Museo di Capodimonte

This guide to Museo di Capodimonte in Naples opens with a question in front of one painting: would you have guessed its painter was, at that very moment, a wanted killer? It follows Caravaggio's flight from Rome after a fatal brawl in May 1606 left a man named Ranuccio Tomassoni dead and a death sentence on his own head, into a Naples of three hundred fifty thousand people that took in fugitives without asking who they'd been. Within a year, the di Franco family commissioned the painting now hanging in front of you, which spent more than three and a half centuries in the church of San Domenico Maggiore before making its way here.