This post was originally published on artnews.com
Caravaggio (b. 1571) is among the newest of the Old Masters. Though in one contemporary’s estimation he was egregius in urbe pictor, the outstanding painter in Rome, he fell out of fashion a few decades after his death; by 1660, Poussin would say that Caravaggio “had come into the world to destroy painting.” It wasn’t until a sustained rehabilitation effort by the Italian art historian Roberto Longhi after the Second World War that Caravaggio really came back into the public eye. But since then we’ve never stopped looking away.
“Caravaggio 2025,” at Rome’s Palazzo Barberini, draws on Italian and international collections to assemble two dozen of the painter’s sixty or so known works. The paintings date from around the artist’s arrival in Rome in 1595 (a few years later than once thought) until his death, in 1610, aged just 38. Like his posthumous reputation, Caravaggio’s catalogue keeps growing as paintings are rediscovered; one canvas here (Ecce Homo, c. 1606–1607) only came to light in 2021, at a Spanish auction, and another (the lesser of two portraits of Maffeo Barberini, c. 1595), remains merely attributed. If you factor in the fourteen other works in other churches and museums, and the ceiling now accessible in the Casino Boncompagni Ludovisi, you can now see nearly two-thirds of the painter’s production in a single trip to Rome, now through July 6.
Caravaggio’s scandalous biography is certainly part of his continued appeal: Michelangelo Merisi, as he was known before taking on the name of the Lombard village where his father worked for a nobleman, became as well known in Rome for his misbehavior as for his astonishing paintings. He carried a sword without a permit, and was once arrested for casting a plate of artichokes (and probably aspersions) at a waiter. The artist eventually fled the city after killing a small-time gangster in a duel that broke out over a tennis match, of all things, for which the artist was sentenced to death. He shuttled from Naples (and the protection of the Colonna family), to Malta (where his membership of the Knights of Malta ended with imprisonment and escape by rappelling down a cliff to a waiting boat), to Sicily, and back to Naples (where a surprise attack in an inn left his face disfigured “beyond recognition”). He would die of malaria, alone, on his way back to Rome.
Caravaggio clearly had a lot going on, and his work—though rarely autobiographical—shows it. Few oeuvres are seeded with as many subtle self-portraits. Around the time he was seeking pardon for the après tennis murder, he would use his own face for the ghastly severed head in David with the Head of Goliath (c.1606)—an image of the artist offering himself, and his painting, to the viewer, as if a premonition of his own mutilation.
But more than biography, it’s Caravaggio’s style that gets somehow fresher with age. He evokes intense and particular human presences, but at the same time a mirror world that is pure image, pure representation: a rapt Narcissus (1597–1598) fittingly opens the show. His paintings are so technically fine as to be both compelling and suspicious, raising more questions than they answer. In the context of mannerist Rome, where imagined Beauty was the ideal, Caravaggio insisted, polemically, on painting from life.
Naturalism is one thing when you’re making secular images, presumably designed as tours de force to be displayed on easels, like, say, The Cardsharps (1596-97),where we observe dapper young men locked into their card game. Or in the three remarkable portraits in the show, including the second, firmly attributed likeness of Maffeo Barberini, one of Caravaggio’s keen aristocratic patrons later known as Pope Urban VII, whose sumptuous greens are being shown to the public for the first time since it was painted in 1598–99. Along with several other paintings in the show, it now returns home to the palazzo that belonged to Barberini’s family.
But commitment to the worldly body is quite another matter when it comes to the sacred, which increasingly occupied Caravaggio as his life became more violent. Whereas the earlier paintings in the show’s first room are lit like studio photographs, the bodies of later paintings are like shots from a detective noir, cast more in shadow than light, giving you the sense that a moral struggle (good versus evil, the divine versus the all too human) is at work beneath their refined surfaces.
Caravaggio almost baits you with the beauty of his holy subjects, as in the three, increasingly sexy evocations of Saint John the Baptist (the last, from 1610, is basically a Venus), or in the paintings modeled by a beguiling Sienese prostitute named Fillide Melandroni, hung together in the show’s second room. She shines as the stately Saint Catherine of Alexandria (1598-99), considered the transition point to Caravaggio’s dusky mature style; as Magdalene standing by a symbolically loaded convex mirror in Martha and Mary Magdalene (1598-99); and as Judith in the iconic Judith and Holofernes (1599-1600), a drama of furrowed brows in which the Babylonian general pays the price for being duped by appearances.
At times, we might fear being fooled ourselves: looking at these absorbing paintings, just like looking in them, is always a fraught affair. Yet it is the very realism of Caravaggio’s bodies—their complicated expressions, their palpable flesh—that renders the sacred paintings truly sacred. In art but also in life, his plunge ever deeper into worldliness seems to have led Caravaggio into otherworldly realms.
Caravaggio reaches a high point with Taking of Christ (1603, from the National Gallery of Ireland). Christ is frozen in the precise second of the betrayal, his fingers still knitted in prayer as Judas plants his kiss; in a near cinematic narrative compression, Roman soldiers are already charging into the scene from the right, wearing their mirrorlike armor; behind Christ, at the far left of the canvas, a disciple, in yet another moment, screams into the black. Caravaggio himself stands in the jumbled crowd, holding up a lantern, straining to get a glimpse. It’s an ambiguous instant we would normally pass over on the way to the story’s inevitable conclusion. But Caravaggio keeps us suspended not in prolonged suffering, but in instantaneous sin.
The painter also lingers in the show’s final, haunting picture, the last one Caravaggio ever made: the Martyrdom of Saint Ursula (1610). He stands directly behind the ghostly white Ursula, just pierced by the arrow of the king of the Huns, whose offer of marriage she refuses; his mouth is open, face slack less with awe than what must be confusion—he’s looking at the king, and perhaps hasn’t even seen Ursula. He is staring out from the darkness. Where does the light come from?