Whenever Caravaggio set brush to canvas, reality was the goal, light the tool for getting there. There is plenty of that light here, south of Sicily, in hot midday sunstrokes that cut deep into shadowy corners and in soft wisps of twilit red that trail off toward Africa.
Soak this light in, then step through the towering, engraved door at the entrance of the Co-Cathedral of St. John, set in the center of the fortified hilltop capital built by the knights of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem - the Knights of Malta - some 40 years before Caravaggio arrived in 1607. Follow the cool, dark corridor into the oratory, as Caravaggio did.
At the far end of the narrow, high-ceilinged room hangs "Beheading of St. John," considered by many to be Caravaggio's masterwork. At 17 by 12 feet, it is the largest canvas he ever painted and the only one he ever signed. It is all about light and dark, the interplay known in Italian as chiaroscuro. The executioner, his arms and back and right leg brightly lit, leans over the freshly beheaded John the Baptist, a deep red cloak draped about his fallen waist.
On the oratory's right wall hangs a smaller Caravaggio painting, "St. Jerome." In it, an elderly man sits, his torso turned, a pen in hand. The gray whiskers of Jerome's beard and the sinew of his neck are richly detailed, vivid.
Such easy connection to an artistic heavyweight like Caravaggio can too often prove elusive. Grand museums gather masterworks in a proximity that allows visitors to survey one epoch to the next with the shuffle of tired feet. These collections show the evolution of style and technique. But individual works, surrounded by so many others, can lack the context of an artist's life and experience; or worse, an individual painting can blur amid the suddenly common feel of something so uncommon.
