The painter
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was born in Milan in 1571 and grew up in the Lombard town that gave him his name. He arrived in Rome in the early 1590s and, within a decade, changed what a painting could look like. His breakthrough came with the Contarelli Chapel canvases in San Luigi dei Francesi (1599–1600), where the calling of Saint Matthew happens in a dim room among men in contemporary dress.
His method was radical for its time. He worked directly from posed models rather than from idealised drawings, lit them from a single high source, and let the rest of the canvas fall into darkness. That handling of light and shadow — chiaroscuro, pushed to the extreme sometimes called tenebrism — gave sacred subjects the immediacy of something witnessed.
In 1606 Caravaggio killed Ranuccio Tommasoni in a fight in Rome and fled the city under sentence of death. The years that followed took him to Naples, Malta and Sicily. He died in 1610 at Porto Ercole, aged thirty-eight. The late paintings are darker, sparer and faster than the Roman work, with figures pressed close to the picture surface.
Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy
The composition dates from around 1606, the year of his flight. A single half-length figure leans back out of the darkness, mouth slightly open, hands loosely joined, hair falling across a bare shoulder. There is no cave, no ointment jar — none of the usual attributes of the penitent Magdalene. What remains is a body in a state that could be read as ecstasy, exhaustion or rapture.
The painting presented in Berlin was one of the few possessions Caravaggio carried with him when he died at Porto Ercole in 1610.
Why it matters here
Caravaggio's subject is the body under pressure — its weight, its skin, its collapse. That is also the material of Berlinde De Bruyckere's sculpture, four centuries later. The exhibition places the two in one room rather than explaining the connection on a wall panel.
Key dates
- 1571 — born in Milan
- c. 1592 — arrives in Rome
- 1599–1600 — Contarelli Chapel, San Luigi dei Francesi
- 1606 — flees Rome; the Magdalene composition is dated to this period
- 1607–1609 — Naples, Malta, Sicily
- 1610 — dies at Porto Ercole
See the painting in Berlin
The work is on view in Caravaggio × Berlinde De Bruyckere at the Embassy of Italy in Berlin, 11 to 25 September 2026. Admission is free and requires advance registration.