For a Caravaggio nut like me, it’s been a good month. A trip to Malta, taking my son to visit his grandmother, presented an opportunity to pay a return visit to the St John’s Co-Cathedral in Valletta, which houses his masterpiece, The Beheading of St John the Baptist.
Back in England, I went to Beyond Caravaggio, an exhibition at the National Gallery of a handful of his paintings surrounded by artworks by lesser mortals. The Taking of Christ, borrowed from the National Gallery of Ireland, is worth the price of admission alone. Neither the furious cathedral attendants shouting at bemused Germans to stop taking pictures of the St John painting, nor the hideous (and customary) overcrowding at the National’s show could stop me basking in Caravaggio’s genius.
