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on the essentials of a scene, as he imagined it. Dark paint creates an illusion of deep shadow around the principal forms and therefore also does away with the need to paint background detail: Bellori, in his biography of the painter, noted that Caravaggio ‘left the ground visible in the half-tones’, meaning that in places he could model form simply by leaving the canvas in the unpainted state in which it had been prepared. (The technique is visible, for example, in the frame of the mirror in Martha and Mary Magdalen.) Caravaggio was fond of short-cuts and liked to work quickly, which suggests another reason behind his extreme tenebrism: quite apart from their expressive effect, pools of darkness, like visible ground, simply mean that there is less to paint.

Caravaggio’s habitual impatience is manifest too in his frequent practice of working wet-in-wet rather than waiting for each layer of oil paint to dry. He was unique among the painters of his time in making no preparatory drawings for his pictures, preferring to block out his compositions directly on the primed canvas. Having posed his models, he often marked the exact positions of heads and other contours by making light incisions in the base layer of paint, presumably so that he could reset the models’ positions after every break in the work. No other artist of his time used such incisions. Caravaggio’s exceptional working procedure argues strongly for the hypothesis that he learned little from his master, Peterzano, and was largely self-taught.78

Caravaggio did not draw because his method of composition was essentially theatrical – proto-cinematic, it might be said, because lighting was also involved. He composed by staging scenes, or fragments of scenes, that he knitted together, collage-like, on his canvas, using shadow to mask the joins. The scenes involved objects, models, props. Fillide knelt on a real purple cushion, leaned against a real wheel and held a real sword while Caravaggio painted her. Sometimes, not surprisingly, the absence of preparatory drawing led him to make a mistake in posing his models: halfway through Judith and Holofernes, he realized that a head half severed would look more detached from the neck and trunk of the body than the head of his very alive model. X-rays show that he painted over the first head of Holofernes, reposed the man and painted him again to achieve the necessary degree of grisly separation.

Caravaggio’s method also involved setting lights, or at least controlling illumination in some way. Joachim von Sandrart gave a short description of his technique, saying that ‘as he wished to effect a more perfect roundness and natural relief, he regularly made use of gloomy vaults or other dark rooms which had one small source of light from above; so that the darkness, by means of strong shadows, might leave power to the light falling upon the model, and thus produce an effect of high relief.’79 There is evidence of it in Martha and Mary Magdalen. The brilliant square of light reflected in the surface of the convex mirror is Caravaggio’s ‘source of light from above’ made visible on the canvas. Bellori noted that Caravaggio began to work in this way at around the time that he painted the St Catherine and other pictures close to it in date, in 1598–9. His pictures from these final years of the sixteenth century ‘have a darker colour’, he observed, ‘as Michele [sic] had already begun to darken the darks’.

Bellori went on to give his own account of how Caravaggio achieved his famously extreme contrasts of light and dark:

the colouring he was introducing was not as sweet and delicate as before, but became boldly dark and black, which he used abundantly to give relief to the forms. He went so far in this style that he never showed any of his figures in open daylight, but instead found a way to place them in the darkness of a closed room, placing a lamp high so that the light would fall straight down, revealing the principal part of the body and leaving the rest in shadow so as to produce a powerful contrast of light and dark. The painters