Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (8 page)

75.
Portrait of Fra Antonio Martelli.
‘This depiction of an obdurate and forceful man, in lean old age, rheumy eyes gazing off into the distance, anticipates the mature portraiture of Rembrandt by some half a century.’

76.
Portrait of Alof de Wignacourt
, with His Pageboy. Instead of a monastic habit, the Grand Master wears a suit of sixteenth-century armour, evoking the heroic defence of Malta at the great Siege of 1565.

77.
The Resurrection of Lazarus.
‘Lazarus, come forth’ (John 11). As Christ bids him to rise from the grave, Lazarus seems reluctant to wake from death.

78.
The Adoration of the Shepherds
. The most tragic of nativities: Mary is a refugee mother utterly alone in the dark with her defenceless child.

79.
A Knight of Malta being Defrocked
by Wolfgang Kilian (detail). The ceremony of
privatio habitus
took place directly beneath Caravaggio’s altarpiece, which can just be made out here at the far end of the oratory.

80.
The Beheading of St John
(detail). In the blood gushing from the saint’s neck, Caravaggio signed his name. It is his only signature on a painting.

81.
St John the Baptist.
Caravaggio’s last known depiction of the saint, who was modelled on this occasion by a swarthy and sun-tanned Sicilian adolescent.

82.
The Adoration of the Shepherds.
Painted for a Franciscan confraternity in Palermo, the last of Caravaggio’s Sicilian altarpieces was allegedly stolen by order of a Mafia boss in 1969. It has not been recovered.

83.
The Burial of St Lucy.
‘The picture’s iconography is ingeniously suggestive of hope ... but its mood is overwhelmingly bleak. Almost half the painting is dark bare stone.’

84.
The Denial of St Peter.
One of just two paintings that can be dated to after the painter’s face was slashed in late 1609. The seriousness of his injuries is shockingly apparent in the work’s ragged, fumbling style.

85.
The Martyrdom of St Ursula.
Caravaggio’s very last work contains his last self-portrait. Behind Ursula’s bowed head, the painter’s face appears. He seems to groan, as he stares sightlessly into space.

Caravaggio’s influence reached forward to the Enlightenment, continued into the Romantic period and has infiltrated the DNA of modern cinema.

86.
Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump
by Joseph Wright of Derby.