It’s difficult to believe, given the current high reputation of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610), that he was ever considered to be anything but one of the great figures of Italian painting. To his contemporaries, his horrifying, voluptuous religious dramas—cinematic stagings of crucial instants in the lives of saints and martyrs, briefly illuminated for a rapt audience by shafts of dazzling light—seemed the most exciting work of the time; witness the numbers of painters who assiduously followed his lead. Today, even though they are in many ways paradigmatic of the values of the fiercely religious Counter-Reformation Rome where Caravaggio mainly worked, from about 1590 to 1606, his paintings bear witness to an individual struggle between official pieties and personal observation that seems timeless. Yet, from the mid-seventeenth century until about fifty years ago, Caravaggio would not have been included in a list of meg ...

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