Biography

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (29 September 1571 18 July 1610) was an Italian artist active in Rome, Naples, Malta, and Sicily between 1593 and 1610. His paintings combined a realistic observation of the human state, both physical and emotional, with a dramatic use of lighting. Few artists in history have exercised as extraordinary influence as this tempestuous and short-lived painter. Caravaggio was destined to turn a large part of European art away from the ideal viewpoint of the Renaissance to the concept that simple reality was of primary importance. He was one of the first to paint people as ordinary looking. Arrogant, rebellious and a murderer, Caravaggio's short and tempestuous life matched the drama of his works. Characterised by their dramatic, almost theatrical lighting, Caravaggio's paintings were controversial, popular, and hugely influential on succeeding generations of painters all over Europe. He painted straight onto the canvas with minimal preparation. Sometimes he abandoned a disappointing composition and painted new work over the top. He used ordinary working people with irregular, rough and characterful faces as models for his saints and showed them in recognisably contemporary surroundings. In many of his works, he makes his paintings appear to be an extension of real space, deliberately making the viewers feel as if they are taking part in the scene. In his early twenties Caravaggio moved to Rome where, during the late 16th and early 17th centuries, many huge new churches and palazzi were being built and paintings were needed to fill them. During the Counter-Reformation the Roman Catholic Church searched for religious art with which to counter the threat of Protestantism, and for this task the artificial conventions of Mannerism, which had ruled art for almost a century, no longer seemed adequate. Caravaggio's novelty was a radical naturalism which combined close physical observation with a dramatic, even theatrical, use of chiaroscuro that came to be known as tenebrism, the shift from light to dark with little intermediate value. He burst upon the Rome art scene in 1600 with the success of his first public commissions, the Martyrdom of Saint Matthew and Calling of Saint Matthew. Thereafter he never lacked for commissions or patrons, yet he handled his success atrociously. He was thrown in jail on several occasions and ultimately had a death warrant issued for him by the Pope. The word spectacular is not amiss because, although Caravaggio aimed at total realism, he wanted drama too. It was the secret of his instant, direct appeal to the Church, to collectors, to fellow artists, to the public, then and since. He depicts dramatic moments, whether cheating at cards or the very second a miracle occurs, in such a way that the viewer feels he is present and can step into the picture. The Church, which bought more than half his output, recognised the huge popular appeal of his vivid presentation of the faith. But it sometimes found Caravaggio too real for comfort. It rejected at least five of his commissioned works or forced him to repaint them, because (as one cardinal put it) he 'crosses the borderline between the sacred and profane'. The Counter-Reformation accepted this new realism as exactly what it wanted in general. But sometimes the cardinals and bishops shuddered at what Caravaggio was doing: it was too close to life. Infamous while he lived, Caravaggio was forgotten almost immediately after his death, and it was only in the 20th century that his importance to the development of Western art was rediscovered. Despite this, his influence on the new Baroque style that eventually emerged from the ruins of Mannerism was profound. It can be seen directly or indirectly in the work of Rubens, Jusepe de Ribera, Bernini, and Rembrandt, and artists in the following generation heavily under his influence were called the "Caravaggisti". Only about 80 works by Caravaggio have survived. Early life (15711592)
Caravaggio was born in Milan, (Confirmed by the finding of the baptism certificate from the Milanese parish of Santo Stefano in Brolo. Traditionally it was believed that he was born in the Lombardy town of Caravaggio, hence his name) where his father, Fermo Merisi, was a household administrator and architect-decorator to the Marchese of Caravaggio, a town not far from the city of Bergamo. His mother, Lucia Aratori, came from a propertied family of the same district. In 1576 the family moved to Caravaggio to escape a plague which ravaged Milan, and Caravaggio's father died there in 1577. It is assumed that the artist grew up in Caravaggio, but his family kept up connections with the Sforzas and with the powerful Colonna family, who were allied by marriage with the Sforzas and destined to play a major role later in Caravaggio's life. They were also the ones who provided Caravaggio with safe refuge and protection throughout his troubled life. Caravaggio's mother died in 1584, and in the same year he was apprenticed for four years to the Milanese painter Simone Peterzano, described in the contract of apprenticeship as a pupil of Titian. Caravaggios years while working with Peterzano are somewhat a mystery. There are no works that have been definitively attributed to that time. The apprenticeship is said to have lasted 4 years during which time Caravaggio learned to mix paint, select brushes, and construct frames. During this time he also learned the Lombard and Venezian realist style which differed significantly from the idealization of the Florentine painting style of the time. Lombard and Venezian realist style valued simplicity and attention to naturalistic detail and was closer to the naturalism of Germany than to the stylized formality and grandeur of Roman Mannerism. Caravaggio naturally inherited an element of realism, but he had no precursors. Essentially, however, Caravaggio created himself. He was antinomian, despising all laws of life and art. But his fatal propensity to break all the rules,

which turned his life first into anarchy, then tragedy, also made him an artist of astonishing originality and creative power. He destroyed the old order and imposed a new one. Records are not clear about his activities upon completing his apprenticeship in Milan but the sale of family land by the young artist implies that such sale could have been made in order to pay off debts or to try to seek fortune elsewhere. None of his paintings from this period have been identified. What is clear is that he sold off his possessions in the town of Caravaggio before setting off for Rome, artistic centre and an irresistible magnet for young artists keen to study its classical buildings and famous works of art. Caravaggio arrived in Rome in the autumn of 1592 as an artist with no reputation, aged 21.

Rome (15921600)
The early years in Rome were tough for the young artist. He moved into the decaying Campo Marzio neighborhood which was a cosmopolitan arty area with inns, temporary shelters, eateries, and picture shops. Caravaggio was nearly broke at the time and had a violent temperament making it hard to keep a steady job. In Rome Caravaggio was initially employed or attached in various studios where he would paint to pay for his board. Around 1593 Caravaggio was accepted within the workshop of one of the most active of the young Mannerist painters in Rome, Giuseppe Cesari, also known as Cavaliere dArpino. DArpino was only three years older than Caravaggio but his work had already drawn the attention of the Pope Clement VIII and he was considered as an up and coming star. One of Caravaggios tasks with the studio production system was that of painting fruits and flowers. Michele was forced by necessity to enter the services of D'Arpino, by whom he was employed to paint flowers and fruits so realistically that they began to attain the higher beauty that we love so much today. Cesari was one of the leading Idealist painters of his time, rather than the Naturalists of whom Caravaggio would become the leading artist. His stay did not last long and Caravaggio left after some eight months at which time he was apparently hospitalised. It appears that Caravaggio may have incurred some enmity from his fellow painters as during his hospitalisation he was apparently never visited by DArpino. Known works from this period include a small Boy Peeling a Fruit (his earliest known painting), a Boy with a Basket of Fruit and the Young Sick Bacchus. There is no direct evidence that he ever tried pure landscape, but he painted leaves, fruit and flowers with a truth and delicacy that has seldom been matched. Caravaggio left Cesari in 1594, determined to make his own way. His fortunes were at their lowest ebb, yet it was now that he forged some extremely important friendships, with the painter Prospero Orsi, the architect Onorio Longhi, and the sixteen year old Sicilian artist Mario Minniti. Orsi, established in the profession, introduced him to influential collectors; Longhi, more balefully, introduced him to the world of Roman street-brawls; and Minniti served as a model and, years later, would be instrumental in helping Caravaggio to obtain important commissions in Sicily. Caravaggio start selling his paintings through dealer, Maestro Valentino. Valentino brought some of Caravaggios work to Cardinal Francesco del Monte, an influential member of the Papal Court (The Cardsharps and Fortune Teller). He soon enjoyed the patronage of del Monte and was invited to live, dine, and work in the house of the cardinal. In 1595 Caravaggio entered in Palazzo Madama. For Del Monte and his wealthy art-loving circle Caravaggio executed a number of intimate chamber-pieces - The Musicians, The Lute Player, a tipsy Bacchus, an allegorical but realistic Boy Bitten by a Lizard. In the household of Del Monte Caravaggio encountered a new reality and found a great protector. Del Monte played a key role in the brilliant career moves that the artist made in these years. He enlarged his circle of patrons and protectors to include other Cardinals, bankers and members of nobility. It was probably through the Cardinal del Monte that Caravaggio was introduced to the Oratorians; a powerful religious group of followers of San Filippo Neri. Cardinal Carlo Borromeo together with the Oratorians headed the pauperistic wing of the Counter Reformation movement which wished to see the Church return to the purity and the simplicity of its origins and away from the wealth and magnificence of the Church of the Renaissance. The most relevant doctrine was social interest and the elevation of the poor. Bellori wrote in 1672 that Caravaggio scorned the works of his predecessors preferring to set for himself nature alone as the object of his brush. The developing naturalism of Caravaggios paintings and the humble appearance of their protagonists appears highly tuned to the doctrines of the Oratorians. Caravaggio is the painter who first looks at life with eyes that have been freed from the blindfold of every official cultural and intellectual tradition. Certainly where the official Church of Rome found his paintings lacking in decorum, they appealed directly to the Oratorians for whose church of Santa Maria in Vallicella in Rome (also called Chiesa Nuovo) he was soon to paint an altar painting (The Entombment, now in Vatican Pinacoteca). The realism returned with Caravaggio's first paintings on religious themes, and the emergence of remarkable spirituality. Caravaggio told the story of Christianity as it had never been told before, as an actual happening. The first of these was the Penitent Magdalene. Penitent Magdalene was understated, in the Lombard manner, not histrionic in the Roman manner of the time. It was followed by others in the same style: Saint Catherine, Martha and Mary Magdalene, Judith Beheading Holofernes, a Sacrifice of Isaac, a Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy, and a Rest on the Flight into Egypt. The works, while viewed by a comparatively limited circle, increased Caravaggio's fame with both connoisseurs and his fellow artists. But a true reputation would depend on public commissions, and for these it was necessary to look to the Church.

Already evident was the intense realism or naturalism for which Caravaggio is now famous. He preferred to paint his subjects as the eye sees them, with all their natural flaws and defects instead of as idealised creations. This allowed a full display of Caravaggio's virtuosic talents. This shift from accepted standard practice and the classical idealism of Michelangelo was very controversial at the time. Not only was his realism a noteworthy feature of his paintings during this period but he turned away from the lengthy preparations traditional in central Italy at the time. Instead, he preferred the Venetian practice of working in oils directly from the subject, half-length figures and still life.

"Most famous painter in Rome" (16001606)

In 1599, presumably through the influence of Del Monte, Caravaggio was contracted to decorate the Contarelli Chapel in the church of San Luigi dei Francesi. This commission was a breakthrough for the young artist and helped to establish Caravaggio as a renowned painter. Caravaggio depicted the saint in a dramatic realism unlike the pictorial style traditionally seen. These realistic paintings caused a stir in Rome and also marked a change in the artists focus. From here on out Caravaggio painted traditional religious themes. The two works making up the commission, the Martyrdom of Saint Matthew and Calling of Saint Matthew, delivered in 1600, were an immediate sensation. Caravaggio's tenebrism (a heightened chiaroscuro) brought high drama to his subjects, while his acutely observed realism brought a new level of emotional intensity. Opinion among Caravaggio's artist peers was polarized. Some denounced him for various perceived failings, notably his insistence on painting from life, without drawings, but for the most part he was hailed as a great artistic visionary: "The painters then in Rome were greatly taken by this novelty, and the young ones particularly gathered around him, praised him as the unique imitator of nature, and looked on his work as miracles." Caravaggio went on to secure a string of prestigious commissions for religious works featuring violent struggles, grotesque decapitations, torture and death. For the most part, each new painting increased his fame, but a few were rejected by the various bodies for whom they were intended, at least in their original forms, and had to be repainted or find new buyers. The essence of the problem was that while Caravaggio's dramatic intensity was appreciated, his realism was seen by some as unacceptably vulgar. His first version of Saint Matthew and the Angel, featured the saint as a bald peasant with dirty legs attended by a lightly clad over-familiar boy-angel, was rejected and a second version had to be painted as The Inspiration of Saint Matthew. At around the same time he was working on the laterals in San Luigi de Francesi. These were The Conversion of St Paul and The Crucifixion of Saint Peter and were commissioned in an artistic combattimento with Annibale Carracci who was awarded the altar painting of the Assumption. The Conversion of Saint Paul was rejected, and while another version of the same subject, the Conversion on the Way to Damascus, was accepted, it featured the saint's horse's haunches far more prominently than the saint himself, prompting this exchange between the artist and an exasperated official of Santa Maria del Popolo: "Why have you put a horse in the middle, and Saint Paul on the ground?" "Because!" "Is the horse God?" "No, but he stands in God's light!" First version of The Crucifixion of Saint Peter was also rejected and now is lost. Caravaggios realist work began to draw accusations of lack of decorum by some quarters of the Church of Rome. The realism pained humanity and protagonists with unrefined peasant features, depicting Christs message as though for the poor and unsophisticated offended the comfortable sensibilities of the established order. The bare feet of so many of the paintings subjects according to Carlo Borromeo were seen as a symbol of faithfulness and obedience to the doctrines of simplicity and poverty. Caravaggios works for the church continued to cause controversy, Madonna di Loreto, the Grooms' Madonna, and the Death of the Virgin. Bellori recounts in 1672 that when Caravaggio was presented with the great works of his predecessors in order that he may study them, the artist merely pointed to the crowds of people around him as if to say that he needed no other examples of great art than those with which life and nature had surrounded him. One secular piece from these years is Amor Victorious, painted in 1602 for Vincenzo Giustiniani, a member of Del Monte's circle. Amor is unclothed, and it is difficult to accept this grinning urchin as the Roman god Cupid as difficult as it was to accept Caravaggio's other semi-clad adolescents as the various angels he painted in his canvases, wearing much the same stage-prop wings. The point, however, is the intense, yet ambiguous reality of the work: it is simultaneously Cupid and Cecco, as Caravaggio's Virgins were simultaneously the Mother of Christ and the Roman courtesans who modeled for them. Caravaggio was gaining a reputation as an eccentric with a fiery temperament. The artist seems to have been restless and easily given to violent outbreaks. A great deal has been written about his eccentric habits. Bellori wrote that Caravaggio barely washed and would wear his clothes without ever changing them until they fell to tatters about him. He associated with the troublemakers in Rome and was frequently involved in brawls and rows. He is said to have slept with his sword at his side and the archives of various courts of Justice in Rome reveal evidence of regular run-ins with the law. In the years 1600-1606 alone, he was brought to trial no less than eleven times. The charges covered a variety of offences, most involved violence. In 1600 Caravaggio was accused of assault and in 1603 he was taken to court for defamation. In 1604 he was charged with throwing a plate of artichokes in the face of a waiter and was imprisoned twice for swearing at the police. His troubles in Rome had been considerable; arrested for the illegal possession of arms and prosecuted for attacking and wounding a public notary in a dispute

over a woman. An early published notice on him tells how "after a fortnight's work he will swagger about for a month or two with a sword at his side and a servant following him, from one ball-court to the next, ever ready to engage in a fight or an argument, so that it is most awkward to get along with him." (The sword was illegal - as with guns today, one had to have licence to carry arms.) His friends and protectors sought to have these proceedings dismissed and were successful.

Exile and death (16061610)

In 1606 Caravaggio's temper went a step too far. On 29 May 1606, he killed, possibly unintentionally, a young man named Ranuccio Tomassoni. An argument described variously as over a woman, or a tennis match, escalated into a swordfight. Caravaggio stabbed his rival, and though he probably hadn't intended to kill him, the man died of his wound. Caravaggio chose not to face justice, but leave Rome with a price on his head. He had no doubt that he would quickly obtain a pardon. The crime of murder carried a death sentence and Caravaggio rapidly fled Rome probably to the Colonna familys estates in Paliano seeking refuge and protection. The warrant issued in Rome for his arrest was to follow him as he sought refuge later in Naples and Malta and Sicily. The artist lived in hope of a papal pardon which would allow him to return to Rome. This indeed appeared possible given that the killing was not entirely premeditated and Caravaggio, himself was wounded. However without such pardon he was never safe and it is clear that restlessness and a sense of persecution were constantly with him from this time on. Previously his high-placed patrons had protected him from the consequences of his escapades, but this time they could do nothing. Caravaggio, outlawed, fled to Naples. There, outside the jurisdiction of the Roman authorities and protected by the Colonna family, the most famous painter in Rome became the most famous in Naples. His style changed as his matured and this was the onset of the powerful religious works of his late years. In Naples Costanza Colonna Sforza, widow of Francesco Sforza, in whose husband's household Caravaggio's father had held a position, maintained a palace. Costanza's brother Ascanio was Cardinal-Protector of the Kingdom of Naples, another brother, Marzio, was an advisor to the Spanish Viceroy, and a sister was married into the important Neapolitan Carafa family - connections which might help explain the cornucopia of major commissions which fell into Caravaggio's lap in that city. His connections with the Colonnas led to a stream of important church commissions, including the Madonna of the Rosary, The Seven Works of Mercy and Flagellation. Despite his success in Naples, after only a few months in the city Caravaggio left for Malta, the headquarters of the Knights of Malta, presumably hoping that the patronage of Alof de Wignacourt, Grand Master of the Knights, could help him secure a pardon for Tomassoni's death. If Caravaggio could become a Knight of Malta, he would be in a better position to seek a papal pardon for the murder. In July 1607 Caravaggio landed in Malta on a galley ship commanded by Fabrizio Colonna the son of the Marquess of Caravaggio. Costanza's son, Knight of Malta and general of the Order's galleys, appears to have facilitated his arrival in the island in 1607 and his escape the next year. De Wignacourt proved so impressed at having the famous artist as official painter to the Order that he inducted him as a knight, and the early biographer Bellori records that the artist was well pleased with his success. Major works from his Malta period include a huge Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, the only painting to which he put his signature and a Portrait of Alof de Wignacourt and his Page, as well as portraits of other leading knights. Yet by late August 1608 he was arrested and imprisoned. The circumstances surrounding this abrupt change of fortune have long been a matter of speculation, but recent investigation has revealed it to have been the result of yet another brawl, during which a knight was seriously wounded. He dramatically escaped from island fort of St Angelo and proceeded to Sicily. By December he had been expelled from the Order "as a foul and rotten member." He was on the run once more, all around Sicily, then on to Naples again. But this time there was no hiding place. The knights, known for their relentlessness, pursued him, and Caravaggio, now thirty nine, in an attempt to seek forgiveness and refuge in Rome, tried to get there. Caravaggio made his way to Sicily where he met his old friend Mario Minniti, who was now married and living in Syracuse. Together they set off on what amounted to be a triumphal tour from Syracuse to Messina and on to the island capital, Palermo. In each city Caravaggio continued to win prestigious and well-paid commissions. Among other works from this period are Burial of St. Lucy, The Raising of Lazarus, and Adoration of the Shepherds. A further altar painting of this period is the Nativity (stolen) for the Oratory of San Lorenzo in Palermo. His works show him capturing the drama and intense psychological complexities of his own life. His style continued to evolve, showing now friezes of figures isolated against vast empty backgrounds. Contemporary reports depict a man whose behaviour was becoming increasingly bizarre, sleeping fully armed and in his clothes, ripping up a painting at a slight word of criticism, mocking the local painters. Caravaggio displayed bizarre behaviour from very early in his career. Mancini describes him as "extremely crazy", a letter of Del Monte notes his strangeness, and Mario Minniti's 1724 biographer says that Mario left Caravaggio because of his behaviour. The strangeness seems to have increased after Malta. Bellori writes of Caravaggio's "fear" driving him from city to city across the island and finally, "feeling that it was no longer safe to remain", to Naples. Baglione says Caravaggio was being "chased by his enemy", but like Bellori does not say who this enemy was.

His last works in Malta and Sicily are very dark and somewhat damaged but their direct iconography, their inspired simplicity and poignancy embody a new intensity of dramatic feeling. After only nine months in Sicily, Caravaggio returned to Naples. According to his earliest biographer he was being pursued by enemies while in Sicily and felt it safest to place himself under the protection of the Colonnas until he could secure his pardon from the pope (now Paul V) and return to Rome. In Naples he painted The Denial of Saint Peter, a final John the Baptist (Borghese), and his last picture, The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula. His style continued to evolve, Saint Ursula is caught in a moment of highest action and drama, as the arrow fired by the king of the Huns strikes her in the breast, unlike earlier paintings which had all the immobility of the posed models. The brushwork was much freer and more impressionistic. Had Caravaggio lived, something new would have come. In Naples he was involved in yet another bar brawl which left him badly disfigured. In the meantime, however, important friends in Rome had successfully petitioned the Pope for a pardon - Caravaggio could return. He loaded his belongings onto a ship but, for some unknown reason, was then arrested and had to buy his way out of jail. By the time he was released, the ship and all his possessions had sailed without him. His frantic efforts to overhaul the vessel brought on an attack of fever. There it appears he fell ill on a beach near Port Ercole and was taken to hospital where he died apparently on the 18th July 1610. His recent wounds and a probable bout of the malaria had reduced him to a state of weakness that he could not overcome. Notice of his death reached Rome some days later. With him were three last paintings, gifts for Cardinal Scipione. A letter from the Bishop of Caserta in Naples to Cardinal Scipione Borghese in Rome, dated 29 July 1610, informs the Cardinal that the Marchesa of Caravaggio is holding two John the Baptists and a Magdalene which were intended for Borghese. These were presumably the price of Caravaggio's pardon from Borghese's uncle, the pope. Human remains found in a church in Porto Ercole in 2010 are believed to almost certainly belong to Caravaggio. The findings come after a year-long investigation using DNA, carbon dating and other analyses.

The birth of Baroque

Caravaggio's approach to painting was unconventional. He avoided the standard method of making copies of old sculptures and instead took the more direct approach of painting directly onto canvas without drawing first. Caravaggio achieved one of the most important revolutions in the history of painting. He inherited a world where the classical idealism of Michelangelo was still normative, especially in the depiction of the human body, and where the eccentricities of his successors, who did not paint from life at all, distorted the popular notion of what the eye actually sees. He rejected both utterly. He painted with an intensity of realism never before equalled, and his impact was so immediate, profound and lasting that it affected all the great painters of the first half of the seventeenth century. Caravaggio was possibly the most revolutionary artist of his day, not following the conventional rules of painting and lighting that had directed other artists for centuries before. His controversial paintings went against the idealized human and religious experience seen in paintings by other artists and instead focused on more naturalistic painting. Many of his predecessors did not paint from real life objects. Caravaggio revolted against this way of painting and took his real life subjects from the streets, the lower classes of society, and painted them realistically, yet managed to lose neither poetry nor deep spiritual feeling. He typically used oil on canvas and painted half-length figures and still lives. The bold contrasts between light and dark in order to illuminate the focal point in his paintings almost seems to replicate the chaos of his own life. The lighting effects give emphasis to the shapes and features as well as humanity. Though he received much criticism for it, Caravaggio painted Biblical characters as ordinary people. He wanted to paint from nature and depicted these heroes as everyday people though this outraged some who felt that enough reverence was not given to these figures. Even though chiaroscuro and naturalistic paintings had been done before, Caravaggios intense effects played a significant role in altering Mannerism through the many future artists who followed his style. His dramatic manipulation of light, belief in working with human models, and his non-sentimental approach to religious art inspired many artists to come in the Baroque school of art. During the period 1592-1598, Caravaggio's work was precise in contour, brightly colored, and sculpturesque in form, like the Mannerists, but with an added moral and social consciousness. By 1600 when Caravaggio had completed his first public commission, he established himself as an opponent of both intellectual Mannerism and classicism. Caravaggio's use of chiaroscuro to create atmosphere, drama, and emotion - was revolutionary. His light is unreal, comes from outside the painting, and creates relief and dark shadow. The resulting paintings are as exciting in their effect upon the senses as on the intellect. Caravaggio's art was not popular with ordinary people, who saw in it a lack of reverence. His art was highly appreciated by artists of his time and has become recognized through the centuries for its religious nature as well as for the new techniques that have changed the art of painting. What in effect Caravaggio is doing systematically and deliberately, for the first time in the history of art, is destroying the space between the event in the painting and the people looking at it. He is giving us direct windows

into life, whether religious life or ordinary life. What then must it have been like in the early seventeenth century, for people who had never come across anything approaching this blast of actuality, to be brought face-to-face with a reenactment of sacred events in two dimensions? Artists were particularly struck, or perhaps shocked is a better word; but horribly stimulated too, and stirred to find out exactly how the man did it. This was no easy matter, either, for Caravaggio's work was already becoming scattered in his lifetime. He was changing all the time, and in his last canvases, such as The Beheading of St John the Baptist (Valletta Cathedral) and Adoration of the Shepherds (Messina, Musee Regionale) he was using black space as a powerful character in the composition, threatening to overwhelm the lit areas, sometimes crowded into a mere quarter of the canvas. These experiments were the most important happenings in art, at least so far as artists themselves were concerned, since Leonardo painted. Moreover, Caravaggio, despite all his difficulties, always finished each piece of work if he possibly could, then went directly on to another, with fresh ideas and new experiments. What is remarkable is that the artist, despite his hunted and, in the end, desperate life, always contrived to go on painting, often without a proper workshop of any kind. His paintings show that he was a man of the most profound religious convictions, of a humble and contrite heart, and with a fanatical devotion to his art. His fundamental ideas were always absolutely clear, though he continually changed and improved his techniques. He believed in total realism, and he always painted from life, dragging poor people in from the street if need be. Only two of his surviving paintings are on wood, which he hated, preferring canvas which he could treat himself and cut to his exact specifications. Analysis shows that he experimented with various oils for his paints, to achieve the smoothness, luminosity, transparency and chiaroscuro he required. Caravaggio was known for realistically capturing moments of human emotion and painting the drama of psychological relationships. He broke with the conventional styles of depicting the saints and used regular everyday people as models and painted them with realistic detail showing the Saints' common humanity. Chiaroscuro was practiced long before he came on the scene, but it was Caravaggio who made the technique definitive, darkening the shadows and transfixing the subject in a blinding shaft of light. With this came the acute observation of physical and psychological reality which formed the ground both for his immense popularity and for his frequent problems with his religious commissions. He worked at great speed, from live models, scoring basic guides directly onto the canvas with the end of the brush handle; very few of Caravaggio's drawings appear to have survived. The approach was anathema to the skilled artists of his day, who decried his refusal to work from drawings and to idealise his figures. Yet the models were basic to his realism. Some have been identified, including Mario Minniti and Francesco Boneri, both fellow artists, Mario appearing as various figures in the early secular works, the young Francesco as a succession of angels, Baptists and Davids in the later canvasses. His female models include Fillide Melandroni, Anna Bianchini, and Maddalena Lena Antognetti, all well-known prostitutes, who appear as female religious figures including the Virgin and various saints. Caravaggio himself appears in several paintings. Previous artists had included self-portraits as onlookers to the action, but Caravaggio's innovation was to include himself as a participant. Caravaggio had a noteworthy ability to express in one scene of unsurpassed vividness the passing of a crucial moment. The Supper at Emmaus depicts the recognition of Christ by his disciples: a moment before he is a fellow traveller, mourning the passing of the Messiah, as he never ceases to be to the inn-keeper's eyes, the second after, he is the Saviour. In The Calling of St Matthew, the hand of the Saint points to himself as if he were saying "Who, me?", while his eyes, fixed upon the figure of Christ, have already said, "Yes, I will follow you". With The Resurrection of Lazarus, he goes a step further, giving us a glimpse of the actual physical process of resurrection. The body of Lazarus is still in the throes of rigor mortis, but his hand, facing and recognizing that of Christ, is alive.

The Caravaggisti
Caravaggio refused to take on apprentices, students or assistants, however his work still had a big impact on artists from Rome, elsewhere in Italy, and from various other countries. Caravaggios revolutionary approach to painting and his use of the technique of chiaroscuro had a significant impact on painters at the beginning of the century. In the 1620s Caravaggios work went out of popularity in Rome, however elsewhere in Italy and Europe the popularity remained. The installation of the St. Matthew paintings in the Contarelli Chapel had an immediate impact among the younger artists in Rome, and Caravaggism became the cutting edge for every ambitious young painter. The first Caravaggisti included Orazio Gentileschi and Giovanni Baglione. Baglione's Caravaggio phase was short-lived; Caravaggio later accused him of plagiarism and the two were involved in a long feud. Baglione went on to write the first biography of Caravaggio. In the next generation of Caravaggisti there were Carlo Saraceni, Bartolomeo Manfredi and Orazio Borgianni. Gentileschi, despite being considerably older, was the only one of these artists to live much beyond 1620, and ended up as court painter to Charles I of England. His daughter Artemisia Gentileschi was also close to Caravaggio, and one of the most gifted of the movement. Yet in Rome and in Italy it was not Caravaggio, but the influence of Annibale Carracci, blending elements from the High Renaissance and Lombard realism, which ultimately triumphed. Caravaggio's brief stay in Naples produced a notable school of Neapolitan Caravaggisti, including Battistello Caracciolo and Carlo Sellitto. The Caravaggisti movement there ended with a terrible outbreak of plague in 1656,

but the Spanish connection Naples was a possession of Spain was instrumental in forming the important Spanish branch of his influence. A group of Catholic artists from Utrecht, the "Utrecht Caravaggisti", travelled to Rome as students in the first years of the 17th century and were profoundly influenced by the work of Caravaggio, as Bellori describes. On their return to the north this trend had a short-lived but influential flowering in the 1620s among painters like Hendrick ter Brugghen, Gerrit van Honthorst, Andries Both and Dirck van Baburen. In the following generation the effects of Caravaggio, although attenuated, are to be seen in the work of Rubens (who purchased Death of the Virgin for the Gonzaga of Mantua and painted a copy of the Entombment of Christ), Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Velzquez, the last of whom presumably saw his work during his various sojourns in Italy.

Death and rebirth of a reputation

Caravaggio's fame scarcely survived his death. His innovations inspired the Baroque, but the Baroque took the drama of his chiaroscuro without the psychological realism. While he directly influenced the style of the artists mentioned above and, at a distance, the Frenchmen Georges de La Tour and Simon Vouet, and the Spaniard Giuseppe Ribera, within a few decades his works were being ascribed to less scandalous artists, or simply overlooked. The Baroque, to which he contributed so much, had evolved, and fashions had changed, but perhaps more pertinently Caravaggio never established a workshop as the Carracci's did, and thus had no school to spread his techniques. Nor did he ever set out his underlying philosophical approach to art, the psychological realism which can only be deduced from his surviving work. Thus his reputation was doubly vulnerable to the critical demolition-jobs done by two of his earliest biographers, Giovanni Baglione, a rival painter with a personal vendetta, and the influential 17th century critic Giovan Bellori, who had not known him but was under the influence of the French Classicist Poussin, who had not known him either but hated his work. In the 1920s art critic Roberto Longhi brought Caravaggio's name once more to the foreground, and placed him in the European tradition: "Ribera, Vermeer, La Tour and Rembrandt could never have existed without him. And the art of Delacroix, Courbet and Manet would have been utterly different". The influential Bernard Berenson agreed: "With the exception of Michelangelo, no other Italian painter exercised so great an influence."

Works
Rome (1593-1599)
Boy Peeling a Fruit 1592/93 Boy Peeling a Fruit is the earliest known work by Caravaggio. According to Mancini, Caravaggio painted this subject for Pandolfo Pucci da Recanati soon after the artists arrival in Rome, around 1592. Numerous copies attest to the popularity of this deceptively simple image. There are several copies from a lost original (Tokyo, Ishizuka collection; Rome, private collection; Hampton Court Palace, London; Florence, Roberto Longhi Foundation; Berlin, private collection). In none of them does the boy peel a pear, as sources indicate, but another fruit, perhaps a nectarine; the same fruit lies on the table before the boy. There is a remarkable resemblance between the facial types of these copies and those of the angel in the St Francis (Hartford) and the boy on the left in the Musicians at the Metropolitan Museum, New York. Seen as a simple genre painting, it differs from most in that the boy is not 'rusticated,' that is, he is depicted as clean and well-dressed instead of as a 'cute' ragamuffin. The boys head is modeled with a strong relief, the boys shirt is rendered with a marvelous translucence as though its folds were overlapping veils of white light. We can see shadows beneath the boys hands. This area represents the opening of the woven sack used to carry the fruit and a few interwoven fibers of the same golden color can be glimpsed. Young Sick Bacchus (Self-Portrait as Bacchus) Galleria Borghese, Rome; 67 x 53 cm Oil on canvas; c. 1593 Apart from its autobiographical content (at one point the artist fell extremely ill and spent six months in the hospital), this early painting was likely used by Caravaggio to market himself, demonstrating his virtuosity in painting genres such as still-life and portraits and hinting at the ability to paint the classical figures of antiquity. The three-quarters angle of the face was among those preferred for late renaissance portraiture, but what is striking is the grimace and tilt of the head, and the very real sense of suffering. The still-life can be compared with that contained in slightly later works such as the Boy With a Basket of Fruit where the fruit are much better condition, reflecting no doubt Caravaggio's improved condition, both physical and mental and the Boy Bitten by a Lizard. The painting shows the influence of his teacher, Simone Peterzano, in the tensed musculature, and of the austere Lombard school in the attention to realistic detail, but the cold light bathing and isolating the subject against a dark background, and the psychological atmosphere this created, was Caravaggio's own. The livid colours of the subject's face, his teasing smile and the mock seriousness of his mythological dignity all reinforce the attempt to undermine the lofty pretensions of Renaissance artistic traditions. Here is no god, just a sickly young man. There is no mistaking the artist's delight in the depiction of the fine peaches and black grapes on the slab, the white grapes in his hand and the vine leaves that crown his hair, but the artist is not content merely to demonstrate his superb technique: he wishes to play an intimate role and only the slab separates him from the viewer. His appearance is striking rather than handsome, he shows both that his face is unhealthy and that his right shoulder is not that of a bronzed Adonis, as convention required, but pale as in the case of any man who normally wears clothes. We can see the signs of illness both in the ashy colour of his face and in his drained anaemic lips. Against the dark background the figure of Bacchus is cast in light, though the muscles in the half-naked body are still hinted at by the more traditional chiaroscuro. On the other hand incredible attention has been paid to the intense and opaque quality of colour; the touch of bright yellow in the two peaches lying near the black grapes in the foreground; the green of the ivy crown against the raven black hair; the deep dark-brown eyes; the white and purplish colour of the drapes which barely cover him. Boy with a Basket of Fruit Galleria Borghese, Rome; 70 x 67 cm Oil on canvas; c. 1593 The painting dates from the time when Caravaggio, newly arrived in Rome from his native Milan, was making his way in the competitive Roman art world. The model was his friend and companion, the Sicilian painter Mario Minniti, at about 16 years old. It is believed to predate more complex works from the same period (also featuring Minniti as a model) such as The Fortune Teller and the Cardsharps. At one level the painting is a genre piece designed to demonstrate the artist's ability to depict everything from the skin of the boy to the skin of a peach, from the folds of the robe to the weave of the basket. The fruit is especially exquisite.

The analysis indicates that Caravaggio is being realistic, in capturing only what was in the fruit basket; he idealizes neither their ripeness nor their arrangementyet almost miraculously, we are still drawn in to look at it; for the viewer it is very much a beautiful subject. One of the sure signs of an early painting by Caravaggio is the patent influence of northern Italian art, but Caravaggio is not content to follow the traditions on which he draws. Instead of the young women favoured by his predecessors, he has chosen a teenage boy; and he has brought his subject almost to the front of the picture plane, so that the boy seems to offer himself as well as the fruit to the spectator's gaze. There is a sign of uncertainty in the awkward way that the boy's long thick neck raises out of his shoulder blades, yet there is compensation in the poetic device which places his weary eyes partially in the shade. Once again Caravaggio has used the diagonal 'cellar' light which was to become a hallmark of his style. Against a near-blank ground, attention is focused on the right side of the boy's upper body, the classical drapery on his right arm and the marvellously realized fruit, displaying succulent peaches and bunches of grapes. The fruit and leaves are depicted with the same irregularities and imperfections that are found in nature. The image is a powerful yet ambiguous one as the youth proffers and clings to his basket of fruit. Baskets of fruit were attributes of the satyrs and it may be that we have here a humanized and idealized representation of one of Bacchus' entourage. But the theme of love (physical love as indicated by the bare right shoulder) seems intended additionally and indeed the sexual suggestiveness is here such a prominent feature that it diverts attention from more specific iconographical references. Yet baskets of fruit were used to symbolize both the sense of taste and the season of autumn and it seems likely that Caravaggio deliberately linked these two symbolic allusions with the erotic characterization in order to convey the transience of love. Boy Bitten by a Lizard National Gallery, London; 66 x 50 cm Oil on canvas; c.1594 It exists in two versions, both believed to be authentic, one in the Fondazione Roberto Longhi in Florence, the other in the National Gallery, London. The differences between the two versions are infinitesimal. The London picture clearly predates the Longhi version, executed with the deeper chiaroscuro of four to five years later. As with all of Caravaggio's early output, much remains conjectural. The model for the boy may have been Mario Minniti, Caravaggio's companion and the model for several other paintings from the period - the bouffant dark curly hair and pursed lips look similar, but in other pictures Mario doesn't look so effeminate. The affected pose may have been the inevitable result of the experiment Caravaggio appears to have been undertaking here: observing and recording acute emotions - surprise and fear - in a situation where real surprise was impossible and where the pose had to be held for a considerable period. Critics of Caravaggio's insistence on painting only from life would later point out this limitation of his method: it lent itself to marvellously realistic (if theatrical) static compositions, but not to scenes involving movement and violence. It would only be in his late period, when he seems to have worked more from imagination, that Caravaggio would be able to completely overcome this problem. Nevertheless, Boy Bitten by a Lizard is an important work in the artist's early oeuvre, precisely because it shows a way out from the airless stillness of very early works such as Boy Peeling a Fruit and Sick Bacchus. One of the most effeminate of his boy models, with a rose in his hair, starts back in pain as his right-hand middle finger, which he has put into a cluster of fruit, is bitten by a lizard. The rose behind the ear, the cherries, the third finger and the lizard probably have sexual significance - the boy becomes aware, with a shock, of the pains of physical love. There is a broader context: the symbolical loss of innocence by way of experiencing sudden, unexpected pain. We witness a scene where the actor encounters the painful side of life, or world and shrinks back, apparently taken by surprise. What was novel, was not the theme so much as its dramatic treatment, evident in the boy's foreshortened right shoulder, the contrasting gestures of his hands and the leftward sloping light. What lingers most in the memory is found in the foreground: the gleaming glass carafe containing a single overblown rose in water, together with its reflections. To be able to paint light reflecting in glass is one of the hallmarks of a virtuoso still-life artist. It makes it all the more interesting to observe how unusually he renders the round crystal-vase in this picture - he flattens it. In so doing, he inverts the lighting of the whole picture, by concentrating the light areas on the left and the dark ones on the right. Fortune Teller (buona ventura) Pinacoteca Capitolina, Rome; 115 x 150 cm Oil on canvas; c. 1594 This Fortune-Teller is generally recognized today as Caravaggios first treatment of a provocative theme which he subsequently repeated and perfected in the painting in the Muse du Louvre in Paris. The Rome Fortune Teller dates from the period during which the artist had recently left the workshop of the Giuseppe Cesari to make his own way selling paintings through the dealer Costantino. Caravaggio sold Fortune Teller the for eight scudi. The painting shows a foppishly-dressed boy, having his palm read by a gypsy girl. The youth abandons his reserve, leans over towards the gypsy-woman and looks into her smiling face, as if he idolized her, and as if the woman was enticing a very willing man. The boy looks smugly pleased as he gazes into her face; he fails to notice that she is removing his ring as she gently strokes his hand; to his ingenuous self-satisfied gaze she returns her own, quietly mocking and sly. It is quite an amazing feat that occurs right in front of our eyes, yet almost impossible to spot.

Giovanni Baglione does indicate the essence of Caravaggio's revolutionary impact on his contemporaries beginning with The Fortune Teller - which was to replace the Renaissance theory of art as a didactic fiction with art as the representation of real life. The cardsharps (I bari) Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth; 94 x 131 cm Oil on canvas; c. 1594 The Cardsharps, lost for almost a century, has been found and is now in Texas, and helps to fill in an important stage in the development of Caravaggio's art. Behind a table that protrudes into the spectator's space, a youthful innocent studies his cards (the dupes face shows exaggerated saintliness and innocence), overlooked by a sinister middle-aged man (who seems overly agitated), whose fingers signal to another, younger scoundrel to his right, who holds a five of hearts behind his back. To the left-hand side of the canvas is the object of their conspiracy, a pile of coins. The second boy has a dagger handy at his side, and violence is not far away. It was the second such painting Caravaggio created. The first, The Fortune Teller, had drawn attention, and this painting extended his reputation. The subjects of The Fortune Teller and Cardsharps offered something new, realistic scenes of street life, especially with this beautifully rendered attention to little details, such as the split fingers on the older man's gloves, or the teenage cheat's anxious glance at his master. The psychological insight is equally striking, the three figures bound together by the common drama, yet each with his own unique play within the larger play. Cardsharps with its mixture of brutal low-life realism and luminous Venetian delicacy, was much admired, and Orsi "went around acclaiming Caravaggio's new style and heightening the reputation of his work." Caravaggio has treated this subject not as a caricature of vice as did those Northern artists who had painted vaguely similar pictures before him, but in a novelistic way, in which the interaction of gesture and glance evokes the drama of deception and lost innocence in the most human of terms. Musicians Metropolitan Museum Of Art, New York; 88 x 116 cm Oil on canvas; c. 1595 Baglione describes this Musicians as Caravaggios first composition painted specifically for Cardinal Del Monte, who took the painter into his household around 1595. Along with the two representations of Lute Players, the Musicians would thus exemplify the cardinals wellknown interests in music and in classical culture. The rarefied character of the Musicians did not strike a chord among the artists followers, who preferred Caravaggios depictions of ordinary daily life. The picture shows four boys in quasi-Classical costume, three playing various musical instruments or singing, the fourth dressed as Cupid and reaching towards a bunch of grapes. The central figure with the lute has been identified as Caravaggio's companion Mario Minniti, and the individual next to him and facing the viewer has been recognised as a self-portrait of the artist. The cupid bears a strong resemblance to the boy in Boy Peeling Fruit, done a few years before, and also to the angel in Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy. Scenes showing musicians were a popular theme at the time - the Church was supporting a revival of music and new styles and forms were being tried, especially by educated and progressive prelates such as Del Monte. This scene, however, is clearly secular rather than religious. The manuscripts show that the boys are practicing madrigals celebrating love, and the eyes of the lutenist, the principal figure, are moist with tears. The songs presumably describe the sorrow of love rather than its pleasures. The violin in the foreground suggests a fifth participant. This was Caravaggio's most ambitious and complex composition to date and the artist has evidently had difficulties with painting the four figures separately - they don't relate to each other or to the picture-space, and the overall effect is somewhat clumsy. The painting is in poor condition, and the music in the manuscript has been badly damaged by past restorations, although a tenor and an alto part can be made out. The surface of the picture is worn and there are extensive losses in the back of the right-hand figure and in the still life of music and the violin. The upturned page of music is a reconstruction based on an old copy of the picture. Saint Francis in Ecstasy Wadsworth Atheneum Hartford, Connecticut; 93 x 128 cm Oil on canvas; c. 1595 The painting was the first of Caravaggio's religious canvasses. It was presumably painted at the behest of Del Monte. It shows Saint Francis of Assisi (the Cardinal's name-saint) at the moment of receiving the signs of the Stigmata, the wounds left in Christ's body by the Crucifixion. The story is told by one of Francis' companions, Brother Leo. In 1224 Francis retired to the wilderness with a small number of his followers to contemplate God. On the mountainside at night Brother Leo saw a six-winged seraph (one of the higher Orders of angels) come down to Francis in answer to the saint's prayer. Caravaggio's painting is less dramatic than the account given by Leo. The six-winged seraph is replaced by a twowinged angel, and there is none of the violent confrontation described by Leo, no streams of fire, no pools of blood, no shouts or fiery images of Christ, just the gentle-seeming angel, bulking far larger than the unconscious saint and Francis's companions in the middle distance, almost invisible in the darkness. Caravaggio's version is much more intimate and marks a sharp change of key: the saint, who has the features of Del Monte, seems to sink back peacefully into the arms of a boy (who bears a marked resemblance to the boy in Boy Peeling a Fruit and to the winged Cupid on the far left of The Musicians, and even more to the boy being cheated in Cardsharps) wearing a sheet and some stage-prop wings. There is very little to indicate the subject beyond the saint's Franciscan robe - no sign of the Stigmata, or blood, or the fearsome seraph. Yet the atmosphere remains genuinely spiritual, the two figures lit by an unearthly effulgence in the dark night-time landscape where strange

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glimmerings flicker on the horizon. The scene is at once real and unreal. Caravaggio's picture is a kind of Pieta with the Virgin's place taken by an angel. Bacchus Galleria Degli Uffizi, Florence; 95 x 85 cm Oil on canvas; c. 1595 The painting shows a youthful Bacchus reclining in classical fashion with grapes and vine leaves in his hair, fingering the drawstring of his loosely-draped robe. On a stone table in front of him is a bowl of fruit and a large carafe of red wine; with his left hand he holds out to the viewer a shallow goblet of the same wine, apparently inviting the viewer to join him. Whether intentional or not, there is humour in this painting. The pink-faced Bacchus is an accurate portrayal of a half-drunk teenager dressed in a sheet and leaning on a mattress in the Cardinal's Rome palazzo, but far less convincing as a Greco-Roman god. The fruit and the carafe have attracted more scholarly attention than Bacchus himself. The fruit, because of the inedible condition of most of the items, is believed by the more serious-minded critics to signify the transience of worldly things. The carafe, because after the painting was cleaned a tiny portrait of the artist working at his easel was discovered in the reflection on the glass. A reflection of Bacchus' face can also be seen on the surface of the wine in the glass he is holding. In order to understand the historical position of Caravaggio's art, we have to be aware of his peerless and revolutionary handling of subject matter. This is true not only of his religious themes, but also of his secular themes. His Bacchus no longer appears to us like an ancient god, or the Olympian vision of the High Renaissance and Mannerism. Instead, Caravaggio paints a rather vulgar and effeminately preened youth, who turns his plump face towards us and offers us wine from a goblet held by pertly cocked fingers with grimy nails. This is not Bacchus himself, but some perfectly ordinary individual dressed up as Bacchus, who looks at us rather wearily and yet alertly. On the one hand, by turning this heathen figure into a somewhat ambiguous purveyor of pleasures, Caravaggio is certainly the great realist he is always claimed to be. On the other hand, however, the sensual lyricism of his painting is so overwhelming that any suspicion of caricature or travesty would be inappropriate. Of all Caravaggio's semi-classical boys and young men the Uffizi's Bacchus is the most seductive. His full lips, his rounded cheeks, his plucked eyebrows, his head-dress of vine-leaves and grapes, his slanting glance, all suggest an invitation to a life of languor and decadence. As always Caravaggio wears his visual learning lightly. It is not just his ability to bring mythology into the modern age that is so striking, he shows the fleshy hands of Bacchus to be sunburnt, but also the attention he gives to the shadow cast by the wine carafe to the god's hand and costume seen through the stem of his glass and to the penumbra of darkness that surrounds him. The theme is a disturbing one but there is monumental grandeur in its development. The colours range impressively from the strong warm treatment of leaves and fruit through the polished and oily skin of the left hand to the bright black velvet bow and the subtly original grey stripe on the illconcealed buff pillow. The Luteplayer Hermitage, Saint Petersburg; 94 x 119 cm Oil on canvas; c. 1596 This painting, mentioned in Del Monte's inventory, shows a single lutanist singing a love song; and a related 'carafe with flowers' is also listed in the catalogue of the Del Monte sale. It may well be that Vincenzo Giustiniani received this Lute Player as a gift from Caravaggios protector Cardinal Del Monte. As in the Uffizi Bacchus, the artist places a table-top in front of the figure. In Hermitage it is bare marble, with a violin on one side and a still life of flowers and fruit on the other. Picture depict a boy with soft facial features and unusually thick brown hair, pouting lips, a half-open mouth and a pensive expression beneath sharply-drawn broad eyebrows. His white shirt is open at the front, revealing the artist's intention to paint a nude. This figure has the same dimensions in both pictures, which suggests that Caravaggio traced one on to oil-paper. In this case only one picture was completed from a fresh study of a model. A sort of ribbon woven into the figure's hair emphasizes its almost androgynous features. The same applies - in the New York version - to a broad yoke which divides his shirt under his chest like a woman's dress. From the seventeenth century there have been uncertainties about the gender of the singer. Baglione and the Del Monte inventory call him a boy; Bellori, who knew only a copy, calls him a girl. There are reasons for this confusion. One is the Renaissance fascination with androgyny and another is the Italian fashion for castrati. Light falls from a high window above left, creating a narrow triangle of brightness in the upper right-hand corner. The brightly illuminated figure stands out boldly against the shadowy background. In the St. Petersburg version, the violin bow lies across the strings and the open book of music - a prominent object for the observation of light and shade. Pieces of fruit lie on the marble slab, extremely brightly colored and brilliantly painted. A crystal vase contains a bunch of flowers, which would have made even Jan Bruegel the Elder jealous. The colors are applied uninhibitedly with a loaded brush - with a richness and precision we do not see elsewhere in Caravaggio's work. Among the early works this painting must count as a virtuoso performance. The glass carafe and its flowers are painted with assured mastery, and Caravaggio is also aware of the problems of perspective that lutes and violins could cause; and he spotlights the solo player and his instruments so as to make them the main focus of attention, the carafe of flowers so that they are a secondary focus.

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This is an early work by Caravaggio who sought above all to convey the reality and solidity of the surrounding world. We can already see the elements of the artist's style which were to have such a widespread influence on other artists. The figure of a young boy dressed in a white shirt stands out clearly against the dark background. The sharp side lighting and the falling shadows give the objects an almost tangible volume and weight. Caravaggio was interested in the uniqueness of the surrounding world and there are markedly individual features not only in the youth's face but also in the objects which make up the still life: the damaged pear, the crack in the lute, and the crumpled pages of the music. Love as the theme of this work is also indicated by other objects. For instance the cracked lute was a metaphor for the love that fails. Basket of Fruit Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan; 31 x 47 cm Oil on canvas; c. 1596 Like its doppelganger in Supper at Emmaus, the basket seems to teeter on the edge of the picture-space, in danger of falling out of the painting and into the viewer's space instead. In the Supper this is a dramatic device, part of the way in which Caravaggio creates the tension of the scene; here, trompe l'oeil (is an art technique involving extremely realistic imagery in order to create the optical illusion, that the depicted objects appear in three dimensions) seems to be almost the whole purpose of the painting, if we subtract the possible didactic element. But the single element that no doubt attracted its original owner, and still catches attention today, is the extraordinary quasi-photographic realism of the observation which underlies the illusionism. Caravaggio is reported to have claimed that he put as much effort into painting a vase of flowers as he did into painting human figures. Such an attitude not only calls into question the hierarchy of pictorial genres that had prevailed since 15th century, but also marks the beginning of a tradition of European still-life painting that was to develop continuously from then on. Whereas, until then, there had only been occasional cases of "pure" object paintings - from Caravaggio onwards, still-life was to be the most popular of genres. It is a response to the increase of private art collections and their demand for profane and virtuoso painting. The basket is at eye level and juts out over the edge of the table into the real space of the spectator. In accordance with the golden section the basket has been moved to the left. Almost abstract character' of work 'is most impressive. Penitent Magdalen Galleria Doria Pamphili, Rome; 123 x 99 cm Oil on canvas; c. 1597 The painting portrays a repentant Mary Magdalene, bowed over in penitent sorrow as she leaves behind her dissolute life, its trappings abandoned beside her. At the time of its completion, the painting was unconventional for its contemporary realism and departure from traditional Magdalene iconography. It has invited both criticism and praise, with speculation even into the 21st century as to Caravaggio's intentions. The painting represents a departure from the standard paintings of the penitent Mary Magdalene of Caravaggio's day, both in portraying her in contemporary clothing and avoiding "the pathos and languid sensuality" with which the subject was generally treated. On this occasion, however, there are none of the usual signs of a religious scene such as a halo. A young girl, seen from above, is seated on a low stool in one of Caravaggio's favourite cave-like settings with her hands cradled in her lap. What reveals the artist's signature is the top diagonal line of shadow that shows the direction of light. Discarded jewellery - a string of pearls, clasps, a jar (perhaps holding precious ointment) - lies on the floor. The girl's hair is loose, as if it has just been washed. Her costume, consisting of a white-sleeved blouse, a yellow tunic and a flowery skirt, is rich. Her gaze is averted from the viewer, her head turned downward in a position that has been compared to traditional portrayals of the crucified Jesus Christ. A single tear runs down one cheek to the side of her nose. Caravaggio was known to have used several prostitutes as models for his works, and historians have speculated that Anna Bianchini is featured in this painting. Decades after the painting's completion, 17th century art biographer Gian Pietro Bellori opined that Caravaggio had feigned religious imagery by adding items associated with Mary Magdalenea carafe of oil and discarded jewelleryto an otherwise modern genre scene. The repentant Mary Magdalene, like the repentant Peter, was a favourite subject of Counter-Reformation art and poetry, which valued the visible expression of the state of contrition 'the gift of tears'. Caravaggio's heroine is sobbing silently to herself and a single tear falls down her cheek. She is, as it were, poised between her past life of luxury and the simple life she will embrace as one of Christ's most faithful followers. The religiosity of the Magdalene appears in the penitent tear which glistens on the girl's left cheek and in what appears to be a contrast between a poverty of spirit or inner conflict in a richly dressed woman who seems to have everything and yet is sorrowful. It is a sign of the painter's skill that he makes this inner conflict moving at the same time as he makes its representation delectable. Rest on the flight to Egypt Galleria Doria Pamphili, Rome; 135 x 167 cm Oil on canvas; c. 1597 The scene is based not on any incident in the Bible itself, but on a body of tales or legends that had grown up in the early Middle Ages around the Bible story of the Holy Family fleeing into Egypt for refuge on being warned that Herod the Great was seeking to kill the Christ Child. According to the legend, Joseph and Mary stopped on the flight in a grove of trees; the Holy Child ordered the trees to bend down so that Joseph could take fruit from them, and then ordered a spring of water to gush forth from the roots so that his parents could quench their thirst. The

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basic story took on many extra details during the centuries. Caravaggio shows Mary asleep with the infant Jesus, while Joseph holds a manuscript for an angel who is playing a hymn to Mary on the violin. It's also one of the very rare landscapes from this artist who seems always to have been painting in a prison cell, a room at a tavern, or at night. Caravaggio's Lombard formation and Venetian heritage are evident in the treatment of the landscape and in the luminous tonalities. Like most depictions of the flight to Egypt this is a peaceful moment, one in which the scenery is to be enjoyed. The artist ingeniously uses the figure of an angel playing the violin with his back to the viewer to divide the composition into two parts. On the right, before an autumnal river-front scene, we can see the sleeping Mary with a dozing infant in her left; on the left, a seated Joseph holding the musical score for the angel. The natural surroundings remind the viewer of the Giorgionesque landscapes of the Cinquecento masters of Northern Italian painting, and it is fully imbued with a degree of nostalgia. Contrasting the unlikelihood of the event is the realistic effect of depiction, the accuracy of details, the trees, the leaves and stones, whereby the total impression becomes astonishingly authentic. The statue-like figure of the angel, with a white robe draped around him, is like a charmingly shaped musical motif, and it provides the basic tone for the composition. The composition fans out from an exquisite angel who is playing music. Joseph is wearing clothes of earth-color and is holding a book of music, from which the angel is playing a violin solo, whilst the donkey's large eyes peeps out from under the brown foliage. The principal motif of Caravaggio's Flight into Egypt is that of the music that can be heard on earth, considered by the Fathers of the Church to be a copy of music in heaven. The intermediary between these two worlds is the invisible sound, which in art takes the form of an Angel playing music, a divine messenger that stands at the border between material and spiritual reality. God communicates with men through Angels, who are his go-betweens. The golden section splits the composition into two parts: the left-hand one, with St Joseph, the donkey, and stones, is dedicated to earthly life, while the right-hand area, which includes the Madonna and Child among living plants, is devoted to the divine world. Fortune Teller (buona ventura) Louvre, Paris; 99 x 131 cm Oil on canvas; 1597/98 The Rome Fortune Teller aroused considerable interest among younger artists and the more avant-garde collectors of Rome, but, according to Mancini, Caravaggio's poverty forced him to sell it for the low sum of eight scudi. It entered the collection of a wealthy banker and connoisseur, the Marchese Vincente Giustiniani, who became an important patron of the artist. Giustiniani's friend, Cardinal Francesco Maria Del Monte, purchased the companion piece, Cardsharps, in 1595, and at some point in that year Caravaggio entered the Cardinal's household. For Del Monte Caravaggio painted a second version of The Fortune Teller, copied from the Giustiniani but with certain changes. The undifferentiated background of the Rome version becomes a real wall broken by the shadows, and the figures more completely fill the space and defining it in three dimensions. The light is more radiant, the cloth of the boy's doublet and the girl's sleeves more finely textured. The dupe becomes more child-like and more innocently vulnerable, the girl less wary-looking, leaning in towards him, more in command of the situation. The man's sword at Mario's boyish hip now juts out towards the viewer, defining the scene in real space, and seems more a danger to himself than to any possible opponent. With The Fortune Teller Caravaggio introduced, around 1594/95, a subject into Italian painting that was known, if at all, only in Netherlandish paintings: the so-called genre, depicting scenes of everyday life, but with a hidden or underlying meaning, intended for the edification of the observant spectator. When he painted this second and more charming version of the Fortune-Teller Caravaggio used a different rounderfaced model for the youth and modified details of his clothing. But one of the most conspicuous changes - the thick and wavy feather in the boy's cap - is mostly the work of a seventeenth-century restorer who added a horizontal strip at the top and repaired damages suffered by the canvas in its transport to Paris. A foppishly dressed young man, a milksop with no experience of life, looks longingly into girl eyes and gives his right hand to a young girl, whose expression is difficult to define, in order to have his future read. A second Fortune-Teller bears elegant witness to Caravaggio's own recognition of the technical progress he had made. She looks placidly into the young man's eyes while she strokes his palm trying ever so lightly to remove his ring. What we have here is not an anecdote of two specific people, but an everyday tale. No specification of place or time detracts our attention from the point of the story, which gives the spectator a sense of complacent superiority as well as aesthetic pleasure. Her deception and his folly are only hinted at. Judith Beheading Holofernes Palazzo Barberini, Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Rome; 145 x 195 cm Oil on canvas; c. 1598 Caravaggios reputation for spectacularly violent images is due in great part to this Judith Beheading Holofernes which was rediscovered only in 1951. The picture is a manifesto for Caravaggios uncompromising realism. Caravaggio's approach was, typically, to choose the moment of greatest dramatic impact, the moment of the decapitation itself. The figures are set out in a shallow stage, theatrically lit from the side, isolated against the inky, black background. In the painting, Judith comes in with her maid - surprisingly and menacingly - from the right, against the direction of reading the picture. The general is lying naked on a white sheet. Paradoxically, his bed is distinguished by a magnificent red curtain, whose colour crowns the act of murder as well as the heroine's triumph.

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X-rays have revealed that Caravaggio adjusted the placement of Holofernes' head as he proceeded, separating it slightly from the torso and moving it slightly to the right. The faces of the three characters demonstrate his mastery of emotion, Judith in particular showing in her face a mix of determination and repulsion. The model for Judith is probably the roman courtesan Fillide Melandroni, who posed for several other works by Caravaggio around this year. A whole book in the Bible is devoted to Judith, because as a woman she embodies the power of the people of Israel to defeat the enemy, though superior in numbers, by means of cunning and courage. She seeks out Holofernes in his tent, makes him drunk, and then beheads him. The sight of their commander's bloodstained head on the battlements of Bethulia puts the enemy to flight. In contrast to the elegant and distant beauty of the vexed Judith, the ferocity of the scene is concentrated in the inhuman scream and the body spasm of the giant Holofernes. Caravaggio has managed to render, with exceptional efficacy, the most dreaded moment in a man's life: the passage from life to death. The upturned eyes of Holofernes indicate that he is not alive any more, yet signs of life still persist in the screaming mouth, the contracting body and the hand that still grips at the bed. The original bare breasts of Judith, which suggest that she has just left the bed, were later covered by the semi-transparent blouse. The roughness of the details and the realistic precision with which the horrific decapitation is rendered (correct down to the tiniest details of anatomy and physiology) has led to the hypothesis that the painting was inspired by two highly publicized contemporary Roman executions; that of Giordano Bruno and above all of Beatrice Cenci in 1599. Judith was painted directly from a model, as the suntan on her hands and face attests. The blond woman with her full breasts, which remain visible through her white blouse, has rolled her sleeves up over her elbows. She stretches out her strong arm, but draws her head back, as if she were repulsed by blood. The Borghese David behaves in a similar fashion. She is very much the chaste and strong instrument of God, her implacable mission to destroy the devil. Holofernes animal-like is an incarnation of evil. Incised lines are visible in the picture's surface - around Judith's left arm and shoulder, around the neck of the elderly maid and around Holofernes' head - and it seems that Caravaggio working from models used them to fix the crucial elements of his composition. Portrait of Fillide (Portrait of a Courtesan) Kaiser Friedrich Museum (destroyed), Berlin; 66 x 53 cm Oil on canvas; c. 1598 It was destroyed in Berlin in 1945 and is known only from photographs. It has been suggested that the portrait represents the goddess Flora who was herself a courtesan. A young woman, holding a bunch of flowers in front of her breast, appears against a dark neutral background. Her intense eyes are looking almost straight at the viewer, in dramatic lighting. Although the woman depicted is more likely to have been one of the artist's models than a lady from an upper-class home, the painting soon found a place alongside the Berlin Cupid, and the first version of St Matthew in the magnificent Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani collection in Rome. Earlier scholars identified the flower she presses to her breast as orange blossom or bergamot, symbol of marriage and fidelity, and claimed the subject as Caterina Campi, wife of Caravaggio's friend Onorio Longhi. Caravaggio scholar John Gash, however, identifies the flowers as "definitely jasmine", symbol of erotic love, and therefore more suitable to a courtesan than to a respectable married woman. Fillide figured prominently in Caravaggio's work in the closing years of the 1590s, appearing as Saint Catherine, as Mary in Martha and Mary Magdalene, and as Judith in Judith Beheading Holofernes. She may have appeared even more frequently - a considerable number of Caravaggio's works are now lost - but she seems to vanish from his paintings after 1599. If sophisticated patrons such as Giustiniani represented one pole of Caravaggio's life, the world of Fillide was the other. She was one of Rome's most successful prostitutes, much sought after by the Roman elite; but she had her true existence in the streets. In February 1599 she was arrested together with a young man named Ranuccio Tomassoni, who seems to have been her pimp, (he came from a good family but was continually turning up in police records in the company of prostitutes, and not as a customer), and charged with creating a disturbance. Saint Catherine of Alexandria ThyssenBornemisza Collection, Villa Hermosa, Madrid; 173 x 133 cm Oil on canvas; c. 1599 Saint Catherine of Alexandria was a popular figure in Catholic iconography. She was of noble origins, and dedicated herself as a Christian after having a vision. At the age of 18 she confronted the Roman Emperor, debated his pagan philosophers, and succeeded in converting many of them to Christianity. Imprisoned by the emperor, she converted his empress and the leader of his armies. Emperor executed her converts (including the empress) and ordered that Catherine herself be put to death on a spiked wheel. The wheel reportedly shattered the moment Catherine touched it. Emperor then had her beheaded. She became patron saint of libraries and librarians, as well as teachers, archivists, and all those associated with wisdom and teaching, and all those whose livelihoods depended upon wheels. The painting formerly belonged to Cardinal Del Monte. Here we see a single female figure in an interior devoid of architectural allusions. The image appears with boldness and an immediacy that combine the nobility of the subject

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(St Catherine was a king's daughter) with the almost plebeian pride of the model (no doubt a Roman woman of the people, who appears on other paintings of the artist, too). The fact that he used a real person as direct inspiration reinforces the idea of reality that Caravaggio decided to give his works. The breadth of conception and realization, and the perfect mastery of a very difficult composition (the figure and objects completely fill the painting, in a subtle play of diagonals) are striking. Caravaggio here chose a "grand" noble approach that heralds the great religious compositions he would soon do for San Luigi dei Francesi. The extraordinary virtuosity in the painting of the large, decorated cloth is absorbed as an integral part of the composition. This is something his followers would not often succeed in doing, for they frequently dealt with the single components of the painting individually, with adverse effects on the unity of the whole. Caravaggio's portrayal of St. Catherine corresponds to the traditional iconography: richly dressed as befits a princess with the split wheel of knives of her first martyrdom, the sword with which she was beheaded for refusing to accept emperor's dishonest propositions and the palm of martyrdom. What Caravaggio innovates is not the iconography which we can see for ourselves comparing his work with earlier ones, but the new treatment that he gives the image. The light falls (unusually) from the right. The realism of the St Catherine is evident - a lack of atmosphere, an almost coarse depiction of the alert face and the common hands, an insistence on harsh shadows, reflections and details. Perhaps the most striking feature is a bravura treatment of the clothing which ranges from seamstress like embroidery on the blouse, through realistic but more liberated golden arabesques on the black skirt, to amazingly free and light brushstrokes creating brocade on the blue drapery. The Saint Catherine marks a transitional phase in Caravaggios development. The painting shows the deeper shadows that would characterize his style after 1600. Yet the model is portrayed with a literalness that still savors of his residence in the Del Monte palace, 15951600. Conversion of Mary Magdalen (Martha and Mary Magdalene) Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit; 98 x 133 cm Oil on canvas; c. 1599 The painting has an iconographically very unusual theme. The painting shows the sisters Martha and Mary from the New Testament. In the 16th century a new emphasis was placed on Mary Magdalens role as a converted sinner. It shows Martha reproaching Mary Magdalene for her vanity. The religious theme is treated in a substantially profane manner. Caravaggio depicts Marys sister Martha dressed modestly reproaching her sister for her wayward conduct and enumerating on her fingers the miracles of Christ. Martha is in the act of converting Mary from her life of pleasure to the life of virtue in Christ. This exact moment of the conversion was obviously a tremendous challenge for the painter because the change is spiritual rather than physical. Martha, her face shadowed, leans forward, passionately arguing with Mary, who twirls an orange blossom between her fingers as she holds a mirror, symbolising the vanity she is about to give up. Caravaggios solution was to manipulate the light which illuminates the Magdalen giving her an unearthly glow. The power of the image lies in Mary's face, caught at the moment when conversion begins. The mirror a traditional image of vanity now reflects the light of divine revelation. Narcissus Palazzo Barberini, Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Rome; Oil on canvas, 110 x 92 cm; 1597/99 The attribution of this painting to Caravaggio has been discussed at length and it is still questioned by some scholars. There are no contemporary sources to refer to, and the attribution rests entirely on stylistic bases. The theory that the picture is by Caravaggio might be confirmed by an export license dating to 1645, referring to a Narcissus by Caravaggio of similar measurements to this canvas. While it is difficult to propose with absolute certainty a secure connection between the document and the present canvas, several major Caravaggio scholars have reconsidered the issue, accepted the link between the license and the painting, and confirmed the autograph quality of the work. Analysis of the details of execution (carried out as part of a recent restoration), stylistic comparison to other works of Caravaggio, and the iconographic innovativeness of the subject all lead to acceptance of the Narcissus as a work of Caravaggio. On the subject of invention, it suffices to mention the exceptional the double figure which - like a playing card - turns on the fulcrum of the highlit knee at the centre of the composition. The story of Narcissus, told by the poet Ovid in his Metamorphoses, is of a handsome youth who falls in love with his own reflection. The work belongs to the years between 1597 and 1599, a transitional period of Caravaggio's career that is still not entirely sorted out or fully understood. It is a moment in which Caravaggio tended towards a magical sense of atmosphere, suspense, and introspection: still strongly influenced by the Lombard style, he is also testing the infinite possibilities of light and shadow. Dating from the same phase of Caravaggio's career are The Lute Player, the Doria Magdalene, and above all the Thyssen St Catherine and Detroit Magdalene, with which this canvas has many connections and resonances. Narcissus marks a unique theme for Caravaggio, that of illusion versus the real world, seen here as two halves of the artist's canvas. The 16th century literary critic Tommaso Stigliani explained the contemporary thinking that the myth of Narcissus clearly demonstrates the unhappy end of those who love their things too much. Medusa Galleria Degli Uffizi, Florence; 55 x 55 cm Oil on canvas stretched over shield; c. 1597/99 In Greek myth, Perseus used the severed snake-haired head of the Gorgon Medusa as a shield with which to turn his enemies to stone. By the sixteenth century Medusa was said to symbolize the triumph of reason over the senses;

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and this may have been why Cardinal Del Monte commissioned Caravaggio to paint Medusa as the figure on a ceremonial shield presented in 1601 to Ferdinand I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany. The poet Marino claimed that it symbolized the Duke's courage in defeating his enemies. As a feat of perspective, the picture is remarkable, the Gorgon's head seems to project into space, so that the blood round her neck appears to fall on the floor. In terms of its psychology, however, it is less successful. The boy who modeled the face (in preference to a girl) is more embarrassed than terrifying. For once Caravaggio cannot achieve an effect of horror; he was to find in the legends of the martyrs a more powerful stimulus to the dark side of his imagination than classical myth. Boy Bitten by a Lizard Longhi Foundation, Florence; 66 x 52 cm Oil on canvas; c. 1600 The London picture clearly predates the Longhi version, executed with the deeper chiaroscuro of four to five years later. Comparison between the two versions is complicated by the unsatisfactory state of the London picture. Against a neutral background, a boy with a white rose behind his ear is standing behind a stone slab which leads diagonally into the picture. In his fright, his shirt has slipped down off his shoulder. While reaching for some fruit, which lies next to a vase containing orange blossom or jasmine, as well as a rose, he has been bitten by a lizard in his middle finger, which has given rise to ticklish erotic overtones and it was painted with such diligence that the boy really appeared to scream. Marini explain the sixteen-year old youth with roses in his hair as a symbol of pleasure, roses as a symbol of love and curly scented hair as indicative of delicacy, lust and effeminacy. It is worth adding that the bared shoulder can be seen as a sign of voluptas (one of Three Graces, and is known as the goddess of "sensual pleasures") and that the lizard was according to Alciati a symbol of deceit. The Luteplayer Metropolitan Museum Of Art, New York; 100 x 127 cm Oil on canvas; c. 1600 As in the Uffizi Bacchus, the artist places a table-top in front of the figure. In the Wildenstein version the table is covered with an oriental carpet. The musical instruments are valuable and probably came from Del Monte's personal collection. Both versions demonstrate the innovative approach to light that Caravaggio adopted at this time. The appearance of second originals is a feature of a new understanding of Caravaggios work, and indeed Vincenzo Giustiniani, whose experience was closely related to the artists career, describes the painters development as beginning with copying others work - Proceeding further, he can also copy his own work, so that the replica may be as good, and even sometimes better, than the first. The anatomical anomalies in the Hermitage, like the slightly out of line eyes, or the hesitations in the profile of the hand, are resolved in the Wildenstein picture. By contrast, the Wildenstein version is more cursory in the drapery, less insistent in the detail, and it does not have the magnificent reflections in the carafe, which were specific to the alchemical context of the original. The Wildenstein version is illuminated by a soft chiaroscuro inspired by the Brescia masters of the 16th century and characteristic of the early phase of Caravaggio's development. The catalogue to the 1990 exhibition held to mark the identification of the Wildenstein Lute Player - which was already known but thought to be a copy by another hand - commented on the markedly different lighting used for this version, claiming that it "marks a significant step toward the more dramatically lit, highly focused style of Caravaggio's maturity" - i.e., towards the heightened contrast between shadows and light (tenebrism) that would mark paintings such as The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew. The strongly foreshortened lute with its bent key-board demonstrates Caravaggio's virtuoso handling of perspective. The objects in the picture include an open book of music lying on another which bears the inscription "Bassus" in Gothic script, whilst the body of a violin serves to hold the book open at the right page. In both versions Caravaggio has painted the scores of older compositions clearly enough for us to read them. Although the artist has cut off one row of notes, he has reproduced the initial notes so exactly that in the St. Petersburg example we can recognize the Roman printer, Valerio Dorica, whereas in the second version we can see that the book was published in Venice by Antonio Gardane. Placed underneath the violin scroll, the bow can scarcely be distinguished from the brownish pattern of the carpet. In this version, a stout recorder and a triangular keyboard instrument are the other objects we see. The X-ray picture shows that they were painted over a still-life. Portrait of Maffeo Barberini Private collection, Florence; Oil on canvas, 124 x 90 cm; c. 1600 Barberini, who later became Pope Urban VIII, 30 years old and from the eminent Florentine Barberini family, was a rapidly rising Church prelate, a friend of Caravaggio's patron Cardinal Francesco Maria Del Monte, and himself a poet and patron of the arts. Barberini's support would continue into later years, in 1603 he commissioned a Sacrifice of Isaac from Caravaggio. In 1623 he became Pope as Urban VIII. Here, the face appears in chiaroscuro against a neutral background in such a way that a wall appears to be screening off the figure from the left. In order to give the figure more rilievo, or more three-dimensionality, the lit sections are painted against a dark, and the sections in shadow against a light, background. The portrait certainly seems a dramatic and indeed revolutionary work appropriately evoking a mood of business-like authority with Maffeo clearly giving orders with his right hand while he holds a memorandum in his left. The inexpertly foreshortened ear is a useful identifying feature in Caravaggio's work.

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David and Goliath Museo del Prado, Madrid; Oil on canvas, 110 x 91 cm; c. 1600 This painting addresses the subject of David and Goliath, which the artist repeatedly dealt with later in his career. A David with the Head of Goliath in Madrid appears to be Caravaggio's earliest depiction of David. The boy's extreme youth is the most striking feature of that picture, which shows him crouched down on one knee in order to tie with some difficulty a rope into the hair of Goliath's decapitated head. The act of seizing a fistful of the victim's hair is presented as a metaphor for physical domination. As in the early Renaissance, David is shown as the adolescent who triumphs not by his strength, but by his power of character and his faith. The oblique pose of the figure (David stands partly parallel to the picture plane) is constructed with admirable skill. This mature work demonstrates the fundamentals of his art: an emphatic solidity created by a harsh contrast of light and shade; the immediacy created by staging the action right in the foreground, and eliminating all superfluous space around it (conventionally, David would have been given room to stand up, so to speak); the elimination of decoration, such as colour or elegant posture, in order to concentrate on the drama alone. The light catches on David's leg, arm and flank, on the massive shoulders from which Goliath's head has been severed, and on the head itself, but everything else is dark. Even David's face is almost invisible in the shadows. A wound on Goliath's forehead shows where he has been felled by the stone from David's sling. The overwhelming impression is of some action intensely personal and private - no triumph, no armies, no victory.

Most famous painter in Rome (16001606)

Calling of Saint Matthew Contarelli Chapel San Luigi Dei Francesi, Rome; 322 x 340 cm Oil on canvas; 1599/1600 It was completed in 1599/1600 for the Contarelli Chapel in the church of the French congregation, San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome. Over a decade before, Cardinal Matteu Contreil (in Italian, Matteo Contarelli) had left funds and specific instructions for the decoration of a chapel based on themes of his namesake. Decoration of the dome was started with frescoes by the late Mannerist artist, and one of the most popular painters in Rome at the time, Cavalier D'Arpino, Caravaggio's former employer. But with the elder painter busy with royal and papal patronage, Cardinal Francesco Del Monte, Caravaggio's patron and also the prefect of the Fabbrica of St Peter's (the Vatican office for Church property), intervened to obtain for Caravaggio his first major church commission and first painting with more than a handful of figures. The three adjacent Caravaggio canvases in the Contarelli chapel represent a decisive shift from the idealising Mannerism of which d'Arpino was the last major practitioner, and the newer, more naturalistic and subject-oriented art represented by Caravaggio and Annibale Carracci; they were highly influential in their day. The Calling hangs opposite The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew. Between the two, at the altar, is The Inspiration of Saint Matthew. While the Martyrdom was likely the first to be started, the Calling was, by report, the first to be completed. The commission for these two lateral paintings, the Calling and the Martyrdom is dated July 1599, and final payment was made in July 1600. The subject traditionally was represented either indoors or out; sometimes Saint Matthew is shown inside a building, with Christ outside (following the Biblical text) summoning him through a window. Caravaggio may well have been familiar with earlier Netherlandish paintings of money lenders or of gamblers seated around a table like Saint Matthew and his associates. The painting depicts the story from the Gospel of Matthew (Matthew 9:9): Jesus saw a man named Matthew at his seat in the custom house, and said to him, "Follow me", and Matthew rose and followed him. In some ways, most of the plebeian, nearly life-sized inhabitants of Levi's money table are the equivalent, if not modelled by those persons in other Caravaggio paintings, including Caravaggio's famous secular genre paintings of The Cardsharps. In this painting, the gloom and the canvassed window appears to situate the table indoors. Christ brings the true light to the dark space of the sitting tax-collectors. This painting records the collision of two worlds the ineluctable power of the immortal faith, and the mundane, foppish, world of Levi. Jesus spears him with a beam of light, with an apparent effortless hand gesture he exerts an inescapable sublime gravity, with no need for wrenching worldly muscularity. Jesus' bare feet are classical simplicity in contrast with the dandified accountants; being barefoot may also symbolize holiness, as if one is on holy ground. Similarly to his treatment of Paul in the Conversion on the Way to Damascus, Caravaggio chronicles the moment when a daily routine is interrupted by the miraculous. Around the man to become Matthew are either the unperceptive or unperturbed bystanders. Caravaggio's audience would have seen the similarity between the gesture of Jesus as he points towards Matthew, and the gesture of God as he awakens Adam in Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel. Following the line of Christ's left arm, it seems that Matthew is being invited to follow him into the world at large. The Church considered Christ to be the second Adam. Caravaggio represented the event as a nearly silent, dramatic narrative. The sequence of actions before and after this moment can be easily and convincingly re-created. The tax-gatherer Levi was seated at a table with his four assistants, counting the day's proceeds, the group lighted from a source at the upper right of the painting. Christ, His

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eyes veiled, with His halo the only hint of divinity, enters with Saint Peter. Gestures of His right hand, all the more powerful and compelling because of its languor, summons Levi. Surprised by the intrusion and perhaps dazzled by the sudden light from the just-opened door, Levi draws back and gestures toward himself with his left hand as if to say, "Who, me?", his right hand remaining on the coin he had been counting before Christ's entrance. The two figures on the left, representing gamblers unaware of the appearance of Christ, are so concerned with counting the money that they do not even notice Christ's arrival; symbolically their inattention to Christ deprives them of the opportunity He offers for eternal life, and condemns them to death. The two boys in the centre do respond, the younger one drawing back against Levi as if seeking his protection, the swaggering older one, who is armed, leaning forward a little menacingly. Saint Peter gestures firmly with his hand to calm his potential resistance. The dramatic point of the picture is that for this moment, no one does anything. Christ's appearance is so unexpected and His gesture so commanding as to suspend action for a shocked instant, before reaction can take place. In another second, Levi will rise up and follow Christ, in fact Christ's feet are already turned as if to leave the room. The particular power of the picture is in this cessation of action. It utilizes the fundamentally static medium of painting to convey characteristic human indecision after a challenge or command and before reaction. The picture is divided into two parts. The standing figures on the right form a vertical rectangle; those gathered around the table on the left a horizontal block. The costumes reinforce the contrast. Levi and his subordinates, who are involved in affairs of this world, are dressed in a contemporary mode, while the barefoot Christ and Saint Peter, who summon Levi to another life and world, appear in timeless cloaks. The two groups are also separated by a void, bridged literally and symbolically by Christ's hand. This hand, like Adam's in Michelangelo's Creation, unifies the two parts formally and psychologically. The light has been no less carefully manipulated: the visible window covered with oilskin, very likely to provide diffused light in the painter's studio; the upper light, to illuminate Saint Matthew's face and the seated group; and the light behind Christ and Saint Peter, introduced only with them. It may be that this third source of light is intended as miraculous. Otherwise, why does Saint Peter cast no shadow on the defensive youth facing him? There have been frequent criticisms of how the handsome head of Christ relates to the outstretched right arm. Only as an afterthought, revealed by X-ray photographs, did Caravaggio decide to have St Peter, representing the Church, who is leaning forward clumsily and imitating Christ's gesture. Martyrdom of Saint Matthew Contarelli Chapel San Luigi Dei Francesi, Rome; 323 x 343 cm Oil on canvas; 1599/1600 Nothing that Caravaggio had done before was equal in scale, majesty or beauty to the paintings he produced for the Contarelli Chapel. The Martyrdom of St Matthew hangs on the right wall of the Contarelli Chapel. According to tradition, the saint was killed on the orders of the king of Ethiopia while celebrating Mass at the altar. The king lusted after his own niece, and had been rebuked by Matthew, for the girl was a nun, and therefore the bride of Christ. Cardinal Contarelli, who had died several decades earlier, had laid down very explicitly what was to be shown: the saint being murdered by a soldier sent by the wicked king, some suitable architecture, and crowds of onlookers showing appropriate emotion. The commission caused Caravaggio considerable difficulty, as he had never painted so large a canvas, nor one with so many figures. X-rays reveal two separate attempts at the composition before the one we see today, with a general movement towards simplification through reduction in the number of figures, and reduction ultimately elimination of the architectural element. The first version revealed by the x-rays is in the Mannerist style of the most admired artist in Rome at the time, Giuseppe Cesari, with a crowd of small figures amidst massive architecture. It must have seemed static and distanced. The second version turned to Raphael for a model, adding a crowd of onlookers displaying fear and pity, including a woman who presumably represented the nun. This was in line with the crowded scene requested by Cardinal Contarelli and with the tenets of Mannerism, which demanded bodies and buildings defined by perspective and drawing, but Caravaggio had already developed a personal style in which bodies were defined by light and darkness and in which backgrounds were eliminated. At this point Caravaggio left off the Martydom and turned his attention to the companion piece, the Calling. Apparently re-inspired, or perhaps with renewed self-confidence, Caravaggio turned back to the Martydom, but this time working in his own idiom. The third version dropped the architecture, reduced the number of actors, and moved the action closer to the viewer; more than this, it introduced the dramatic chiaroscuro which picks out the most important elements of the subject, and chose to represent the moment of greatest drama, as the murderer is about to plunge his sword into the fallen saint. This is the version we see today, the action caught at the moment of highest drama, the bystanders reduced to supporting roles by the sharply selective light, the whole giving the impression of a moment seen as if in a lightning flash. This painting marks the moment when the Mannerist orthodoxy of the late 16th century rational, intellectual, and perhaps a little artificial gives way to the Baroque. It caused a sensation. Federico Zuccari, one of the most eminent painters in Rome and a champion of Mannerism, came to see, and sniffed that it was nothing. But the younger artists were totally won over, and Caravaggio became suddenly the most famous artist in Rome. The location is the steps up to a Christian altar, with a Greek cross marked on its frontage, and a candle burning. In the background on the left, we can just make out the shaft of a column in the almost impenetrable darkness. Steps

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ascend parallel to the picture towards the altar at the back. They also appear on the left, where churches do not normally have steps. For this reason some experts have claimed to detect a baptismal font in the foreground, especially as men are lying nearby, half-naked. On the left, a man is leaning against a step. He has no more concrete role than two youths crouching in the foreground on the right, staring at the main action. They form the right-hand border of the composition, like river-gods on classical reliefs. The picture's main figure is also half-naked. This is not the martyr, but his executioner. What Caravaggio is really depicting is the murderer's moment. He has thrown St Matthew, a bearded old man, to the ground. As a priest, he is wearing alb and chasuble. Whilst his victim helplessly props himself up on the ground, the Herculean youth seizes his wrist in his right hand, to hold the victim still for the death-blow. Yet the apostle's attempt to ward off his murderer, with his furious face, turns into a different gesture as an angel extends a martyr's palm-leaf to his open hand. It takes concentration to understand that the confused melee is a victory of sainthood. Saint Matthew appears to recoil as he falls before the naked fury of his executioner, burning in the glare of light, who readies his sword to strike. Around the saint are persons showing varied emotions, as required by Contarelli: terror, awe, and consternation, while an angel holds out the palm of martyrdom. Confusion about the image can be alleviated by understanding that Matthew is not quailing in fear at the executioner's strike, instead he reaches for the angel's gift. The executioner's grasp and the angel's reach are two parallel paths. Only Matthew is privy to the angelic visitation. Viewed as such, this is a painting not about a moment of general terror, but the death of a saint as the personal handshake of the divine. Italian Baroque painting and sculpture of the time commonly depicted martyrdoms not as moments of fear, but as moments of joy or ecstasy, as in for example, Bernini's Santa Bibiana. One factor worth noting is that Caravaggio, unlike his Mannerist predecessors, has actually made a simple fact of early modern church architecture work in his favour: large cathedrals like Saint Peter's might be well lit, but small chapels like the Contarelli were not. They were, and are, dark and narrow. Anyone coming down the nave of San Luigi would've seen the pale killer nudes looming out of the dark from a distance. The figures of the saint and the horror-struck boy on the left, for example, are borrowed from Titian's altarpiece of The Martyrdom of St Peter the Martyr in Venice. The figure in the background, about left-centre and behind the assassin, is a self-portrait by Caravaggio. St Matthew and the Angel Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum (destroyed), Berlin; 232 x 183 cm Oil on canvas; 1602 It was destroyed in 1945 and is now known only from black and white photographs and enhanced color reproductions. The Contarelli presumably turned to him because they were pleased with the two side-panels he had provided for the chapel. These had been extremely well received, but Saint Matthew and the Angel was rejected. They may have been disconcerted by the fact that this illiterate peasant, who seems as if he might never have written a word before and this angel came down to guide his hand so firmly, has no clear connection with the polished tax-collector depicted in the Calling of Matthew on one neighbouring wall, nor the venerable high churchman in the Martyrdom on the other. These faults were rectified by the artist in his replacement canvas, The Inspiration of Saint Matthew, which now hangs in the chapel. The rejected work was purchased by Caravaggio's patron, the wealthy banker Vincenzo Giustiniani, for his private collection, and probably cut down in size. It eventually entered the Kaiser Friedrich Museum painting gallery in Berlin, where it was destroyed in the closing stages of World War II. Caravaggio's first St Matthew showed an old man bearded and bald dressed in a simple tunic and seated in a Savaronola chair. He is a plebian figure with a tough weather-beaten appearance and his sturdy legs are thrust towards the spectator his foot apparently bursting through the picture plane. He holds a heavy book on his knees and leans forward to look with amazement at the Hebrew characters that appear with such startling precision on the page before him. These form the first verse of Matthew's Gospel describing Christ's descent from Abraham; Matthew's was the first of the Gospels and it was believed that inspired by God Matthew had written it in Hebrew in his own hand. Caravaggio portrays Matthew as simple and unlettered. His pose is uncomfortable and he grasps the book as one unaccustomed his heavy workman's hand resting on the page; his wrinkled brow and bulging eyes convey astonishment. The angel touches his hand and seems to breathe across the page his wing framing the saint's head as the words appear miraculously with little help from the quill pen (there is no ink-well). Baglione said that the painting pleased nobody 'After he had finished the central picture of St Matthew and installed it on the altar the priests took it down saying that the figure with its legs crossed and its feet rudely exposed to the public had neither the decorum not the appearance of a saint.' Caravaggio who was a very imaginative and uncompromising young artist thought hard about what it must have been like when an elderly poor working man a simple publican suddenly had to sit down to write a book. And so he painted a picture of St Matthew with a bald head and bare dusty feet awkwardly gripping the huge volume anxiously wrinkling his brow under the unaccustomed strain of writing. By his side he painted a youthful angel who seems just to have arrived from on high and who gently guides the labourer's hand as a teacher may do to a child. When Caravaggio delivered this picture to the church where it was to be placed on the altar people were scandalized at what they took to be lack of respect for the saint.

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The Inspiration of Saint Matthew Contarelli Chapel, San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome; Oil on canvas, 292 x 186 cm; 1602 The first version was a masterpiece of the artist. It contained, in the angel who with gentle indulgence guided the saint's uncertain hand as he wrote, one of the most charming figures ever painted by the artist. The first painting was criticized for Matthew's lack of decorum. In second version Matthew remains an austere figure with bare chest and feet but transformed into an intellectual has attained a greater dignity with halo and toga-like cloak. Caravaggio did not take any risks with the second version. Matthew now appears to be himself as portrayed in the lateral paintings. In the final version, likewise a splendid feat of imagination but certainly less fascinating than the first, the angel much more correctly counts on his fingers, in the traditional scholastic fashion, the arguments than the saint should take note of and develop. The restless Matthew leans to work, as the angel enumerates for him the work to come. All is darkness but for the two large figures. Matthew appears to have rushed to his desk, his stool teetering into our space. His expression is sober. A whirlwind of drapery envelops the angel. The saint balances on his bench, in precarious equilibrium, like a modern schoolboy; but this time the unorthodox elements do not seem to have raised particular objections. The relative positions of apostle and angel were clearly derived from Tintoretto's Virgin Appearing to Saint Jerome. The Conversion of Saint Paul Odescalchi Balbi Collection, Rome; 237 cm x 189 cm Oil on cypress wood; 1600/01 It is one of at least two paintings by Caravaggio of the same subject, the Conversion of Paul. Another is The Conversion of Saint Paul on the Road to Damascus, in the Cerasi Chapel of Santa Maria del Popolo. The painting, together with a Crucifixion of Saint Peter, was commissioned by Monsignor (later Cardinal) Tiberio Cerasi, Treasurer-General to Pope Clement VIII, in September 1600. According to Caravaggio's early biographer Giovanni Baglione, both paintings were rejected by Cerasi, and replaced by the second versions which hang in the chapel today. According to the Acts of the Apostles, on the way to Damascus Saul the Pharisee (soon to be Paul the Apostle) fell to the ground when he heard the voice of Christ saying to him, 'Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?' and temporarily lost his sight. It was reasonable to assume that Saul had fallen from a horse. Several modern commentators have questioned whether the rejection of the first versions of Caravaggio's two paintings was quite so straightforward as the record makes it seem, and speculate that Cardinal Sannessio may have seized the opportunity of Cerasi's unexpected death on 3 May 1601 to seize the paintings. Certainly there is no obvious reason for the rejection, and the two second versions which replaced them were, if the surviving first version of the Conversion is a guide, (the first Crucifixion of Peter has disappeared), far more unconventional than the first. In the position of the St Paul and of the Christ, and in the movement of the horse into the depth of the picture, this work is still related to the tradition of Michelangelo's fresco in the Paolina Chapel. There are decidedly Caravaggesque elements in the work, such as the face of the angel supporting Christ, which greatly resembles that of the Amor Victorious, or of the Isaac in the Sacrifice of Isaac (Uffizi). The Conversion on the Way to Damascus Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome; Oil on canvas 230 cm x 175 cm; 1601 Caravaggio is showing us St Paul who was a kind of 'bad boy' at the beginning: a narrow intolerant man who angrily persecuted the Christians. He was riding on a mission to intensify the persecutions when suddenly, terrifyingly he had a vision. Christ appeared to him. He was blinded and thrown off his horse. There is significance here because a man on horseback is a proud man in control above the others but once thrown off his horse all the trappings of power and dignity and self-certainty are roughly removed. Caravaggio is close to the Bible. The horse is there and, to hold him, a groom, but the drama is internalized within the mind of Saul. He lies on the ground stunned, his eyes closed as if dazzled by the brightness of God's light that streams down the white part of the skewbald horse, but that the light is heavenly is clear only to the believer, for Saul has no halo. Caravaggio makes religious experience look natural. Technically the picture has defects. The horse, based on Drer, looks hemmed in, there is too much happening at the composition's base, too many feet cramped together, let alone Saul's splayed hands and discarded sword. Bellori's view that the scene is 'entirely without action' misses the point. Like a composer who values silence, Caravaggio respects stillness. Look at Paul absolutely vulnerable legs out-stretched, arms raised to heaven as he falls, eyes shut since he has been blinded. Now he cannot even see what is in front of him, let alone have vision superior to anybody else. Caravaggio paints him with compassionate truthfulness so that we see what it means to be thrown off a horse: not just coming down to the level of others but laid flat. And Paul becomes even less important because with a stroke of utter brilliance Caravaggio shows the whole event not in terms of Paul but of the horse. It is the horse who is spotlighted as central, careful not to tread on the poor creature that has so unexpectedly slid beneath his belly. Paul has become lower than the beasts, the man who thought himself able to judge and condemn others. The horse is more alert to Paul's predicament than he had ever been, to the needs of his fellow humans.

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As compared with the first version, the valid version, painted on canvas in contravention of the letter of the contract, the second version reduces the incident to what is visible. Instead of looking like a figure modelled on a classical river-god, as he does in the first version, Saul now appears boldly foreshortened. The model Caravaggio has chosen is markedly younger, though is again wearing Roman leather-armour, which follows the contours of his body. That said, powerful red colouring and clearly defined borders, as well as the shadow areas on Saul's neck, now emphasize the difference between skin and armour.

The Crucifixion of Saint Peter Cerasi Chapel, Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome; Oil on canvas, 230 x 175 cm; 1601 The Crucifixion of St Peter in the church of Santa Maria del Popolo is one of two paintings in the Cerasi Chapel. Across the chapel is a second Caravaggio work depicting the The Conversion of Saint Paul on the Road to Damascus (1601). On the altar between the two is an Assumption of the Virgin Mary by Annibale Carracci. The two Caravaggios, as well as the altarpiece by Carracci, were commissioned in September 1600 by Monsignor Tiberio Cerasi, who died shortly afterwards. Caravaggio's original versions of both paintings were rejected (Baglione states that Caravaggio first executed the two pictures 'in another manner, but as they did not please the patron). They passed into the private collection of Cardinal Sannessio, and several modern scholars have speculated that Sennassio may have taken advantage of Cerasi's sudden death to seize some pictures by Rome's most famous new painter. The first Conversion of Paul has been identified with The Conversion of Saint Paul (1600) in the Odescalchi Balbi Collection, Rome, but the first version of the Crucifixion of Peter has disappeared; some scholars have identified it with a painting now in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, but this is not generally accepted (in the Hermitage catalog Martyrdom of St. Peter is attributed, with a question mark, to Lionello Spada and dated on the first quarter of the 17th century). In all events, the second versions, which seem to have been more unconventional than the first, were accepted without comment by the executors of Cerasi's estate in 1601. The two saints, Peter and Paul, together represent the foundations of the Catholic Church, Peter the 'rock' upon which Christ declared his Church to be built, and Paul who founded the seat of the church in Rome. Caravaggio's paintings were thus intended to symbolise Rome's (and Cerasi's) devotion to the Princes of the Apostles in this church which dominated the great piazza welcoming pilgrims as they entered the city from the north, representing the great Counter-Reformation themes of conversion and martyrdom and serving as propaganda against the twin threats of backsliding and Protestantism. The painting depicts the martyrdom of St. Peter by crucifixionPeter asked that his cross be inverted so as not to imitate his mentor, Christ, hence he is depicted upside-down. The large canvas shows Romans, their faces shielded, struggling to erect the cross of the elderly but muscular St. Peter. Peter is heavier than his aged body would suggest, and his lifting requires the efforts of three men, as if the crime they perpetrate already weighs on them. Caravaggio's St Peter is not a heroic martyr, nor a Herculean hero in the manner of Michelangelo, but an old man suffering pain and in fear of death. The scene, set on some stony field, is grim. The dark, impenetrable background draws the spectator's gaze back again to the sharply illuminated figures who remind us, through the banal ugliness of their actions and movements - note the yellow rear and filthy feet of the lower figure - that the death of the apostle was not a heroic drama, but a wretched and humiliating execution. There are three executioners who fit into a criss-cross pattern, each marked out by the colours of their clothes. They are made anonymous, for two men have their backs to the spectator and the eyes of the third (on the picture) are in darkness. Caravaggio has painted St Peter's body with his astonishing feeling for anatomy and the skin structure of an elderly male physique. At the same time, he has chosen the very instant when the Prince of the Apostles is raised into the undignified position in which he will be crucified - upside-down, in Nero's Circus. St. John the Baptist (Youth with Ram) Musei Capitolini, Rome; Oil on canvas, 129 x 94 cm; 1600/02 This painting exists in two versions and both are in Rome, the other in the Galleria Doria-Pamphili. John was frequently shown in Christian art, identifiable by his bowl, reed cross, camel's skin and lamb. The most popular scene prior to the Counter-Reformation was of John's baptism of Jesus, or else the infant Baptist together with the infant Jesus and Mary his mother, frequently supplemented by the Baptist's own mother St Elizabeth. John alone in the desert was less popular, but not unknown. For the young Caravaggio, John was invariably a boy or youth alone in the wilderness. This image was based on the statement in the Gospel of Luke that "the child grew and was strengthened in spirit, and was in the deserts until the day of his manifestation to Israel." These works allowed a religious treatment of the partly clothed youths he liked to paint at this period - not all the models have a very saintly look. The youthful John is shown half-reclining, one arm around a ram's neck, his turned to the viewer with an impish grin. There's almost nothing to signify that this indeed the prophet sent to make straight the road in the wilderness no cross, no leather belt, just a scrap of camel's skin lost in the voluminous folds of the red cloak, and the ram. The image is a masterpiece of virtuosity whose appeal lies in its soft, caressing light and velvety rendering of cloth, flesh, and plants. Only virtue of the symbols of Christ displayed in the painting: the ram (ram probably implying the beast offered to God by Abraham in place of Isac an event that foreshadows the self-sacrifice of Christ to God the

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Father), and the grape-leaves (from whose red juice, akin to the blood of Christ, springs life); otherwise the iconographical subject appears as a nude youth with an ironic, if not allusive, expression. The raised leg indicated both the resurrection and victory triumph. These two meanings are in harmony because the resurrection triumphed over death which in this painting is symbolised by the dried tree trunk on which the raised leg rests. In the upper right hand corner to reinforce the allegory green vine-leaves (a common Christological symbol of eternal life) wink at one out of the darkness. Its cultivated content and its destination for an aristocratic patron are underscored by the artist's explicit use of a great figurative source of the past: Michelangelo's Ignudi from the Sistine Ceiling but he is transformed by the youthful Baptist's smile. But whereas Michelangelo created abstract and ideal figures with cold lights and a merely theoretical plasticism, Caravaggio models his figure on the careful observation of nature, achieving an image of perfect realism. St. John the Baptist (Youth with Ram) Galleria Doria Pamphili, Rome; Oil on canvas, 132 x 97 cm; 1600/02 In this picture the totally naked boy sits leaning far back, like one of the 'ignudi' who adorn Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling. Here, he is propping his left elbow on some white drapery, has straightened out his left leg behind him, and is supporting his bent right leg by gripping the toes. A magnificent piece of red fabric provides pictorial ornament, at the bottom on the left. With his right arm, the boy is reaching for a ram which has suddenly materialized from the depth of the picture. Its nose and mouth are nearly touching the smiling boy's cheek. Caravaggio clearly based the figure on Michelangelo's example, though he painted it according to his own principles of working direct from a living model. The figure does not reveal the great Florentine's feeling for musculature, but the vigorous contouring of his back shows his influence. Caravaggio is likely to have used a study here. With great skill and his instinct for dynamic action, Caravaggio has placed the carefully built-up body in such a way that the figure's left elbow almost bumps against the edge of the picture. Otherwise, however, the figure is completely free. Supper at Emmaus National Gallery, London; 141 x 196 cm Oil on canvas; 1601/02 The gospel according to St Luke (24:13-32) tells of the meeting of two disciples with the resurrected Christ. It is only during the meal that his companions recognize him in the way he blesses and breaks the bread. But with that, the vision of Christ vanishes. In the gospel according to St Mark (16:12) he is said to have appeared to them "in an other form" which is why Caravaggio did not paint him with a beard at the age of his crucifixion, but as a youth. It is also a recurring theme in Caravaggio's paintings to find the sublime interrupting the daily routine. The unexalted humanity is apt for this scene, since the human Jesus has made himself unrecognizable to his disciples, and at once confirms and surmounts his humanity. Caravaggio seems to suggest that perhaps a Jesus could enter our daily encounters. The dark background envelops the tableau. What makes this work notable is first the way he uses light, both naturalistically and as on Christ's face for its spiritual significance; and secondly for his portrayal of the Saviour's face as clean-shaven, fleshy, even ugly. The table is set close to us parallel to the plane of the canvas but far enough removed for a disciple to be shown before it. At the moment of dramatic revelation this disciple pushes back his chair in astonished disbelief. In doing so he seems to thrust it into our own space before the canvas revealing Christ to us as well. We see this disciple only from the side and back in the darkness; the focus of our attention is on the illuminated Christ. The astonished disciple at the right an unforgettable figure throws out his arms in a dramatic gesture of amazement so that his left hand seems to cut through the picture plane. The host seems interested but somewhat confused at the surprise and emotion shown by the disciples. Both react with violent, clumsy gestures while the host oblivious of any spiritual happening stays calm. The light falling sharply from the top left to illuminate the scene has all the suddenness of the moment of recognition. It captures the climax of the story, the moment at which seeing becomes recognizing. In other words, the lighting in the painting is not merely illumination, but also an allegory. It models the objects, makes them visible to the eye and is at the same time a spiritual portrayal of the revelation, the vision, which will be gone in an instant. Caravaggio has offset the transience of this fleeting moment in the tranquillity of his still life on the table. On the surfaces of the glasses, crockery, bread and fruit, poultry and vine leaves, he unfurls all the sensual magic of textural portrayal in a manner hitherto unprecedented in Italian painting. Many of the still-life details though realistic in appearance are there for symbolic reasons-the autumnal grapes and apples (which allude both to the fruits of Grace brought by Christ and to original sin) and pomegranate refer respectively to the wine of the Eucharist (in the carafe) the Fall of Man and the Crown of Thorns. The bread of the Eucharist which in Caravaggio's time was the sole means of communion for the laity is laced under Christ's left hand and near the front of the table as on the altar. The realism with which Caravaggio treated even religious subjects - apostles who look like labourers, the plump and slightly feminine figure of Christ - met with the vehement disapproval of the clergy. A basket of fruit impudently intrudes near the front table-edge. As in the Uffizi Bacchus, the still-life spreads out under the main figure. Christ's gesture parallels the priest's consecration of the wafer. The outstretched arms of the disciple which may also allude to the Crucifixion join us to the pilgrim: we are all on pilgrimage in search of salvation. Even those who

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do not acknowledge Christ are on this journey; the innkeeper who sees and understands nothing represents the world of pagans and heretics who do not recognize Christ and his Church. Nevertheless the innkeeper casts a shadow that seems to form a negative halo around the brilliant head of Christ as if to indicate that we honour the Saviour even while ignoring or denying him.

The Incredulity of Saint Thomas Sanssouci, Potsdam; Oil on canvas, 107 x 146 cm; 1601/02 This picture seems to belong to the same group as the second St Matthew and the Angel and The Sacrifice of Isaac because the same model reappears as the apostle at the apex of this composition. Like the first St Matthew and the Angel this picture belonged to Vincenzo Giustiniani and then entered the Prussian royal collection. Fortunately it was kept in Potsdam and so it survived the last war intact. According to St John's Gospel, Thomas missed one of Christ's appearances to the Apostles after His resurrection. He therefore announced that, unless he could thrust his hand into Christ's side, he would not believe what he had been told. A week later Christ appeared, asked Thomas to reach out his hands to touch Him and said, 'Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.' This drama of disbelief seems to have touched Caravaggio personally. Few of his paintings are physically so shocking - his Thomas pushes curiosity to its limits before he will say, 'My Lord and my God.' The classical composition carefully unites the four heads in the quest for truth. Christ's head is largely in shadow, as He is the person who is the least knowable. He also has a beauty that had not been evident in the paintings of His arrest and appearance at Emmaus. Amor Victorious Staatliche Museen Gemldegalerie, Berlin; 156 x 113 cm Oil on canvas; 1601/03 This painting was always considered one of Caravaggio's great masterpieces. The figure sets up a direct, special and privileged relationship with the viewer, with an immediate appeal that is truly extraordinary. One is bewildered by this painting, by the absolute freedom that the subject obviously enjoys, detaching himself from mere mortals who must obey the laws of nature. The figure is in the act of mocking the world with a complete impunity, a selfassurance that produces a mixture of astonishment and envy. Amor Vincit Omnia ("Love Conquers All", known in English by a variety of names including Amor Victorious, Victorious Cupid, Love Triumphant, Love Victorious, or Earthly Love) shows Amor, the Roman Cupid, wearing dark eagle wings, half-sitting on or perhaps climbing down from what appears to be a table. Scattered around are the emblems of all human endeavours violin and lute, armour, coronet, square and compasses, pen and manuscript, bay leaves, and an astral globe, tangled and trampled under Cupids foot. He places his left knee lightly over these objects, while he holds a bunch of arrows in his right hand. Since the attributes of war, military glory, science and arts are scattered at Amor's feet, the painting reminds the viewer of a vanitas still-life. Some objects in this still-life are emphasized: pieces of a suit of armour, a lute and a violin with a bow. These may refer to Mars and Venus, who, according to some classical genealogies, including that of Virgil's Aeneid, were the parents of the playful little winged deity Amor. Thus in this painting the musical instruments represent Venus herself rather than either art in general or, through the association of fading melodies, transitoriness of human life. It is likely, of course, that the viewer of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries may have thought of all the previous connotations, too, since he was used to the multiple meanings of symbols. A musical manuscript on the floor shows a large "V". It has therefore been suggested also that the picture is a coded reference to the attainments of Vincenzo Giustiniani: his Genoese family ruled Chios (until the island's capture by the Turks) in 1622, hence the coronet; the cultivated Marchese also wrote about music and painting (pen, manuscript and musical instruments), was constructing an imposing new palazzo (geometrical instruments), studied astronomy (astral sphere), and was praised for his military prowess (armour). The symbology thus holds the possible reading: Vincenzo Conquers All. Giustiniani is said to have prized it above all other works in his collection. The subject was a common one for the age. Caravaggios treatment is remarkable for the realism of his Cupid where other depictions show an idealised, almost generic, beautiful boy, Caravaggios Cupid is highly individual, charming but not at all beautiful, all crooked teeth and crooked grin: one feels that one would recognise him in the street. The shock of the Caravaggio, quite apart from the dramatic chiaroscuro lighting and the photographic clarity, is the mingling of the allegorical and the real, this sense it gives of a child who is having a thoroughly good time dressing up in stage-prop wings with a bunch of arrows and having his picture painted. Nevertheless, despite the clear indications of Caravaggios practice of painting direct from a live model, there is an undeniable resemblance to the pose of Michelangelo's Victory now in the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, and it is likely the artist had this in mind, but his Amor has a cheeky charm that is all his own. Inevitably, much scholarly and non-scholarly ink has been spilled over the alleged eroticism of the painting. Yet the homoerotic content was perhaps not so apparent to Giustinianis generation as it has become today. Naked boys

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could be seen on any riverbank or seashore, and the eroticisation of children is very much a cultural artefact of the present-day rather than Caravaggio's. Certainly neither Giustiniani, who was not a homosexual, nor his visitors, appear to have been concerned by the question of modesty or to have even raised it and the story that the Marchese kept Amor hidden behind a curtain relates to his reported wish that it should be kept as a final pice de rsistance for visitors, to be seen only when the rest of the collection had been viewed in other words, the curtain was to reveal the painting, not to hide it. In 1602, shortly after Amor Vincit was completed, Cardinal Benedetto Giustiniani, Vincenzos brother and collaborator in the creation of the Giustiniani collection of contemporary art, commissioned a painting from the noted artist Giovanni Baglione. Bagliones Divine and Profane Love showed Divine Love separating a juvenile Cupid on the ground in the lower right corner (profane love) from a Lucifer in the left corner. Its style was thoroughly derivative of Caravaggio (who had recently emerged as a rival for Church commissions) and a clear challenge to the recent Amor, and the younger painter bitterly protested at what he saw as the plagiarism. Taunted by one of Caravaggios friends, Baglione responded with a second version, in which the devil was given Caravaggios face. Thus began a long and vicious quarrel which was to have unforeseeable ramifications for Caravaggio decades after his death when the unforgiving Baglione became his first biographer. Taking of Christ National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin; Oil on canvas, 133, 5 x 169, 5 cm; 1602 There are seven figures in the painting, from left to right: St John, Jesus, Judas, two soldiers, a man (a self-portrait of Caravaggio), and a soldier. The main figures are pushed to the left, so that the right-hand half of the picture is left to the soldiers, whose suits of armour absorb what little light there is, and whose faces are the most part hidden. They are standing, and only the upper three-quarters of their bodies are depicted. The figures are arrayed before a very dark background, in which the setting is disguised. The main light source is not evident in the painting but comes from the upper left. There is a lantern being held by the man at the right (Caravaggio). The three men on the right are there mainly to intensify the visual core of the painting, underscored by the lantern. At the far left, a man (St John) is fleeing; his arms are raised, his mouth is open in a gasp, his cloak is flying and being snatched back by a soldier. On the left, the tactile aspect is not forgotten. Judas vigorously embraces his master, whilst a heavily mailed arm reaches above him towards Christ's throat. Christ, however, crosses his hands, which he holds out well in front of him. Johns red cloak is torn from his shoulder, as it flaps open it binds the faces of Christ and Judas together - a deliberate touch on the artist's part. The fleeing figure of John in his terror contrasts to the entering self portrait of the artist thus making the point that even a sinner one thousand years after the resurrection has a better understanding of what Christ is than does his friend four days before. Another version of this subject is in the Museum of Western and Eastern Art, Odessa. The Sacrifice of Isaac Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence; Oil on canvas, 104 x 135 cm; 1603 The artist thrusts the action to the front of the picture frame like a sculpted frieze. Old Abraham, with features reminiscent of the second St Matthew, is intercepted in the act of slitting his son's throat by an admonishing angel who with his right hand prevents the murder and with his left points to the substitute victim. Light directs the viewer to scan the scene from left to right as it picks out the angel's shoulder and left hand, the quizzical face of Abraham, the right shoulder and terrified face of Isaac and finally the docile ram. A continuous movement links the back of the angel's neck to Isaac's profile; and angel and boy have a family likeness. Caravaggio combines a hint of horror with pastoral beauty. In the foreground the sharp knife is silhouetted against the light on Isaac's arm. In the distance is one of Caravaggio's rare landscapes, a glimpse perhaps of the Alban hills round Rome and an acknowledgement of the skill of his one serious rival, Annibale Carracci, whose landscapes were particularly admired. The angel, seen in profile at the left-hand edge of the picture, is pointing to a view of the landscape with his powerfully extended index-finger. At first glance he is indicating the ram rather then Isaac, but his finger is pointing beyond this towards the liberating landscape on the right. Isaac is thrust down roughly on the sacrificial altar, casts a look of agony at the viewer, and emits a scream of horror. Caravaggio pushes to extremes the dramatic effect of the scene pointing out with his peculiar use of the light the terror on the face of the young Isaac and on the charming angel's profile. Realism also is expressed by the old Abraham figure, Isaac has been identified as Cecco Boneri, who appeared as Caravaggio's model in several other pictures. Recent X-ray analysis showed that Caravaggio used Cecco also for the angel, and later modified the profile and the hair to hide the resemblance. The Entombment Pinacoteca, Vatican; Oil on canvas, 300 x 203 cm; 1602/03 The Entombment was executed for the second chapel on the right side of Santa Maria in Vallicella, also known as the Chiesa Nuova, the mother church of the Oratorian order founded by Saint Philip Neri. While there is much in this representation that was revolutionary for Caravaggio's time, it is not clear that the highly naturalistic reconstruction of a gospel event in this painting would have been antithetical to the vividly faithful Oratorians, who sought to relive experiences through prayer. Even critics of Caravaggio and his style, such

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as Baglione and Bellori, admired this painting. Of all Caravaggio's paintings, The Entombment is probably the most monumental. Nothing distinguished Caravaggio's history paintings more strongly from the art of the Renaissance than his refusal to portray the human individual as sublime, beautiful and heroic. His figures are bowed, bent, cowering, reclining or stooped. The self confident and the statuesque have been replaced by humility and subjection. The stone slab makes its appearance in the picture with terrifying power. According to one's attitude, one will detect in this painting either irreverence or profound religious bewilderment in the face of the death of Christ, because it presents the meaning of the sacred event - the unique occasion - which lies in the heart of Church ritual, in a tangible visual form. This counter-reformation painting with a diagonal cascade of mourners and cadaver-bearers descending to the limp, dead Christ and the bare stone is not a moment of transfiguration, but of mourning. As the viewer's eye descends from the gloom there is, too, a descent from the hysteria of Mary of Cleophas through subdued emotion to death as the final emotional silencing. Unlike the gored post-crucifixion Jesus in morbid Spanish displays, Italian Christs die generally bloodlessly. As if emphasizing the dead Christ's inability to feel pain, a hand enters the wound at his side. His body is one of a muscled, veined, thick-limbed labourer rather than the usual, bony-thin depiction. While faces are important in painting generally, in Caravaggio it is important always to note where the arms are pointing. Skyward in The Conversion of Saint Paul on the Road to Damascus, towards Levi in The Calling of Saint Matthew. Here, the dead God's fallen arm and immaculate shroud touch stone; the grieving Mary Magdalene gesticulates to Heaven. In some ways, that was the message of Christ: God come to earth, and mankind reconciled with the heavens. As usual, even with his works of highest devotion, Caravaggio never fails to ground himself. Tradition held that the Virgin Mary be depicted as eternally young, but here Caravaggio paints the Virgin as an old woman. The figure of the Virgin Mary is also partially obscured; we see her in the blue robe and her arms are held out to her side, imitating the line of the stone they stand upon. Her right hand hovers above his head as if she is reaching out to touch him. Caravaggio did not really portray the Burial or the Deposition in the traditional way in as much as Christ is not shown at the moment when he is laid in the tomb but rather when in the presence of the holy women he is laid by Nicodemus and John on the Anointing Stone that is the stone with which the sepulchre will be closed. Around the body of Christ are the Virgin Mary Magdalene, John Nicodemus and Mary of Cleophas who raises her arms and eyes to heaven in a gesture of high dramatic tension. Apart from the upright Magdalen all figures stoop in symbolic attitude of laying their Lord in the grave, the stone slab of which juts out in harsh reality to the picture frame. A cascade of stances ripples down to the white shroud draped under the figure of Christ. The dead hand is as cold and lifeless as the stone it rests against; the white mantle imbued as it is by the aura of Christ falls gently on the green plant hinting at the resurrection of Christ of which the mourners seem as yet unaware. The peasant types employed by Caravaggio are the everyday type that death happens to. The virgin and disciples of Christ are no more singled out than the rest of the grieving group. This may have seemed irreligious to an observer in the painter's time. The message to all mourners as well as Christ's immediate followers is a reference to death as a transition and the beginning of a new life. For Christians especially the hope of a new life is made all the more possible by Christ's death and resurrection. Christ in the Garden (Christ on the Mount of Olives) Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum (destroyed), Berlin; Oil on canvas, 154 x 222 cm; 1602/03 The painting was destroyed in the Second World War, it is known to us today through extant black and white photographs. This was a wonderful composition that caught the instant in which Christ awakes the sleeping apostles. The construction of the scene descends toward the lower right corner. St Peter in particular is shown in a classical position, with the containment that characterizes this moment in the artist's career. The details are typical - Christ's elegantly raised little finger, the fall of the drape, St Peter's face. But beyond such stylistic considerations the inspired treatment of the subject betrays the imprint of Caravaggio's imagination. Rather than the more frequently depicted episode when the anguished Christ prays to have his bitter cup taken from him while his disciples sleep Caravaggio chose to depict the less mystical but certainly more dramatic moment when Jesus returns from prayer to find his followers asleep and wakens Peter with the rebuke 'What would none of you stay awake with me one hour? Stay awake and pray that you may be spared the test. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak' (Matthew XXVI: 40-41). These words precede the arrival of Judas and the soldiers and Christ's pointing finger should be seen as indicating the imminent catastrophe. The other two disciples in the picture are John in the centre and James. St. John the Baptist (John in the Wilderness) Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; Oil on canvas 173 cm x 133 cm; 1603/4 This is one of the few pictures where Caravaggio places his subject in a natural setting, here against leaves and with a plant at his feet. Sharp outlines of the body, swirling fiery red cloak, carelessly draped about him emphasize the latent force of John's youthful personality which was to precipitate him into public life to call the rich and powerful to repentance. His eyes are hidden in shadow. The conception of the image is itself remarkable for the Baptist had

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hardly ever before been portrayed as an isolated seated figure who lacks moreover his usual attributes of halo, lamb and banderole. Stark contrasts of light and dark accentuate the perception that the figure leans forward out of the deep shadows of the background and into the lighter realm of the viewer's own space. Painted toward the end of the artist's career in Rome it was almost certainly commissioned by Ottavio Costa, the papal banker for a small oratory in the Costa fiefdom of Conscente (a village near Albenga on the Italian Riviera). The brooding melancholy of the Nelson-Atkins Baptist has attracted the attention of almost every commentator. It seems indeed as if Caravaggio instilled in this image an element of the essential pessimism of the Baptist's preaching of the senseless tragedy of his early martyrdom and perhaps even some measure of the artist's own troubled psyche. This Baptist seems like a psychic mirror-image of the first, with all the signs reversed: the brilliant morning light which bathed the earlier painting has become harsh and almost lunar in its contrasts, and the vivid green foliage has turned to dry dead brown. There is almost nothing in the way of symbols to identify that this is indeed a religious image, no halo, no sheep, no leather girdle, nothing but the thin reed cross (a reference to Christ's description of John as "a reed shaken by the wind"). This adolescent, almost adult, John seems locked in some private world known only to his creator. Caravaggio's conception of the saint as a seated, solitary figure, lacking almost any narrative identity (how do we know this is the Baptist? What is happening here?) was truly revolutionary. Artists from Giotto to Bellini and beyond had shown the Baptist as an approachable story, a symbol understandable to all; the very idea that a work should express a private world, rather than a common religious and social experience, was radically new. St. John the Baptist (John in the Wilderness) Palazzo Corsini Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Rome; Oil on canvas, 94 x 131 cm; 1603/04 Kansas St. John is laid out vertically, the Rome horizontally. Both lend themselves to a modernistic reading aimed at pointing out a certain air between contempt and arrogance. In effect what we are dealing with here are splendid exercises in modelling the body through the play of light and shadow. In the version now in Kansas City, the figure is set before a dense curtain of plants; in that in Rome, there is only the trunk of a cypress tree, on the left. Both are admirable feats of painting. Caravaggio in turn knew how to make apparently uninteresting religious themes into paintings desirable even for his aristocratic patrons. The figure has been stripped of identifying symbols - no belt, not even the "raiment of camel's hair", and the reed cross is only suggested. The background and surrounds have darkened even further, and again there is the sense of a story from which the viewer is excluded. Caravaggio was not the first artist to have treated the Baptist as a cryptic male nude - there were prior examples but he introduced a new note of realism and drama. His John has the roughened, sunburnt hands and neck of a labourer, his pale torso emerging with a contrast that reminds the viewer that this is a real boy who has gotten undressed for his modelling session - unlike Raphael's Baptist, who is as idealised and un-individualised as one of his winged cherubs. Madonna di Loreto Cavalletti Chapel Sant' Agostino, Rome; Oil on canvas, 260 x 150 cm; 1604/06 In the winter of 1603/4 Caravaggio had been in Tolentino, not far from the shrine of Loreto, and he may have gone there to see the supposed Holy House of Nazareth. Loreto is a small town a few miles south of Ancona and near the sea. Its most conspicuous building is the basilica. A sixteenth century inscription on the eastern facade of the basilica describes the tradition which makes this shrine so famous. It is here that most holy Mary Mother of God was born; here that she was saluted by the Angel, here that the eternal Word of God was made Flesh. Angels conveyed this House from Palestine to the town Tersato in Illyria (Dalmatia) in the year of salvation 1291 in the pontificate of Nicholas IV. Three years later in the beginning of the pontificate of Boniface VIII it was carried again by the ministry of angels and placed in a wood near this hill in the vicinity of Recanati in the Marche of Ancona. It depicts the apparition of the barefoot virgin and naked child to two peasants on a pilgrimage; or as some say it is the quickening of the iconic statue of the Virgin. The doorway or niche is not an exalted cumulus or bevy of putti, but a partly decrepit wall of flaking brick is visible. Only the merest halo sanctifies her and the baby. While beautiful, the Virgin Mary could be any woman, emerging from the night shadows. Like many of Caravaggio's Roman paintings, such as the Conversion on the Way to Damascus or the Calling of St Matthew, the scene is a moment where everyday common man (or woman) encounters the divine. He has made simple devotion affecting. Two pilgrims - pellegrini in Italian - kneel in prayer before the statue beside a pillar, while the Madonna and Child, living to the eyes of faith, look down on them in quiet attention. (The painting is also called Madonna dei Pellegrini.) The woman has a ruckled bonnet and the dirty soles of the man's feet are so close to the spectator that they cannot be avoided. The haloes on the sacred figures and their raised position remove them from our world, but their beauty contains no hint of arrogance - they gaze at the world with gentle sympathy. Some have seen in this Madonna the latest woman in Caravaggio's life Lena or Maddalena, over whom he had a fight. She is painted with love, but has only one rich passage in the left arm of her dress; elsewhere colour is toned

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down. Her craning neck was to be almost a mannerism in Caravaggio's works of this period, but here the pose is convincing. The Crowning with Thorns Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna; Oil on canvas 127 x 165, 5 cm; c. 1604 This cruelty of the two torturers is depicted with acutely observed reality as they hammer home the thorns, as is the bored slouch of the official leaning on the rail as he oversees the death of God. Christ is suffering real pain with patient endurance. The front boundary of the picture is articulated by a wooden barrier, on which the captain is leaning, in order to observe the action but take no part in it. He watches the executioner's half-naked assistants abuse Christ at his behest. The powerful figure of the suffering victim, sitting almost naked on a bench, seems larger than he is. The figure on the right knocks the crown of thorns against the far side of Christ's head with the bottom of his cane while the left-hand torturer raises his so as to bring it down from the top on the near visible side of Christ's brow: a rhythmic and sadistic hammering. The authorship of this arresting picture has often been disputed. The composition is worthy of Caravaggio and the facial types seem characteristic, but the overall impression is curiously flat. There is real beauty in the subtle play of light across Christs face and breast. By contrast, the hands of Christ and the seated soldier seem wooden and below the masters standard. One suspects that this painting was projected by Caravaggio and mainly executed by him, but with minor assistance. The Crowning with Thorns Palazo degli Alberti, Cassa di Risparmi, Prato; Oil on canvas, 178 x 125 cm; c. 1605 This picture creates a different kind of drama than the Crowning with Thorns in Vienna, which is also disputed. The vertical format allows us to concentrate on Christ, who occupies the center of the picture. The figure of a man, naked from the waist up, sitting on a chair in front of a barrier in the foreground, holding the rope with which Christ's hands are bound, leads the eye towards him. A second man in a brilliant red robe is almost gently gripping the victim by his upper body and upper left arm. A third assistant is pressing the crown down so hard on to Christ's head with his stick that a drop of blood is running down his temple. The gestures which define the situation are restrained and understatedthe almost imperceptible actions of the tormentors focus attention on Christ, who looks up, his bound hands slightly raised almost in forgiveness. The handling of Christs face, shoulder, and hands and, possibly, also the red mantle seem attributable to the master himself. By contrast, the three assailants on all sides of Christ display little contact with his technique or skills. St Jerome Writing Galleria Borghese, Rome; Oil on canvas, 112 x 157 cm; 1605/06 Just as Protestants wished to translate the Bible into local languages to make the Word of God accessible to ordinary believers, so Catholics were keen to justify the use of the standard Latin version, made by St Jerome in the late fourth century. Jerome had been baptized by one pope, had been given his task as translator by another and had called St Peter the first bishop of Rome. Among the Latin Fathers of the Church he was a powerful ally against modern heretics, who attacked the cult of the saints, restricted the use of Latin to the learned and viewed the papacy as the whore of Babylon. It was wholly appropriate that this image was bought by Scipione Borghese, soon after he was made a cardinal in 1605 by his uncle, the new Pope Paul V. In pre-Reformation days Jerome was shown with a pet lion and a cardinal's hat. Now Catholic reformers wished to pare religious art down to its essentials, and the good-living cardinal, acquired a painting that was as austere as it was sombre. The thin old man, whose face is reminiscent of the model who had been Abraham, Matthew and one of the Apostles with Thomas, sits reflecting on a codex of the Bible while his right hand is poised to write. Whereas in the Renaissance, Antonello da Messina and Drer had made him into a wealthy scholar, Caravaggio reduces Jerome's possessions to a minimum. The text he holds open, a second closed one and a third kept open by a skull are perched on a small table. Harsh lighting emphasizes the sinewy muscles of his tired arms and the parallel between his bony head and the skull - man is born to die, but the Word of God lives forever. The conception of St Jerome Writing is itself a remarkable achievement in which composition and subject-matter strongly reinforce each other: the ageing saint feverishly concentrating on what he has written absent-mindedly stretches out a sinewy arm to the inkwell on the far side of the table and in so doing indicates the skull, a reminder of death which observes him symmetrically in his very struggle to overcome it. St Jerome in Meditation Monastery of Santa Maria, Montserrat; Oil on canvas, 118 x 81 cm; 1605/06 Saint Jerome was a popular figure in Caravaggio's time, and the artist painted him at least eight times (only three survive). Whether this was from personal choice or at the request of patrons is unknown, but it gave Caravaggio the opportunity to explore the potential - from an artist's perspective - of aged and wrinkled flesh. Jerome is shown here contemplating one of his symbols, the skull, a reminder of the inevitability of death and the vanity of worldly things. The suntan revealed in this upright picture on the old man's face and hands, in contrast to the light color on his arms and upper body, indicates that Caravaggio was again studying from a living model. Strong shadows disturb the structural features of the upper body. With only a piece of white drapery around his loins, and his Cardinal-red mantle slung across his legs, the old man has his left hand resting on his mantle, which also covers the table, whilst

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he is pensively stroking his beard with his right hand. Although his head is lowered, he is not looking at the skull in front of him. That said, the skull's empty eye-sockets appear to be staring at him. The painting is probably from the Giustiniani collection (the collection of Caravaggio's patron the banker Vincenzo Giustiniani and his brother the cardinal Benedetto). Benedetto built up a large collection of religious works by the artist, and a St Jerome of the same dimensions as this one is in the Giustiniani inventory of 1638. Madonna with the Serpent Galleria Borghese, Rome; Oil on canvas, 292 x 211 cm; 1605/06 Under the watchful gaze of St Anne, Jesus's apocryphal grandmother, Mary helps a naked Christ Child to tread on a snake. The snake may be interpreted as Satan and indirectly as heresy, for Mary and Jesus are free of sin and its consequences, Mary as a virgin mother and by reason of her Immaculate Conception, Jesus as God made man - and they combine to crush the serpent under their feet. This large iconographic canvas has certain humanity thanks to Mary's naturalness and the lack of inhibition with which Caravaggio depicts Christ naked (a fact that gave offence to some connoisseurs at the time, according to Bellori). Though their haloes are aligned, a dark gulf separates the pretty Mary from her ugly mother; and if the palafrenieri were willing to let Cardinal Scipione Borghese buy the picture so soon after they had received it and paid for it, it may have been because they disliked the unflattering depiction of their patroness. The secretary of one of the cardinals wrote: we find nothing in this picture but vulgarity, sacrilege, impiety and disgust. It would seem to be the work of a painter who knows his craft but whose spirit lies in darkness who has long been far removed from God and adoration of God and from all good thoughts'. The Christ child gave him an opportunity to paint another nude boy which he relished and perhaps he accentuated the nudity to the point of offence. The lighting in the painting is unusual: we almost see the window from which it falls at the upper left and Caravaggio shows a ceiling perhaps for the first time. The recent conservation work has revealed the use of incisions on the canvas, a feature of the artist's working methods. The cleaning has also restored the brightness of the colours of the painting, in particular on the snake's body where there are reflections of light and in the beam of light from above. While not his most successful arrangement, it is an atypical representation of the Virgin for its time, and must have been shocking to some contemporary viewers. The allegory, at its core, is simple. The Virgin with the aid of her son, whom she holds, tramples on a serpent, the emblem of evil or original sin. Saint Anne, whom the painting is intended to honour, is a wrinkled old grandmother, witnessing the event. Flimsy halos crown the upright; the snake recoils in anti-halos. Both Mary and Jesus are barefoot; Jesus is a fully naked uncircumcised child. All else is mainly shadow, and the figures gain monumentality in the light. If this painting was meant to honour the grandmother of Christ, it is unclear how the ungracious depiction of her wrinkled visage in this painting would have been seen as reverent or iconic. Further shock must have accrued, as stated by Bellori, at the Virgin Marys revealing bodice. The Death of the Virgin Muse du Louvre, Paris; Oil on canvas, 369 x 245 cm; 1604/06 The friars found that depiction is alarming, because the Madonna was modeled on a prostitute with whom Caravaggio was in love (according to Mancini), because her legs were exposed (Baglione), because her swollen body was too realistic (Bellori) - for whichever reason, they felt prompted to reject it. Caravaggio scholar John Gash suggests that the problem for the Carmelites may have been theological rather than aesthetic, in that Caravaggio's version fails to assert the doctrine of the Assumption of Mary, the idea that the Mother of God did not die in any ordinary sense but was assumed into Heaven. The replacement altarpiece, of some other artist showed the Virgin not dying, but ascending into Heaven with choirs of angels. The painting is severe, sad and still. Under a red canopy hanging from a barely visible ceiling, the disciples are grouped round the corpse (fixed on a bed in rigor mortis), most standing to the left. Light coming from a window high on the left picks out their foreheads and bald pates, before falling on the upper part of the Virgin's body. Above her stands the young, mourning St John the Evangelist who had been given special charge of her; in front, the seated Mary Magdalene stoops forward and almost buries her head in her lap. Mary Magdalene is lamenting, drained of emotion and without any hope of redemption. In the predominant colours - red, orange, dark green - Caravaggio uses a slightly wider range than in his later, darker Roman paintings, but nowhere else did he achieve a mood of such overwhelming solemnity. Mary's companions, her Son's followers, are struck dumb by their grief, like relief sculptures on antique tombs. There is no suggestion that their sorrow will be turned into joy, or that Mary will be assumed into heaven. It was pointed out that the artist has not made a representation of death, but has shown a real death. Thus the painting offends the sensibility not only of its own time, but of all times, because of what it suggests about the obscure, fearful meaning of the end of life. The fact that for The Death of the Virgin he reputedly took as a model a drowned prostitute is only half the story: the more important half is that the dead woman is laid out as the poor lay out their dead, and the mourners mourn her as the poor mourn. Caravaggio eliminated any physical manifestation of the supernatural, except for the thin gold circlet of Mary's halo. Light presumably enters from a window hidden beyond the upper left edge of the frame and a door must open behind the curtain on the right towards which the man partially seen in the background is heading. Mary lies as though suspended on the coffin, her plain dress unlaced at the top. The unveiled and barefooted Mary lies on a

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plank with one arm flung out as if there has not yet been time to prepare the body to fold the hands together and to cover the feet with the mantle thrown haphazardly across her legs. In the varied expressions and gestures of those assembled around Mary Caravaggio described with extraordinary insight the individual responses of real people to death and personal loss. Caravaggio excludes any reference to the divine; no flights of angel choirs, no upward-turned eye looks to a world beyond, no hint of divine succour lightens the atmosphere of heavy grief. Caravaggio shows the scene in a setting of bleak poverty. The painful humanity of the Virgin whose hand on her swollen belly seems so movingly to recall the protective gesture of a pregnant woman does not negate redemption but inspires a passionate contemplation on the mystery of the divine made human. The painting recalls the Entombment in the Vatican in scope, sobriety, and the photographic naturalism. The figures are nearly life-sized. Caravaggio expresses the greater grief of the former not by a more emotive face, but by hiding their faces. Caravaggio, master of stark and dark canvases, is not interested in a mannerist exercise that captures a range of emotions. In some ways this is a silent grief, this is no wake for wailers. The sobbing occurs in faceless emotional silence.

Exile and death (16061610)

Mary Magdalen in Ecstasy Private collection Rome; Oil on canvas 106.5 x 91 cm; 1606/10 The painting was done in the few months following Caravaggio's flight from Rome after the death of Tommassoni. He fled Rome, persecuted and without money, and recovered in Zagarolo under the protection of Duke Don Marzio Colonna, where he painted a Supper at Emmaus and another halflength figure of the Magdalen. With this money he moved on to Naples. This testimony of the early sources is somewhat difficult to reconcile with the Magdalen that Caravaggio reportedly had with him on his final voyage to Rome in July, 1610. As such, it may well be the Magdalen referred to in the letters Bishop Deodato Gentile sent from Naples to Cardinal Scipione Borghese in Rome in 1610. According to a legend popular in Caravaggio's time, after Christ's death his faithful female disciple Mary of Magdala moved to southern France, where she lived as a hermit in a cave at Sainte-Beune near Aix-en-Provence. There she was transported seven times a day by angels into the presence of God, "where she heard, with her bodily ears, the delightful harmonies of the celestial choirs." Earlier artists had depicted Mary ascending into the divine presence through multicoloured clouds accompanied by angels; Caravaggio made the supernatural an entirely interior experience, with the Magdalen alone against a featureless dark background, caught in a ray of intense light, her head lolling back and eyes stained with tears. This revolutionary naturalistic interpretation of the legend also allowed him to capture the ambiguous parallel between mystical and erotic love, in Mary's semi-reclining posture and bared shoulder. Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy, in its beautiful simplicity and stark realism, almost seems modern, a testament to how far ahead the painter was of his time. Indeed, it would influence the works of many later artists of the 17th-century, including Berninis sculptural masterpiece, Ecstasy of Saint Theresa. Supper at Emmaus Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan; Oil on canvas, 141 x 175 cm; 1606 This later version of the subject is more restrained in colour and action than that in the National Gallery, London, less symbolic, more reverential. Instead of sumptuous still-life, we see only bread, a bowl, a tin plate, and a jug. The gestures of surprise are much the same, though differently distributed and he brought the figures slightly closer to the picture plane. Presence is more important than performance in this mute drama in which the dark shadows and saturated colours evoke a feeling of religious mystery. This difference possibly reflects the circumstances of Caravaggio's life at that point (he had fled Rome as an outlaw following the death of Ranuccio Tomassoni), or possibly, recognizing the ongoing evolution of his art, in the intervening five years he had come to recognize the value of understatement. An elderly innkeeper and an elderly maid wait anxiously on the three men, who have arrived in the small village. The disciple to the left turns his face away towards Christ, the one on the right is seen in three-quarter profile. This time, instead of recoiling from Christ, they lean forward in his direction, as with a tranquil gesture he blesses the bread. A diagonal line links the disciple on the left, Jesus and the host; Christ is slightly to the left of centre and the second disciple and the maid are at the back right. The scene is ordered peacefully. Christ's gown is blue-green, the disciple on the left wears a cloak in which old gold, greys and earthy browns predominate and nothing is so striking as to detract from the contemplative mood. The Supper at Emmaus was thinly painted with a tremulous brushwork that had not been seen previously in Caravaggios work. It is the first painting to display all the hallmarks of the artists late style. The Seven Acts of Mercy Church of Pio Monte della Misericordia, Naples; Oil on canvas, 390 x 260 cm; 1607 Early in January 1607 Caravaggio was paid 400 ducati for the immense altarpiece commissioned to him by the Pio Monte di Misericordia (where it may still be seen today). The painting shows the Seven Acts of Mercy. Originally it was meant to be seven separate panels around the church, however Caravaggio produces arguably his greatest

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masterpiece by combining all Seven Mercies in one composition. It is very complicated in its organization. Caravaggio actually had to add a series of figures (two angels and the Madonna and Child, the latter painted later) in the upper part of the painting, which make the composition of the picture the most complex, perhaps, in any of his works. Caravaggio did not paint exemplary episodes intended to stir the viewer to religious piety through the illustrative emphasis of gestures and feelings. Rather, he entrusted the educational effectiveness of his works to the evidence of things in themselves, in the conviction that nothing should be added above and beyond what is already contained in the intrinsic eloquence of the various poses. We readily apprehend the artist's power of synthesis, which concentrates a conceptual content that is potentially quite dispersive, in the model behaviour of a few figures. Matthew 25:35-36 'For when I was hungry you gave me food; when thirsty you gave me drink; when I was a stranger you took me into your home, when naked you clothed me; when I was ill you came to my help, when in prison you visited me.' To this was added the pious act of burying the dead making seven works. Matthew's parable is about salvation through good works and Caravaggio's painting is a complex allegory of brotherly love in extreme situations. The works of mercy are acted out by twelve figures, most of them seen only in part. To the left a plump host welcomes the stranger. Caravaggio identifies him as a pilgrim by the shell on his hat. Drink for the thirsty is represented by Samson slaking his thirst in the desert from the jawbone of an ass. At left centre St Martin clothes the naked. He wears velvet and has a plumed hat. An almost invisible figure reclining at lower left represents the sick who are succoured. To the right the visitor is also feeding the hungry. She represents Pero nursing her starving father Cimon. Pero is Caravaggio's only female nude, if she can be called that. Unhappy with her chore she has tucked her dress up under her father's chin and covering her other breast turns with crossed legs while uttering what we can only imagine as a groan from her coarse lips. Behind her the feet of the cadaver disappear to the chant of a harshly illuminated priest. The candles that he holds aloft are one of Caravaggio's rare internal sources of light. Two angels, who are embracing one another, hover down from heaven on powerful wings. They offer the Madonna and her child protection, without carrying them, so that the Christ-child can observe the night's activities on earth along with his mother. Just beyond the wall at the right side a priest with a torch in his hand is confirming a corpse. John Spike notes that the choice of Samson as an emblem of Giving Drink to the Thirsty is so peculiar as to demand some explanation. The fearsome scourge of the Philistines was a deeply flawed man who accomplished his heroic tasks through the grace of God. When Samson was in danger of dying of thirst, God gave him water to drink from the jawbone of an ass. It is difficult to square this miracle with an allegory of the Seven Acts of Mercy since it was not in fact the work of human charity. The Crucifixion of St Andrew Museum of Art, Cleveland; Oil on canvas, 203 x 153 cm; 1607 St Andrew was patron saint of Constantinople. From that city his body had been snatched by crusaders and brought to Amalfi, just one bay south of Naples. The Count of Benevente, was charged by his royal master to renovate the crypt in the cathedral of Amalfi, where the saint is buried; and it must have been while he was so engaged that he asked Caravaggio to paint him the scene of the saint's death. According to the The Golden Legend, Aegeas had Andrew held on the cross by ropes rather than nails, to prolong his suffering (Andrew's sin was having converted the proconsul's wife). As a great light shines, St Andrew dies. It is this moment that Caravaggio paints, but the supernatural elements can be detected only by knowing the story. The old man looks weary from his agony, and the sturdy executioner who tries to undo the thongs is twisted round in a vain attempt to release him. Below a small group are transfixed by Andrew's eloquence. By restricting any sense of space Caravaggio has made a drama more intimate than the events of everyday life. The Crucifixion of St Andrew depicts the miraculous paralysis that affected the executioners commanded by Aegeas, proconsul of Patras in Greece (seen on the right) to untie Saint Andrew from the cross. Aegeas was yielding to the demand of the crowd whose sympathy the saint had won after preaching to them from the cross for two days. The miracle occurred in answer to Saint Andrew's impassioned prayer that he be allowed to die on the cross. Caravaggio subtly employed all possible means to create the impression of rigidity as he captured the amazement on the onlookers' faces. The woman at the lower left with a large goiter (a disease common among those living in the mountains near Naples) injects a disturbing note of naturalism often used by Caravaggio in his religious scenes. It may be shown here to inspire compassion with the misery of the poor and sick - or possibly to signify the conversion of a sinful person. She is the sole sympathizer in the painting - the men at the right seem to be ruffians connected with the proconsul. Although Caravaggio never painted Christ on the Cross, he invested this Crucifixion of Saint Andrew with the same seriousness, dignity and compassion found in the moving representations of Christ on the Cross painted by the great masters. David Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna; Oil on wood, 91 x 117 cm; 1606/07 The painting is one of the rare exceptions in the art of Caravaggio: it is painted on wood instead of canvas. The attribution and the dating of the painting is debated.

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The David with the Head of Goliath in Vienna epitomizes some problems posed by the consistent inconsistencies of paintings after Rome. The picture's attribution has been doubted by most authorities except for Wolfgang Prohaska who would date it to the early months in Naples. Compared to the Seven Acts of Mercy which is documented to this time this luminous David seems uncharacteristic. The painting is beautifully rendered on a fine wooden panel a support the artist almost never used. Its mood is more pastoral than elegiac and decidedly more triumphant than tragic taking it in short in an entirely different direction from the compositionally similar David in the Galleria Borghese. The David in Vienna gives the youth rather more credit (than the David in Madrid); the young man gallantly rests the giant's sword on his shoulder and strides forward confidently. The swords represented in this version and in the later Borghese David are undisguisedly contemporary to Caravaggio's time - not the massive weapon that only Goliath had the strength to wield. The act of seizing a fistful of the victim's hair is presented as a metaphor for physical domination. Caravaggio frequently explored a subject in multiple variations, most notably his many versions of John the Baptist - but the Vienna painting is less 'dark' in mood, the David more triumphant than the introspective and oddly compassionate David of the Borghese, and the head of Goliath, widely accepted as a self-portrait of the artist in the Borghese, is more generic. Madonna del Rosario Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna; Oil on canvas, 364,5 x 249,5 cm; 1607 The theme is Dominican. St Dominic and his friars spread the devotion of the rosary; and here the Madonna, as Queen of Heaven, issues orders to the saint to her right, who clutches a rosary, and the Dominican St Peter Martyr to her left. Beside St Peter Martyr stands the most famous of Dominican theologians, St Thomas Aquinas. Madonna, Child and saints form a heavenly triangle concealed from the classically costumed suppliants at the front, who kneel in prayer with arms outstretched to St Dominic, while a donor in modern ruff and doublet eyes the viewer. The column to the left and the curtain overhead add to the formality of the scene. Caravaggio achieves an elaborate ordering and interlocking of forms that heralds the typical Baroque altarpiece. In the foreground at the left a woman and a small child with thick diaper can be seen. Two older men and a youth in the centre are holding out their arms to receive rosaries from the hands of the Dominican Order's founder. Caravaggio set his assembly within a shadowed, yet defined architectural setting of an apse bounded on one side by the column. The palette boasts both an uncustomary range and unusual combination of colours - blue green yellow and cream - in addition to his usual black white and earth tones. The holy Mother and Child are both drawn awkwardly and moreover their faces look strangely blank, creating an emotional void at the heart of the scene which jars with the desperate attitudes struck by the humble devotees. The Madonna of the Rosary is indeed unique in its acquiescence to the ecclesiastical hierarchy; its division of the world into three descending strata of holiness - with humanity crammed into the lowest register. Caravaggio removes the beads from the Madonna's hands and allows Saint Dominic to hold them out impassively to a grasping crowd. The Christ child looks away. The Rosary seekers do not glance upward; their path toward Christ passes through Saint Dominic. Almost overlooked in the lower left corner are a mother and child kneeling and simply clad in contemporary clothes. The little one's hands are clasped in prayer. His mother voices her appeal to the Virgin and Child on high and the Virgin at least appears to heed her. Her connection with heaven is the most direct. The Flagellation of Christ Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples; Oil on canvas, 286 x 213 cm; 1607 This major painting, which (like the Seven Works of Mercy) dates from Caravaggio's first visit to Naples, is disquieting in its own special way. The atmosphere is so dense that the pillar before which Christ is being whipped can hardly be made out, but the handling of paint is so fluent that the cruel action taking place has its own powerful rhythm. The viewer is caught up in the horror. The near-naked Christ is being twisted into position by the torturer on the right while the torturer on the left tears at his hair. At the bottom left a third tormentor stoops to prepare his scourge. Restricted palette of dismal colours gives a grim force that few earlier paintings had equalled. The Flagellation of Christ had long been a popular subject in religious artand in contemporary religious practice, where the church encouraged self-flagellation as a means by which the faithful might enter into the suffering of Christ. Caravaggio would have had in mind the famous fresco by Sebastiano del Piombo in the church of San Pietro in Montorsio in Rome. Caravaggio has reworked Piombo's composition by drastically reducing the picture space so that the sculptural figures seem presented on a shallow stage. He has, however, retained Piombo's sense of the flagellation as a kind of sadistic ballet, with the figures arranged rhythmically across the canvas. Caravaggio's painting introduces an acutely observed reality into the sceneChrist is in this drooping pose, not because it might seem graceful, but because the torturer on the right is kicking the back of his knee while the figure on the left holds his hair tightly in his fist. This series of highly dramatic and innovative Neapolitan altarpiecesthe Seven Works of Mercy, this Flagellation, and a close companion piece, Christ at the Column, all done within a few months of his arrival in the city instantly made Caravaggio the most talked-about artist in Naples, and the church of Sant'Anna dei Lombardi became a centre of the Caravaggisti.

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Christ at the Column (The Flagellation of Christ) Muse des Beaux-Arts, Rouen; Oil on canvas, 134,5 x 175,5 cm; 1607 Mancini and other sources based in Rome were not well informed on Caravaggios paintings for private collectors in Naples. The lack of firm references to this Flagellation, generally dated to 1607, is not surprising. The painting shows the flagellation of Christ following his arrest and trial and before his crucifixion. The scene was traditionally depicted in front of a column, possibly alluding to the judgement hall of Pilate. The snub-nosed torturer on the far right is recognisably the same figure who modelled as one of the torturers in The Flagellation of Christ, and as the executioner in Salome with the Head of John the Baptist. The movement of these figures, who are sharply divided into two different halves of the picture, is conceived entirely in terms of the light coming from the left. In the process, the flagellation column, usually a decisive motif appears as little more than a symbol of Christ, without having any effect on the pictorial space, which is immersed in the blackness of the background. Caravaggio has flattened the space, reduced the figures to a minimum, and used light to direct attention to the crucial parts of his composition - Christ's face and torso, the faces of the two torturers, and the hand holding the out-of-frame whip. Salome with the Head of St John the Baptist National Gallery, London; Oil on canvas, 92 x 107 cm; c. 1606/07 The handling and the raking light link this painting to works done in Naples during the artist's brief stay in the city during 16061607, an impression confirmed by the blances between Salome and the Virgin in the Madonna of the Rosary, and between the executioner holding the head of the Baptist and one of the two torturers in Christ at the Column and The Flagellation of Christ. The Baptist has been executed for denouncing Salome's mother Herodias over her illicit marriage with Herod. Caravaggio uses the device of planting two heads - Salome's and her maid's (or her mother's) - so close together that they seem to grow out of one body as the contrasting stages of youth and age. Salome looks away from her victim. The executioner takes no joy in what he has been commanded to do. He feels only a stunned emotion in keeping with the sombre tones that Caravaggio adopts. No longer concerned with the incidentals of the narrative, Caravaggio focuses on the essential human tragedy of the story. It is so quickly painted that it seems unfinished, as it may well be, with thin hastily applied paint and schematic drapery on the executioner. The entire surface show signs of hurry; the color on Salome's face is applied like makeup stopping crudely at the hairline. St Jerome writing St John Museum, La Valletta; Oil on canvas, 117 x 157 cm; 1607/08 This picture of the holy scholar was made for Ippolito Malaspina, a Maltese knight whose coat of arms is on the wooden panel to the right. He was connected by marriage to Caravaggio's patron Ottavio Costa and was a confidant of the Grand Master, who may have been used as the model for the saint. The saint does indeed look like Wignacourt himself. The work would therefore have been commissioned as a tribute to the Grand Master. St Jerome has no halo, his workbench is rudimentary, he does not own any folios, he has one candle to see by, a crucifix to meditate on, a stone to beat against his chest, and a skull to remind him of his mortality. He is partly naked because he lives an eremitical life in the desert of Judaea. A steady light shines on his torso and picks out the red cloak round his legs. The source of the light is outside the picture, and can be interpreted as Christ, Light of the World. The striking features of this painting are the illusionistic representation of the still life on the table and the impact of the red cloak enveloping the white-haired figure of the saint. Poring over the volumes of the Holy Scripture and engaged in an exegetical task as the quill pen - painted with a single brushstroke - indicates St Jerome is portrayed not as a penitent as is often the case but rather as a scholar. His head counterbalanced by the skull he is intent on the reading and annotation of the sacred passages and symbolically counters the futility of worldly goods. Because of the rapid execution with irregularities in the rendering of the beard and the outlines of the books and cloak it has been suggested that the work is unfinished. Long brushstrokes are visible on the white cloth hanging over the edge of the table. Portrait of Alof de Wignacourt with his Page Muse du Louvre, Paris; Oil on canvas, 195 x 134 cm; 1607/08 This famous portrait shows the Grand Master in formal armour, holding his baton of command, every gleaming inch, an image of the military might of the Knights. At the time he was about sixty years old. He had strengthened the fortifications of the island, built an aqueduct to guarantee water to the city, and launched several attacks on the Turks. He had turned the Knights into a sovereign power, making himself in effect a prince answerable to no-one except the pope, with his own increasingly wealthy court. One of his innovations had been to surround to himself with young pages, in imitation of the fashion of the princely courts, and his pages were, of course, taken from the noblest Catholic families of Europe. Page, in charge of Wignacourts plumed helmet and cloak, is placed a little awkwardly within the composition - his feet are aligned with the feet of de Wignacourt, as if standing beside de Wignacourt, but his hand and the helmet overlap de Wignacourt's elbow, giving the impression that from the waist up he is in front of the knight. The fact can be

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explained by Caravaggio's practice of painting separately from live models - de Wignacourt and the page were apparently not together in the studio at the same time. Wignacourt, encased in splendid black and gold Milanese armour, stares upwards and outwards out of the frame in a dignified manner that invites the viewer to gaze upon him in awe, leaving the page, with his look of boyish interest, as the sole thoroughly human presence, and a far more sympathetic one than the self-conscious man of steel. The double-portrait with the pageboy was an unusual combination for the time. It may have been ordered by Wignacourt to stress the dignity of his court, or Caravaggio may have been inspired by a painting by Titian that he could have seen in his youth in Milan, The Speech of Alfonso d'Avalos, showing the Spanish governor of the city addressing his knights with a page beside him holding his helmet. Portrait of Fra Antonio Martelli, a Knight of Malta Galleria Palatina (Palazzo Pitti), Florence; Oil on canvas, 119 x 96 cm; 1608 The Grand Master playfully rests his left hand on his sword in its sheath, whilst in his right hand he is holding a rosary. The artist subtly dramatizes the contradiction between piety and brutality by the lighting and the fact that his subject is averting his eyes from the viewer. Only very recently was this painting identified in the gallery's storeroom, and related to a reference in Bellori's book of 1672. Until recently it was thought that this painting represented Alof de Wignacourt, Grand Master of the Order of the Knights of Malta, and that it was a preparatory study for the large and famous Portrait of Alof de Wignacourt and his Page, but recent documentary discoveries indicate that it is the portrait of another prominent member of the Order, Antonio Martelli of Florence, Prior of Messina. Martelli ageing with sagging neck and brooding eyes is deeply melancholic. He is shown with extreme simplicity, adorned only with the great eight-pointed star which shines with brilliance against the darkness of his dress while the twin might of the sword and the rosary he defends the world. Beheading of Saint John the Baptist Saint John Museum, La Valletta; Oil on canvas, 361 x 520 cm; 1608 It is still in the Oratorio di San Giovanni (now St John Museum) in La Valletta. This is one of Caravaggio's most extraordinary creations, for many it is his greatest masterpiece. It is characterized by a magical balance of all the parts. It is no accident that the artist brings back into the painting a precise reference to the setting, placing behind the figures, as a backdrop, the severe, sixteenth century architecture of the prison building, at the window of which, in a stroke of genius, two figures silently witness the scene. Salome stands with a golden platter to receive his head. Another woman, who has been identified as Herodias or simply a bystander who realizes that the execution is wrong, stands by in shock while a jailer issues instructions and the executioner draws his dagger to finish the beheading. This is a final compendium of Caravaggio's art. Well-known figures return (the old woman, the youth, the nude ruffian, the bearded nobleman), as do Lombard elements. It is painted surely and rapidly with few pentimenti little care for detail and as Bellori pointed out: In this work Caravaggio used all the power of his brush, working with such boldness that the canvas priming shows through the half tones. Because it is huge and relatively empty it makes its best impression from the back of the long chapel. Caravaggio must have calculated this effect with some care. The hues are muted; the brilliant flame-red of John's garment is the only powerful spot of colour. Blood runs a relatively unobtrusive but unavoidable detail in the centre foreground. Of course our eyes focus on just that spot and if we could get close enough to the picture we would read in the blood Caravaggio's only and terrible signature: 'Fra Michel Angelo'. The signature is proof of Caravaggio's pride in attaining the honour he had sought so assiduously: its place and its nature are almost pathological and they seem to confirm suspicions of Caravaggio's identification with the Baptist and of his unusual preoccupation with beheading. It is an ignoble scene. John does not kneel as is customary, but is brought low on the ground and his body is trussed like that of a sacrificial lamb, his hands tied behind his back, his red cloak suggesting blood and a rope snaking across the floor. There is considerable empty space in the image, but because the canvas is quite large the figures are approximately life-sized. Characteristically of his later paintings, the number of props and the detail in the props used is minimal. Sleeping Cupid Galleria Palatina (Palazzo Pitti), Florence; Oil on canvas, 71 x 105 cm; 1608 This curiously sombre little picture is the only classical relic of Caravaggio's time on Malta. It was commissioned for Fra Francesco dell'Antella, Florentine Secretary for Italy to Alof de Wignacourt and an old inscription on the back records that it was painted in Malta in 1608. The subject of a sleeping Cupid, bowstring broken and arrows cast aside usually signifies the abandonment of worldly pleasures, and dell'Antella may have commissioned it as a reminder of his vow of chastity. The plump, solid figure is well articulated by the artist who had learnt in Rome all that he needed to know about human anatomy from antiquity and the Renaissance; and yet he is affectionately observed as though he were a mere mortal child asleep. In the darkness it is possible to make out his wings - he is not a young putto - and the quiver of

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arrows on which he sleeps, the bow with its broken string and the arrow, with a tinge of red, that he holds in his hand. In human affairs he plays a symbolic role. In imitating Michelangelo's work Caravaggio isolated the sculptural motif of the sleeping Cupid for an independent painting. His pot-bellied and toothy snoring child surely flouted the probable classical proportions and cherubic repose of Michelangelo's slumbering figure. Caravaggios deliberate conception of the work as a rival to its sculpted antecedent is suggested by the ways in which he enhanced the three-dimensionality of his painted Cupid: drastically reducing the range of colour and intensifying the contrast of lights and darks. Burial of St Lucy Museo Nazionale di Palazzo Bellomo, Syracuse; Oil on canvas, 408 x 300 cm; 1608 St Lucy was a local saint of Syracuse, who had been denounced as a Christian by her former suitor and had died from her tortures in 304. His Sicilian biographer states that he owed the commission to his friend Minniti, who may also have helped him paint it. The heavily-muscled grave-diggers emerge from murky shadows, the mourners are so much smaller that they seem placed some distance away, the officer directing operations beside the bishop is obscured and only the young man above the saint stands out poignantly in his red cloak. Characteristically, light imitates the action of the sun by falling from the right. The scene takes the viewer back to the age of the Church of the catacombs. By pushing the representatives of Church and State to the sidelines Caravaggio effectively eliminated any pomp and circumstance from the scene and instead focused attention on Lucy and her mourners a knot of anonymous men and elderly women. At the centre of the composition a young man cloaked in warm red and rising directly behind and above the corpse forms the only uninterrupted vertical in the composition. This man contemplates the saint with meditative calm suspending his folded hands protectively over her. His lowered glance guides the viewer's attention to the body which rests directly on the bare earth. His and the saint's youthfulness set them apart from the old and middle-aged participants and this distinction in age-groups is perhaps meant to stir the viewers' compassion in the face of untimely death. Lighting Lucy's face from below Caravaggio filled the eye-sockets with pools of shadow as if in reference to the legend that she had torn out her eyes and sent them to her pagan suitor; as they were miraculously restored and more beautiful than before she became the patron saint of sight. Lucy humbly dressed in drab brown is pointedly not laid to rest in a sarcophagus but is buried like any common poor person. The subject of burial of St Lucy is an extremely unusual one; artists more frequently used the explicitly sensational image of the saint holding her gouged-out eyes on a platter. But the choice of the burial, as Caravaggio's theme, enabled him to construct a composition in which movement and stillness, physical power and spiritual presence interact with effective precision. The painting is unfortunately in very poor condition. The painting was recently restored at the Istituto Centrale per il Restauro in Rome and transferred from the Basilica Santa Lucia to the Bellamo Museum in Syracuse. The Raising of Lazarus Museo Regionale, Messina; Oil on canvas, 380 x 275 cm; 1608/09 Most of Caravaggio's religious subjects emphasize sadness, suffering and death. In 1609 he dealt with the triumph of life and in doing so created the most visionary picture of his career. Lazarus, the brother of Martha and Mary, was the patron of Giovanni Battista de' Lazzari, to whom Caravaggio was contracted to paint an altarpiece in the church of the Padri Crociferi. The Gospel of St John tells how Lazarus fell sick, died, was buried and then miraculously raised from the dead by Christ. Once again, the scene is set against blank walls that overwhelm the actors, who once more are laid out like figures on a frieze. Some of them, says Susinno, were modelled on members of the community, but at this stage Caravaggio did not have time to base himself wholly on models and relied on his memory - the whole design is based on an engraving after Giulio Romano and his Jesus is a reversed image of the Christ who called Matthew to join him. The interaction of the relief of figures caught in corporate effort and emotion, with a large void above, is quite different from the closely focussed individualised dramas of his early and middle periods. As is usual with Caravaggio, light becomes an important element in the drama, picking out crucial details such as Lazarus's hands one lax and open to receive, the other reaching towards Christ - and the wonder-struck faces of the onlookers. Light is presented as a metaphor for the power of the spirit, in the way in which it falls on the palm of Lazarus's right hand opened to embrace the resurrection effected through Christ, and the involvement of everyone in the mystery is stressed as much by light as it is through the close proximity of bodies. Caravaggio concentrated on Lazarus himself, whose right hand is fixed at the very centre of the composition. Distinctive too are Lazarus's acclamatory gesture and the horizontal extension of his arms from his torso suggestive of a cross. The distinguished details in the portrayal of Christ Lazarus and the sisters Martha and Mary suggest that Caravaggio thought hard about the symbolic content in this Gospel incident. He placed Christ in front of a door whose darkened opening may allude to the door of death, a motif from Early Christian funerary art. Light enters the scene behind Jesus, however striking his shoulder and grazing the wrist and the fingertips of his pointed hand. While one open-mouthed man stares at him, two others appear to look past him towards the light. The interplay of

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Christ, door and light calls to mind verses found elsewhere in John's Gospel: Christ as the door to salvation (10:9) and his God-appointed role to illuminate the world (6:28; 8:12) Although Caravaggio showed Lazarus groping towards the light he still remains suspended between the realms of life and death. Stiff in rigor mortis Lazarus left hand has not shaken free of the grave as is made explicit by the skull and bones below. Resting her cheek against Lazarus Martha almost appears to breathe life into her brother. There is a remarkable contrast between the flexible bodies of the grieving sisters and the near-rigid corpse of their brother. The ardent expressiveness may well reflect Caravaggio's personal preoccupations at the time, some have interpreted Lazarus's struggle against death's powerful grip as a metaphor for Caravaggio's despair of his own salvation. Adoration of the Shepherds Museo Regionale, Messina; Oil on canvas, 314 x 211 cm; 1609 While in Messina, Caravaggio was contracted to paint four scenes of the Passion. If he finished any of them, nothing now survives. This nativity scene, Susinno says, was ordered by the Senate of Messina for the Capuchin church of Santa Maria degli Angeli. A Franciscan simplicity pervades it: in the wooden barn a donkey and an ox stand patiently at the back, there is straw on the floor and in a basket the Holy Family have a loaf of bread, the carpenter's tools of Joseph and some pieces of cloth. Joseph, in red introduces the shepherds, in brown and grey, to the young Virgin Mother, whose dress is a brighter red. Mary cuddles her baby peacefully and, apart from two haloes, only the bare-shouldered young man, who kneels with clasped hands, gives the moment of the child's discovery a hint of its meaning. God became man as one of the poor. Ironically, for this canvas Caravaggio received 1000 scudi, the highest amount mentioned in any accounts of his career. Caravaggio evoked the friars' ideals of humility and poverty by representing the Virgin seated on the ground. Instead of a reverential Madonna kneeling in adoration before her divine child, Caravaggio's Mary behaves like any ordinary new mother. She hugs her baby. Caravaggio's seeming determine to ground the event in reality even at the expense of disregarding the universal jubilation at the Messiah's coming. The few people present in the Adoration almost efface themselves in order not to disturb the tender intimacy of mother and baby. Nothing intrinsic in this baby signals divinity; without a halo or celestial radiance on its body it looks much like any newborn child. Salome with the Head of the Baptist Palazzo Real, Madrid; Oil on canvas, 116 x 140 cm; 1608/10 The early Caravaggio biographer Giovanni Bellori, writing in 1672, records the artist sending a Salome with the Head of John the Baptist from Naples to the Grand Master of the Knights of Malta, Fra Alof de Wignacourt, in the hope of regaining favour after having been expelled from the Order in 1608. It seems likely that this is the work, according to Caravaggio scholar John Gash. Gash also notes that the executioner, looking down at the severed head, helps transform the painting "from a provocative spectacle into a profound meditation on death and human malevolence." It essentially follows the earlier version, today in London. The only slight change is in the pose of the executioner and with an unusual emptiness at the left. And yet the two works are very obviously different. This later version rises out of an abyss of shadow. The executioner thoughtfully observes the result of his work, instead of lifting up the Baptist's head with certainty. Longhis dating of this Salom to the last years of Caravaggio has been generally accepted. As it is not possible to distinguish between the style of Caravaggios paintings in Sicily, made between October 1608 and the fall of 1609, and his return to Naples, sometime before October 24, 1609, until his death in July 1610, the painting is provisionally catalogued with the Messina pictures only by virtue of its similarities to the Adoration of the Shepherds. The Annunciation Muse des Beaux-Arts, Nancy; Oil on canvas, 285 x 205 cm; 1608/09 Whether the painting was made in Sicily or in Naples is not known. Its style would seem to exclude earlier datings, for it is clearly a very late work. This dating was proposed by Longhi (1951) on the basis of its style. The Madonna is kneeling humbly on the floor. From the left on a cloud which looks solid enough to bear his weight the angel descends his wings still spread out. He has turned away from the viewer towards the future Mother of God. A lily-stalk appears in the centre of the picture as if this symbol of the Holy Virgin's purity were its most important object. It has been pointed out that the angel comes into the painting from real space, cancelling the separation between the picture and the viewer in a way typical of the baroque aesthetic. The angel's face is practically invisible. The Virgin does not look at him, she is completely self-absorbed, her pose is devoid of joyous acceptance. She seems instead crushed by the expectation of an unbearable future. The spiritual testament that Caravaggio left us with this large, two-figural painting, where once again the Virgin is not distinguished by deifying attributes, is an infinite existential sadness, which seems to contain no hope of redemption. The painting has been considerably damaged and retouched, and what remains of Caravaggio's brushwork is the angel, who bears a resemblance to the figure in John the Baptist at the Fountain. The illusionistic treatment of the angel, floating on his cloud and seeming to protrude outside the picture plane, is more Baroque than is normal for

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Caravaggio, but the contrast between the energetic pose of the heavenly messenger and the receptive Mary is dramatically and psychologically effective. The loose brushwork is typical of Caravaggio's later period. Nativity with St Francis and St Lawrence Formerly San Lorenzo, Palermo (stolen the night of September 1718, 1969); Oil on canvas, 268 x 197 cm; 1609 The composition is less successful than in other cases; the contained and pensive atmosphere, however, shows that at this stage Caravaggio associated the idea of advent of Christ not with the joy of Redemption but with a future that was at best uncertain. Under the roof of the stable in Bethlehem, whose side walls are disappearing into brownish darkness, shepherds and saints gathered to worship the newborn Christ-child in such a way that we can make out Archdeacon Lawrence on the left only after a second look, and viewers may well mistake St Francis for a shepherd. One figure, the patron, represents the church for which the picture was intended, and the other, the Order to which the church belongs. We cannot be entirely sure who Joseph, the foster-father, is. The naked Christ-child lies there on a bed of straw and some white drapery. Exhausted, the Holy Virgin is crouching on the ground behind him looking at the child. The ox, which appears behind St Lawrence, is also looking in that direction. Above all this, an angel is flying down from heaven. In his left hand he is holding a banner on which the words of the Gloria are written. His right hand is pointing upwards, as if, by also looking at the baby, he wanted to reassure the Christ-child that he really is the Son of God. The Nativity is traditional work not only because the Christ Child is alone on the ground while the Madonna sits on a low seat but equally because of the more conventional poses and well-dressed appearances of the surrounding figures. Such presentation may have reflected some stipulation from the patron. Mary's hands are not clasped in prayer; instead she rests one hand on her distended abdomen. This explicit gesture directs our attention to the new-born child who delivered moments before now lies supine before her knees. The ox displaying such a nosy interest next to Mary symbolizes the Hebrew prophecy of the virgin birth: 'Behold a virgin will conceive and bring forth a son' (Isaiah 7:14). Mary wears contemporary dress instead of her traditional robe and mantle. Nor is her head crowned with a halo. The young man seated in the foreground has been identified as Saint Joseph since the time of Bellori. Apart from his proximity to the mother and child however this blond youth is unrecognisable as Mary's elderly husband. Rakishly attired in skintight hose the youth discusses the Nativity with a bemused-looking old man who has all the Joseph attributes that the young dandy lacks. The handsome youth fits into the role of sower-of-doubts by behaving in ways unbecoming to a saint: turning his face away from Jesus gesturing underhandedly nudging the infant with his shoe. The Denial of St Peter Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City; Oil on canvas, 94 x 125 cm; 1610 After the artist's many attempts to intensify the dynamics of a scene from the right, this composition offers a dramatic sequence of figures from the left. On a very dark night with deep shadows and without any indication of artificial light, a soldier wearing a helmet and armour appears from the left. He is turning his face so far round to the maid that it gets swallowed up by the darkness. The maid herself, her face obscured by the soldier's shadow, is peering at the soldier from close quarters. She is pointing her left hand at St Peter, who is holding both hands against his chest in a gestion of confirmation. The pointing finger of the soldier and two pointing fingers of the woman allude to the three accusations and to Peter's three denials. The picture, a marvel of narrative as well as pictorial concision was painted by Caravaggio in the last months of his tempestuous life and marks an extreme stage in his revolutionary style. In it he eschews delicacy and beauty of colour and with extraordinary psychological penetration concentrates exclusively on the human drama. Caravaggio's late works depend for their dramatic effect on brightly lit areas standing in stark contrast to a dark background. The episode from Mark XIV:66-72 in which Peter soon after Christ's arrest is challenged by the serving maid of Caiaphas, the High Priest to admit his identity as one of Christ's disciples was not often depicted during the Counter Reformation. But its dramatic possibilities clearly appealed to Caravaggio. The flames leaping up in the background cast intense reflections on the saint and his accuser and thereby add an unusual dimension to Caravaggio's dramatic chiaroscuro. David Galleria Borghese, Rome; Oil on canvas, 125 x 101 cm; 1609/10 Dirty silver, black and browns dominate the picture. The light shows David to look like a boy from the street, whose sword has just a drop of blood on it to show that, like Caravaggio once, he knows what it is to have just killed a man. Another drop of blood in the midst of the giant's forehead confirms that he has been felled by a stone. Caravaggio captures the drama more effectively by having the head dangling from David's hand and dripping blood, rather than resting on a ledge. The sword in David's hand carries an abbreviated inscription H-AS OS; this has been interpreted as an abbreviation of the Latin phrase Humilitas occidit superbiam ("humility kills pride"). Gazing upon his bloody handiwork David looks perturbed his expression mingling sadness with compassion. The decision to depict him as pensive rather than jubilant creates an unusual psychological bond between him and Goliath. This bond is further complicated by the fact that Caravaggio has depicted himself as Goliath, while the

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model for David is il suo Caravaggino ("his own little Caravaggio"). It appears that this, the Borghese version of David with the Head of Goliath, may be a double self-portrait. The young Caravaggio wistfully holds the head of the adult Caravaggio. The wild and riotous behaviour of the young Caravaggio essentially had destroyed his life as a mature adult, and he reflects with a familiar hermeticism on his own condition in a painting of a not entirely unrelated religious subject. Of all Caravaggio's works the David has been regarded as a window into his psyche. Recent interpretations have explored the personal meaning of the image more widely by focusing on the visual antithesis offered by the two biblical characters: David projecting youth, virtue, faith and compassion, versus Goliath embodying age, sin, doubt and punishment. If Goliath's head is indeed Caravaggio's, there is an element of self disgust in this painting. The device recalls the way that Michelangelo, in the Last Judgment for the Sistine Chapel, placed an anguished face with features evidently his own onto the flayed body of St Bartholomew, but Caravaggio's mood is closer to one of despair. As a witness to God's light, Bartholomew takes his seat in heaven: Goliath, God's enemy, is doomed to everlasting night. Caravaggio has depicted David not as cruel and indifferent but as deeply moved by Goliath's death. If the painting was a gift to Cardinal Borghese, the papal official with the power to grant Caravaggio a pardon for murder, it can also be interpreted as a personal plea for mercy. St John the Baptist Galleria Borghese, Rome; Oil on canvas, 159 x 124 cm; 1610 The painting was executed during the last days of Caravaggio's stay in Naples, together with the Martyrdom of St Ursula. A comparison can be made between the young St John in the Galleria Borghese in Rome and the paintings of the same subject in Kansas City and in the Galleria Nazionale di Arte Antica in Rome. The Borghese St John with its simple pose and thoughtful gaze would appear to be the portrait of a shepherd boy at rest, were it not for the very striking red drapery at his side. The body is delicate and the expression is dreamy, so much, so as to suggest a considerable distance in time from the other two. One can see vine-leaves in the background (symbol of eternal life) and the raised foot resting on a dried tree trunk (a symbol of death). The lamb which traditionally accompanies Saint John is the personification of Jesus. The boy is immersed in a reverie: perhaps as Saint John he is lost in private melancholy, contemplating the coming sacrifice of Christ; or perhaps as a real-life street-kid called on to model for hours he is merely bored. As so often with Caravaggio, the sense is of both at once. But the overwhelming feeling is of sorrow. The red cloak envelopes his puny childish body like a flame in the dark, the sole touch of colour apart from the pale flesh of the juvenile saint. From documentary evidence it appears that the canvas was together with another St John and a Magdalen part of the baggage that the artist took with him to Rome as a gift for Scipione Borghese, a great admirer of his painting, in exchange for a papal pardon. The Martyrdom of St Ursula Banca Commerciale Italiana, Naples; Oil on canvas, 154 x 178 cm; 1610 The holy Ursula, accompanied by eleven thousand virgins, was captured by the Huns. The eleven thousand virgins were slaughtered, but the king of the Huns was overcome by Ursula's modesty and beauty and begged her forgiveness if only she would marry him. Ursula replied that she would not, upon which the king transfixed her with an arrow. It marks yet another change in style: in Sicily he had continued the compositional scheme introduced with The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, a small group of figures dwarfed by massive architecture, but Ursula marks a return to a scene which brings the action directly into the space of the viewer, at the very moment when the Hun king lets fly his arrow, and Ursula looks down with an expression of mild surprise, at the shaft sticking out of her chest. Caravaggio shows martyrdom at horrifyingly close range, the string still throbbing on the bow. In the dimly lit scene the saint gazes at the arrow with an air of quiet concern, while the Hun stares at her, his eyes shaded in darkness, one attendant looking at his hand and another, who must be modelled on Caravaggio himself, peering from the back, anxious to watch the proceedings. It is the last time that Caravaggio sees himself as an anguished spectator, but in pictorial terms the painting seems to presage what might have been a fresh stage in his career, for the Hun is painted with a new boldness in the brushwork. The varnish was still wet in May. In early July, Caravaggio was dead.

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