THE PAINTING THAT HUNG UNDER THE WRONG NAME FOR A CENTURY
For most of the twentieth century, a Jesuit residence in Dublin had a dark, dramatic painting of a betrayal hanging quietly in its dining hall. The priests who ate beneath it believed it was the work of a minor Dutch follower of a more famous Italian master. It hung there through decades of dinners, unremarkable, misattributed, until a restorer finally looked closely enough in 1990 to recognize what it actually was: a lost original by Caravaggio himself, "The Taking of Christ," painted around 1602 and missing from the historical record for nearly two hundred years.
That kind of disappearance was not unusual for him. Caravaggio was, by multiple accounts, the most electrifying Italian painter to work since Michelangelo — whom he was not related to, though he shared the name — and he was almost completely forgotten within years of his own death. Paintings were quietly reassigned to other artists' catalogues. His name barely survived the century he died in, and it would take three hundred years for anyone to fully undo the damage.
A new docudrama, "Caravaggio" (2025), directed by David Bickerstaff and Phil Grabsky, sets out to correct that erasure, walking through his greatest works with historians including Helen Langdon, Christie's head of research and expertise Letizia Treves, the Italian art historian Fabio Scaletti, and the contemporary artist Stephen Nelson. The film is, by most measures, a generous primer — full of long, slow pans across his most famous canvases, letting viewers see brushwork normally kept at a careful distance behind rope barriers in churches and museums.
But a review of the film points to an odd tension at its center: even while telling a story built almost entirely on collaboration — patrons who protected him, cardinals who intervened on his behalf, models who appear again and again across his canvases — the film still frames him the way modern audiences expect: solitary, violent, a "damned artist" answering to no one.
The violence, at least, is not invention. In May 1606, Caravaggio killed a man named Ranuccio Tomassoni in a fight in Rome, reportedly over a disputed wager or a woman, the exact cause still debated by historians. He fled the city with a death sentence over his head, and spent his final years moving between Naples, Malta, and Sicily, painting some of his most haunting work while waiting for a pardon that arrived, from Pope Paul V, only after he was already dead. He died in 1610, not yet forty, under circumstances still disputed today — fever, infection, or violence of his own kind finally catching up with him on a beach near Porto Ercole.
One of his last paintings, held today in Rome's Galleria Borghese, shows the young David holding the severed head of Goliath at arm's length, blood still fresh at the neck. Most scholars now agree the head is a self-portrait. Caravaggio, in what may have been an attempt to appease the same authorities pursuing him, painted his own execution before anyone else could carry it out.
It took three centuries for anyone to place him back at the center of Western painting. The reassessment came largely from a single scholar, Roberto Longhi, in the 1920s, who argued that Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Georges de La Tour were simply inconceivable without him — a lineage of painters, the Caravaggisti, who carried his dramatic use of light and shadow forward long after his name had faded from memory.
A documentary can spend two hours correcting the record on who helped Caravaggio, who protected him, who sat for him — and still walk out the same door it walked in through, because the myth of the solitary genius is so much easier to sell than the truth of the crowded room. Perhaps that's not a failure of the film. Perhaps it's simply what happened to Caravaggio the first time, four hundred years ago, playing out again in real time.
