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an agreement to build and decorate the central chapel of the church of the Padri Crociferi, the ‘cross-bearing fathers’, a confraternity of hospitallers devoted to caring for the sick.100 Determined to obtain the services of Caravaggio, the de’ Lazzari family offered him a huge sum of money to paint the principal altarpiece for their new chapel, more than three times the fee he might have expected for an equivalent commission when he was at the peak of his fame in Rome. The proposed title was The Madonna, St John the Baptist and Other Saints, which suggests a rather static image of the type that would come to be known as a Sacra Conversazione, or ‘sacred conversation’. Caravaggio must have disliked the subject, because in a play on his patrons’ family name he made the counter-suggestion that they commission him to paint The Resurrection of Lazarus instead. The de’ Lazzari accepted the proposal, and some time around the start of 1609 Caravaggio started work.

In Rome at the height of the Renaissance it had not been unknown for a famous artist to alter the terms of a commission. Michelangelo had famously plucked up the courage to tell Pope Julius II that his initial plan for the Sistine Chapel ceiling was ‘a poor thing’, replacing the pope’s proposal of twelve apostles in a field of classical decoration with his own vastly more ambitious scheme of illustrations to the Book of Genesis. But in the provincial artistic milieu of Messina, Caravaggio’s assertion of independence was still being talked about a hundred years later. Susinno was even more struck by it than he was by the huge fee that the painter was paid:

When some wealthy members of the house of Lazzaro wished to build a new chapel for the church of the Padri Crociferi, they commissioned Caravaggio to paint a large canvas and agreed to pay the sum of 1,000 scudi. Caravaggio conceived the Resurrection of Lazarus, alluding to their family. Those noblemen were greatly satisfied, and the artist was given free rein to fulfil his creative fantasy. It is commendable to give liberty to great artists to operate at their own will, instead of tying both their hands when they are ordered to execute a certain work in this or that manner or form.101

Why, apart from this play on his patrons’ name, did Caravaggio want to paint the story of Lazarus raised from the dead? It was a subject rarely depicted since the very early Renaissance. Following the conventions of Byzantine art, Giotto and Duccio had painted Lazarus, plague-spotted, rising from his tomb still wrapped in his grave clothes. In Caravaggio’s later work, there is a powerful thrust towards both the subject matter and the style of much earlier Christian art. The only artist before him to have deliberately regressed in a comparable way had been – again – Michelangelo. With the creation of the Rondanini Pietà, late in life, Michelangelo had plunged his art back to the angular and ascetic forms of Gothic carving. Caravaggio’s The Resurrection of Lazarus makes a similarly unorthodox statement of primitivist intent.

Light and dark, which Caravaggio had previously manipulated in the service of a beguilingly deceptive optical realism, now serve an altogether different purpose. Their function is simply to amplify meaning and feeling – to reduce, to pare away, to lose or annihilate everything irrelevant to the essentials of the story he wants to tell. Nine tenths of the painting is bitumen black, a great pit of darkness in which the action unfolds. It is the darkness of death. To the left, the deeply shadowed figure of Christ enters the sepulchre of Lazarus and with a gesture of his right hand bids the dead man to awake: ‘Lazarus, come forth’ (John 11:43). Around his shadowed form a gaggle of bystanders can be seen craning their necks for a view of the impending miracle.

Below Christ’s beckoning hand, two swarthy and sunburned labourers lift the dead man’s tombstone, while another raises the corpse from the grave. As the last of the three workmen stumbles forward, cradling the exhumed body, panic, disgust and wonder are mingled