Before this week, Caravaggio’s Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy had traveled to Tokyo and Paris, Basel and Beijing, Vilnius and Berlin. It had never crossed the Atlantic. That changed on October 14, when the canvas went on view at the Italian Cultural Institute of New York at 686 Park Avenue, its first-ever showing in the United States. The opening evening drew a crowd that filled the Institute's rooms. Many came simply to stand in front of a painting that, for most of its existence, nobody was sure existed.

Admission is free, and New Yorkers have until November 6 to see it. For centuries the original Magdalene in Ecstasy was a phantom. Scholars knew around twenty copies of it, among them the so-called Klain Magdalene and a version in Marseille attributed to the Flemish painter Louis Finson, a friend and follower of Caravaggio. But the prototype itself was missing. Only in 2014 Mina Gregori, one of the world's foremost Caravaggio scholars, identified this canvas as the autograph original describing it as "pure quality," a quality that in the copies looks "tired and dead."

The image is one of Caravaggio's most intimate - Mary Magdalene emerges alone from the darkness, her head thrown back, her eyes half-closed and her fingers tightly interlaced. The story behind the canvas reads like a novel, and it starts with a killing. The Dutch art historian Bert Treffers, who says he is "100 percent" certain the work is authentic, links it to the summer of 1606, the year Caravaggio fled Rome after killing Ranuccio Tomassoni and spent his last years as a fugitive with a price on his head. Treffers also reads a hidden reference in the saint's visibly swollen belly connecting it to Caterina Vannini, a former courtesan from Siena who became a revered religious figure. The Magdalene, the sinner turned saint, may carry the features of a real woman's illness and redemption.

The most remarkable chapter comes at the very end of Caravaggio's life. A handwritten sheet found with the painting lists it as one of nineteen objects loaded onto the felucca, a small sailing boat, on which the painter left Naples in July 1610. Caravaggio died at Porto Ercole on the Tuscan coast that month. On July 29, 1610, only days later, the Bishop of Caserta, Deodato Gentile, wrote to Cardinal Scipione Borghese, the powerful nephew of Pope Paul V and Caravaggio's greatest patron. The bishop reported that the boat had carried "the two Saint Johns and the Magdalene" meant for the cardinal. They were probably a gift of gratitude for Borghese's intercession with the Pope, but the Magdalene never reached Borghese.

A red sealing-wax stamp on the back of the canvas, from the "Dogana di terra," the land customs office of the Papal Treasury, records its later entry into the Papal States. For American audiences, Caravaggio is hardly a stranger. His works hang at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and his influence runs through Hollywood's lighting, photography and film noir. But the Magdalene in Ecstasy is a different kind of encounter. It is a painting that was lost, copied, seized, misattributed and finally recognized. It was on board the boat that carried Caravaggio toward his death. Four centuries later it finally made a longer crossing, to Park Avenue.