Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [113]
True to his method of transposing the biblical past to the present day, Caravaggio imagined The Calling of St Matthew taking place in a dingy room somewhere in modern Rome. Christ and St Peter have just entered the dim and plainly furnished office of Matthew, the tax-gatherer. Here they encounter five men, grouped around a table set close to a bare wall relieved only by a single window. The window’s shutter is open, but little light penetrates through its four dull panes, which are made not of glass but of oilskin held in place by crossed strings. There are coins on the table as well as a moneybag, an open account book and an inkwell from which the stem of a quill protrudes. A transaction is taking place.
At the far end of the table, a young man sitting in a savonarola chair is absorbed in calculation. He is the taxpayer, who has settled his dues and is now receiving a small amount of change. His shoulders are hunched as he counts the meagre handful of coins before him and prepares to draw the money in. Directly behind him, a bespectacled old man wearing a fur-trimmed coat peers down at the table, as if to check that all the sums have been done correctly. Next to them sits Matthew himself, accompanied by his page, a round-faced boy who leans with friendly familiarity on his master’s shoulder. Caravaggio’s Sicilian friend, the painter Mario Minniti, posed for this figure. Opposite sits another young man in fine page’s livery, his striped black and white sleeves flashing and shimmering in the half-dark of the room. He is presumably the taxpayer’s minder. Tradition has it that this figure was also modelled by a painter, Lionello Spada. But the identification may be apocryphal, a flight of fancy inspired perhaps by the sword – spada, in Italian – that he wears at his side.
The biblical account of Matthew’s election to the apostolate is terse in the extreme: ‘And as Jesus passed forth from thence, he saw a man, named Matthew, sitting at the receipt of custom: and he saith unto him, Follow me. And he arose, and followed him’ (Matthew 9:9). Caravaggio has painted the moment at the heart of this truncated narrative, when Christ has just spoken his simple two-word command. Matthew, at once astonished and compelled, points to his own chest as he gazes up into the eyes of the Saviour. There is incredulity in his expression and a question frozen on his lips: ‘Who, me?’ He continues, absent-mindedly, to count out one last coin of the taxpayer’s change, but he knows in which direction his destiny is taking him. He braces his legs, preparing to stand up and step into his new existence. The command is irresistible, its outcome inevitable. Christ fixes the tax-collector with a hypnotizingly intense stare. Even as he reaches out towards Matthew, he has already begun to leave the room. His bare feet, half hidden in deep shadow, are turned away from the company of men back towards the outside world. In a moment he will have left, taking his new apostle with him. All has been done that needed to be done.
Matthew and his companions, grouped around the coin-strewn table, might almost be gaming in the tavern of the Cardsharps, painted for Cardinal del Monte five years earlier. The disconsolate man paying his taxes and raking back a pile of change looks like a gambler who has just won an annoyingly small pot. Indeed that was exactly what the seventeenth-century writer Joachim von Sandrart took him for, years after the picture was painted. ‘Christ is represented in a dark room,’ he wrote, ‘which he has entered with two of His followers and finds the tax collector Matthew in the company of a gang of rogues with whom he is playing cards and dice, and sitting about drinking. Matthew, as if afraid, conceals the cards in one hand and places the other on his breast; in his face he reveals that alarm and shame which is the result of his feeling