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about the palpable proving of faith. Joachim von Sandrart, impressed by the graphic realism of the work, described it as a picture of ‘Christ, in whose holy wounds, Thomas, in the presence of the other apostles, is putting his finger. By means of good painting and modelling he was able to show on the faces of all those present such an expression of astonishment and naturalness of skin and flesh that in comparison all other pictures seemed to be coloured paper.’43 Sandrart was responding not only to the flesh wound in Christ’s side but also to the wrinkled and wizened skin of Thomas and his companions. Thin and papery with age, perhaps it was this that elicited his thoughts about other pictures looking like coloured paper. Caravaggio, once the painter of withered autumn fruits, was becoming increasingly the painter of withered human beings, battered by age and poverty.

Like The Supper at Emmaus, Doubting Thomas was inspired by a legend of the risen Christ. The painter’s source was a passage from the gospel of John:

when the doors were shut where the disciples were assembled for fear of the Jews, came Jesus and stood in the midst, and saith unto them, Peace be with you. And when he had so said, he shewed unto them his hands and his side. Then were the disciples glad, when they saw the Lord … But Thomas, one of the twelve, called Didymus, was not with them when Jesus came. The other disciples therefore said unto him, We have seen the Lord. But he said unto them, Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe. And after eight days again his disciples were within, and Thomas with them: then came Jesus, the doors being shut, and stood in the midst, and said, Peace be unto you. Then saith he to Thomas, Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing. And Thomas answered and said unto him, My Lord and my God. Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed’ (John 20:20–29).

Caravaggio chose a half-length frieze-like composition and a close-up view, further excluding all extraneous detail with his usual blanket of shadow. The story is distilled to its essence. Four faces, arranged in the configuration of a diamond, bear mute witness to the miracle of the Resurrection. Christ gently accepts the indignity of being surgically investigated by his sceptical follower. Holding aside the folds of his burial sheet, he guides Thomas’s hand towards him and draws the disciple’s forefinger into his open wound. Two fellow-disciples crowd round, eyes fixed on the clinical probing of divine flesh. Christ too looks down, as though assisting at his own autopsy. The place where finger meets wound is a different kind of vanishing point, achieved without the calculations of perspective. All converges at the place where the miracle is proved to be true, and the metaphysical and the empirical meet.

Thomas and his fellow apostles are men in the same mould as the first St Matthew and the Angel, earnest, ordinary, with heavily lined brows and sunburned faces. Thomas’s sleeve needs restitching at the shoulder. An otherwordly radiance floods the scene, illumination the herald of revelation. Cured of his doubt, Thomas himself looks not at the wound in Christ’s side but instead to the light.

There is also, once more, the suggestion of a reminiscence of Michelangelo’s paintings for the Sistine Chapel. Thomas’s reaching gesture is another of Caravaggio’s inverted variations on the fingertip-touching act of generation at the centre of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam. In the act of touching Christ, Thomas is born again in unquestioning faith.

Giustiniani commissioned one other, very different picture from Caravaggio. It is the single, stunning exception to the prevailingly solemn body of work produced by the artist during these middle years of his career. Omnia vincit amor, or Love Conquers All, was painted in the summer