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Shockingly he has made a botch of the job, cutting deep into the saint’s neck, deep enough to sever the jugular, but leaving the head still attached to the trunk. Now he reaches behind him for the sharpened knife in the scabbard at his belt, which he needs to cut the last flap of flesh connecting John’s head to his body. He grabs the saint by his hair so that he can get at the place he needs to with his knife. He might be a butcher working at his slab.

Does the saint still live? His pale face seems animated, as if he were in his last death agonies, recoiling from the gurgled, choking rush of his own blood. In the frozen world of Caravaggio’s painting, he must wait forever for the coup de grâce. A swathe of red drapery has been thrown carelessly across his otherwise naked body. This sudden shock of colour in the prison gloom emphasizes the atrocious nature of what is taking place. It is like a pictogram or symbol of bloodletting in the dark. The martyr lies on a sheepskin, which symbolically makes of him a blessed Christian lamb, brought to sacrifice. The painter has contrived to pick out the martyr’s naked left foot with a stray shaft of light. Surrounded by pools of darkness, placed next to some twisting coils of rope, it is almost like a still life detail – separate from the rest of the scene and yet emblematic of the poor and painfully solitary death which the saint endures.

The novices of the Order of St John listened to sermons and received instruction in the oratory for which Caravaggio’s painting was destined. The place was both a school for the martyrs of the future and a burial ground for the martyrs of the past – the bones of the knights who had died at the Great Siege were interred beneath its stone-flagged floor. Within the oratory, novices were trained in the hard ways of the Knights of Malta and made to understand that they too might have to face death in a distant land at the hands of unbelievers. Caravaggio’s altarpiece was designed to make sure that they could be under no illusions about what that might mean. A martyr’s death brought the reward of eternal glory with the saints in heaven, but there would be nothing glorious about the death itself. It could be a death much like this one, a sordid act of butchery in a dark and lonely place. The picture is like a catechism, an asking of questions. Are you sure you have it in you to be a Knight of the Order of St John? Are you ready to die? To die like this?

Next to the executioner, underscoring Caravaggio’s transposition of John’s legend to a cruel present, stands the figure of a Turkish jailor with heavy black keys dangling at his belt. He directs operations with an air of weary impatience, pointing unnecessarily at the richly chased and gilded plate onto which the severed head must be placed. Beside him stands an old woman with her head in her hands, distraught at the spectacle of the martyrdom. She is another version of the goitrous peasant woman gazing piteously at the crucified body of the saint in The Crucifixion of St Andrew. She stands for Christian pity and prayer. The main group of five figures is completed by that of the serving girl who has been sent to collect the head.62 Her pose has an eloquent woodenness about it. She is trying her best to carry out a task that appals her, affecting a mechanical workaday demeanour that the expression on her face belies. She stares fixedly down at the plate in her hands, pursing her lips like somebody desperately stifling the impulse to puke.

What she cannot bear to look at is the spurting of the saint’s blood from the deep gash in his nearly severed neck. It is so thick that it resembles a skein of red wool laid on the ground. Beneath the main pool of coagulating gore, there lie some thinner threads of blood. Anyone looking closely at the picture sees that they have been made to spell out the letters of Caravaggio’s own name: ‘F. Michelangelo’. Inscribed in the blood of St John the Baptist