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Leaning on his reed cross, immersed in deep meditation, Saint John the Baptist was painted by a mature Caravaggio. The work remained in the home of Ottavio Costa until the Ligurian banker's death. Initially intended for the small church of the Conscente estate, the collector never managed to part with it. Today, this masterpiece is one of the jewels of The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy, preserved at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut, also belonged to Costa. This is the first known sacred work by Caravaggio, created in 1597, in which the painter explores the dramatic use of shadow. The Ligurian banker, who the artist met during his stay in Rome, collected both paintings, demonstrating his appreciation for the talent of the Lombard master. In the exhibition Caravaggio 2025 at Palazzo Barberini for the first time, 24 paintings by the Master are exhibited together in a unique path, an itinerary that restores the revolutionary scope of Caravaggio in the art, religion and society of his time. Admiring these "fragments of the heart" today, once part of large private collections and now dispersed in museums around the world, represents an unrepeatable opportunity. Thanks to an extraordinary exhibition, defined as "pharaonic" by the director of the National Galleries of Ancient Art in Rome, Thomas Clement Salomon, these masterpieces are reunited in the capital.