Santa Maria del Popolo: The Cerasi Chapel
Why is it significant?
Step inside the church, walk up the nave toward the high altar, and turn into the small chapel just to its left.
Key Facts
| Place | Santa Maria del Popolo: The Cerasi Chapel |
|---|---|
| Address | Piazza del Popolo 12, 00187 Roma RM, Italy |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.91150, 12.47650 |
| Part of Walk | Caravaggio's Rome: Masterpieces, Brawls and a Killing |
| Generated | Generated |
Step inside the church, walk up the nave toward the high altar, and turn into the small chapel just to its left. Two paintings face each other across a space so narrow that you can hardly step back from them... and that is exactly how Caravaggio meant you to meet them: up close, from the side, almost inside the scene.
In 1600 Tiberio Cerasi, treasurer-general to the pope, bought this chapel and hired the two most talked-about painters in Rome. Annibale Carracci painted the Assumption over the altar; Caravaggio got the side walls, the Conversion of Saint Paul and the Crucifixion of Saint Peter. His first versions were set aside, and he painted these two in their place. One of the rejected ones, a very different Conversion, still survives in a private collection in Rome.
Look at Saint Paul: thrown flat on his back, arms open, eyes shut, blinded by a light we cannot see, while an enormous piebald horse fills almost the whole picture, one hoof carefully lifted so as not to trample him. No heavenly host, no Christ in the clouds. A story goes that someone asked the painter why he had put a horse in the middle instead of God. Because, he supposedly answered, the horse is standing in God's light.
Opposite, Saint Peter is being hauled upside down on his cross by three labourers. You hardly see their faces. You see their effort: a back straining under the beam, a man hauling on a rope, the dirty soles of feet turned toward you. Peter, old and heavy, lifts his head and looks not at heaven but past us. It is a painting about work, weight and fear, hung in a rich man's chapel.
When Caravaggio arrived in Rome in the early 1590s, a penniless young painter from Lombardy, he very likely walked in through the city gate right beside this church, the main road from the north. Within ten years he was painting for the pope's treasurer. Within fifteen he would be a fugitive with a price on his head. Walk out, cross the square, and take Via del Babuino, the street on the left of the twin churches, looking for a stone figure everybody used to insult.