Art and Blood: Caravaggio in Three Churches, No Tickets

Three churches, an art historian, and not a single admission fee. San Luigi dei Francesi, Sant'Agostino and Santa Maria del Popolo hold some of the best paintings Caravaggio made and all three are free to enter, which is the practical case for this walk: no timed slot, no queue, no cloakroom, just the pictures where they were installed. The route also goes through the streets he actually used, the ones where he drank, fought and found his models among the poorest people in the city. Rome in those decades was violent, and his biography is a court record as much as an artistic one. The paintings themselves broke the rules of religious imagery so completely that some were rejected by the people who paid for them. In the Conversion of Saint Paul the horse takes up more of the canvas than the saint. Feet are dirty. Saints look like the people who were in the room. Working out why a painter would do that, in 1600, with a cardinal footing the bill, is what the guide is for. Arrive ten minutes early: the operator cannot take latecomers.