Capuchin Crypt and Museum Site Features

The five chapels of bones

The remains of thousands of Capuchin friars, moved here in 1631 and arranged into ornamental designs across walls and vaults. Some skeletons are intact and still in their Franciscan habits; most of the work is made from individual bones.

The trilingual plaque

In one of the chapels: "What you are now, we once were; what we are now, you shall be." The crypt's entire argument in one sentence, and the thing to read before walking the rest.

The Crypt of the Three Skeletons

Three youthful skeletons, symbols of the precariousness of life and of universal death, in a chamber decorated with bones in complex floral motifs. At its centre is a figure — probably a Barberini princess — holding a scythe and a set of scales: death, and divine judgement. The plaques commemorate friars venerated for their holiness.

San Francesco in meditazione, attributed to Caravaggio

Francis at prayer with a skull in his hands and the cross laid on the ground. Dated 1600–1610 and given to Caravaggio attr. — the museum is careful about this. The painting is not precisely cited in the early sources, manuscript or printed; it surfaced only at the beginning of the twentieth century and was attributed to Caravaggio by Giorgio Cantalamessa, a leading scholar of the day. A long debate among specialists followed and continues today.

Guido Reni's St Michael the Archangel Defeating Satan

First chapel on the right, commissioned by Antonio Barberini in 1630 and completed in 1636. By legend Reni, having heard that Cardinal Giovanni Battista Pamphilj had defamed him, gave Satan — crushed under the archangel's foot — the cardinal's face. Pamphilj later became Innocent X, whose Velázquez portrait hangs in his family's palace a mile away.

The rest of the chapels

Gerard van Honthorst's Christ Mocked, Mario Balassi's Transfiguration for Taddeo Barberini, Giovanni Lanfranco's Nativity, Domenichino's Stigmatization of St Francis, Baccio Ciarpi's Prayer in Gethsemane and Andrea Sacchi's Saint Anthony.

Fra Luigi da Crema

A Capuchin painter working across the turn of the nineteenth century, whose devotional work the museum holds — the order looking at its own artists rather than only at the famous ones who painted for it.

What it started

The crypt's fame once rivalled the Catacombs, and the Sedlec ossuary in the Czech Republic and the Skull Chapel in Poland are both said to have been inspired by it.