I may have been quiet with my words, but I’ve been active with my eyes, as I’ve just returned from an amazing month in Italy. Included here are photos of artwork that I suspect few have seen, from Michelangelo’s Secret Room, to a painting by Bernini (yes, painting!) made at age 25 and perhaps a self-portrait, from early El Greco’s to the blockbuster Caravaggio exhibition in the Palazzo Barbernini, Rome.

In 1530, in response to a death warrant from the Medici Pope Clement VII for the sculptor’s support of the Republic, Michelangelo hid for 6 months in The Church of San Lorenzo, Florence. During this time, on the walls of a small room just around the corner and downstairs from his famous New Sacristy Medici Chapel, Michelangelo made what I suspect are his only extant mural-size charcoal drawings – studies for his Sistine Ceiling and numerous sculptures. Discovered in 1975, this room has only recently been opened to the public…. The Caravaggio exhibition, of just about all Caravaggio paintings that could travel, was phenomenal, not only because so many of his paintings hung on the same walls, but also because visitors could get right up to the surfaces, where the artist’s almost expressionistic brushwork of lace and details, his subtle use of warm and cool contrasts (long before color theory was known), his famous dirt-around-toenails and on feet, and the intense depth of his emotionally depicted faces could be seen. Caravaggio, who, among other outrageous acts, killed Ranuccio Tomassoni, was on the run from authorities for much of his life, and painting after painting in the show were of religious images of murder, where Caravaggio seems to express repentance, as well as plead for forgiveness... An exhibition in the Duomo of Venice linking political and artistic developments between Crete and Venice between the 13th-16^th centuries, included powerful El Greco’s made in his 20s, before emigrating to Spain... And finally, what a treat it was to run into @Kyle Staver, who was making prints in Venice!