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Video artists are projecting films of the fiery Baroque
master's renderings of Jesus being flogged, Roman wine god
Bacchus and the severed head of the snake-haired monster Medusa
on the walls of the Palazzo delle Esposizioni gallery.
Music and perfumes accompany the display of 57 pictures famed
for a theatrical use of light and shadow that matched the drama
of the artist's life.
Art historian Claudio Strinati, who advised the creators of the
exhibition, said taking the characters out of their original
contexts completely changed the viewer's experience.
"There is an appeal here, the images present themselves to us
like apparitions, characters coming from a far away world and
arriving in our space," Strinati said.
The "Caravaggio Experience" is starting shortly after the
Victoria and Albert Museum in London also opened an exhibition
that reinterprets the work of another Italian master, showing
Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli's works alongside versions
by pre-Raphaelite and pop artists.
The technique of plucking certain characters from the original
backgrounds used in the Caravaggio exhibition can also help art
historians with their studies, Strinati said.
"Caravaggio is a painter of people, of characters. This
enlargement of the characters ... is like focusing with a big
lens, isolating them from the works they are usually found in."
The artist's roving existence and the years he spent as a
fugitive after killing a man in a brawl are told using maps of
Sicily and Malta projected alongside the works he painted there
until his death aged around 38.
(Reporting by Antonio Denti; Writing by Isla Binnie; Editing by
Tom Heneghan)
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