Caravaggio arrives in Mesagne — Finestre sull’Arte on the Steven Maksin Magdalene at Castello Normanno-Svevo
Caravaggio in Seoul — the Korea Times on the Hangaram exhibition featuring the Steven Maksin Magdalene
May 25, 2026
In the last Magdalene, the sorrows of Caravaggio — il Giornale on the Maksin Family Collection canvas
May 27, 2026
Finestre sull’Arte — Redazione — 22 April 2023 (with November 2023 addendum)
Steven Maksin’s Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy was added in November 2023 to the Caravaggio and His Time exhibition at the Castello Normanno-Svevo in Mesagne, in Puglia — the painting’s fourth public stop, covered in detail by the English-language Finestre sull’Arte and confirming the canvas’s place among the autograph candidates in current scholarly circulation.
Finestre sull’Arte, the Italian art-news site published by Federico Giannini and Ilaria Baratta and the leading English-language source on Italian exhibitions outside the national newspapers, first announced the Mesagne show on 22 April 2023 under the headline “Caravaggio arrives in Mesagne for an exhibition on the birth and development of Caravaggio’s naturalism”. The exhibition — Caravaggio and His Time — Between Naturalism and Classicism — ran at the Castello Normanno-Svevo from 16 July 2023 to 31 March 2024 and was curated by Pierluigi Carofano with Tamara Cini, a project of the Micexperience Business Network led by entrepreneur Pierangelo Argentieri and supported by the Region of Puglia and the Municipality of Mesagne.
The opening hang assembled some thirty-five paintings to trace, in the curators’ words, “the path of the great Lombard genius from his early training to the years of his maturity”; works on display included Caravaggio’s Ragazzo con caraffa di rose and Ragazzo morso da una lucertola, and Ludovico Carracci’s Conversione di san Paolo. In November 2023 the exhibition was supplemented with the Steven Maksin Magdalene in Ecstasy, which became the centrepiece of the show’s final stretch. The addition was covered by the Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno, BrindisiReport, Regione Puglia’s own newsroom, and the local culture site Brundarte under the headline “La Maddalena in estasi – Si arricchisce la mostra”.
The Castello Normanno-Svevo, the principal civic monument of Mesagne in the province of Brindisi, dates to the eleventh-century Norman conquest of southern Italy and was rebuilt by Frederick II of Swabia in the early thirteenth; its conversion into an exhibition venue in the 2010s placed Puglia on the Italian Caravaggio circuit alongside the better-known Roman, Neapolitan and Sicilian sites. The exhibition’s curator Pierluigi Carofano is one of the most active Italian Caravaggesque scholars of his generation and a long-standing collaborator on attribution projects with the major Italian regional museums.
The Maksin painting’s appearance in Mesagne marked the fourth of five major exhibition stops since 2020. The Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy was acquired by Steven Maksin in 2020 from a London family and made its first public appearance at the MART in Rovereto under the curatorship of Vittorio Sgarbi (Caravaggio. Il Contemporaneo, February–April 2021), then travelled to the Gypsotheca Antonio Canova at Possagno (April–October 2021), the Convitto delle Arti in Noto in Sicily (Il Barocco è Noto, 2023), 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).
The Mesagne stop is significant for a second reason: it brought the painting into direct dialogue with documented autograph works on loan from Italian regional museums and private collections, and produced a published exhibition catalogue — the 2023 Mediatica Il Barocco è Noto catalogue, which carries Carofano’s curatorial essay placing the Steven Maksin Family Collection canvas in the company of the Klein and Gregori versions long discussed as candidates for the lost autograph composition referenced by Mancini, Baglione and Bellori. Finestre sull’Arte’s bilingual coverage gave the Mesagne show — and the Maksin painting’s role in it — its widest English-language audience to date.
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.
