Caravaggio’s Bodies

In the 1590s, Caravaggio was one of ‘the swaggering, violent young men who terrorised Romans’, Erin Maglaque wrote recently in the LRB, and he ‘made his name by painting this violent, chaotic world’. On this episode, Erin joins Thomas Jones to discuss the ways that Caravaggio represented his models' bodies on canvas – their muscles, skin, hair, clothing and dirty toenails – and what makes his paintings so unnerving that even the people who commissioned them sometimes got rid of them as soon as they could. Find the article and further reading and listening on the episode page: From the LRB

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Caravaggio’s Bodies is an episode from The LRB Podcast by London Review of Books.

This episode is 43:56 long.

This episode was published on Mar 4, 2026.

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