Caravaggio's dark, dramatic light changed European painting. Five of his works explained, from the Boy Bitten by a Lizard to the Seven Works of Mercy, each with a full article.

A god eating his child on the wall of a dining room, a severed head painted on a parade shield, skeletons tending a garden: eight paintings that have unsettled viewers for centuries, and what their painters meant by them.

Caravaggio painted Judith Beheading Holofernes in Rome around 1599-1602, and Artemisia Gentileschi answered it years later with her own Judith. Both retell the same biblical killing, but they differ in effort, in bodies and in patron. This guide compares the two paintings side by side.

Caravaggio's Boy Bitten by a Lizard, painted in Rome around 1594, is the first major European painting to use surprise as its primary subject. A handsome young man recoils as a lizard hidden among the cherries on the table sinks its teeth into his finger — and the picture's whole structure exists to make the viewer feel the bite. The 1594 commission, the iconography, the early Caravaggio boys, and how the picture announced the visual grammar of the entire Baroque.

A pointing hand. A shaft of light through a tavern window. Five tax collectors at a table looking up. Caravaggio painted the founding scene of European Baroque in 1599, and every painter for the next forty years tried to figure out how.

Searching for Caravaggio's Narcissus? This is the painting: roughly 110 by 92 centimetres of oil on canvas, painted in Rome at the start of his career. A young man kneeling at a dark pool, looking at his own reflection. What the painting shows, why it is so dark, and how to bring the fine print home.

Caravaggio's Judith Beheading Holofernes (c.1599) turns a biblical story into a stage scene. In the Book of Judith, a widow saves her city by killing an enemy general; Caravaggio shows the moment of the blow in a single hard light, with Judith's face caught between duty and disgust.