A severed head, a tortured man, a murdered woman, each of them caught in the illuminating gaze of a visionary artist. Which other long-dead painter talks to our fears like Caravaggio? Unnervingly violent, psychologically fraught, and, to contemporary eyes, compellingly cinematic, four centuries after they were created, his works still exert an unsettling emotional force.
This is particularly true of The Flagellation of Christ and the other paintings in which those grisly images appear, completed towards the end of Caravaggio’s life during his exile in Naples between 1606 and 1610.
This month, one of them, The Martyrdom of St Ursula, joins the National Gallery’s own Salome with the Head of John the Baptist as part of the London institution’s 200th anniversary celebrations.
