Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio1601
Crucifixion of Saint Peter
Three laborers strain to raise the upside-down cross — an old peasant Peter watches the nail in his hand, not the sky. Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome.
Depicted passages
About Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio
1571–1610 · Italian
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was a Lombard painter active in Rome, Naples, Malta, and Sicily whose radical chiaroscuro and street-modeled saints reshaped European religious painting. Between the Contarelli Matthew cycle (1599–1602) and his final canvases sent from Naples in 1610, he produced roughly thirty canonical biblical works.