Caravaggio was an Italian Renaissance painter.  It was therefore more likely than not that he would run into the Church of Rome.  He was preoccupied with the chiaroscuro in his painting – as Caruso’s voice would be in his singing.  (The painterly word would be tenebrous.)  His love life was all over the place, and he had a God given capacity to get into serious trouble – with authority, or people of either sex.  But especially with the Thought Police.

All this is on show in the film Caravaggio’s Shadow.  It is preternaturally dark, and troubled – to an extent that I once thought of leaving early.  (Perhaps in part because for two hours the night before I had wrestled with a stark RSC version of the most violent play in the lexicon – Titus Andronicus.)

The artist was frighteningly original.  That was enough to get him into trouble.  And he painted straight from the flesh – and he used people from what the Church would call the gutter as his models.  Saints could be based on sluts.  (He was certainly not alone in that – my recollection is that El Greco  – he of the Counter-Reformation – modelled the madonna on his mistress.)  And this was the time when the Reformation ran into the Renaissance.

Then the artist is convicted of murder after killing an opponent in a brawl.  He asks the pope for a pardon.  The pope assigns a ‘shadow’ to investigate.  That investigation is the subject of the film. 

The painter is hot and bothered.  The shadow is coldness made flesh – with the morals of Vladimir Putin.  Both leads are well played and the drama is engaging – wounding even.  But it stays dark and wounding.

It was for me held together by the incomparable Isabelle Huppert.  She is speaking in French, but she oozes her austere authority whenever she is on the screen.  And for someone past what the French call ‘a certain age,’ she has a remarkable capacity to lead us to believe that seriously heavy breathing – to use a phrase used by Walter Matthau – is never entirely out of the question.  But it will be her call.  She is just regnal.

Although the artist is hostile to the Church, he is addicted to the missionary position to the extent that some in the audience – well, at least one – got sick of the sight of his bum.

And if you want to know why Rome never recovered from its decline and fall, and why Italy is not now and never has been well governed, you need not look any further than the Church of Rome.  They are the bad guys in this movie.  The shadow is just their venomous distillation, and the artist just their inevitable victim. 

I don’t think the Church keeps the Index now, at least on the table, but if it did, this movie would claim top billing.