Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio

The Calling of Saint Matthew

The Calling of Saint Matthew, painted between 1599 and 1600 for the Contarelli Chapel in San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome, is the canonical Caravaggio. A shaft of late-afternoon sunlight rakes across a darkened tavern from the right; Christ enters from the same side, his arm extended in a gesture borrowed almost note-for-note from Michelangelo's Creation of Adam on the Sistine ceiling. Matthew, the tax collector, sits at a wooden counting table with four companions in contemporary sixteenth-century Roman dress — feathered hats, slashed sleeves, a pile of coins — and points incredulously at his own chest. The painting hangs to this day in the chapel for which it was made, opposite Caravaggio's own Martyrdom of Saint Matthew on the facing wall, with the Inspiration of Saint Matthew above the altar between them. The three together formed Caravaggio's first major public commission and made his Roman reputation overnight in 1600.

Conversion on the Way to Damascus

Conversion on the Way to Damascus, painted in 1601 for the Cerasi Chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome, shows Saul fallen to the ground beside the enormous body of his horse, blinded by the light from heaven described in Acts 9. There is no traditional theatrical sky-rending — no parting of the clouds, no Christ in glory, no celestial host. The miracle is rendered as a single shaft of off-canvas light that illuminates the white belly of the horse, the inside of Saul's open palms, and the soles of his outstretched boots. The groom holding the horse barely registers what is happening. The composition was rejected by Caravaggio's patron Tiberio Cerasi as too eccentric and immediately repainted; this is the second version, and it became one of the foundational pictures of European Baroque tenebrism. Annibale Carracci's classicizing Assumption of the Virgin hangs on the chapel's facing wall, the canonical pairing of the two opposing tendencies of early-seventeenth-century Roman religious painting.

Judith Beheading Holofernes

Judith Beheading Holofernes, painted around 1602 and now in the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica in the Palazzo Barberini in Rome, illustrates the climactic moment of the deuterocanonical Book of Judith: the young Hebrew widow saws through the neck of the drunken Assyrian general in his own command tent. Caravaggio places the act at the literal center of the canvas. Judith leans back from the spurting blood with an expression of fastidious disgust; the elderly servant Abra leans in, holding open the linen sack into which the head will fall. The sword is already half through the neck; the eyes of Holofernes are still open. The painting was rediscovered in a Roman bank vault in the early twentieth century and remains the principal Caravaggesque treatment of one of the most-painted Old Testament subjects of the early modern period — anticipating, by about a decade, Artemisia Gentileschi's even more violent Naples and Uffizi versions of the same scene.

The Taking of Christ

The Taking of Christ, painted around 1602 and rediscovered in 1990 hanging unidentified in the dining room of a Jesuit residence in Dublin, depicts the moment of arrest in Gethsemane. Judas leans in to deliver the kiss; an armored Roman guard reaches across him to grip Christ's neck; a young John flees screaming from the left edge of the frame, his red cloak whipping out of view; and at the far right, holding up a lantern to light the scene, is the artist's own self-portrait — Caravaggio inserting himself as the man whose lamp makes the betrayal visible. The painting was identified by the Italian art historians Sergio Benedetti and Francesca Cappelletti from cleaning records and inventory traces; it is now on long-term loan to the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin and is the most consequential single Caravaggio rediscovery of the modern period.

The Incredulity of Saint Thomas

The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, painted around 1602 for the Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani and now in the Bildergalerie at Sanssouci in Potsdam, illustrates the moment in John 20 when Christ invites the doubting apostle to thrust his finger into the wound in his side. Caravaggio paints the contact with extraordinary literal-mindedness: Thomas's index finger disappears into the actual gap in Christ's flesh, the skin pulled visibly aside by the apostle's other hand, while two more apostles lean in over Thomas's shoulder. The light comes from the left as in nearly all Caravaggio's paintings of this period; the figures are cropped tightly, with no architectural background and no setting beyond the four men and the dark space behind them. The painting is among the most reproduced single religious images of Caravaggio's career and was widely imitated in seventeenth-century Italian and Spanish painting.

David with the Head of Goliath

David with the Head of Goliath, painted in 1610 in Naples or possibly Rome and now in the Galleria Borghese in Rome, is one of the last paintings Caravaggio completed before his death later that year on the Tuscan coast at age thirty-eight. A young David, half-stripped, holds the severed head of the Philistine giant out toward the viewer — and the head is unmistakably Caravaggio's own self-portrait, eyes still half-open, mouth slack, a final act of pictorial confession by an artist who was at the time under sentence of beheading by the papal courts for the 1606 killing of Ranuccio Tomassoni in a Roman ball-court brawl. The painting is widely read as Caravaggio's plea to Cardinal Scipione Borghese — a key intermediary in negotiating the papal pardon Caravaggio was hoping to receive — and entered the Borghese collection shortly after his death.