My 24-hour Caravaggio bender

13,500, that’s how many Picasso paintings are estimated to exist. Mattise, 1,007; Delacroix, 853; Rubens, 832. And of the Italian painter, disgraced knight, murderer, and possible pimp, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, only around 80 survive. I flew to Rome to see 32 of them in one day – a lazy Bonnie Blue of art appreciation.

Rome starts with dinner, Enoteca Corsi on Via Del Gesu (bucatini, Roman style, and a glass of red). Passing the children flinging toys 30 feet in the air at the Trevi fountain, I head to my crumbling hotel. The next morning I visit the Contarelli Chapel (where a priest reprimands me for wearing a baseball cap), Basilica of Saint Augustine, and Cerasi Chapel to see my first six works.

The last time I came to Rome was in 2015. Laying eyes on David with the Head of Goliath in Villa Borghese brought me to tears. Ten years later the Contarelli Chapel brings a more ridiculous encounter, one where art maintenance meets the algorithm. I watch two art historians dust The Inspiration of Saint Matthew, filmed by two curly-haired fuckboys, art now subjugated to the divine provenance of social media.

I admire how the light moves across The Calling of Saint Matthew, where a haloed man enters in the right frame, his extended finger pointing at the head of the slumped figure at the far end of a dining table (this gesture was Caravaggio’s attempt to better Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, an artist he spent his whole career trying to beat). The light falls in from the top right at a diagonal, the chosen man yet to accept his fate (it is the most simple things that are the hardest to achieve). Walking into Cerasi Chapel, what astonishes me about The Conversion on the Way to Damascus is the scale of the horse. It’s as if its body breathes over the supine Saul, showing his vulnerability.

A naive pilgrim, I stomp to Palazzo Barberini for the big spring retrospective, joining the cruise ship retirees in the queue. For two hours I dodge the crowds, getting as close to the work as possible. The first room is brimming with innocence and sexual intrigue. The second explores portraiture and femininity. In the third room, the viewer sees many of Caravaggio’s most significant religious works. And, in the fourth room, there are three paintings from toward the end of his life, two from his time in Napoli, and one portrait from Malta.

The exhibition opens with Narcissus on the first wall, The Cardsharps placed next to The Musicians, Boy Peeling Fruit alongside Self Portrait as Bacchus, in which the surly painter clutches grapes, his shoulder arched away from the viewer. With a snarl he says: “Enjoy yourself? You wouldn’t know how!” In The Musicians, four twinks fight over the proverbial aux cable at the afters (the Italian title, Concerto, better fitting its orgiastic mass). Sexual possibility collapses distance. Have I, in fact, died and woken up in the chiaroscuro of heaven’s darkroom? An old man near me collapses.

Moving on from frisson and power games, the second room re-evaluates Caravaggio’s engagement with femininity and threat. Three canvases sit on three separate walls: Martha and Mary Magdalene, Judith Beheading Holofernes, and Saint Catherine of Alexandria, all using the same model, Fillide Melandroni (a prostitute who rose through the ranks to become a courtesan). The brutishness of Caravaggio’s life often overshadows the delicacy in the work. But these canvases show the painter’s attunement to feminine detail; even Judith’s fatal act of severance is counterbalanced by the weighted presence of her single pearl earring.

In Martha and Mary Magdalene, Mary grips an orange flower. Martha is trying to convert her sister, her clothes pious in contrast to Mary’s glamour. There is a striking lustre in the dress of the martyr Saint Catherine, sharpened by her act of clasping a thin sword – smooth and sharp playing off one another. Similarly, the old woman who is Judith’s accomplice clutches draping fabric to cover the head of the Holophernes, its softness contrasted to her focused, wearied face – in turn sharpening the contrast with Judith’s porcelain cheeks and the pearl. As Judith gets her revenge, both the beheader and the dying man have erect nipples. Experience replaces innocence. The scene of murder is also one of furious arousal. No one around me collapses.

In the third and fourth rooms the work turns darker. I examine the Taking of Christ, Supper at Emmaus and Flagellation of Christ. Someone’s phone keeps ringing with the Succession theme tune. These canvases are large, stultifying works, one’s about crisis, violence, and impossibility. I spend a long time looking at the portrayal of the foot on Jesus’s calf. In the Taking of Christ, Caravaggio figures himself as a lantern bearer, shining a light on the arrest of Jesus. By the final panel of the exhibition, the Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, we see the artist once more, aged, the light extinguished.

What strikes me about these paintings, over and over, is their aggressive naturalism. The canvases are full of movement, tense muscles, built up pressure. Caravaggio’s taste for swordfighting is useful for describing something about what his works do: they slice, pincer, and thrust, skewering life into contained, violent, and sexualised drama. Underneath it, there’s a naive belief that death and sacrifice will lead to redemption.

Like reading Dante, there’s something curiously modern about Caravaggio. Iconography flirts dangerously with iconoclasm. The viewer gets nailed to the moment. The painter lifts up our participation by drawing religious iconography down to earth. It is the sacred itself that becomes an intensifier of ordinary experiences.

At a time when the church ruled (and artists were dependent on patronage), Caravaggio gave painting his greatest invention: chiaroscuro, the aggressive contrasts of bright light and dark shadow. John Berger described it synesthetically, as smelling “of candles, over-ripe melons, [and] damp washing.” Rather than creating ennobling images of the Godly, Caravaggio centred the fullness of human experience in some of the most powerful sites of religious authority (and places visited by the wealthiest figures of the society of his day).

The unwashed feet of pilgrims, grapes between the fingers of knaves, the stale bread at the table of the son of God – the painter put the profane before us.

Plucking his models from the urban poor, from brothels, drinking dens and gambling tables, he thrust these figures, the fullness of their lives, into taut canvases. The darkness that envelopes his figures is not just the canvas, but their lives beyond it.

In his studio he lit his models from high up, possibly even breaking holes in the ceiling to steal the light of the sun, like Prometheus. It allowed him to diminish the spiritual grandeur of the artists that preceded him, and refocus the canvas on the immediate perceptible realm: the substance of clothing, food and flesh – and the force of sex, power and death.