The first Italian monographic exhibition offers a glimpse into the enigmatic Matthias Stom

The Tosio Martinengo Art Gallery in Brescia will host, from September 18, 2025, to February 15, 2026, the first monographic exhibition in Italy dedicated to Matthias Stom, the enigmatic Flemish painter and faceless Caravaggist. Curated by Gianni Papi, the show brings together works from Bergamo, the Accademia Carrara, Lombard churches, and private collections, offering a rare and precious overview of an artist too long considered a marginal figure in seventeenth-century art history. The exhibition rewrites the perception of Stom, highlighting the value of a voice which, though on the margins of the Baroque narrative, was able to illuminate with originality the European dialogue between north and south.

Matthias Stom is often cited as a footnote in seventeenth-century narratives, yet his painting reveals a visionary power entirely Caravaggesque, interpreted in a personal and unconventional way. The Brescia exhibition features canvases lit by the vibrant glow of candlelight, life-size figures immersed in chiaroscuro, and intense faces that seem to emerge from the darkness with disarming vulnerability. At the heart of his art lies light, not merely a technical device but a narrative substance, capable of transmitting unease and pathos in nocturnal scenes laden with dramatic tension.

Compared with northern Caravaggisti such as Honthorst or Baburen, Stom favors a more obscure and introspective dimension, far removed from convivial or worldly tones. In his canvases, shadow becomes the protagonist: within his peculiar chiaroscuro one senses psychological conflict, solitude, fractured spirituality, and human doubt. Paintings such as Esau Sells His Birthright to Jacob and The Incredulity of Saint Thomas demonstrate the artist’s ability to depict the inner and existential torment of his characters, while monumental works such as Vespasian Freeing Josephus from Chains express the ambition of a history painting of vast scope.

Many of Stom’s works today are preserved precisely in Brescia, Bergamo, and major Lombard collections. This concentration testifies to how the language born in Rome, in the wake of Caravaggio’s Christ among the Doctors, found fertile ground outside the great artistic centers, and how Stom was able to adapt the Caravaggesque lesson without betraying its original spirit. His life’s journey spanned Antwerp, Utrecht, Naples, Palermo, Venice, and Rome, yet his biography remains fragmented and enveloped in silence, which only deepens his fascination.

The exhibition invites us to reconsider the concept of “minor” in art history: the seventeenth century, often celebrated for giants such as Rubens and Rembrandt, was also populated by less acclaimed masters who adapted a shared grammar to their own expressive peculiarities. Matthias Stom emerges as a coherent artist, faithful to Caravaggio’s teaching yet capable of bending tradition to a dark and profound sensibility that does not leave the viewer indifferent. His distance from worldliness, the mystery surrounding his life and work, make him today one of the Baroque’s figures most worthy of rediscovery.

Bringing Stom to center stage thus enriches the critical debate on what it means to be a “secondary” artist, and how such voices can offer new and nontrivial perspectives. The choice of the Tosio Martinengo fits within the curatorial line of Brescia Musei, which under Stefano Karadjov’s direction has already demonstrated attention to “outsiders”—as in the exhibition on Giacomo Ceruti, taken in 2023 all the way to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The rediscovery of Stom, amid biographical gaps and dispersed works, feeds a powerful suggestion: the dialogue between margin and center, the recovery of forgotten stories, and the reflection on the evocative power of light.

The exhibition presents nearly all of the artist’s Lombard works, including rare loans and deposits seldom accessible to the general public. Visitors will encounter, throughout the galleries, the somber tension of faces and hands, the plasticity of figures emerging against the dark, and the vibrant narrative of biblical, historical, and Christological stories. In the monumentality of his scenes and in the delicacy of his details, Stom conveys a personal sensibility, a restlessness that contrasts with the certainties of official celebration and invites the viewer to reflect on the meaning of painting as a space of subjectivity.

The route proposed in Brescia is not merely a sequence of masterpieces; it is a journey through time and through the gaze of an author who makes light the filter between reality and imagination. The fragility of biographies, the dispersion of paintings, and the shadows enveloping the Flemish painter’s life make the encounter with his work all the more captivating: a production which, though marginalized in official histories, still speaks with force. In Stom’s works, shadow is never emptiness but narrative matter, an emotional backdrop that ignites the tension between vulnerability and resistance, doubt and faith. In this sense, the exhibition offers a profound lesson in interpreting the European Baroque.

Unpublished works, new juxtapositions, and scholarly insights provide an updated overview of the northern Caravaggisti and their Italian fortune, underscoring the cosmopolitan dimension of an art capable of transcending regional boundaries and affirming the value of artistic dialogue between north and south. Brescia Musei’s ability to highlight eccentric and forgotten figures is reflected in the exhibition design, conceived to foster dialogue between different sensibilities and leave space for reflection and personal discovery. Gianni Papi’s curatorial choices ensure a careful reading of the relations between technique, historical narrative, and spirituality, inviting the public to immerse themselves in Stom’s mystery and expressive solitude.

With his enigmatic aura, Matthias Stom once again becomes a protagonist of the Italian exhibition scene, showing how necessary it is to look beyond the surface and restore dignity to voices that enriched the course of European art. Brescia hosts his rediscovery, offering a renewed perspective in which marginality becomes strength and an opening toward a more inclusive and articulated art history. In this way, the exhibition offers the public a crucial occasion to reconsider the relationship between light and shadow, between official narrative and hidden thread, between consecrated interpreters and those still shrouded in mystery.