By Fr. Anthony R. Lusvardi, S.J..

While most of the world's attention was focused on the election of the new pope in Rome, another major spectacle was taking place in the city as well. "If there is a single painter with whom the new millennium has identified, it is without a doubt Caravaggio," begins the catalogue for Caravaggio 2025, an extraordinary exhibition of twenty-four of the artist's works, gathered at Rome's Palazzo Barberini from museums and private collections across the world. Judging from the crowds and the hype, the event's organizers have it right. Caravaggio is in.

This hasn't always been the case. After falling into obscurity for several centuries, Caravaggio's (1571-1610) star began to rise again in 1951 thanks to a similar exhibition organized in Milan by the great art historian Roberto Longhi. Another art historian I know told me years ago that her colleagues had run out of things to write about Michelangelo and so fixed on Caravaggio. But there's more to it than that.

The painter's life fits the post-Byronic template for a tragic artist - salacious liaisons, murder, exile, and an untimely death on the unforgiving (but romantic) Italian coast. Romanticism put a premium on artistic self-expression, and Caravaggio's work was undeniably original because of the inner tumult that gushes from his figures. Those figures are not always conventionally beautiful, but they are compelling.

Yet these considerations don't quite explain Caravaggio's magnetic draw. Perhaps above all, Caravaggio was a great religious painter and something about his style resonates with the spiritual aspirations and shortcomings of our age. His works on secular themes are clever, but don't convey the power of his later religious works. And none of those works are quite so powerful as the Flagellation, Supper at Emmaus, and Ecce Homo with Jesus Christ at their center. One feels a yearning for redemption in the darkness of the artist's life.

Caravaggio biographer Andrew Graham-Dixon locates the roots of Caravaggio's style in the reforms of Milan's great archbishop St. Charles Borromeo (1538-1584). Borromeo was the dominant cultural and religious figure in Caravaggio's native Lombardy at the time of the artist's birth. Guided by the Council of Trent's emphasis on the sacraments and the imaginative prayer of St. Ignatius Loyola, Borromeo favored an intense, dramatic, devotional style Graham-Dixon describes as "populist."

These characteristics - alongside Borromeo's awareness of the darkness that original sin casts over our existence - are distilled in Caravaggio's mature work. In the Flagellation or the Conversion of St. Paul or St. Francis contemplating death, one feels no scholastic abstraction, but salvation worked out achingly in wounded flesh.

Another art historian, Alessandro Zuccari, points out that all available evidence indicates that Caravaggio's religious beliefs were conventionally Catholic. He confessed and received Communion at Easter and participated in forty-hours Eucharistic devotions. The fiery temper that caused the artist so much grief is evidence of concupiscence, not heterodoxy.

Exiled from Rome after killing a man in a duel, Caravaggio spent the rest of his life seeking papal forgiveness instead of fortune in the Protestant principalities of northern Europe. When his self-portrait appears in scriptural scenes, it has a haggard, yearning look. But feeling the difficulty of faith is not the same thing as unbelief. And that's, I suspect, why the artist's work so resonates today.

In Michelangelo's muscular figures, we witness the robust marriage of faith and Renaissance humanism. The inky darkness of Caravaggio's scenes anticipates an age when faith no longer feels so inevitable. At Caravaggio 2025, I was struck by the arrangement of St. Francis in Ecstasy - the saint, reclining in soft angelic arms, fills one side of the painting, but its center is all shadow. If you look closely, you can make out figures in the distance,...