Caravaggio exhibition at Rome’s Palazzo Barberini could be the best show yet of his works | Canada Voices

Italian painter Michelangelo Merisi, better known as Caravaggio, did everything in a hurry. He was flat broke when he arrived in Rome around 1595, but within a few years had become the city’s most envied painter. He quickly dethroned the reigning style of Italian art, and his influence spread rapidly through his native land and beyond. He even sped up the act of painting, dispensing with steps that other painters took for granted.

Caravaggio is one of the most popular Old Masters, which is why a major exhibition of his work at Rome’s Palazzo Barberini is sure to be a hot ticket through to its closing date on July 6. Even Pope Francis was a fan; his favourite canvas, The Calling of St. Matthew, hangs in Rome’s church of San Luigi dei Francesi.

2025 summer visual arts preview: Canada is going ‘elbows up’ with a strong showing of homegrown talent

The show’s 24 canvases came from 17 museums in Europe and the U.S., as well as from private collections. With only about 60 paintings by Caravaggio known to exist, the curators who coaxed so many owners to loan their treasures are right to call this one of the most ambitious shows of his work.

The exhibition includes a recently authenticated Ecce Homo, described by Madrid’s Museo del Prado as “one of the greatest discoveries in the history of art.” There’s also a remarkably casual portrait of Maffeo Barberini (who later became Pope Urban VIII), which was authenticated in the 1960s but until now has remained hidden in a private collection.

Caravaggio challenged an idealizing style of painting in which gesture and expression were heavily formalized, especially in religious art. As co-curator Francesca Cappelletti writes in the exhibition catalogue, his canvases feature “a humanity made up of wrinkled old men, insolent or sullen teenagers, and beautiful girls with somewhat marked features, with dirty feet and blackened nails just about everywhere.”

He also painted from life, as was seldom done at the time, with little preliminary sketching. He found his models within a circle of friends, lovers and street characters, some of whom posed for him repeatedly.

Unusual Lawren Harris painting showing in Nova Scotia to mark William Davis centenary

The show’s outstanding ensemble is a trio of large religious paintings, gathered from museums in three countries, all featuring the same model – reputedly the courtesan Fillide Melandroni. In Judith Beheading Holofernes, she handles her sword at arm’s length, rotating both forearms toward the viewer, as if to tumble the general’s head onto the gallery floor. Holofernes, his mouth open in a death roar, clenches his fist near the jets of blood shooting toward the viewer’s feet. Everything is boldly lit from the sides and crowded toward the front of the picture plane, with almost no visible background.

Caravaggio’s use of strong contrasts of light and dark (or chiaroscuro) is often compared to theatrical lighting (and to film noir, the mid-20th-century style of high-contrast cinematography). Lighting in 17th-century theatres, however, was mostly from footlights, and would remain so until after French impressionist artist Edgar Degas had made his theatre paintings more than three centuries later. Caravaggio’s real inspiration was ordinary domestic lighting, which had somehow gone unnoticed by other painters.

The darkness that often surrounds his figures is actually the ground colour – usually brown – used as a preliminary base. In the flinty Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, the dark ground (deep brown bordering on black) takes up more than half of the painting. He also used the ground to define contours, as Rossella Vodret reveals in her catalogue essay about Caravaggio’s methods. That meant he could continue painting without waiting for the neighbouring section to dry.

“The execution of his paintings was extremely fast,” Vodret writes. Caravaggio’s live modelling and quick brushwork jacked up the intensity of paintings such as The Flagellation of Christ. The brutality of the scene is focused in a fist clutching at Christ’s hair, and in the contortions of another man tying his hands while seeming to kick at his leg.

In David With the Head of Goliath, the giant-killer’s foreshortened arm thrusts the severed head out from the darkness, the sidelight glinting on Goliath’s staring eye and sagging lower lip. The expression on the boy’s face, tilted to the side and half in shadow, seems more troubled than victorious – just one of many Caravaggio faces that register complex feelings about what is happening. A partly shadowed figure in the newly authenticated Ecce Homo stares at us over Christ’s shoulder with a look of raw dismay that wouldn’t be out of place in a painting by Francisco Goya.

Caravaggio was a violent man in a society where a slight could lead to a brawl, such as the one that opens Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, written at about the time the painter arrived in Rome. He was well-known to police before he killed a man in 1606, and died in exile four years later, at the age of 38.

For decades after, young painters streamed to Rome to study Caravaggio’s canvases. These “Caravaggists” included the Spaniard José de Ribera, who, at Rome’s Galleria Borghese, has three works hanging opposite three by his hero. These include Caravaggio’s thinly illuminated painting of Saint Jerome Writing, his lean bare arm reaching at full length with his pen, toward a book held open with a skull.

Caravaggio’s followers ultimately weighed against his own reputation. “By the end of the seventeenth century,” writes art historian Nicholas Penny, “Caravaggio’s work was increasingly confused with that of inferior imitators.” In Cappelletti’s words, “he disappeared both from scholarship and the public imagination” until the 20th century.

Cree filmmaker Neil Diamond explores Indigenous masks that inspired Paris Surrealists

Cappelletti’s approach to the show she co-curated with Maria Cristina Terzaghi and Thomas Clement Salomon is scholarly in a traditional sense, with little interest in themes such as the painter’s sexuality. Keith Christiansen, a former Metropolitan Museum curator, claims in his catalogue essay that there is “no evidence that Caravaggio thought of his art as a vehicle of self-expression.”

It’s easy to see, however, that he revelled in the young flesh of his sullen, half-naked boys. And he was keenly aware that he was up to something quite different, technically and emotionally, from his peers. That something continues to speak to us loudly, five centuries after his death.

Caravaggio 2025 continues through July 6 at the Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica in Rome’s Palazzo Barberini.