Disputed Caravaggio Magdalene goes on show in New York

A painting attributed to Caravaggio by Mina Gregori in 2014 has gone on public display in the United States for the first time. Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy opened at the Italian Cultural Institute in New York on 14 October and remains on view until 6 November.

Lent from a 'Swiss private collection', the picture is being presented by the organisers as an autograph work from Caravaggio’s final years. Its arrival offers American visitors an opportunity to examine a painting whose attribution has attracted both distinguished support and explicit scholarly opposition.

The attribution turns on the relationship between this canvas and a composition long familiar through copies. Gregori identified the privately owned painting as Caravaggio’s lost original in 2014. Another candidate, generally known as the Klain Magdalene, had already attracted support, including that of the scholar Maurizio Marini.

The two versions were brought together at the Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris in 2018. That comparison exposed the distance between the confidence of individual advocates and any wider agreement. Reporting on the exhibition, The Art Newspaper recorded Gert Jan van der Sman’s view that both pictures were seventeenth-century copies of a lost or unidentified original. John Gash also expressed scepticism about the version endorsed by Gregori.

The Paris curators deliberately left the question open. In an interview with About Art On Line, Maria Cristina Terzaghi explained that the exhibition presented the existing opinions and allowed scholars and visitors to compare the pictures. Gregori contributed the catalogue entry defending her candidate; the entry for the Klain version summarised the competing scholarly positions.

The chronology is also unsettled. Dates around 1606 and 1610 have been proposed. Terzaghi discussed affinities between the Gregori painting and Caravaggio’s late Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, while acknowledging the complexity of the problem. The New York publicity dates the painting to the artist’s final years and identifies it with a Magdalene carried on his last journey in 1610. That identification forms part of the attribution case and should be understood as such.

The canvas has continued to travel while the debate remains unresolved. In 2025 it was exhibited at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi, where it was promoted as the first Caravaggio shown in India. The Art Newspaper’s coverage again drew attention to the continuing disagreement. New York now provides another opportunity for direct examination. Such access is valuable, particularly for a work otherwise held privately.

Caravaggio: Maddalena in estasi, Italian Cultural Institute, 686 Park Avenue, New York, 14 October-6 November 2026. Admission free.