Caravaggio’s art is made from darkness and light. His pictures present spotlit moments of extreme and often agonized human experience.
– Andrew Graham-Dixon, Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane
The most important artist of the 17th century, Caravaggio was a revolutionary who forever changed art.
Abandoning the highly idealized figures and heavenly settings dominant at the time, Caravaggio painted flawed human beings in contemporary surroundings. He highlighted emotions and pioneered a spotlight effect to increase drama and illuminate key figures while leaving large portions of canvas in darkness. Above all, he a condensed each story into a single moment in time breaking the “fourth wall” to allow audiences to be a part of the scene.
Flawed himself, Caravaggio often incorporated self-portraits in his works. Like his characters, he was emotional and larger than life, a visionary with a fragile ego and contentious nature but with a talent that could not be contained. Before 2026 Robie and I had never heard the name Michelangelo Merisi. After three months in Italy, we became acquainted with the artist known simply as Caravaggio.
London & Dublin
Before we thought about chasing Caravaggio across Italy, in September 2024 Robie and I saw the artist’s Taking of Christ in Dublin, a scene depicting Jesus’ betrayal in the Garden of Gethsemane.
Painted during the height of his career, the work encapsulates Caravaggio’s style of stark, religious immediacy over sprawling Biblical scenes. In capturing the condensed and dramatic moment of Judas’ betrayal, Caravaggio contrasted the soldiers’ dark armor with Christ’s resignation. The painting, with a self-portrait in the far right, was lost for nearly 200 years and misattributed to another artist when it was found hanging in the dining hall of the Dublin Jesuits in the 1990s.
In January this year, Robie and I found three of Caravaggio’s works during a trip to The National Gallery in London.
On the third day after the Crucifixion two of Jesus’s disciples were walking to Emmaus when they met the resurrected Christ. Though they failed to recognize him, that evening at supper Jesus “… took the bread and blessed it and broke it and gave it to them. And their eyes were opened, and they recognized him. And he vanished out of their sight.” (Luke 24: 30–31)
Supper at Emmaus vividly captures the dramatic climax, the moment when the disciples, depicted as ordinary workmen wearing ragged clothes suddenly see what has been in front of them all along. Their actions convey their astonishment. One leaps out of his chair while the other throws his arms out in disbelief.
Also in The National Gallery is Caravaggio’s Salome receives the Head of John the Baptist.
Reduced to the story’s essentials, Caravaggio focuses on the human impact in an emotional scene with a pronounced play between light and dark. As the brutish executioner places John’s head on a plate, Salome gives an enigmatic sidelong look and an elderly maidservant clasps her hands in grief.
In the same gallery is Boy bitten by a Lizard, one of Caravaggio’s earlier works.
Painted not long after the young artist left his unhappy apprenticeship at a studio in Rome, this piece displays Caravaggio’s talent with still lifes as fruit, a rose and sprig of jasmine are depicted in the foreground. Even more impressive is the reflection of the room Caravaggio painted on the curved surface of the vase, but the focal point remains the young man recoiling from a lizard clinging to his finger. Here Caravaggio shows his emerging and innovative style of creating a snapshot of an emotion frozen in time.
Caravaggio’s early influences
Born Michelangelo Merisi in the small town of Caravaggio, the artist would take the placename of his birth to distinguish him from the famed master of David, The Pietà and Sistine Chapel.
When Caravaggio was a child, his father moved the family to Milan. After the bubonic plague killed his father, grandparents and uncle, Caravaggio never forgot their pale, lifeless bodies or the effort it took to bury the heavy corpses littering the streets, stark images he would use later in his work.
Brought up during the Counter Reformation, Caravaggio was indoctrinated into a harsh religious environment intended to purge the Catholic Church of corruption. By promoting a more austere version of Scripture, the Vatican paved the way for Caravaggio’s reimagined Biblical scenes. No longer did religious art consist entirely of heavenly hordes, idealized saints and divine settings. Before Caravaggio, religious paintings were distant and detached. Through him, they were humble, intimate and utterly approachable.
Rome
Like all aspiring painters, the young Caravaggio made his way from Milan to the epicenter of the art world. After his Rome apprenticeship ended, the artist broke from tradition and began painting scenes with the people he saw on the street. During a trip to the Eternal City in April, Robie and I sought out his works.
In another of the artist’s early paintings, Fortune Teller at the Capitoline Museum depicts a gypsy woman charming a nobleman. As the youth holds out his palm to be read, the girl skillfully steals the ring from his finger, an event highlighted by a light illuminating the bright-faced boy while subtly obscuring the girl’s expression.
Caravaggio soon followed the piece with a painting Robie and I had seen often when we lived in Texas.
At the Kimball Art Museum in Fort Worth, Cardsharps shows a scene from Rome’s underground where a trusting, well-dressed boy reviews his cards as an older man signals to his accomplice reaching for a card hidden in his belt.
With Fortune Teller and Cardsharps, Caravaggio caught the eye of powerful people in Rome leading him to paint the Penitent Magdalene for the wardrobe master of the pope now hanging in Rome’s Doria Pamphilj Gallery.
Upending convention, Caravaggio painted Mary Magdalene as an ordinary woman in contemporary clothes, not an ethereal, saintly figure. Modeled by a Roman courtesan, the picture captures a fallen woman’s remorse as she abandons her jewels and bows her head in sorrow, a posture evoking the image of Christ on the cross and a pose Caravaggio would return to again and again.
The following year Caravaggio painted Judith Beheading Holofernes, a piece showing the young artist’s emerging naturalist style now housed in the Palazzo Barberini.
Once more using working people as models, Caravaggio’s muse for Judith is another courtesan who doesn’t feign consternation when asked to emulate cutting off a man’s head. While it wasn’t new to paint Biblical scenes in contemporary settings, what set Caravaggio apart was his transformation of sacred scenes into gritty, realistic stories.
Following the popularity of Judith, Caravaggio received his first commission: to provide three paintings from the life of Saint Matthew for the Contarelli Chapel inside the Church of Saint Louis of the French near the Piazza Navona. On the left hangs the Calling of Saint Matthew.
Borrowing from Michelangelo, Caravaggio mimicked the hand in the Creation of Adam. But where Michelangelo depicted Adam passively waiting to receive the spark of life, Caravaggio reversed the gesture giving Jesus the languid outstretched finger. By imitating the famous scene, Caravaggio shows Christ as the life-giver, reaching out to Matthew who until this moment has been spiritually lifeless and pointing to himself in disbelief.
On the right of the Contarelli Chapel is the Martyrdom of Saint Matthew depicting the chaotic, violent scene of the saint’s assassination.
With dramatic, strobe-like lighting, a muscular man posing as a convert hovers over a fallen Matthew ready to strike the final blow. Around them, an altar boy flees and an angel descends extending a palm branch. Behind the assassin’s right shoulder, Caravaggio painted another self-portrait, turning his face to watch the tragedy while racing to flee.
It took Caravaggio two attempts to create a painting for the chapel’s main altar. In Saint Matthew and the Angel, Caravaggio’s rendition of the saint as a rough, rustic peasant struggling to write the Gospel was rejected and tragically destroyed during World War II.
To replace it, Caravaggio painted the Inspiration of Saint Matthew capturing the moment an angel descends from heaven to dictate the Gospel as a wide-eyed Matthew faithfully transcribes it.
More success followed the Contarelli paintings including Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus in London and the Madonna of Loreto found in another church near the Piazza Navona.
Located on the pilgrim path to St. Peter’s, Caravaggio knew his painting in the Basilica Sant’Agostino would be seen by millions and used it to reach a broad audience. In the informal scene, Mary cranes her neck like Christ on the cross, straining to hear the supplications of two travel-worn pilgrims. Unlike the usual romanticized image of Mary, Caravaggio painted a barefoot Virgin standing at the threshold of a dilapidated building with flaking plaster and dirty walls like a common, 17th-century Roman alleyway.
The intimate portrait of a revered icon in everyday clothing and familiar setting was instantly recognizable to the masses, and they adored it. But the painting also earned Caravaggio critics among fellow artists and members of the Church mortified at seeing laborers and prostitutes depicted as saints. Even worse, he portrayed them with torn clothes, wrinkled features and dirty, bare feet. Upon its unveiling, Madonna of Loreto earned Caravaggio fame as well as a growing list of enemies.
With his new status, Caravaggio received a commission to paint twin portraits of saints Peter and Paul inside the Cerasi Chapel at the Santa Maria del Popolo, a church located inside Rome’s northern gate and another stop frequented by pilgrims.
After Peter declared himself unworthy to die in the same manner as Jesus, he asked to be crucified upside down. But Caravaggio didn’t paint the saintly Peter looking skyward in anticipation of his heavenly reward. Instead, we see the moment three laborers toil to hoist a withered, old man into position for execution. As was becoming customary, Caravaggio highlighted the drama by eliminating any background, making the viewer feel part of the scene.
Directly across from the Crucifixion of St. Peter hangs the Conversion of Saint Paul on the road to Damascus.
Capturing a personal, quiet moment of transformation, Caravaggio painted a foreshortened Saul in the foreground tumbling into the viewer’s space with outspread arms in a joyful embrace while surrendering to God’s grace. But what surprised audiences was Paul’s horse filling half the canvas with its rear facing the chapel altar.
When the Treasurer-General to Pope Clement VIII commissioned two artists to decorate his chapel in the Santa Maria del Popolo Church, he chose Caravaggio for the two side panels and Annibale Carracci for the main altarpiece. Knowing Caravaggio painted dark, gritty scenes with a chaotic, tight focus, Carracci purposefully painted a bright and airy Assumption of the Virgin Mary. In return, Caravaggio mocked his rival by turning the horse’s flanks to face the hyper-idealized work.
Like his paintings, Caravaggio’s intense personality was growing increasingly combative and dark. As his fame increased, he acted more aggressive and belligerent, and after killing a man in a duel, Caravaggio soon became a fugitive on the run.
To be continued….