The Brooklyn Rail

In entering this extraordinary exhibition, Caravaggio 2025 at the Palazzo Barberini in Rome, brilliantly co-curated by Francesca Cappelletti, Maria Cristina Terzaghi, and Thomas Clement Salomon, I found myself wondering why the works of certain artists, and not others, arouse our admiration and viewership only long after their deaths. For example, Johannes Vermeer, who died in 1675 at the age of forty-three, and whose work remained unknown for 211 years until discovered and made known by Théophile Thoré-Bürger. Or Piero della Francesca, who died in 1492 around the age of seventy-five, and whose work fell into obscurity until the nineteenth century, when he was rediscovered by both Sir Charles Lock Eastlake and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. Something similar can be said of Caravaggio, who died in 1610 at the age of thirty-eight, and whose fame languished for 341 years until the ground-breaking exhibit curated by Roberto Longhi at the Royal Palace in Milan in 1951. Each of these artists was a radical innovator whose innovations it took a long time for the culture at large to absorb.

What is so compelling in confronting any picture by Caravaggio is how it never fails to communicate a strong feeling of human drama, urgency, and anxiety, and how it seems to be suspended in a moment of the kind of immediacy that we feel in lived experience. This compressed and densely installed display of twenty-four paintings is divided into four sections that cover Caravaggio’s entire artistic life, spanning approximately eighteen years, from his arrival in Rome around 1592, through his sojourns in Naples, Sicily, and Malta, and death in Porto Ercole in 1610. Going through this exhibition was a joyful odyssey spent absorbing the sheer audacity of this master’s boundless pictorial expressions, literally invented on-the-run during his short lifetime. What is particularly striking is the way Caravaggio managed to create such a radical invention, from which every aspect of human emotion is conveyed with such immediacy on the painted surface—especially considering what we know of his personality, in which an irrefutable charisma was infused with a crazed compulsion for self-destruction. Whatever the paradoxes that lie in between Caravaggio the person and Caravaggio the artist, one can rest assured that without his sheer force of will and love of the art of painting—the consolidation of vision and the ability to execute it—the thin line that stretches between fragility and agility is more visible in the paintings than the mystery of his real life.

The full weight and strength of Caravaggio’s personality and character are already visible in the earliest works in the show, before he developed his famous use of chiaroscuro. Both Boy Peeling a Fruit (ca. 1592–93) and The Cardsharps (ca. 1595) are brightly and even lit, and in them we recognize the artist’s ardent response to the broad secularization of painting during the seventeenth century by exploring the sociology of the table, emphasizing the satisfaction of the senses and all related activities that belong to the earthly realm. In the former, these include the appetite for food, depicting a boy very intently peeling a plum with his two hands, and in the latter, the depiction of gaming as a pastime in which attention is given to elements of chance and cheating. In both, the artist reveals the modest gratification of ordinary proceedings and transactions, of things that are fundamental to life that we often take for granted.

In his later works, he often turns to subjects of sex and violence within the context of religion, as in Judith Beheading Holofernes (ca. 1599), Martha and Mary Magdalene (ca.1598), and The Supper at Emmaus (ca. 1601). Here we see Caravaggio’s exceptional ability to maximize the tenable realism, with similar uses of composition and treatments of chiaroscuro that rely on the strong diagonal structure stretching from bottom left to top right of the paintings. For the sake of amplifying the intense drama of Judith beheading Holofernes, its spatial proscenium needed to be wider than both that of Martha and Mary Magdalene and the depiction of Christ and his apostles, which are remarkable for their serenity and meditation on faith. Otherwise, the coordination of transitory bodies, hand gestures, facial expressions, various penetrations of eyes in Judith, Holofernes, the old servant Abra, Christ and his disciples, is dazzlingly composed to spotlight the horror of being killed, the untidy yet clinical act of violence, and the complicity of the onlooker. The same can be said for the way Caravaggio achieves an opposite goal in his depiction of Martha and the soon-to-be-reformed sinner Mary Magdalene during their benign dialogue. Here, and in the artist’s other paintings, drama and responses to miracles are conveyed by intricately engineered gestures of eyes and hands, and the powerful sense of light, which shimmers, refracts, glows, and is absorbed on various surfaces.

In The Taking of Christ (ca. 1602), and in his very last painting, The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula (1610), we at once recognize Caravaggio’s other so-called “one-up” pictorial jugglery, from which figures are confined to a narrow frontal strip on which the main narrative is deployed. As a result, both are spatially compressed, eliciting an overwhelming and pervasive sense of claustrophobia, stripping away the sacredness of the biblical stories. In the former, the seven figures, including John, Judas, the three soldiers, and a man holding a lantern (presumably a self-portrait) are in transitory movement to the left, except for Christ (depicted in three-quarter profile, body, outstretched arms, and closed hands in reverse) who is leaning slightly to the right. Similarly, in the Saint Ursula painting, all the figures, including Ursula looking down at the shaft sticking out of her chest, and a few onlookers (one of whom once again is presumably self-portrait), all stare in shock as they’re portrayed in near and complete profiles turning to the left. It’s the Hunnish leader who killed Ursula, in near frontal view at the very second holding on to his bow turning slightly to the right of the picture that intensifies his rage in contrast to Ursula’s calm observation of her wound.

Finally, in confronting two of the late masterpieces in the exhibition, The Conversion of Saint Paul (ca. 1600–01) and The Flagellation of Christ (ca. 1607), I came to understand more fully Frank Stella’s admiration of Caravaggio. In the first, we see the master depicting the divine glory of angels and trumpets heralding Paul’s conversion in reverse: the soon-to-be Paul falling to the earth below, his near naked body in collapse, hands covering his suddenly blinded eyes; Christ leans down from the clouds above, demanding the soldier’s soul. This is an unsentimental episode from a down-to-earth perspective. A similar interpretation was cast upon the subject of Christ being flagellated in the second picture. Here, what we see is Christ in his luminous, muscular body (which in its articulation and arabesque of lines and volumes may possibly be one of the best male nudes ever painted in Western painting) standing at the center being tortured by brutal acts of violence, with one ruffian tugging his hair while the other is shackling his wrist. While Christ’s face looks downward in serenity, their faces are bawdy and salacious. In each painting, we ourselves are meant to be felt as much as seen, which inevitably brings our attention to the mechanism with which Caravaggio’s pictorial invention is associated with his fame, especially with the larger commissioned works in Rome (which should have been mentioned in the main introductory wall text of the exhibit), including Calling of Saint Matthew (1599–1600) at the Contarelli Chapel of San Luigi dei Francesi, The Conversion on the Way to Damascus (ca.1601), and Crucifixion of St. Peter (1601) at the Cerasi Chapel of Santa Maria del Popolo.

I conclude with what we already know but need to be reminded of in each painting, which is a product of forcefully conceived centralized focus along with intense convergence of animated figures in what seems to be an airless space. In between the use of hard, effective lighting cast upon objects and areas carefully devised to carry our eyes across the picture, along with expressive gestures, including explosive foreshortening, solid volumes are infused with a restless amplification of surface-dissolving illusionism that projects frontally towards our private space, confronting us viewers with both cold-eyed realism and compassion. I, for one, always marvel at how Caravaggio managed to paint directly on his canvases without recourse to any preliminary drawings. However short Caravaggio’s life, however extreme, nefarious, and tumultuous, the plausibility of the narratives he created in his paintings and the fertility of his ideas are a brilliant triumph.