Caravaggio
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49 free Caravaggio trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Caravaggio painted saints with dirty feet, used a well-known Roman prostitute as his Judith and his Virgin Mary, threw a plate of artichokes at a waiter, killed a man over a tennis match or a woman, was knighted in Malta and expelled as a 'foul and rotten member', and died of a fever on a Tuscan beach at 38. Along the way he invented the lighting that defined Baroque painting and, in one historian's words, 'modern painting' itself. These 49 questions track the life and the pictures: the Milan apprenticeship with a pupil of Titian, the arrival in Rome 'naked and extremely needy', Cardinal del Monte's chamber pieces, Boy Bitten by a Lizard and the Medusa shield, the Contarelli Chapel Matthews, the rejected Death of the Virgin that Rubens told Mantua to buy, the horse in the Conversion of Saint Paul, the Tomassoni brawl, the Beheading of Saint John in Valletta with its signature in blood, the Palermo Nativity stolen in 1969, the Taking of Christ found in a Dublin Jesuit dining room, and the 2010 bones at Porto Ercole. Every answer is cited to a page we checked and each explanation adds one more detail. Play it solo or print it for an art-history night.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What was Caravaggio's real name?
Michelangelo Merisi
Michelangelo Merisi. 'Caravaggio' is the Lombard town his family came from, and his first name points to a birthday on 29 September, the feast of the Archangel Michael.
Q 02In which city did the young Caravaggio begin his apprenticeship as a painter in 1584?
Milan
Milan. His father had kept a workshop there, and at 12 the boy was bound to Simone Peterzano, a specialist in fresco, a technique Caravaggio never took up.
Q 03Caravaggio's dramatic form of chiaroscuro came to be known as what?
Tenebrism
Tenebrism. Faces and hands are picked out by a harsh light against a mostly dark setting, a look so widely copied that his followers were called tenebrists.
Q 04Caravaggio's teacher Simone Peterzano styled himself a pupil of which Venetian master?
Titian
Titian. Peterzano had trained in Venice and signed pictures 'Titiani alumnus', and the darkest, most dramatic Venetian painting reads like a forerunner of his own pupil's style.
Q 05Caravaggio left Lombardy for Rome in 1592 after a violent incident said to involve whom?
A police officer
A police officer. The only evidence is a note in the margin of an early biography, but it fits the pattern: he began his career as he ended it, in trouble with the law.
Q 06What was the young Caravaggio set to paint in Giuseppe Cesari's busy Roman workshop?
Flowers and fruit
Flowers and fruit. An early biographer says he chafed at being kept from painting figures, and after about eight months he left to sell pictures of his own.
Q 07Caravaggio's Entombment of Christ, painted for a Roman church, now hangs in which museum?
The Vatican Museums
The Vatican Museums. French commissioners carried it off to Paris in 1797, and when it came back two decades later it went into the pope's picture gallery, not its old chapel.
Q 08Which cardinal became Caravaggio's first major patron and took him into his Roman palace?
Francesco Maria del Monte
Francesco Maria del Monte. Living in his household gave the painter a status he flaunted: arrested in 1598 for carrying a sword, he told the court he bore it by right as the cardinal's painter.
Q 09Why did the young Caravaggio nickname his first Roman landlord, a priest, 'Monsignor Salad'?
He served little else
He served little else. Caravaggio lodged with Pandolfo Pucci soon after reaching Rome, was given only salad in the evenings, and left within a few months with the nickname as his revenge.
Q 10In Caravaggio's The Fortune Teller, what does the girl steal as she reads the young man's palm?
His ring
His ring. She eases it off while he gazes into her face, and Caravaggio painted the scene twice; one canvas stayed in Rome and the other was given to Louis XIV.
Q 11One of two versions of Caravaggio's Boy Bitten by a Lizard hangs in which London museum?
The National Gallery
The National Gallery. Catching a split second of pain was almost unheard of in the 1590s, and an early biographer said you could almost hear the boy scream.
Q 12Caravaggio's Medusa was painted on what kind of object?
A shield
A shield. It was made as a gift for the Grand Duke of Tuscany, whose family had owned a Medusa by Leonardo da Vinci, and Caravaggio's was meant to stand the comparison.
Q 13In which Florence museum does Caravaggio's Medusa hang?
Uffizi
Uffizi. The picture was painted in Rome to enter the Medici collection in Florence, and four centuries later it still hangs with that collection.
Q 21Which museum holds Caravaggio's Death of the Virgin, which once belonged to Charles I of England?
The Louvre
The Louvre. Charles I's pictures were sold off after his execution, and this one passed through a private collector's hands before Louis XIV bought it in 1671.
Q 22Caravaggio's Madonna of the Grooms was painted for an altar in which great church?
St Peter's Basilica
St Peter's Basilica. Commissioned by the pope's grooms and finished in April 1606, it was taken down within weeks, and Cardinal Scipione Borghese soon had it for his own collection.
Q 23How did Vincenzo Giustiniani display Caravaggio's Amor Vincit Omnia?
Behind a green curtain
Q 14What did Caravaggio include in his Basket of Fruit?
Wormholes and blight
Wormholes and blight. A horticulturist who studied the canvas found an apple bored by insects and starting to rot, and leaves scorched by fungus, all painted as carefully as the perfect fruit.
Q 15Caravaggio's Saint Matthew cycle decorates which Roman church's Contarelli Chapel?
San Luigi dei Francesi
San Luigi dei Francesi. It was his first major public commission, two canvases each almost ten feet square, and it established him at once as the most original painter in Rome.
Q 16Caravaggio's The Calling of Saint Matthew shows Jesus summoning a man of which trade?
Tax collector
Tax collector. Caravaggio moved the Gospel scene to a dim counting room of his own day and dressed Matthew's companions in the gaudy fashions of Rome around 1600.
Q 17What offended the patrons in Caravaggio's first version of Matthew and the Angel?
The saint's dirty peasant legs
The saint's dirty peasant legs. The priests wanted a dignified scholar, which is what Caravaggio then supplied; the rejected canvas ended up in Berlin, where it burned in 1945.
Q 18In Caravaggio's Conversion on the Way to Damascus, what dominates the canvas more than Saint Paul himself?
A horse's haunches
A horse's haunches. Paul lies on his back in a pool of light, arms flung wide, while an old groom calmly steadies the animal so that it does not tread on him.
Q 19Caravaggio's Death of the Virgin was rejected partly because its model was thought to be what?
A prostitute
A prostitute. That was one early writer's account; others blamed the undignified look of the dead Virgin herself, and the friars replaced the picture with a far more decorous one.
Q 20On whose advice did the Duke of Mantua buy the rejected Death of the Virgin?
Peter Paul Rubens
Peter Paul Rubens. He praised it as one of Caravaggio's best works, and before it left Rome the duke's envoy put it on show so that the city's artists could see it.
Behind a green curtain. He is said to have prized it above everything else he owned, and to have unveiled it only after visitors had seen his other pictures, so that it would not outshine them.
Q 24The courtesan Fillide Melandroni probably posed as which biblical heroine in a gory Caravaggio of about 1599?
Judith
Judith. She saws at the tyrant's neck with a sword while her old maid waits beside her, in a setting one biographer calls more like a Roman brothel than a general's tent.
Q 25A disputed Caravaggio, a biblical beheading, turned up in 2014 in the attic of a house in which French city?
Toulouse
Toulouse. The owners came across it while looking into a leak in the roof, and in 2019 a private buyer took it shortly before it was due to be auctioned.
Q 26In 1603 Caravaggio was arrested for defaming which fellow painter with offensive poems?
Giovanni Baglione
Giovanni Baglione. The verses twisted his surname into an obscenity, and the rival who had Caravaggio jailed for them went on to write one of the first accounts of his life.
Q 27A tavern waiter sued Caravaggio for throwing a plate of what in his face?
Artichokes
Artichokes. It was one of a string of charges in 1604, a year in which he was also arrested for carrying weapons and for insulting the city guard.
Q 28The 1606 sword fight in which Caravaggio killed Ranuccio Tomassoni is traditionally linked to which sport?
Tennis
Tennis. Reports at the time spoke of a quarrel over a game and a wager, and the two men fought at a court in Rome's Campo Marzio, where Tomassoni bled to death.
Q 29What penalty did Rome's courts impose on Caravaggio for killing Ranuccio Tomassoni?
A death sentence
A death sentence. He was convicted in his absence after fleeing Rome, which is why he spent his last four years on the move between Naples, Malta and Sicily.
Q 30After killing a man in Rome in 1606, Caravaggio sheltered on the estates of which powerful family?
Colonna
Colonna. Costanza Colonna, marchesa of his home town, had known his family since his childhood and sheltered him more than once in his years on the run.