Story and Photos Libor Pospisil
-
In Part One of this article, I wrote about how I retraced Caravaggio’s arrival in Rome andhis rise to fame. In the these next two trails, I write about how I see him reaching his artistic summit for a brief moment,before slipping down toward his tragic end. These trails pass along, not only grand galleries, but also a secluded villa—until recently—closed to visitors. It holds the most unique Caravaggio.
Feature image: Palazzo Barberini—the site of the Caravaggio 2025 exhibition and home to several of the painter’s works.
Palazzo Barberini: Painting secrets: My second Caravaggio Trail began at Palazzo Barberini, a world-class gallery that is often eclipsed by its more famous Roman peers. Nonetheless, it is well worth visiting for both its art and architecture—the façade, gardens, and oval staircase are gems of the Baroque era.
The gallery serves as a permanent home to several of Caravaggio’s works. One of them, the small canvas Narcissus, opened the Caravaggio 2025 exhibition—though it requires a rather lengthy explanatory note. For over a century, scholars have debated whether Caravaggio actually painted it. Roberto Longhi was firmly in the yes camp, whereas Andrew Graham-Dixon expressed doubts.
In Narcissus, Caravaggio makes us feel we have caught a young man in an intensely private moment—an illusion made possible only by chiaroscuro, since the meaning of the scene would collapse against a bright background. The young man is too absorbed in his own reflection to notice us. His carefully styled hair and puffed Baroque sleeves suggest that he is craving admiration from others. But surely, he does not want us to see him admiring himself. The canvas struck me as disarmingly simple yet powerful in its ability to create a sense of unease. I chose to believe it was Caravaggio’s work.
Narcissus was not the only time Caravaggio drew inspiration from classical mythology. He was tasked with depicting Roman gods on the ceiling of Villa Aurora.
Villa Aurora. Princess evicted:
I first learned about Villa Aurora a few years ago, through a newspaper headline: “Roman villa with world’s only Caravaggio mural up for sale.” When the last owner, Prince Boncompagni Ludovisi, passed away, the Baroque property was fought over in a legal battle between his widow and sons. A court order eventually forced the princess-widow out, and the villa ended up on the market with an asking price of half a billion dollars—potentially the world’s most expensive residence for sale ever. No bidders turned up.
The villa was always closed to the public, until now. While still in legal limbo, its administrators began offering small guided tours, which must be reserved weeks in advance. Fortunately, I was able to secure a ticket just in time for my trip.
The villa sits outside the bustle of the city center, a short walk from Palazzo Barberini. I met the villa guide outside at the inconspicuous iron gate, and as a group had now formed, we followed her through the garden up the hill. It felt like stepping into the world of Baroque Rome as we left crowds and the modern city behind. The guide then recounted the villa’s history—in Italian, which I welcomed for its authenticity even though I caught only a few fragments. Once at the top, we saw the villa, looking pleasant but not striking, and after its recent travails, it needed renovation. The current high asking price is primarily due to the famous artworks on its ceilings, the works of several renowned artists.
Villa Aurora: Laboratory
The villa was originally built as a suburban retreat for Cardinal del Monte. To decorate the ceiling of a small room, he turned to a young painter in his circle of acquaintances, Caravaggio. Curiously, the room was used at the time as a laboratory for alchemical experiments — yes, besides music and astronomy, the Cardinal was also fascinated by alchemy. Despite having no experience with ceilings, Caravaggio took up the task, probably grateful for any opportunity to make art. Inexperienced, he did not attempt fresco and instead painted directly in oil on the plaster.
Caravaggio’s ceiling shows Jupiter, Neptune, and Pluto floating in a blue sky around the globe. The triad of gods likely reflected the room’s purpose, each god symbolizing one element—Air, Water, and Earth. Some alchemists of the era excluded Fire and considered only these three elements fundamental to all matter in the world.
The room was small indeed, so we had to take turns gazing up at the ceiling. It was not high either, and the gods were nude. The abundance of male flesh, painted in fine detail just above our heads, could make the viewing awkward for some. Whether this reflected Caravaggio’s lack of ceiling skills or if it was a deliberate mischief remains unclear. He, moreover, gave Neptune his own face.
The painting may not be ranked as a masterpiece, but it is unique for more than simply being Caravaggio’s only ceiling art. Its brightness very much aligns with Renaissance conventions—the only time Caravaggio did so. After that work, he charted his own style.
Galleria Borghese: Fame and gossip
From Villa Aurora, it was just a fifteen-minute stroll to the Galleria Borghese, passing under the ancient Porta Pinciana and then through a pleasantly shaded park. The city’s second most visited gallery holds the largest collection of Caravaggio paintings, spanning his entire career and all of his themes. There are deeply religious works and a few mundane ones with playful undertones. I was drawn to a still life once attributed to Caravaggio for its chiaroscuro, which is the art of using intense dark and light colors to give the illusion of depth. The attribution is unclear, as some scholars now believe it was more likely created by one of his students in a workshop where they collaborated on paintings. Still, I liked it and ordered a print for my home, where its dark background pairs neatly with a grey wall.
Among the Galleria Borghese works are Caravaggio’s Boy with a Basket of Fruit and John the Baptist, two of the several examples that loudly demonstrate how much he enjoyed painting young men. The inevitable gossip began in his lifetime and never really ceased. Of course, Caravaggio’s masterpieces are some of the top art ever created, and the artist’s personality and choices should not enter the conversation. But let us be honest: the nightlife, with its daggers and duels, the legal troubles, the proximity to courtesans, and the questions about certain men in his paintings—all of this only deepened the public’s fascination with the artist Caravaggio and spread his fame further.
Vatican Museums: Caravaggio around the world: My third Caravaggio Trail meandered on the opposite side of the Tiber River. There, I chose to skip Palazzo Corsini, which displays another Caravaggio painting of John the Baptist, so that I could see an exhibition at the Palazzo Barberini. Instead, I found myself directly at the Vatican Museums, home to the fitting climax of any Caravaggio walk in Rome, featuring a large canvas depicting the Entombment of Christ, which shows a highly confident artist at the peak of his powers.
The Entombment captures the moment when a gathering of mourners lowers the body of Christ into the tomb. His pale skin brightens up the dark space. One arm hangs loosely downward, in a homage to Caravaggio’s namesake, Michelangelo, who used a similar pose in the “Pietà” at St. Peter’s Basilica. Praising Caravaggio for the hyper-realistic rendering of Christ’s body has become a cliché, but it remains well-deserved.
After the French army defeated the pope, Napoleon’s emissaries recognized the painting’s artistic value, seized The Entombment, and carried it off to Paris. It was only returned to Rome after the Battle of Waterloo. Now, in 2025, the canvas is traveling again. The late Pope Francis personally chose it as the centerpiece of the Vatican pavilion at Expo Osaka.
St. Peter’s Basilica: Humiliation:
Madonna and Child with St. Anne, Caravaggio. Galleria Borghese. Source: Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Madonna_and_Child_with_St._Anne-Caravaggio_(c._1605-6).jpg), public domain.
Having his painting in the Vatican Museums is a posthumous honor for Caravaggio. Next door, in St. Peter’s Basilica, however, I would have searched in vain for his art, although he had worked on an important commission there. That commission possibly came with the support of Pope Paul V and his nephew, Cardinal Scipione Borghese, who had introduced Caravaggio to the papal court. Upon completion, the resulting canvas, Madonna and Child with St. Anne, was installed as an altarpiece in the basilica.
That was Caravaggio’s triumph, one that every artist dreamed of. But the installation did not even last one month—the Madonna was removed from the basilica, for reasons that are still debated. One theory says that Caravaggio went too far. His friend Lena once again posed as Madonna, and her revealing cleavage may have seemed too impious for the Catholic shrine. Another suggestion is that St. Anne, depicted as an ordinary elderly woman, offended the papal fraternity that revered her as their patron saint.
For Caravaggio, being expelled from St. Peter’s Basilica was a devastating blow. It was small comfort that the Church objected to his model, not his talent. After expulsion, Scipione Borghese purchased the unwanted Madonna at a discount, which is why it now hangs in the Galleria Borghese. Rejections of Caravaggio’s works continued to mount. Around that time, his personality became increasingly volatile. What followed was the fateful event that led to his ultimate downfall.
End of the trail: On May 29, 1606, on a tennis court at today’s Via di Pallacorda, just off Piazza Borghese, Caravaggio fatally wounded a man with his sword. The clash was likely a duel, which was a strictly forbidden activity in Rome, making it a double crime. Caravaggio decided to flee the city the next day.
He spent years in exile, first in the nearby Alban Hills, then in Naples, Sicily, and, as my avid readers will recall, also in Malta. There, too, he got himself into trouble, landing in the prison of a massive coastal fort. Unbelievably, he still managed to escape. He broke out of his cell, scaled down the imposing walls, and slipped onto a waiting boat, on which he fled the island.
All along, Caravaggio yearned for Rome. It was the city that had opened its doors to him, a poor painter from the north, and given him the chance to rise to the artistic summit. He desperately wanted to return. He used brush and canvas to try to buy himself redemption. He painted David with the Head of Goliath, using his own face to portray the severed head of the fallen giant. He shipped it as a gift to Cardinal Scipione Borghese, who oversaw papal justice in the city. Today, the painting can be viewed in the Galleria Borghese—a memento of Caravaggio’s darkest moments.
When a papal pardon seemed imminent, Caravaggio set out on a voyage back to Rome. After landing, he disembarked and attended to some documents, but his paintings remained on the boat, which had sailed away in the meantime. Desperate to recover them, he set out along the coastal road. Soon, exhausted by the heat and without friends or companions, he fell ill with fever, likely malaria. In 1610, he died in Porto Ercole at the age of thirty-nine, never having seen Rome again.
Better known every day: The store at San Luigi dei Francesi offered half a dozen books on Caravaggio, as did many other bookshops around the city. His art continues to resonate in our century. Some are drawn to the spiritual depth of his compositions. Some admire how he skillfully turned paintings into high-resolution dramas. Others are intrigued by his movie-like biography, with contradictions that no screenwriter could ever invent—a perennial sinner whose art became a messaging tool of the Church; a painter of harrowing martyrdoms as well as of lascivious looks; a self-made man honored by cardinals and aristocrats, who ended up an outlaw on the run. Andrew Graham-Dixon sums it up in the subtitle of his book: A Life Sacred and Profane.
I found another reason to be fascinated by Caravaggio—he was that rare talent who single-handedly changed the course of his field. After him, art was never the same. His brush painted over the Renaissance era and forged an entirely new style, the Baroque. Later artists, directly or indirectly, followed him. At the Palazzo Barberini exhibition, one wall carried a quote from a 17th century biographer: “Caravaggio… was becoming better known every day for the coloring that he was introducing, not sweet… as before, but intensified through with bold dark passages, as he made considerable use of black to give relief to the forms.” It was a revolution, and, most incredibly, Caravaggio completed it within just the fifteen years he had in Rome.
Chiaroscuro in the air: My last Caravaggio Trail was a long one. One evening, I walked from St. Peter’s Basilica back to my Hotel Caravaggio. The sky was pitch black, and along the way, the emotion-filled statues of saints glowed with dramatic light. The spirit of the artist was everywhere—not only in the many churches and galleries, but also in the narrow lanes, the broad piazzas, the façades of grand palaces, and above all in the very atmosphere of the city. It was an atmosphere that Caravaggio could not find anywhere else. After my fourth visit, I began to understand why, for him, Rome was the most extraordinary city in the world.
———————————————————————————————————————
New Biographic Film: Coincidentally, a new film, five years in the making, was recently released, describing the life and works of Caravaggio.
List of all Caravaggio’s works along the second and third trails
- Palazzo Barberini https://barberinicorsini.org/en/visit/practical-information/
- Judith Beheading Holofernes
- Narcissus
- Saint Francis in Prayer
- Villa Aurora – consult CoopCulture for ticket availability https://www.coopculture.it/en/index.html
- Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto
- Galleria Borghese https://galleriaborghese.beniculturali.it/en/visita/
- Young Sick Bacchus
- Boy with a Basket of Fruit
- Saint Jerome Writing
- Madonna and Child with Saint Anne (also known as Madonna dei Palafrenieri)
- John the Baptist
- David with the Head of Goliath
- Palazzo Corsini https://barberinicorsini.org/en/visit/practical-information/
- John the Baptist
- Vatican Museums https://www.museivaticani.va/content/museivaticani/en/info/orari-musei-vaticani.html
- The Entombment of Christ
References
- Graham-Dixon, Andrew. Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane. Allen Lane, 2010. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Caravaggio/rFIV_tYYld0C?hl=en
- Johnson, Paul. Art: A New History. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Art/rZX4MAAACAAJ?hl=en
- The Exhibition Catalogue—Cappelletti, Francesca, and Maria Cristina Terzaghi, eds. Caravaggio 2025. Marsilio Arte, 2025.
Leave a Reply