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him. She is leaning on a haystack, behind which those animals are grazing; on the left side, at the foot of the Virgin, St Joseph is seated in attractive drapery, deep in thought. Nearby the three shepherds adore the newborn child; the first one has a staff in his hand and is dressed in a white garment, the second with his two hands joined in prayer shows a bare shoulder that looks like living flesh, and finally the third one looks on admiringly, his bold head painted marvellously. The rest of the canvas consists of a black background with rough wood that constitutes the shed. Indeed, the background was higher, and it was necessary to cut off a large section in order to fit the canvas into the chapel.104

Caravaggio’s Adoration of the Shepherds is the most tragic of nativities. Mary has just given birth to her tiny, swaddled child. She slumps, exhausted from her labours, not against a haystack as Susinno mistakenly said, but against the side of a manger. Behind her, in the half dark, the biblical ox and ass stand patient and impassive. Mary is the Madonna del Parto – the ‘Madonna of childbirth’ – and also the Madonna of humility. She reclines on the bare earth of the cattleshed, strewn with strands of straw that catch the light like threads of gold. Those pieces of light are her only riches, but her eyes are closed to them. She is a refugee mother, utterly alone in the dark with her defenceless child.

Joseph is singled out by his halo, but he is not with her – he is with the shepherds, part of her audience. None of the men are truly with her, and there is no sense that any of them can help her. The bald shepherd closest to Mary and her child reaches out to touch them. But his hand is kept back from actually making contact, as if by an invisible force. The men are suspended in an eternal agony of empathy. Their faces radiate compassion and helplessness. What can be done? Does the world really have to be like this?

Once again, Caravaggio in Sicily reached back to the oldest popular traditions of Christian art. The motif of the tiny baby, crawling on his mother’s body, pressing his face to hers and reaching to touch her with his little hand, is drawn from Byzantine art.105 The whole scene has been conceived as another of the painter’s assemblages of sculpturally realized figures, but this time what is evoked is not the sacred mountain with its chapels, but the tradition of the Christmas crib, begun by St Francis at the monastery of Greccio in the chill winter of 1223.

It is no coincidence that The Adoration of the Shepherds was painted for one of Messina’s Franciscan churches. Such was the depth of the friars’ attachment to Caravaggio’s painting that they later fought tooth and nail to keep it. ‘At various times princes have been attracted by this Nativity and sought to take it away,’ wrote Susinno, ‘but they were unable to do so because the Capuchin Fathers made an appeal to the Senate, which in those days was more important, and its authority made them realize that those Fathers were its only custodians. As a result the picture remained in Messina, and I can affirm in truth that this unique work is the most masterly painting by Caravaggio.’106

All of Caravaggio’s great Sicilian pictures reach back – back to the oldest and most direct forms of Christian art, and back to his own oldest and most painful memories. Whether he was conscious of it or not, The Adoration of the Shepherds is an uncanny allegory of his own emergence into the dark world of Milan under plague back in the 1570s – born to a mother soon to be bereaved, born to be abandoned by all save her. That is why the men in the picture look on but cannot touch, like dreams or ghosts. They see the mother and child’s abandonment, but can do nothing to assuage it. They are hardly in the same place, but in another shadowland. Iconographically, the gnarled and saddened men are Joseph and the shepherds. Emotionally, they are Caravaggio’s father, his uncles, his grandfather – all the men in the family that he might have had, but lost. Caravaggio’s own father’s tools