Tuesday, May 19th our Grade 7 and Grade 8 Visual Art students visited Palazzo Barberini for an extended morning with two of Caravaggio’s most powerful works: Judith Beheading Holofernes and Saint John the Baptist.
Guided by Ms Mardešić and Mr Donnelly, students spent significant time in front of each painting, examining chiaroscuro, brushwork, the handling of fabric, flesh, and paint surface, and the psychological intensity of Caravaggio’s figures.
The curatorial choice to pair these two works was deliberate. The Judith is one of the most viscerally violent images in Western painting; Holofernes caught mid-scream, the physical effort of the beheading rendered without romanticism, blood present and unglamourised.
The Saint John is its opposite: a young man alone, turned inward, warm light falling on flesh and fabric with extraordinary tenderness. One work is all violence and drama. The other is quiet, weary, melancholic, almost unbearably still.
That contrast is not obvious to a casual visitor. It requires looking at both works seriously and at length, which is exactly what the students did.
The morning ended with an extended observational drawing session in the Gran Salone, beneath Pietro da Cortona’s extraordinary ceiling fresco, one of the great Baroque interiors in Rome.
MMI Art Expanded Classroom 
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