San Luigi dei Francesi site features

From the street it is a flat grey-white front with no square in front of it. You come down a narrow lane off Piazza Navona and the facade is suddenly there, filling the view, with statues standing in niches across it — kings and saints, not the Roman ones you have been looking at all day.

Inside it is dark, gilded and narrow. A single nave runs ahead between chapels, the walls lined in coloured marble, the ceiling heavy with gold. It is cool and quiet after the lane outside, and the first thing you notice is that people are not spread through it — they are all standing at one chapel on the left, near the far end.

That chapel has three large canvases on three walls. Two face each other across it and one hangs above the altar between them. They are almost entirely brown and black, with figures coming out of the dark in a hard raking light, and one of them has a shaft of light crossing the whole picture above a table of men counting money.

Everything else in the church is competing with that and losing. There is a second frescoed chapel with Saint Cecilia's story across its walls and ceiling, painted by a different hand in bright clear colour, and it is usually empty.

Under the floor and along the walls are the French dead of Rome — an ambassador to two kings, an economist, a painter, and a woman whose tomb was raised by her lover.

The Contarelli Chapel

Caravaggio's Saint Matthew cycle, dated 1599–1600: The Calling of Saint Matthew on the left wall, The Inspiration of Saint Matthew above the altar, The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew on the right.

Why these three matter

The parish records this as Caravaggio's first large commission for religious subjects and the principal turning point of his career, obtained in 1600 through his friendships in pro-French circles. Before it he was painting still lifes, genre scenes and portraits for Cardinal del Monte.

The detached facade

Della Porta's front is a piece of decorative work entirely independent of the body of the structure — a method much copied later.

The facade statues

Charlemagne, Saint Louis, Saint Clothilde and Saint Jeanne of Valois.

The Polet Chapel

Frescoes by Domenichino, the Histories of Saint Cecilia. Usually empty.

Natoire's frescoes

Stories of Saint Louis IX, Saint Denis and Clovis, by Charles-Joseph Natoire.

The French dead

Cardinal de Bernis, ambassador in Rome for Louis XV and Louis XVI; the economist Frédéric Bastiat; the painter Antoniazzo Romano; the sculptor Pierre Le Gros the Younger, in an unmarked grave; and Pauline de Beaumont, dead of consumption in 1805, her tomb erected by her lover Chateaubriand.

The free audio tour

The parish's own tour of the church and the Caravaggios: a smartphone and headphones, no app to install, reached by QR code at the door.