When Pope Paul V learns that Caravaggio uses prostitutes, thieves and vagabonds as models for his paintings, he orders an investigation into the artist by the Vatican secret service.

The results of the investigation will determine whether Caravaggio's request to be pardoned from his death sentence for the murder of a rival will succeed.

Davide Stanzione in Best Movie assigns the film 3.3 stars out of 5 and speaks of it as: "A surprising, bruised and sensual film, which manages to reproduce the works of Caravaggio within the visual fabric of the images and restores, with more accursed vigor than you stumble, the torrid demons of a boundless artist, torn between the torment of the body and the ecstasy of the sacred".

[2] According to Zinaida Pronchenko, "Placido does not try to diversify the usual narrative — he drank, copulated, transferred to the canvas — with conceptual solutions, as, for example, Derek Jarman in his 1986 Caravaggio.

[3] As Vittoria Scarpa (Сineuropa) notes, "One of the film’s strengths is its demonstration of how aspects of reality entered into the painter’s works, how thieves, vagabonds and harlots appeared on the artist’s canvasses, as if on stage, transformed into eternal works of art".