The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew (Caravaggio)

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. This drew on his own earlier genre-pieces, Cardsharps and The Fortune Teller, but writ large. 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, in much the same way a spotlight picks out the action on a stage, but centuries before spotlights were imagined, and chose to represent the moment of greatest drama, as the murderer has plunged 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, 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.

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 withdraws his sword from the saint's chest. 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. As Caravaggio's biographer Peter Robb puts it: "Anyone coming down the nave of San Luigi (the church which contains the chapel) would've seen the pale killer nudes looming out of the dark from a distance, in a space that seemed to open out of the wall into the church's real transept."

That said, the painting contains many references from Michelangelo, Raphael and others, which critic John Gash ascribes not so much to a need to find appropriate poses as to a desire for "a quality of monumental grandeur akin to that of the High Renaissance." The figures of the saint and the horror-struck boy on the left, for example, are borrowed "to the extent of almost 'quoting' directly" from Titian's altarpiece of The Assassination of Saint Peter Martyr in Venice.

• Conversion on the Way to Damascus.

• Prose, Francine (2005). Caravaggio: Painter of Miracles. ISBN 0-06-057560-3.
• Spike, John T. (2001). Caravaggio. ISBN 0-7892-0639-0.
• Gash, John (2003). Caravaggio. ISBN 1-904449-22-0.
• Robb, Peter (1998). M. ISBN 0-312-27474-2.
• Langdon, Helen (1998). Caravaggio: A Life. ISBN 0-374-11894-9.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Martyrdom of Saint Matthew by Caravaggio.

• Washington Post review