Art lovers are invited to immerse themselves in Italian painter Caravaggio's scenes of pain and pleasure in a Rome display with a difference - there is not a single canvas on show.

Video artists are projecting films of the fiery Baroque master's renderings of Jesus being flogged, Roman wine god Bacchus and the severed head of the snake-haired monster Medusa on the walls of the Palazzo delle Esposizioni gallery.

Music and perfumes accompany the display of 57 pictures famed for a theatrical use of light and shadow that matched the drama of the artist's life.

Art historian Claudio Strinati, who advised the creators of the exhibition, said taking the characters out of their original contexts completely changed the viewer's experience.

"There is an appeal here, the images present themselves to us like apparitions, characters coming from a far away world and arriving in our space," Strinati said.

The "Caravaggio Experience" is starting shortly after the Victoria and Albert Museum in London also opened an exhibition that reinterprets the work of another Italian master, showing Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli's works alongside versions by pre-Raphaelite and pop artists.

The technique of plucking certain characters from the original backgrounds used in the Caravaggio exhibition can also help art historians with their studies, Strinati said.

"Caravaggio is a painter of people, of characters. This enlargement of the characters ... is like focusing with a big lens, isolating them from the works they are usually found in."

The artist's roving existence and the years he spent as a fugitive after killing a man in a brawl are told using maps of Sicily and Malta projected alongside the works he painted there until his death aged around 38.

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