When In rome, the Class was lucky enough to

check out this church called San Luigi Dei Francesi, which contains a cycle of three paintings by the baroque master Caravaggio. Housed in the Contarelli Chapel near the back of the church, the three paintings are an unbelievable sight, with their almost nauseating attention to detail and dynamic chiaroscuro. They show three crucial moments in the life of St Matthew: his calling to service by J.C., his writing of the gospel from divine inspiration, and his assassination/martyrdom.

Seeing these paintings was a truly awesome experience. I was speechless, stunned even, by

not only the uncanny technical mastery displayed, but also by the painting's modesty. They depict the Saint as a dishevelled old man with an age-worn face and dirty feet. Caravaggio's later paintings carry the weight of his genius, in that they display the ordinariness, the everyday humanity that he believed the miracles of the bible were really about. His work did not idealize the world around him, the world around him was his ideal subject.