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had continued throughout 1603. In his evidence given at the libel trial, Orazio Gentileschi had remembered Caravaggio returning ‘a Capuchin’s robe and a pair of wings’. Cecco had worn the wings when he sat for Omnia vincit amor. The Capuchin robe, sacred uniform of the Franciscan order, had been worn by the rather older model whom Caravaggio cast in another picture of the same period, St Francis in Meditation, now in the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, Palazzo Barberini, Rome. Nothing is known about why, or for whom, this ascetically morbid picture was painted. The saint kneels alone in darkness beside the simple wooden crucifix that assists his meditations. His torn, patched cloak is the symbol of his piety and of his utter disdain for the things of this world. He holds a skull in his hands, staring deep into the sockets where eyes once were. He is shown lost in contemplation of his own mortality, and of the eternal life that awaits him thanks to Christ’s crucifixion at Golgotha, ‘the place of the skull’. But the idea of the picture is stronger than its execution. The folds of the drapery have been cursorily painted and the penitential pose seems artificial. Caravaggio had always composed with a strong sense of theatre, but here his work tips over into theatricality.

According to Gentileschi, Caravaggio had returned the borrowed habit at around the beginning of September 1603, so probably the St Francis was completed shortly before then. The Sacrifice of Isaac is another picture from this time. Less penitentially gloomy, it clothes an Old Testament legend in the same robes of holy poverty. The lined and bald Abraham is cousin to Caravaggio’s earlier pauper saints and strongly resembles the uppermost disciple in his Doubting Thomas. A simple man of simple faith, he steels himself to do God’s bidding, holding his screaming son down as if the boy – modelled by Cecco in yet another guise – were just one more lamb brought to slaughter.

The Sacrifice of Isaac had been the subject of a famous competition in fifteenth-century Florence between Lorenzo Ghiberti and Filippo Brunelleschi, for the commission of a cast-bronze pair of doors for the city Baptistry. Each artist had produced a single bas-relief in bronze, which between them became the two most famous Renaissance treatments of the subject. The eventual winner, Ghiberti, had devised a composition of great elegance and delicacy, setting the scene in a gracefully abbreviated landscape and lending a balletic quality even to the murderous gesture of the Old Testament prophet. Brunelleschi had produced a much brusquer and more violent interpretation of the story, focusing on the action itself, where Abraham plunges the dagger dramatically towards his son even as the angel stays his hand. Brunelleschi lost the competition, but unsurprisingly it was with his vivid, violent, essentially late medieval view of the story that Caravaggio identified. Caravaggio’s greatest Dutch admirer, Rembrandt, would give a yet more brutal emphasis to the drama, by showing Abraham’s smothering hand clamped over the face of his helpless son.

The Sacrifice of Isaac is also notable for Caravaggio’s very last view of landscape: an idyllic glimpse of the Roman campagna complete with winding path, avenue of cypresses, a country villa and a distant monastery silhouetted against a fragment of summer sky. From 1604 onwards, his painted world shrinks in on itself, and even events set outside look as though they are taking place in a darkened theatre. Middle tones almost disappear. Increasingly, there is only darkness and light.

A PLATE OF ARTICHOKES AND OTHER STORIES

Caravaggio would receive just three commissions for large-scale public religious paintings between 1603 and 1606. As the spareness and solemnity of his work became increasingly out of step with the times, he was forced to watch from the sidelines as lesser painters overtook him in the unstable hierarchy of Roman patronage. In reaction, he became ever more aggressive. An eighteenth-century writer of artists’ lives, Filippo Baldinucci, recounts