The Secret Behind Caravaggio's Dirty Feet

There is a detail in Caravaggio's paintings that most people never notice, but 400 years ago it was a scandal for the church. This detail is found in the feet of the figures that appear in his paintings. If you look closely, it is common to see that the figures in his works have bare feet, that they are dirty and that the soles are even black with dust and mud. Something that in the 17th century was not allowed and that the church was not willing to accept. Caravaggio made that decision over and over again despite the consequences, but to understand why he did this, we first need to know a little about his story. Michelangelo Morisi da Caravaggio was born in Milan in 1571, but he spent much of his childhood in the small town of Caravaggio in Lombardy, a place deeply shaped by the theology of Saint Charles Borromeo, the Archbishop of Milan who was one of the great promoters of the movement known as pauperism. Pauperism was a current within Catholicism that held that Christ and his apostles had lived in poverty and that the church should reflect that poverty rather than hide it. That saints were not idealized figures of noble appearance, but real humble people who walked barefoot and worked with their hands. When Caravaggio arrived in Rome in 1592, the city was in the midst of the counter-reformation. The church had responded to Protestantism with a campaign to glorify its saints and its images. The church encouraged painters to create works that would inspire devotion and reverence. Saints were meant to be shown as beings of light, of supernatural beauty, and above all, removed from the mundane reality of everyday life. For the church of the counter-reformation, the poor were a problem. A document from the period described beggars and vagrants as ignorant of Christian truth, as sinners who did not deserve to be depicted alongside the saints. For them, poverty was not a virtue, but a sign of moral weakness. And Caravaggio believed exactly the opposite. When Caravaggio delivered his first version of Saint Matthew and the Angel for the church of the priests' reaction was one of dismay. Caravaggio had to paint a second version, more conventional and more in line with what the church expected. However, his paintings continued to go against its wishes. Years later, the Death of the Virgin, which he painted for the Carmelites, was withdrawn because the priests believed he had used a prostitute as a model. The Madonna dei Palafrenieri was removed from the Vatican just two days after being installed. A cardinal's secretary even wrote that it contained vulgarity, sacrilege, impiousness, and disgust. But Caravaggio never changed his style. And this brings us to one of the most controversial and important paintings of his entire career. But before we continue, I would like to remind you that, if you would like to have this work or any other painting by Caravaggio in your collection, you can purchase it directly from our website. In our catalogue, you will find more than 900 carefully selected works for you to choose your favourites and begin your own art collection. Shipping is free worldwide, and by purchasing from the store, you will be supporting me enormously in continuing to create videos like this every week. I will leave the link in the description so you can place your order once you finish watching the video. The Madonna of the Rosary was painted around 1607, and today is held at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. It could be said that it is one of the most ambitious works of Caravaggio's entire career, but it is also one of the most charged with political and theological meaning. If we look at the composition carefully, the first thing we notice is its monumental scale, standing at more than three and a half metres tall. At the top, we see the Virgin with the Child, flanked by Saint Dominic and Saint Peter Martyr, while in the lower section, we can see a crowd of people kneeling to receive the rosary. Now, the detail that makes this painting so controversial is found in the foreground. These bare, dirty feet with blackened soles represent the feet of the poor of Rome, and Caravaggio deliberately placed them in the foreground so that they would be so close to the viewer that they would be the first thing seen. The art historian, Claudia Vigiani, one of the foremost specialists on Caravaggio's work, describes these feet not as an anecdotal detail but as a form of propaganda, a public communication of a very specific theological message. We could say that Caravaggio painted these dirty feet as a message of inclusion for the poor within the church, to tell the people visiting the church that faith was not the property of nobles or cardinals, and that Christ had not come only for the clean and the perfumed, but also for those who walked barefoot through the mud. For a person living in the 17th century, this message was something truly revolutionary. We have to keep in mind that during this period, a churchgoer would enter a church expecting to see idealised beauty in its paintings. They expected the saints to look like saints, not like neighbours from their own street. However, Caravaggio did exactly the opposite. It is documented that for his works he would take beggars, labourers, women from the street and give them the names of the apostles and the virgin. He would also light them from above, with that light descending vertically over their bodies, as if God were paying attention to them specifically. A cardinal who wrote about his work said that what Caravaggio was doing was collapsing the distance between the divine and the ordinary, and the renaissance had spent two centuries building that very distance. Throughout his career, the church repeatedly demanded that Caravaggio alter his compositions to suit what his patrons and the institution considered appropriate, but as we have seen throughout this video, in many cases he refused. Caravaggio died in 1610, at the age of 38, under circumstances that remain unclear to this day, while waiting for a papal pardon for a crime he had committed years earlier. The pardon came, but too late. Still, his sense of authenticity, that rawness of human existence that so unsettled his contemporaries, remains perfectly preserved today in the Augustinian churches of Rome. Those dirty feet that so many try to erase are still there, holding onto a message most people walk right past. Thank you for watching the video until the end. I would love for you to leave me in the comments whether you think these paintings truly deserve to be censored in their time, or whether you think that detail of the dirty feet is exactly what gives Caravaggio's work such a powerful message. I will be reading your thoughts in the comments. Thank you for your support, and I will see you in the next video.