And here's where everything changes again.
Caravaggio arrives like a slap.
After the Neoplatonic allegories, the serene Raphaels, the Titians glowing with ideal warmth, you're suddenly in a real room with a real person in real light.
The adolescent Bacchus is soft and fleshy.
His nails are dirty.
The fruit in the bowl is slightly rotten.
The god of wine looks like someone you might pass in a market.
This is Caravaggio's revolution: sacred and mythological subjects treated as if they are happening right now, to ordinary people, in ordinary light.
Not the heavenly realm.
Not the ideal human form.
The world as it actually is, rendered with almost violent directness.
It was deeply shocking to contemporaries and immensely influential.
Every naturalistic painting made in Europe over the next century traces something back to this room.
The Uffizi also holds his Medusa — a severed head painted on a shield, originally made as a gift for Ferdinand I de' Medici.
The expression is genuine horror.
The snakes are still writhing.
The model may have been Caravaggio himself.
Fun fact: Caravaggio's real name was Michelangelo Merisi.
He was named after the Florentine who dominates the room just down the corridor.
The coincidence was not lost on either of them.
