The view runs northwest across the roofs of the old town from high on the cathedral. The dome and the pair of towers in the middle distance belong to La Clerecía, the Jesuit college that is now the Pontifical University. The plaza at lower right is Plaza de Anaya, with the columned front of the Palacio de Anaya along its far side and the small domed church of San Sebastián sitting between them.

I took this on 8 May 2014, at about twenty to two in the afternoon. It is the large studio in the Rubens House in Antwerp, the room where Rubens and his assistants turned out the enormous canvases that went to Madrid and Paris and London. I had a very wide lens on the camera that day, which is why the ceiling looks like it belongs to a cathedral. It doesn’t.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio arrived in Rome around 1592, at approximately 21, with no money, no connections, and a technique nobody in the city had seen before. He was dead by 1610, at 38 or 39, on a beach in Porto Ercole, probably of fever, possibly of lead poisoning from his own pigments, possibly of something worse. In between, he produced roughly 80 paintings that broke Western art into a before and an after — and killed a man in a street brawl, fled Rome as a fugitive, killed or badly wounded at least one other person in Malta, and spent the last four years of his life on the run from a papal death warrant.