Bangladesh, March 26 -- The current exhibition of Boy with a Basket of Fruit (ca. 1595) at The Morgan Library & Museum—on view through April 19, 2026—offers a rare opportunity to see what may be Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggios first masterpiece not as a prelude, but as a provocation. Installed in a focused, intimate gallery and contextualized alongside works that both precede and follow it, the painting emerges not as a technical exercise but as an act of aesthetic and philosophical insurrection.

The Morgans curatorial framing emphasizes the works place at a turning point in Italian painting—linking Lombard naturalism with a “revolutionary approach” that disrupts illusion and foregrounds artifice. But wha...