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This commission with the paintings done after life … made Caravaggio famous, and the paintings were excessively praised by evil people. When Federico Zuccaro came to see this picture, while I was there, he exclaimed: ‘What is all the fuss about?’ and after having studied the entire work carefully, added: ‘I do not see anything here other than the idea of Giorgione in the picture of the saint when Christ calls him to the Apostolate’; and, sneering, astonished by such commotion, he turned his back and left.13

At first sight Zuccaro’s response seems as puzzling as it is petty. Caravaggio’s monumental, tenebristic Calling of St Matthew has little in common with the works of Giorgione, painter of The Tempest, The Sleeping Venus and the Three Ages of Man. But Zuccaro’s phrase, ‘the idea of Giorgione’, suggests that he meant to invoke the Venetian master first and foremost as a stereotype – the embodiment of a particular approach to painting. It is by no means certain that the crusty academician was familiar with Giorgione’s actual works. But he certainly knew Giorgio Vasari’s life of Giorgione, which had emphasized the painter’s absolute dependence on the evidence of his own eyes. According to Vasari, Giorgione ‘would never represent anything in his works without copying it from life’.14 Vasari was a partisan of the Tuscan–Roman approach to art, with its strong emphasis on idealized forms, usually realized in the medium of fresco; his portrayal of Giorgione as a slavish naturalist was part of a systematic damning of the great Venetian oil painters with faint praise. So in declaring that Caravaggio was merely another Giorgione, Zuccaro was tarring him with the same brush: the comment was shorthand for saying that Caravaggio had no faculty of invention or imagination, that he was a painter who brought everything down to the level of mundane actual life, even the sacred mysteries. The curmudgeonly and conservative Zuccaro may well have been genuinely disturbed by the painter’s decision to depict Matthew in his tax office as if he were a character in a low-life genre scene. If so, he would not be the last to take offence at Caravaggio’s perceived sins against decorum.

In certain circles of the Roman art world Caravaggio would always be seen as an unwelcome outsider. Not only did Zuccaro criticize him for being an empty-headed naturalist, but he also implied that Caravaggio was polluting the pure and noble traditions of Roman painting with a seditious foreign idea – ‘the idea of Giorgione’ – brought in from Venice. Caravaggio’s dark and monumental oil paintings would certainly have looked extremely Venetian in the chapel of a Roman church in 1600, because only in Venice, where dampness and humidity discouraged fresco painting, was it common to see such large works of religious art carried out in oil on canvas. Caravaggio’s painting must have seemed truly foreign, alien.15

Caravaggio may not have been unduly concerned by Zuccaro’s dislike for his work, but it was hardly a good omen. The Accademia di San Luca was an influential organization that could play an important role in a painter’s career. He seems to have tried to be a part of it. A few years earlier he had been one of 105 artists to participate in the religious devotion known as the Forty Hours, annual celebrations in honour of St Luke. At that time he was not yet a member of the academy, although there is evidence to suggest that he may have joined some time after 1600.16 He was, however, never admitted to its inner circle.

The Contarelli paintings divided opinion, but they instantly established Caravaggio as one of the leading painters of the city. However, there is no sign that success mellowed him. His life on the streets of the city was more turbulent than ever. At some point during the winter of 1600 – the precise date is unknown – he clashed with one of Rome’s many unemployed mercenaries. Both men drew their swords. The painter outfought the soldier, who retired hurt. Caravaggio’s friend, the notoriously hot-headed Onorio