New York and Bergamo look to the future together, thanks to art and solidarity.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has granted the loan of I musici di Caravaggio to the Bergamo museum until
at the end of the summer, a great gesture of international generosity is thus realized and, at the same time, the possibility for the Accademia Carrara to reopen its doors, welcoming the public with a surprise.

It is not an easy time for culture either. While we think about how to redesign our future, museums do their part, for the social function that is their own, making themselves available to the community. Carrara is preparing to do so, in continuity with its origins and its history. Exhibiting the work of a great Italian artist, like Caravaggio , popular all over the world for his ability to involve and conquer, yesterday as today, means drawing attention to the importance of the role of culture through which to recognize the own identity, overcome difficulties and reopen to the world.

In the painting, three young people are engaged in a musical entertainment - among them the painter who self-portrays himself - according to a widespread practice and represented here in a scene of decisive modernity with that figure who gives us his back and whose features we can perceive through the profile just mentioned. Sophisticated image, but also rich in elements that draw on reality, an announcement of one of the artist's most original fields of investigation.


The work, now housed in the most important museum in the United States, testifies to the solid alliance between Carrara and the Metropolitan Museum and the solidarity that currently unites Bergamo to New York , a city severely tested by the health emergency. The musicians concluded the itinerary of the exhibition Titian and Caravaggio in Peterzano, a pupil of Titian and master of Caravaggio, which was obscured after just three weeks of opening. La Carrara restarts from its collections and from this act of generosity of the American museum, which has indulged the desire to exhibit this early painting by Caravaggio in the heart of the art gallery. Special thanks to director Max Hollein and to Keith Christiansen, Chairman of the Department of European Paintings The Metropolitan Museum of Art New York.