Cheisa di San Luigi dei Francesi
San Luigi dei Francesi (1589) in itself is a beautiful church but the big guns of this place is clearly the triptych by none other than Caravaggio. The three paintings in the triptych have to do with St. Matthew but my favorite of the three is this one, 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘐𝘯𝘴𝘱𝘪𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘰𝘧 𝘚𝘢𝘪𝘯𝘵 𝘔𝘢𝘵𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘸 (1600), I love the detail of the chubby angels fingers as if he’s explaining something elaborate to Matthew and has to count out on his fingers. And St. Matthew’s expression is so startled like “Where the hell did you come from?!”
Rococo ceiling by Charles-Joseph Natoire (1756), this photograph is not my own I found it on Wikipedia, credit to Livioandronico2013
In a different Caravaggio in a different church (Santa Maria del Popolo 1477) that I did not get a good picture of, his depiction of Saint Peter being nailed to the cross and hoisted upside down is breathtaking, the pain and confusion is Peter’s face and the sheer force of the men hoisting the cross upside down is terrifying, but the detail that gets a lot of attention is the muddy feet of the men doing the work. Before Caravaggio painting was idealized and not realistic, never ugly, Caravaggio brought a lot of that out in his paintings and his use of black was very theatrical, giving a spotlight to his subjects which had never been done before.
But he was a troubled soul, fist fights, knife fights, one ended in murder, perhaps accidentally, causing Caravaggio to spend his last four years on the run, down to Sicily and later Malta. He was only 38 when he died.
Interestingly, the first written account of Caravaggio in Rome was when he was a witness to a murder outside of San Luigi dei Francesi. Perhaps when he was there working on or installing these paintings?
