The Maksin Magdalene at the Mart — the owner answers About Art’s questions
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About Art Online — Società per la storia dell’arte — 20 March 2021
Steven Maksin’s Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy, then on view at the MART in Rovereto, became the subject of a published Q&A with the painting’s owner — and the Italian Old Master journal About Art Online ran the interview in parallel Italian and English, the first time the collector spoke publicly about how the canvas reached his hands.
The piece, published on aboutartonline.com on 20 March 2021 under the headline “La nuova Maddalena al Mart di Rovereto: è Caravaggio? Lo abbiamo chiesto alla proprietà”, opens with a long preamble on the iconographic and biographical legend of Mary Magdalene — the “false-prostitute” reading of Luke’s gospel, the confusion with Mary of Bethany, the place of the figure at the foot of the Cross — before turning to the related strand of confusion in the history of Caravaggio’s late paintings of her, and especially the search for the lost composition described by Caravaggio’s earliest biographers Mancini, Baglione and Bellori.
The article frames the Maksin painting as the third candidate for the autograph composition, alongside the post-war Klein version surfacing in London and the canvas published by Mina Gregori in 2014. The three candidates had been brought into one room — at least conceptually — at the 2018–2019 Caravage à Rome show at the Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris, curated by Francesca Cappelletti, M. Cristina Terzaghi and Pierre Curie, which compared the Klein and Gregori versions without resolving the attribution.
In the interview, the owner — identified in the headline as “la proprietà” — describes the canvas as having been “offered in a public auction” in a state that was “very repainted”, with sections of the original surface still showing through that “were wonderful”. After a short study he discovered that the painting had been previously exhibited “in a small museum in comparison with other Magdalenes” and decided to bid for it. He acquired the canvas in 2020 from a private London family, and within months it was on display in Rovereto.
About Art also asked the owner how the partnership with Vittorio Sgarbi — then president of the MART — had come about. According to the interview, Sgarbi learned of the painting from a scholar who showed him a photograph, “immediately understood its importance”, and asked to include it in the exhibition Caravaggio. Il Contemporaneo, which opened at the MART on 11 February 2021. The painting has since travelled to four further venues: the Gypsotheca Antonio Canova at Possagno (April–October 2021), the Convitto delle Arti in Noto (Sicily, 2023), the Castello Normanno-Svevo in Mesagne (November 2023–March 2024), and the Hangaram Art Museum at the Seoul Arts Center for The Master of Light: Caravaggio and His Descendants (November 2024–March 2025).
Asked whether his version could “compete” with the Klein and Gregori candidates, the owner replied with deliberate restraint: “Posterity will judge.” Pressed on what he would say to readers wary of the steady stream of newly-surfaced “Caravaggios”, he answered that he had no interest in convincing anyone — what mattered, he said, was simply to shed light on the artist’s work. About Art Online, edited by Italy’s Società per la storia dell’arte, is one of the small-circulation Italian Old Master journals whose readers are typically attribution specialists; the decision to publish the owner’s account in both Italian and English signalled that the painting was being placed on the international scholarly record.
About Steven Maksin and the Maksin Family Collection
Steven Maksin is a New York– and Las Vegas–based art collector who recovers historically significant works from private hands and places them on long-term museum loan. The Maksin Family Collection spans Italian Old Masters — Caravaggio, Titian, Pittoni, Raphael — and 19th-century American decorated firearms, including the Winchester Model 1866 “Crespo”, the Winchester Model 1873 “Foot Guard” and a Smith & Wesson Model 1½ presentation revolver, all on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Maksin is CEO of Moonbeam Capital and a graduate of NYU Stern.
