Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (6 page)

51.
St Matthew and the Angel
(second version). More refined but less forceful, the saint has metamorphosed from illiterate bumpkin to dignified sage. The picture still hangs over the altar in the Contarelli Chapel today.

52.
The Death of the Virgin
, in which a prostitute modelled for the Virgin. The picture was rejected by the fathers of Santa Maria della Scala, the last straw that may have triggered Caravaggio to commit murder.

53.
The Death of the Virgin
by Carlo Saraceni, the picture that replaced Caravaggio’s rejected altarpiece (above).

54.
Doubting Thomas.
‘Then saith he to Thomas, Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing’ (John 20).

55.
The Sacrifice of Isaac.
Abraham holds his squealing son down as if the boy were a lamb brought to slaughter. These are the last glimpses of landscape in Caravaggio’s work.

56.
Omnia vincit amor.
‘Love conquers all.’ Cupid was modelled by Cecco. An English visitor to Rome was told that ‘’Twas the body & face / of [Caravaggio’s] owne boy or servant / that laid with him.’

57.
Divine Love
by Giovanni Baglione. The avenging angel triumphs over the devil, who has been caught
in flagrante
with his young catamite. The sodomitic Satan on the left is a libellous caricature of Caravaggio.

58. Study for
The Resurrection
by Giovanni Baglione. This study preserves the composition of Baglione’s lost altarpiece for the Gesù, which Caravaggio mocked openly: ‘It’s a bungle . . . the worst he has done.’

59.
St Jerome Writing.
A penitentially solemn picture. It may have been a gift to Scipione Borghese, papal nephew, for helping Caravaggio obtain a pardon for violent assault in the summer of 1605.

60.
St Francis in Meditation.
The saint is lost in contemplation of his own mortality, and of Christ’s crucifixion at Golgotha, ‘the place of the skull’.

61.
St John the Baptist.
A world away from the earlier St John modelled by Cecco. This glowering adolescent ‘might almost be a portrait of Caravaggio’s own dark state of mind’ during his later years in Rome.

62.
The Madonna of the Rosary.
This altarpiece was greatly admired by Peter Paul Rubens, one of a group of connoisseurs who bought the picture for a prominent church in Antwerp in 1651.