Caravaggio’s Saint John the Baptist (1571–1610), a masterpiece of the Galleria Borghese, reveals the full innovative force of the Lombard master: a painting made of light, flesh, and silence. An image suspended between the sacred and the human, in which the intensity of the gaze and the dramatic chiaroscuro convey the modernity of one of the absolute protagonists of painting.

This volume guides the reader into the heart of Caravaggio’s Saint John the Baptist, executed in the final months of the painter’s life. The young Baptist—fragile and contemplative, immersed in silence—becomes the symbol of an existential condition marked by vulnerability and waiting, born of the same restlessness that haunted Caravaggio himself. Through an analysis of the work and a careful reconstruction of documentary evidence, the text also sheds light on the circumstances that led the painting into the Borghese collections, intertwining the history of art with judicial history.