Caravaggio — Magdalene in Ecstasy / Maddalena in Estasi

Free
Exhibition
Visual Art

Directorate of Accounts
First Floor

14th December - 21st December
11:00 AM - 07:00 PM

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The presentation of Caravaggio’s Magdalene in Ecstasy at the Serendipity Arts Festival in Goa marks an exceptional cultural event—one that forges an unprecedented dialogue between the power of classical painting and the vitality of contemporary artistic practice.

Exhibited for the first time in India within this context, the work brings to the festival an extraordinary moment of encounter: a masterpiece that embodies the origins of modern sensibility within the language of early seventeenth-century painting.

Caravaggio is often described as the first modern artist. This recognition arises not merely from his innovative use of light or his dramatic compositional strategies, but from the profound psycho-emotional involvement he demands of the viewer. In Magdalene in Ecstasy, the irruption of lived, palpable reality into the pictorial space draws the spectator into an almost physical proximity with the scene. The viewer becomes part of the experience, implicated in a moment suspended between spiritual intensity and human vulnerability. This radical collapse of distance—between image and observer, between representation and presence—marks a conceptual threshold that resonates deeply with contemporary artistic research.

A joint presentation by Serendipity Arts Festival, Embassy of Italy in India, Consulate General of Italy in Mumbai, Italian Embassy Cultural Centre New Delhi, Istituto Italiano di Cultura di Mumbai, and MetaMorfosi Cultural Association.