Did you know that Malta has one of the rare magnificent paintings in chiaroscuro by Caravaggio?

The 17th-century Italian painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio took chiaroscuro to the extreme, often blacking out large portions of the background and brightly illuminating large foreground subjects. This combination of using high contrast with a single focused light source had an incredibly dramatic effect in The Beheading of St John the Baptist.