AI-powered virtual exhibition - 2026
A virtual exhibition of every painting by Caravaggio: 64 works in seven rooms, walked through in the order he painted them, with an AI guide that answers questions about the canvas in front of you.
All 64 paintings, seven rooms, one AI guide you can ask about every canvas.
A real Caravaggio retrospective is impossible: the paintings are spread across churches and museums from Rome to Malta to Saint Petersburg, and many never travel. The goal was to put all of them in one place, the 64 works accepted as his, and to keep what makes a good exhibition worth the visit: a route that tells a story, the light falling on the canvas and not on the room, and someone to ask when a painting raises a question.
The works hang in seven rooms, one for each period of his life, from the early years in Rome to Naples, Malta and Sicily, so walking forward means following his career. Each painting has its date, medium, size, current location and a short description. In front of any of them you can ask the AI guide, which answers about that specific work and suggests questions to start from. A guided tour stops at each canvas in turn, an index jumps straight to one, and the whole exhibition speaks Italian, English, French, Spanish and German.
React Three Fiber drives Three.js declaratively, so seven rooms and 64 paintings stay a readable tree of components. You move with the scroll wheel or a swipe and look around with the mouse or by tilting the phone; clicking a painting glides the camera in front of it before opening the details. The guide runs on Gemini behind a serverless function that validates and rate-limits every request, so the key never reaches the browser. Every painting has its own link, and browsers without WebGL 2 get the same works as a grid.
