Caravaggio a Roma

The perfectly lit exhibition, capable of enhancing its countless lights and shadows, accompanies us through 4 rooms, already crowded at the midweek opening. Its promotion has clearly understood the objective and the Caravaggio public from the beginning, a hard core that is difficult to lose but equally very demanding. The logical structure of the itinerary has been very clear and defined from the first tables; concise and direct captions and audio guides immediately offer the visitor a positive image of the project, accompanying him at an agile pace along the itinerary. The forecast of the great influx, the almost sold out reservations, have marked the times of fruition, well calculated. The project has been well presented and in a Rome wrapped up in the Jubilee, the experience through the works and life of Merisi has in itself a meaning of redemption. Yes, because the face of that man Michelangelo who appears in many works now as a martyr, now as a curious spectator, now as a protagonist, as he is also sick, seems to want to take us into his inner torment almost like a Christ on Calvary, who in the gaze of others seeks his own identity and love. The biblical yearning is not improvised: Caravaggio never approached religious works without first having in mind written and iconographic sources despite his life as a cursed man. His was a life as a fugitive, made up of complaints, fights, trials and long-implored pardons: a famous fruit of this inexhaustible torment The Flagellation of Christ, present in the exhibition. Hoping to be readmitted to the Papal State, in that Rome that had cursed and glorified him in life, still convalescent he ended his days by a twist of fate in Tuscany in Porto Ercole in the Santa Maria Ausiliatrice sanatorium, probably due to a neglected infection. 

Valentina Niccolai