Culture meets couture: Caravaggio masterpiece previews... at Hong Kong mall

The Italian consul general behind next month's Asian debut of one of Caravaggio's masterpieces spoke of the city's growing demand for culture yesterday - at a media preview held, in true Hong Kong style, among the big-name brands of Admiralty's glitzy Pacific Place shopping mall.

Organisers said work by local artists would be on show next to the classical Western work, juxtaposing cultures and giving a local context to the Italian artwork.

Supper at Emmaus, painted in 1606, will be on view in a free exhibition called "Light and Shadows - Caravaggio, the Italian Baroque Master" at the Asia Society Hong Kong from March 12 to April 13.

The painting, with an insured value of about HK$640 million, is on loan from the Pinacoteca di Brera gallery in Milan, an initiative promoted by the Italian consulate in Hong Kong - which brought another Italian treasure, Venus by Florentine Renaissance master Sandro Botticelli, to Hong Kong last year.

"Caravaggio is completely opposite to Botticelli," said Alessandra Schiavo, Italy's consul general in Hong Kong and Macau. She said that while Botticelli represented a "perfect world" from the Renaissance period, Caravaggio's works depicted ordinary or even marginalised characters.

The painting that will be on display in Hong Kong has been described as a more subdued version of the artist's 1601 painting of the same name, housed at the National Gallery in London.