He painted the most spiritual, revolutionary masterpieces of the 17th century, and he was a sword-obsessed street brawler who fled a death sentence for murder. Caravaggio is the ultimate contradiction: absolute empathy on canvas, unfiltered chaos in his police record.

This episode unpacks the chaotic life and revolutionary art of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, the man who essentially invented modern painting by refusing to sugarcoat reality. From childhood trauma to the Counter-Reformation’s aesthetic war, his murder of a rival, and his fugitive years, we trace how a tortured life produced transcendent light.

• How losing his father to plague at age six shaped his obsession with sudden, violent death and deep sorrow
• His invention of tenebrism, painting straight onto dark canvas with no sketches, scoring guides with the brush handle
• Why the church rejected works like Death of the Virgin, allegedly modeled on a drowned prostitute
• The 1606 killing of Ranuccio Tomassoni, the papal death bounty, and his obsessive paintings of decapitations
• His knighthood and expulsion in Malta, the ambush that scarred him, and his 2018-confirmed death from sepsis at 38