Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [114]
Sandrart plainly failed to give the painting his full attention, but none the less his misinterpretation evokes a mood that Caravaggio intended to create. The tax-gatherer’s office, with its basement gloom and its cast of mercenary characters, is a convincingly seedy den of iniquity. Christ brings light into this darkness, just as he brings illumination and divine purpose to Matthew’s dreary, money-grubbing existence. The picture’s main light source is high and to the right, to suggest daylight flooding in from above, perhaps through an open door and down a flight of stairs. It flashes on to the face of Matthew, along a diagonal parallel with the line traced by Christ’s golden halo and his outstretched, spotlit, beckoning hand. It is the light of ordinary mundane reality, yet it is also the light of God.
The Calling of St Matthew is built on contrasts, and not only the contrast of light and shade. Whereas Matthew and his companions are dressed in foppish modern finery, Christ and the solemn, reproving figure of St Peter go barefoot and wear simple, timeless robes. They belong to a different time and place, and a different moral and spiritual universe. They might be an apparition or a dream, projected from the distant sacred past into a profane Roman present.
With The Calling of St Matthew Caravaggio was staking his claim to a place in the great Italian tradition of monumental religious painting. He had the confidence to weave an overt reference to that tradition into the very fabric of his picture. The hand that Christ holds out to Matthew is a direct paraphrase of one of the most celebrated images of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, a detail appropriated from The Creation of Adam in which the animating finger of God reaches towards the languid hand of the first man. Yet it is the hand of Adam, not God, that Caravaggio has chosen to give to his own solemnly beckoning figure of Christ. This apparent homage to Michelangelo is actually a statement of Caravaggio’s independence of thought, and the detail adds a subtly appropriate layer of meaning to the picture. Caravaggio’s Christ becomes a second Adam, made in God’s image but purged of sin, calling Matthew to his redemption: ‘For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive’ (1 Corinthians 15:22).
The hand of Christ is not the only such allusion in the painting. The grouping of figures around the table has been calculated to resemble a profane version of the Last Supper. The young man counting his change, oblivious to the call of Christ, clutches a bag of money in his shadowed left hand. He is like Judas with his fifty pieces of silver. It is from the company of worldly Judases, to that of Christ the Saviour, that Matthew has been called.
The painting is poetical and metaphorical, although the piety of which it speaks is harsh, direct and forbidding. It also has a haunting quality, the character of a personal renunciation: in The Calling of St Matthew, Caravaggio revisited the world of his own early genre paintings, but only to consign that world to darkness. The picture was the artist’s first public demonstration of his formidable naturalism, but it is less like a depiction of real life than a dream of escaping reality altogether, of being called away from a life of vice, suddenly and inexplicably, and summoned into the presence of God. Did Caravaggio himself dream of being chosen like this – of being rescued from his own unruly, imperfect nature?
The painter fought long and hard with the second of his pictures for the Contarelli Chapel, The Martyrdom of St Matthew. His struggle became common knowledge among the gossiping artists of Rome. Bellori, writing seventy years afterwards, knew enough to declare that Caravaggio ‘did it over twice’,4 a claim confirmed when the picture was examined during conservation in