Vita gazette – Caravaggio’s Bacchus will be shown at the Vinitaly trade fair in Verona this spring. Art and heritage campaign group Mi Riconosci has described the plans as “absurd” and “unacceptable”, arguing that government rules prohibit paintings from leaving the museum.

In a deal between the Uffizi and Italy’s culture and agriculture ministries, Caravaggio’s Bacchus, which shows a boy reclining with vines in his hair, will be displayed in an as-yet unspecified location at the Vinitaly wine fair alongside Guido Reni’s Boy Bacchus (around 1630-1640), another work owned by the Florence museum. Running from 2 to 5 April and expected to draw around 4,000 wine producers, the fair is a flagship for Italy’s wine industry that generated €7.4bn in exports in 2022, making wine Italy’s biggest export last year. The Uffizi is being paid for the two loans.

However, Mi Riconosci argues in an article posted on its website that the loan does not conform with culture ministry guidelines published in 2008 outlining the circumstances in which state museum loans can take place, adding that the work appears in a “List of immovable works” published by the Uffizi in September 2022.

Fabrizio Moretti, a Uffizi scientific committee member, expressed perplexity that the work was being loaned for a “commercial” rather than an “intellectual” cause. At the same time, the Bari University archaeologist Giulio Volpe said he is “absolutely not against such operations, even if they may appear commercial,” Il Fatto Quotidiano reports. The Uffizi’s website, meanwhile, states that while “immovable” works cannot be exported internationally, it does not rule out domestic loans. The museum was contacted by The Art Newspaper and declined to comment.

The government has presented the wine fair as part of its objection to the European Commission’s decision in January to give Ireland the green light to display health warning labels on alcoholic beverage containers, including bottles of wine.

Unveiling plans for Vinitaly last week, agriculture minister Francesco Lollobrigida told journalists the Uffizi paintings would help “elevate” wine, a product he said the Irish government had “stigmatised”.