On the traces of Caravaggio

A private Caravaggio tour in Rome, seeing the paintings in the churches they were painted for — in the light they were designed for, at the altars they were made to hang above.

Michelangelo Merisi belongs to this city more than to any other. He arrived poor, worked here for around fifteen years, and left in 1606 with a death sentence on his head after killing a man in a fight near Campo Marzio. Most of his greatest work is still where he left it, and almost all of it is free to walk in and see.

The three churches

• Santa Maria del Popolo — the Cerasi Chapel, with the Conversion of Saint Paul and the Crucifixion of Saint Peter facing each other across a narrow space. Paul is on his back under a horse; there is nothing heavenly in the frame at all
• San Luigi dei Francesi — the Contarelli Chapel and the three-painting Matthew cycle, including the Calling of Saint Matthew, the picture that changed European painting. A tax collector in a Roman tavern, a shaft of light, and a hand
• Sant’Agostino in Campo Marzio — the Madonna of Loreto, with two pilgrims kneeling in the foreground and the dirt of the road on the soles of their feet. It caused a scandal for exactly that reason

What the guide is actually showing you

Caravaggio worked from live models pulled off the street — labourers, prostitutes, ordinary Roman faces — and painted straight onto the canvas without preparatory drawings. The lighting is not symbolic decoration; it is a single hard source, cutting a dark room. Once that is pointed out, you cannot unsee it in any painting of the next century.

His subjects come overwhelmingly from the Bible, and several from the Hebrew scriptures. Judith Beheading Holofernes, at Palazzo Barberini, can be added — it is the one that most rewards being read against the Book of Judith rather than against art history.

Practical information

• The three churches are free to enter. What you are paying for is the guide, not the access
• The chapels are lit by coin-operated lights on a timer. Bring one-euro coins — without them you are looking at a dark rectangle
• All three close in the middle of the day, roughly from midday to four. The tour has to be built around that
• They are working churches: services take priority, and shoulders and knees must be covered
• About 3 hours, entirely on foot, in the historic centre

Six more Caravaggios hang together in the Borghese Gallery, which pairs naturally with this walk.