Francesca Cappelletti — Caravaggio in Focus

Francesca Cappelletti is the director of Rome’s Galleria Borghese, one of the great Caravaggio collections in the world, and one of the foremost scholars of 17th-century Italian painting. Her research helped authenticate and reattribute several Caravaggio works, including involvement in the identification of “The Taking of Christ” — a painting that had spent centuries hanging in a Jesuit dining hall in Dublin, attributed to a minor Dutch painter, before being recognized as a Caravaggio original. That kind of detective work, grounded in archival research and deep visual knowledge, is what she brings to the lecture room.

Caravaggio’s influence on Western painting is difficult to overstate. His use of dramatic chiaroscuro — extreme contrast between light and shadow — and his insistence on painting biblical subjects with the faces and bodies of ordinary people from the Roman streets were radical departures that effectively created a new visual language. He was also violent, criminal, and almost certainly killed a man, which has made his biography as compelling as his canvases. Understanding his work means understanding both the technical revolution he accomplished and the turbulent life that produced it.

The Morgan Library’s exhibition provides the setting, and Cappelletti’s lecture adds a scholarly layer that gallery visits alone cannot offer. For anyone with an interest in art history, this is a chance to hear the director of one of Europe’s major museums speak about a painter she has spent her career studying, in front of original works, for free.