Caravaggio goes for Baroque

This review by longtime Charlotte arts critic Lawrence Toppman was published by The Charlotte Ledger on April 30, 2026. You can find out more about The Charlotte Ledger’s commitment to smart local news and information and sign up for our newsletter for free here. Ledger subscribers can add the Toppman on the Arts newsletter on their “My Account” page.

Today’s Toppman on the Arts is sponsored by Charlotte Master Chorale. Enjoy lighthearted music and great beer at Triple C Brewing on May 8. Join the Charlotte Master Chorale Chamber Singers for a fun-filled evening that blurs performance and community gathering.

by Lawrence Toppman

Should you visit an art museum to see one jaw-dropping painting? In the case of “Caravaggio/Revolution: Baroque Masterpieces from the Roberto Longhi Foundation,” which opened this week at The Mint Museum Uptown, I would say yes.

You get Caravaggio’s “Boy Bitten by a Lizard,” the aforementioned stunner. You get a copy of an earlier work by that 16^th-century Roman master, “Boy Peeling Fruit,” less amazing but attractive. You get a wall of dramatic portraits of murdered saints by Jusepe de Ribera, who was born 20 years after Caravaggio in 1591 and moved to Rome a few years after the older man died in 1610.

The rest is an array of paintings, mostly by Italians, who were influenced by Caravaggio’s use of chiaroscuro (a fancy term for light and shadow), more realistic depictions of human faces, superb use of small details — his still-life elements seem especially modern — and sexual allusions, both direct and obscure. (Scholars debate Caravaggio’s sexual predilections.)

Some of those works are startlingly original, some ploddingly ordinary. Sometimes the same narrative produces both reactions. In Carlo Saraceni’s “Judith with the Head of Holofernes,” about the Jewish widow who seduces an Assyrian general so she can decapitate him, her servant stares up in awe at the heroine; she’s radiant, lit by an inner fire, proudly displaying her trophy. In a nearby painting with the same title by Baptista del Muro, a portly maiden in Renaissance dress holds the head distastefully and seems to ask her indifferent companion, “What I am supposed to do with this?”

We meet Caravaggio near the opening of the exhibit in a chalk portrait by Ottavio Leoni, probably done after his death. With his mussed hair, eye bruised or scarred in a fight and sneering smile, he looks like the tough guy who was regularly dragged into Italian courts and jails, kicked out of cities and died at 38, possibly from lead poisoning — painters used mixtures full of lead — or, if you feel that’s too banal, by murder.

I quote one allegation from a long Wikipedia article: “Vatican documents released in 2002 support the theory that the wealthy Tomassoni family had him hunted down and killed as a vendetta for Caravaggio's murder of gangster Ranuccio Tomassoni, in a botched attempt at castration after a duel over the affections of model Fillide Melandroni.”

Well, geniuses can be jerks. And “Boy Bitten by a Lizard” comes from a genius in his mid-20s. It ties together all the elements I mentioned in paragraph three, along with a terrific sense of action: The boy recoils in surprise and anger, his fingers spread and flailing, with the lizard (probably phallic symbol No. 1) clinging tenaciously to the middle digit of his right hand (probably phallic symbol No. 2).

Caravaggio liked to paint from life, without preliminary sketches, though he couldn’t clamp a dead lizard to a kid’s finger for hours. So he also worked from memory or his own imagination, painting with such exactitude that you see an entire room reflected faintly in a glass carafe full of water and flowers. You can scrutinize every square inch of this painting with pleasure.

Contrast that furious activity with the stillness of Ribera’s saints, most of whom were martyred in grisly ways. These men aren’t idealized; they’re sunburned, wary, grizzled, wrinkled. Saint Bartholomew holds a hunting knife and his own flayed outer skin, as if his stripped-down self has morphed into something more exalted. Saint Judas Thaddeus shyly offers the viewer the axe with which he’ll be chopped up.

You won’t find Jesus bringing anyone joy or balm here, performing miracles, preaching love. This is an old-school Catholic show, where religious belief must be connected to suffering. Christ is seen only en route to the cross or coming down from it, often in paintings that look posed and artificial. However beautifully composed, these are homilies, lacking Caravaggio’s vitality.

That said, I urge you to seek out four paintings that pulled me up short. In one of Lorenzo Lotto’s small, delicate renderings of religious figures, Saint Peter Martyr reads peacefully from a thick book, while blood drips from a knife embedded in his skull. Mattia Preti’s “Susannah and the Elders” seems to offer the usual Old Testament morality, with the would-be rapist tugging on the robe of the startled, nearly naked young woman. Yet the other “elder,” who could be the first one’s son, wears a look of thoughtful anxiety. Does his conscience already trouble him?

Preti’s “The Concert” is one of the most unintentionally spooky paintings I’ve ever seen. Two smirking, zombie-pale musicians, one with a guitar and one with a recorder, sit at a table; they’re serenading an equally well-dressed, sepulchral woman who could have crept out of a tomb in Poe’s House of Usher, and all three have glazed expressions.

Nearby, you’ll find “The Servant Girl,” Gaspare Traversi’s small portrait of a young woman chuckling and pointing at something we can’t see. It’s a welcome break from grandiose or sanctified biblical scenes, proof that artists 400 years ago were starting to find ordinary people in everyday situations as interesting as saints and madonnas. That was another legacy of Caravaggio’s, one of many that make him eternally fresh four centuries on. For once, the word “revolution” in the title of this exhibit is no exaggeration.

Lawrence Toppman covered the arts for 40 years at The Charlotte Observer before retiring in 2020. Now, he’s back in the critic’s chair for the Charlotte Ledger — look for his reviews several times each month in the Charlotte Ledger.