Inside Caravaggio

The visionary world of the international artist, highlighting the emotion-driven and intellectual signs that marked important stages in his life. Caravaggio’s technique has been studied in unprecedented depth and detail as part of a project promoted by the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage, which from 2009 onward carried out a vast campaign of diagnostic tests analyzing the twenty-two autographed works by Caravaggio still in Rome. The project provided the occasion to examine Caravaggio’s unique execution from a groundbreaking point of view, reaching areas inside Caravaggio that had never been explored before and making new discoveries about his genius. This catalog offers a unique opportunity to explore the years of Caravaggio’s extraordinary artistic production from a wholly new perspective. It will present twenty masterpieces by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, which will be shown together in a Milanese exhibition in 2017 for the very first time ever. The key to the interpretation of the works on display and the leitmotif running through the whole volume is the analysis of the idiosyncratic painting technique that this great Lombard painter was so loath to divulge. He never really had pupils or founded a school despite the enormous success enjoyed by his works in the first decade of the 1600s. Caravaggio remains a mystery who continues to fascinate us today, and the aim of this initiative is to look inside Caravaggio with the help of the latest diagnostic techniques that represent the new frontier for knowledge in art history as well as in the field of conservation.