An exceptional sequence of works highlights the innovative nature of his painting

A man of sword and brush. For his entire short life (1571–1610), Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio did nothing else. With the sword, he dealt death; with the brush, he conquered eternity. Irascible, hot-tempered, brutal. Always ready to insult, to fight—often over nothing. He hurled stones at guards. Imprisoned multiple times, he had to beg for the protection of the powerful or break out of jail. He haunted the underbelly of society: shady taverns crowded with gamblers, soldiers, ruffians, gypsies, and prostitutes. Rome, the city of popes, counted over ten thousand women working in prostitution, but Caravaggio often seemed to prefer rent boys—young men like himself: beautiful and doomed, living desperate lives marked by fate. He brought them into his studio, posed them, and turned them into models. Just a bare shoulder, a flower placed in the hair, the hint of parted, full lips (Boy Bitten by a Lizard)—that’s all it took to ignite his canvases with sensual, heart-wrenching flesh. He loved them in fleeting, clandestine embraces. Perhaps he didn’t know that, through art, he would make them eternal. When the painter arrived in Rome, after a few years apprenticed to Simone Peterzano in Milan, he was about twenty. He found construction sites everywhere. The city was abuzz. Under papal direction, architects were transforming it, preparing it for the grandeur of the Baroque.

A man of sword and brush. For his entire short life, he did nothing else. With the former, he dealt death; with the latter, he conquered eternity

The air was thick with luxury, beauty, and sensuality. Down here, the harshness of the Counter-Reformation was but a distant echo. The strict moral codes of Bishops Federico and Carlo Borromeo were still struggling to push past the mists of the northern plains.
Caravaggio quickly formed key relationships—with Landolfo Pucci, master of the house to the sister of Pope Sixtus V, and with two well-connected painters, Antiveduto Grammatica and the Cavalier d’Arpino.

The prevailing style still looked to Raphael and Michelangelo, combined with the detailed, meticulous brushstrokes of the Flemish. But Caravaggio, shaped by the realist painting tradition of Lombardy, didn’t care. He decided, as biographer Giovanni Baglione put it, to "go his own way." He started painting to sell—or so he claimed. But soon, abandoning the clear and elegant style, he launched a revolution.

He shut the shutters of his studio tightly. Left outside were the sun, the world, another kind of life. Engulfed in darkness, lit only by a single lamp on a table, he began to paint. The painter of light worked in shadow. For him, truth was a nocturnal mystery—a beam of light cast on a barely visible body, guessed at in a darkened room. He painted in extremes, with fury and precision, with theatrical staging and deeply lyrical intimacy. He became the unmatched master of chiaroscuro. A technical necessity, yes, to give volume to form—but even more, a spiritual urgency.

Repeatedly imprisoned, he was forced to beg for the protection of the powerful or to escape

In those contrasts, he poured all of himself: his ambivalence, his contradictions, his genius and wildness.
Constantly teetering between religious yearning and murderous impulse—both in life and in art—no one staged crime, savagery, and torture better than he did: Judith and Holofernes, Crowning with Thorns, Flagellation, Salome with the Head of John the Baptist. In 1606, during yet another brawl, he became a murderer for real. He killed Ranuccio Tomassoni—a crime for which he was sentenced to death. Thus began his flight: Naples, Malta, Syracuse, Messina, Palermo. Ever darker and more tormented, now siding with death, he left masterpieces wherever he went. He would die, “badly, as he had lived” (Baglione), from a malignant fever, alone, on a deserted beach in Porto Ercole. In Rome, where he was awaited after Pope Paul V granted him a pardon, only the news of his unexpected death would arrive.
It was July 18, 1610.

He met his end as he had lived—badly—from a malignant fever, alone, on a deserted beach in Porto Ercole.

CARAVAGGIO 2025: THE EXHIBITION

By Claudia Baldi. With “Caravaggio 2025”, the National Galleries of Ancient Art, in collaboration with the Borghese Gallery, celebrate the artist in a great exhibition at Palazzo Barberini in Rome, open until July 6. For the first time, 24 paintings from various foreign museums have been gathered, offering a unique journey through the 15 years of the human and artistic story of Michelangelo Merisi. The exhibition spans from his early works of 1595 to his grand religious commissions, culminating in the last, poignant canvas from 1610, The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, painted shortly before his death at the age of 39, after an intense and tumultuous life. The exhibition highlights the power and modernity of Caravaggio’s painting, providing a new perspective on the artistic and cultural revolution initiated by the master. Scholars will find interesting points for research and deepening in the comparison of works such as Saint Catherine from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid and those preserved in Palazzo Barberini itself, like Judith and Holofernes and the two extraordinary portraits of Maffeo Barberini, loans from private collectors. An unmissable event, then, not only as a tribute to the genius of Caravaggio but also as an opportunity to reflect on his influence on contemporary art and our collective imagination. The exhibition is accompanied by an impressive catalog from Marsilio, with texts by F. Cappelletti, S. Causa, K. Christiansen, F. Curti, G. Papi, G. Porzio, C. Strinati, M.C. Terzaghi, R. Vodret, and A. Zaccuri.