• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1273 0

1966. X-ray photographs reveal the painter’s aborted first composition, in which the bearded martyr stood before the altar, hands outstretched to protect himself from the assault of three armed men. As one of the assassins prepared to attack, another strode in from the side, sword at the ready. A third stepped in with his back to the viewer, as if entering the scene from directly in front of the picture. Shocked spectators looked on. In this initial attempt, the figures were considerably smaller than in the completed version. The architecture, square columns and pilasters with heavy cornicing, was correspondingly more prominent. The painter was perhaps struggling to depict the scene as it had been described in Contarelli’s instructions: ‘a long wide space in the form of a temple … where St Matthew dressed in vestments to celebrate the mass is killed by the hands of soldiers’.

Unhappy with his first effort, Caravaggio painted it out and rethought his approach. Now he was determined to give his composition a focal point, to make an image that would be at once more monumental and more dynamic. He made two fundamental changes to the composition that had displeased him: he greatly increased the scale of the individual figures, and he reduced the number of executioners from three to one. The story of murder and martyrdom was in this way compressed to a single brutal act. In the finished work a snarling youth wields a sword over the prone figure of Matthew, who lies at the base of a simple stone altar. The saint, whose chasuble is splashed with blood, has already been wounded. The assassin grasps him by the wrist, subduing Matthew at the same time as turning his body towards him, the better to administer the coup de grâce. In the first version of the painting the killers had been represented as athletic youths stripped to the waist. In the final version the single assassin is nude save for a loincloth. A high, raking light falls on the scene, catching his pale skin and accentuating his musculature. It also catches Matthew’s white vestments and his helpless upturned face.

Caravaggio’s final composition resembles a centrifuge, with peripheral forms and figures seeming to fly off in all directions, driven away by the violence at the centre. On the right-hand side a statuesque altar-boy screams, open-mouthed. To the left several onlookers recoil, including two men in shadow. One raises his hands in a gesture of instinctive shock and revulsion, while the other simply stares, transfixed. Behind them two bravi, one armed with a sword and wearing a plumed hat, look back as they prepare to flee the scene. Two more distant figures, isolated against the darkness, have already taken flight. One is shown in half-profile while the other is shown in full-face, picked out by a sudden shaft of light. He turns back to stare at the killing, his eyes full of sadness, regret, guilt. His features are unmistakably those of Caravaggio himself.

The painter’s treatment of the foreground was long regarded as a puzzle. To the right-hand side, two nearly nude figures huddle together on a fold of striped blanket. Opposite them, another reclining nude supports his weight on both hands while dangling his right leg into a dark area of void space. The near-nudity of Matthew’s assassin might be explained by the fact that he is pagan, but why should these other figures be half naked in church at the celebration of Mass? It has been argued that they are no more than an expedient compositional device, and that their function is essentially to swell the small crowd of witnesses.5 A more plausible explanation, advanced by Giovanni Urbani in his report on the cleaning of both Contarelli Chapel pictures in 1966, is that the nudes should be regarded as recent converts to Christianity who are about to be baptized.6 The evidence suggests that his hypothesis is correct.

The principal source for the story of Matthew’s martyrdom was the popular compendium of saints’ lives known as The Golden Legend. There it is told that Matthew travelled to Ethiopia, where he converted