Caravaggio on the screen: location and evocation - part one

ART AND LOCATION – CINEMA IN DETAIL

The Caravaggio 2025 exhibition at Palazzo Barberini (initially March 7 – July 6, 2025, extended to July 20, 2025), has once again brought the Lombard painter to the attention of the general public. Not that interest in the artist has ever waned in recent decades; on the contrary, his name is perhaps too often bandied about despite a minimal exhibition presence, a non-sense in a city like Rome which preserves more of his works than any other place in the world, some of which are still in their original contexts, e.g. the Churches of San Luigi dei Francesi, Sant'Agostino, and Santa Maria del Popolo.

The Palazzo Barberinie xhibition, however, has the merit of taking stock of the situation, displaying only paintings attributed to Caravaggio - 24 in total (some still debated) - and avoiding the easy option of crowding the walls with comparisons that aren't always accurate, fillers that have been seen countless times.

Given the focus of this column, our thoughts immediately turn to the films and TV series in which Caravaggio's locations, or evocations of the "Caravaggio phenomenon", have been prominent.

We will leave aside the inevitable use in scenic works about his life to paintings inserted into the creative unfolding of the narrative on an easel in his home or studio or in the homes of his patrons, far from the museums or churches they evoke for us today. As seen for example in the RAI drama directed by Silverio Blasi in 1967, starring Gian Maria Volontè and Carla Gravina; in Derek Jarman's masterpiece (1986); or the 2008 Rai miniseries, directed by Angelo Longoni and starring Alessio Boni - all entitled Caravaggio. The latest was Michele Placido's film, Caravaggio’s Shadow (2022), starring Riccardo Scamarcio.
The Caravaggio-themed locations used for scenic purposes must then be sought elsewhere.

Caravaggio in the TV series Ripley

Most recently, Steven Zaillian's TV series Ripley (2024), based on Patricia Highsmith's 1955 novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Anthony Minghella’s screen adaptation of the same name in 1999 and René Clément’s Plein Soleil (1960), won the Italy For Movies Award at the Ischia Film Festival.

The eight-part Netflix series features numerous art references (Picasso and Raphael are the most obvious after Caravaggio), with protagonist Tom Ripley (Andrew Scott) a painter with a passion for the Lombard master.
The novel itself connects Ripley, an identity thief, and his life constantly on the move with Caravaggio’s tormented existence on the run after the murder of Ranuccio Tomassoni.

Episode 4, La Dolce Vita, is set in Rome where Tom goes to see the Stories of Saint Matthew (1599-1600), painted for Mathieu Cointrel which hang in the chapel better known by the Italianized version of his surname, Contarelli. To a careful observer, however, the context is jarring, as the paintings are not in the last chapel to the left as they are in the building in Rome, but in the last to the right of Santa Maria la Nova in Naples, creating a certain disorientation.

It is equally unsettling, a few minutes later, to see Tom listening to a guidein front of the Borghese Gallery’s David with the Head of Goliath in a room that also features Bernini's Apollo and Daphne, another masterpiece from Scipione Borghese’s collection. However, the setting on the screen is not the casino in Rome, but another building where reproductions of the two works have been placed, or perhaps a room builton a Cinecittà soundstage.

The references to Caravaggio, who, in Bellori's words (1672), "cominciò ad ingagliardire gli oscuri" ("began to enliven the dark ones") in those two years that straddled the centuries, are a tribute to the painter who is a point of reference for Steven Zaillian himself and even more so for the director of photography, Robert Elswit, Oscar winner for the masterpiece that is Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood (2007).

Later, in Episode 7 (Ghoulish Fun), Ripley goes to Sicily to track down Caravaggio, at the Oratory of San Lorenzo in Palermo, where he again notes the painter's name in his guidebook and sees the Nativity with Saints Lawrence and Francis of Assisi. 
Fiction and real history intertwine even more tightly here.  The Ripley story is set in 1960/61 when the painting still hung above the altar, only to be stolen on the night of October 17-18, 1969, never to be found again. It is, to this day, one of the top ten most important stolen works of art in the world according to the FBI, and a fitting reference in a series about a master con artist.

It's also worth considering that two of the eight episodes have titles that echo Caravaggio's works: Episode 2 - The Seven Works of Mercy – sees Dickie takes Tom to Naples to admire the painting of that name at the Pio Monte della Misericordia in Piazza Riario Sforza, while Episode 8 – Narcissus - marks a possible reference to the painting in the Galleria Spada, one of the great debates in the Caravaggio oeuvre (many attribute it to the Roman painter, Spadarino) and on display at the Palazzo Barberini exhibition. Beyond the evocative title, however, that final episode takes us to the night of May 28, 1606, and the murder of Ranuccio Tomassoni, which marked the beginning of Caravaggio's flight. 

Here, the works are displayed as in the aforementioned films about the painter: the Crucifixion of Saint Peter (1601) from the Capella Cerasi of the Church of Santa Maria del Popolo is seen in the artist's studiowhere the guards search for him, then the Madonna dei Palafrenieri (1606), from the Borghese Gallery, is seen in Palazzo Colonna in Paliano, Lazio. The town marks the beginning of his wanderings, he is a guest in Paliano and surroundings of Duchess Costanza Colonna, widow of Francesco Sforza, who employed Fermo Merisi as a master builder in the small town of Caravaggio, when his son Michelangelo was just a child.

With the images presented in the closing episode, Patricia Highsmith's imagined connection between Tom Ripley and the great Lombard painter becomes all-encompassing.

• Read the second part of the article

• Watch the films:
  Caravaggio - Silverio Blasi, 1967 (Raiplay)
  Caravaggio - Derek Jarman, 1986 (Prime Video)
  Caravaggio’s Shadow - Michele Placido, 2022 (Prime Video)