Madonna with a snake by Michelangelo Merisi and Caravaggio

The painting of the Italian painter Caravaggio “Madonna with a snake”, in Italy is better known as the “Madonna of Palafrenieri”. The size of the painting is 292 x 211 cm, canvas, oil. In his painting, the artist depicted a famous apocryphal story about the serpent, the Most Holy Mother of God and God’s son.

In the later works of Caravaggio, the drama of the world perception is strengthened and at the same time there is an even greater gravitation towards monumentalization. Unity and intensity of action, mood, completeness and uniqueness of compositional constructions, amazing power of the cut-off modeling inform them character of real scenes full of great feelings and thoughts.

The independence and free-thinking of Caravaggio from the previous artistic tradition, of course, was somewhat exaggerated by his contemporaries, but the novelty of the picturesque decisions and the originality of the artist’s works were indeed quite revolutionary in the visual arts and cultural life of Rome at the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries.