Caravaggio
the Soul and the Blood

“Caravaggio – the Soul and the Blood” is a narrative and visual tour through the places where the artist lived and those that still preserve some of his most famous works: Milan, Florence, Rome, Naples and Malta.

The scientific advice was entrusted to prof. Claudio Strinati, expert art historian of Caravaggio, who shows us the correlations between the artist’s personality and life and his works. The film is further enriched by the interventions of Professor Mina Gregori, President of the Roberto Longhi Art History Studies Foundation, who provides some personal readings of Caravaggio’s masterpieces, and Dr Rossella Vodret, also curator of the exhibition “Inside Caravaggio,” at Palazzo Reale in Milan, who illustrates the results of the most recent studies on the artist’s pictorial techniques.

A thorough research in the archives that preserve traces of the artist’s passage, leads us to a reconstruction of the tracks and troubles of Caravaggio and to the discovery of his works, of which about 40 are treated in the film. Thanks to the use of advanced graphic elaborations, of extreme macros and of games of light and shadow, the paintings of Caravaggio take life and body, giving an almost tactile perception.

The contemporaneity of Caravaggio’s soul is returned in the film by symbolic scenes set in a contemporary and essential context, which stage the moods of Caravaggio with visionary visual and artistic choices of great emotional impact: the compulsion, the search for freedom, pain, passion, attraction to risk but also to mercy, up to the request of forgiveness and redemption.

The voice of Caravaggio’s inner self, emotional, evocative and at the same time intimate, is that of Manuel Agnelli. The frontman of Afterhours and judge of X Factor IT, a multifaceted and talented artist, who is himself revolutionary and original, impulsive and deep. An alter ego able, like Caravaggio, to excite and upset. The voice-over of Caravaggio/Manuel layered onto the symbolic scenes translates into the continuous movement of the moods of the artist, reproducing the nuances of his character and unveiling the emotions, often violent, that harbored in him, helping the viewer to get in touch with his mind and soul.