Baroque · 1601
Caravaggio 1571–1610
National Gallery · London
The risen Christ is recognised at the instant he breaks bread, and Caravaggio throws the moment into violent, theatrical light.
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Chapter 1 of 7
An inn, Rome, sixteen-oh-one. Two travellers have walked all day with a stranger, and only now, as he breaks the bread, do they know him. Caravaggio was thirty when he painted this for the nobleman Ciriaco Mattei — already scandalous, already brilliant — and here he turns resurrection into a body-shock, a collision of the sacred and the everyday, not a heavenly vision.
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