GALLERIA BORGHESE, Caravaggio_First Floor Room 8

You've finally reached the most moving part of the gallery: Caravaggio's rooms. No museum in the world has as many works by the painter as this one, and they let you retrace the entire arc of his career.

Start with his first painting called Young Sick Bacchus, which Caravaggio painted shortly after his arrival in Rome from Lombardy. This is definitely a self-portrait that was painted after a sickness, which is evident in the pallor of the figure's face and lips. The bunches of grapes in the foreground convey his passion for perfectly depicting nature. You can notice the same passion in another work titled Boy with a Basket of Fruit, in which the fruit and the leaves in the basket are almost overflowing with life.

Now move on to the work entitled Madonna and Child with St. Anne, or Madonna dei Palafrenieri in Italian; it earned this name because it was painted in 1605 for the Palafrenieri Chapel in Saint Peter's Basilica. This was one of Caravaggio's so-called "scandalous" works, in the sense that it was rejected by those who had commissioned it; it was only displayed for a month over the altar before being sold to Cardinal Borghese. And why did they reject it? For its lack of decorum: the Virgin is represented as a normal girl, while St. Anne is shown as an old wrinkled lady... even the child's nakedness seemed inappropriate!...