A new documentary on Caravaggio is debuting on the small screen next week, premiering on the streaming platform Marquee TV. Caravaggio is the latest release in the Exhibition on Screen series, directed by Phil Grabsky and David Bickerstaff, which also includes a record-breaking 2023 film about Vermeer.
The feature-length film examines the life and work of the Baroque master, combining expert commentary, painting analysis and dramatised sequences to explore the artist’s practice and biography. The production draws on five years of the directors’ research and international travel.
Grabsky tells The Art Newspaper that Caravaggio’s tumultuous personal life, including numerous arrests for brawling, has overshadowed previous portrayals. “Caravaggio is unquestionably one of the greats but I think he has been ill-served by previous films that have focused on and exaggerated his nocturnal activities in Rome to the detriment of understanding just who he was in reality and what lies at the heart of his practice and output,” he says.
Grabsky and his co-director David Bickerstaff have previously produced films on Van Gogh and Vermeer as part of the Exhibition on Screen series, with the latter becoming the highest grossing art documentary in UK history, showing in more than 300 cinemas across the country. Other artists covered by the series include Frida Kahlo, Edward Hopper, Rembrandt van Rijn, Henri Matisse, Edvard Munch and Claude Monet.
Grabsky says: “The cinema reaction so far has been tremendous—it’s our second most popular film after Vermeer—and we recently won the audience award at the prestigious Master of Art festival.”
While the release of the Vermeer film coincided with the opening of a major exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, that of others, including Caravaggio, have not. “One of my ambitions is to keep the films varied,” says Grabsky. “Some are based on major exhibitions, some on somewhat smaller exhibitions and some have nothing to do with exhibitions—in a way we, the filmmakers, are curating our own. So [Mary] Cassatt, [Edward] Hopper, Kahlo, and many more, are biographies we just wanted to make.”
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, born in Milan in 1571, was an Italian Baroque painter known for dramatic realism and his bold use of light and shadow. He worked mainly in Rome, where his intense, lifelike religious scenes brought him fame and controversy. He had a violent temperament and went into exile after he killed a man in 1606. Caravaggio spent his final years moving between Naples, Malta and Sicily before dying at 38, possibly of syphilis. After being sentenced to death by beheading while on the run, his works increasingly featured severed heads such as David with the Head of Goliath, Judith Beheading Holofernes and The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist.
Caravaggio, David with the Head of Goliath (1609-10)
Galleria Borghese
Caravaggio will premiere on 6 April on Marquee TV, described as “Netflix for the arts” by the Financial Times. Ed Humphrey, Marquee TV’s chief executive officer, tells The Art Newspaper that the service grew its subscriber base 40% in 2025. “This demonstrates that demand for arts programming is not declining,” he says.
