Tales of the city: How the National Gallery’s new Caravaggio exhibition brings a dark story to life

As one of the most famous Caravaggio’s arrives at the National Gallery from Naples as part of the London institution’s 200th anniversary celebrations, Michael Hodges looks at what the rebellious painter’s works tell us about the soul of a great city and how we live today

The Martyrdom of St Ursula , has joined the National Gallery’s own Salome with the Head of John the Baptist (The National Gallery)

A severed head, a tortured man, a murdered woman, each of them caught in the illuminating gaze of a visionary artist. Which other long-dead painter talks to our fears like Caravaggio? Unnervingly violent, psychologically fraught, and, to contemporary eyes, compellingly cinematic, four centuries after they were created, his works still exert an unsettling emotional force.

This is particularly true of The Flagellation of Christ and the other paintings in which those grisly images appear, completed towards the end of Caravaggio’s life during his exile in Naples between 1606 and 1610.

And now, one of them, The Martyrdom of St Ursula, has joined the National Gallery’s own Salome with the Head of John the Baptist as part of the London institution’s 200th anniversary celebrations. It’s a very small show, with only two paintings, but it will be a must-see – both transporting and instructional. A pioneer of chiaroscuro, the technique that illuminates faces and torsos within a canvas of shadows, Caravaggio teaches us to fear the darkness in ourselves.