‘St Francis in Meditation’ by Michelangelo Caravaggio

The internet has opened up a virtual cornucopia of art history to anyone with the curiosity to seek it out. But it’s still virtually impossible to convey the brilliance of Michelangelo Caravaggio by way of a picture on the internet—impossible because his method of layering his paint and leaving them partially transparent means that when seen in the original his figures look not so much like paintings as three-dimensional holographs.

This St Francis is just another electrifying figure from Caravaggio’s brush that translates very poorly to a blog post. But here it is, nonetheless, because my memory of it makes it one of the most memorable paintings of the nobility of man I’ve seen.