture and secured a preemptive export ban. The consensus around the Madrid picture has been remarkably swift by the fractious standards of Caravaggio studies: Maria Cristina Terzaghi (Roma Tre), Gianni Papi, Giuseppe Porzio (University of Naples), and Christiansen all contributed essays to the accompanying publication, Caravaggio: The Ecce Homo Unveiled (Marsilio Arte, 2024), and all four accepted the painting as autograph. Terzaghi traced the provenance to the collection of Don Garcia de Avellaneda y Haro, Viceroy of Naples between 1653 and 1659, and from there into the Spanish royal collection, where it was recorded in the Real Alcázar in 1666. By 1789 it hung at the Casa de Campo; it later passed through the hands of Manuel Godoy (1767–1851), the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, and, from 1823, the Pérez de Castro family, in whose possession it remained until its dramatic reappearance.
What does the Madrid painting do to the Genoa one? Not what its champions might have hoped. The two compositions share the same subject but differ significantly in arrangement, tonality, and psychological effect. Where the Genoa picture compresses its figures into a frontal plane, the Madrid version activates the space along a receding diagonal, creating what Christiansen described as a ‘dramatic crescendo’ from Pilate to Christ to the young attendant behind. The Madrid painting is larger (111 × 86 cm, though still smaller than Cigoli’s Pitti version), and its tonality is cooler, its handling more assured. The question is unavoidable: could Caravaggio, who routinely broke with his own conventions and whose late oeuvre is notorious for its unevenness, have painted both? Or does the superiority of the Madrid composition suggest that the Genoa picture is the work of a follower who knew the general scheme (perhaps through one of the Sicilian copies recorded in Messina) without having had access to the fully resolved original?
Terzaghi’s identification of the Madrid canvas with the 1631 Lezcano inventory entry has been contested by Christiansen on grounds of scale. The Lezcano record describes the painting in detail, noting an Ecce Homo with Pilate presenting Christ to the people and an attendant dressing him from behind in a purple robe, valued at the exceptionally high sum of 800 ducats and attributed to Caravaggio. The entry also specifies a ‘quadro grande,’ a large painting, yet both the Madrid and Genoa canvases are considerably smaller than Cigoli’s Pitti painting, which the 1607 receipt describes as the companion piece to Caravaggio’s commission. If the two works were intended as pendants, as the seventeenth-century usage of ‘quadro compagnio’ strongly implies, they should have been of comparable dimensions. Neither candidate fits comfortably.The painting Caravaggio promised Massimi in 1605 may never have been completed at all.
Where, then, does this leave the Genoa canvas? The painting holds its ground in the Musei di Strada Nuova, attributed to Caravaggio without the kind of qualifying language, ‘school of’ or ‘circle of,’ that would formally downgrade it. The 2019 conference at the Palazzo della Meridiana, curated by Orlando and accompanying the exhibition Caravaggio and the Genoese: Clients, Collectors, Painters, took stock of all positions without reaching resolution. Orlando and Bonavera have continued to argue for the picture’s autograph status on technical grounds, while Porzio and others have situated the composition within the broader matrix of Caravaggio’s Neapolitan and Sicilian output, where a looser, more improvised handling was in any case the norm. One of the more suggestive details noted by Porzio concerns the young attendant’s face, drawn from shadow by the gleam of his eyes alone, a motif that recurs in the servant figure of the Denial of Saint Peter (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), a painting generally dated to Caravaggio’s late period. But Maurizio Marini (1943–2011) and Spike both placed the Denial around 1607, complicating any neat chronological alignment with a late dating for the Genoa picture. John Gash has proposed 1609, linking the painting to a documented commission from Niccolò di Giacomo of Messina for four Stories of the Passion, though whether the Ecce Homo was among the subjects executed for that commission remains uncertain.
Whatever the final verdict on its authorship, and it may never come, the painting deserves attention on its own terms. The figure of Christ is genuinely moving: eyes closed, hands bound, head slightly bowed, his passivity is not that of a theological abstraction but of a particular body in a particular moment of physical and psychological exhaustion. If this is the work of a follower, it is the work of someone who had looked very closely at how Caravaggio thought through the relationship between sacred narrative and lived experience, someone who understood that the power of the image lay in its refusal to idealise suffering. That, in itself, is worth reckoning with.
References
Barbiellini Amidei, R. (1987) ‘Ecce Homo for Massimo Massimi’, in Caravaggio: nuove riflessioni. Quaderni di Palazzo Venezia, 6. Rome: Fratelli Palombi
Christiansen, K. (2024) ‘The Madrid Ecce Homo and Caravaggio’s Late Works’, in Christiansen, K., Papi, G., Porzio, G. and Terzaghi, M.C. (eds.) Caravaggio: The Ecce Homo Unveiled. Venice: Marsilio Arte, pp. 107–157
Di Fabio, C. (1997) ‘Caravaggio’s Ecce Homo in Palazzo Bianco’, in Van Dyck a Genova: grande pittura e collezionismo. Exhibition catalogue. Milan: Electa
Gregori, M. and Lapucci, R. (1991) ‘Technical examination of the Ecce Homo’, in Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio: come nascono i capolavori. Exhibition catalogue. Florence: Electa
Longhi, R. (1954) ‘Il vero Caravaggio nell’Ecce Homo di Genova’, Paragone, 5(51), pp. 3–10.
Orlando, A. (ed.) (2019) Caravaggio e i Genovesi: committenti, collezionisti, pittori. Exhibition catalogue. Genoa: Sagep Editori.
Porzio, G. (2024) ‘Caravaggio in Naples and the Ecce Homo’, in Christiansen, K., Papi, G., Porzio, G. and Terzaghi, M.C. (eds.) Caravaggio: The Ecce Homo Unveiled. Venice: Marsilio Arte, pp. 73–105
Priarone, M. (2011) ‘Il percorso critico dell’Ecce Homo di Palazzo Bianco’, in La Pittura a Genova e in Liguria. 2nd edn. Genoa: Sagep Editori, pp. 89–115
Schütze, S. (2015) Caravaggio: The Complete Works. Cologne: Taschen
Spike, J.T. (2013) Caravaggio. 2nd edn. New York: Abbeville Press
Terzaghi, M.C. (2024) ‘The Provenance of the Madrid Ecce Homo’, in Christiansen, K., Papi, G., Porzio, G. and Terzaghi, M.C. (eds.) Caravaggio: The Ecce Homo Unveiled. Venice: Marsilio Arte, pp. 15–71
Vannugli, A. (2009) ‘La collezione di Juan de Lezcano’, Paragone, 60(85), pp. 3–47
