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By Root 1309 0

as lacking in compassion as the stolid executioners in The Crucifixion of St Peter. They stand for the implacable forces unleashed by the act of betrayal. Just enough of the face of the soldier on the right is visible, beneath his helmet, to reveal that Caravaggio used the same model who had sat for the open-armed disciple in The Supper at Emmaus. This would have been all the more evident when both pictures hung in Ciriaco Mattei’s palace. The effect must have been slightly disconcerting, like watching the same actor playing utterly contrasting roles simultaneously. Did Caravaggio do it on purpose, to demonstrate the versatility of his method? The other soldier is so obscured by the burnished steel of his helmet that almost nothing can be seen of his features. He is faceless as well as pitiless.

The encounter of Judas and Christ is charged with feeling, an exchange through which guilt and saddened acquiescence flow. Those emotions are amplified by the fleeing disciple, whose red cloak billows excitedly above the heads of Christ and Judas, linking his form so closely to theirs that he seems less like a person in his own right than like their psychic emanation – a scream forced out into the night sky by their inner turmoil. But the soldiers feel nothing and they show no capacity for feeling. They are all murderous efficiency, armoured against compassion. Christ, Judas and the disciple are beings of yielding flesh; the soldiers seem made of the very steel that they wear. Bellori was particularly struck by the horrid contrast between dark metal and soft human tissue: ‘a soldier in full armour extends his arms and his ironclad hand towards the chest of the Lord.’

Caravaggio took the idea for this vivid distinction from a woodcut of Christ’s arrest in the garden of Gethsemane by the German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer. In Dürer’s image the soldier’s chain-mailed arm, which calls to mind the scales of an armadillo, reaches across the kissing Judas to the vulnerable figure of Christ with exactly the same gesture. In his own picture, Caravaggio sharpened that ugly juxtaposition and made it even more shocking. The soldier’s black armour, jointed at shoulder and elbow, looks like the carapace of some gigantic insect. His black hand points into Christ’s neck like the sting of a scorpion about to pierce its prey.

Caravaggio was in the habit of pillaging prints and engravings for compositional ideas during the early years of the seventeenth century. He probably kept a stock of such images, ready catalysts for his imagination. Dürer’s woodcut was not his only source for The Betrayal. There is another borrowing in the composition, this time from an engraving actually commissioned by the man for whom the picture was destined, Ciriaco Mattei himself. In 1601 Mattei had asked the engraver Francesco Villamena to commemorate a particularly brutal Roman street battle between members of the city’s pro-French and pro-Spanish factions. From this bruising scene of affray, Caravaggio took one detail: that of the crescent-shaped, billowing cloak that connects the fleeing disciple to the figures of Christ and Judas. Once again, the painter makes the detail an organic part of his own, very different composition. The actual borrowing is less interesting than the fact that Caravaggio should have been thinking about a scene of modern-day violence in Rome when he devised the composition of his Betrayal. It seems that he envisaged the scene, from the start, as just the kind of fracas with which he was personally familiar – a nocturnal scuffle, with figures crying out in the dark Roman night as the sbirri pounce on their man.

At the back right of the scene, set slightly apart from its principal action yet straining to witness it, the painter included his own self-portrait. He holds up a lantern with his right hand, a gesture which some have seen as a proud flaunting of his new and very particular method – a demonstration of exactly that technical revolution in studio lighting which Bellori attributed to Caravaggio when he spoke of him ‘placing a lamp