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The story that the painting illustrates is told in all four books of the New Testament. According to the gospels, Christ prophesied that his disciple Peter would deny him three times before the cock had crowed twice. On the day of Christ’s arrest in the garden of Gethsemane, Peter followed his master into the courtyard of the high priest Caiaphas. He waited there as Christ was tormented by his accusers: ‘And some began to spit on him, and to cover his face, and to buffet him, and to say unto him, Prophesy: and the servants did strike him with the palms of their hands. And as Peter was beneath in the palace, there cometh one of the maids of the high priest: And when she saw Peter warming himself, she looked upon him, and said, And thou also wast with Jesus of Nazareth. But he denied, saying, I know not, neither understand I what thou sayest.’ Twice more, Peter was asked if he knew Jesus, and each time he gave the same answer: ‘And the second time the cock crew. And Peter called to mind the word that Jesus said unto him, Before the cock crow twice, thou shalt deny me thrice. And when he thought thereon, he wept’ (Mark 14:65–72).

Caravaggio has combined elements from all three denials in a single image. Behind the figures, a reddish-brown smudge and some scattered flecks of brighter pigment suggest the fire by which Peter warms himself, damp logs spitting sparks into the air. On the left, his face entirely in shadow, stands one of Caiaphas’s guards. He looks like a dim memory of the malign soldier in the much earlier Betrayal of Christ, which had shown the moment directly before Peter’s threefold denial. This soldier’s red shirtsleeve is indicated in a few summary strokes of red paint with swiftly dashed-in highlights. A wedge-shaped piece of light fragments and disperses in the darkness of his armour. His face and hands are a blur. Beside him, a single girl stands in for both maids challenging Peter. She stares intently at the soldier while pointing at Peter with a half-sketched hand.

The most eloquent figure in the picture is Peter himself, his bald head creased with lines and his face carrying an expression of deep, glassy-eyed self-recrimination. He points both of his own hands towards himself, as if to complete the triple accusation. He denies Christ and hates himself in the same moment. A tear wells out of a corner of his half-hidden right eye. He is the embodiment of saddened guilt, a man who knows he has done wrong and can hardly bear to confront himself.

Against the odds, it is a moving and powerful image. Caravaggio has drawn on all his long-practised ingenuity. But his strategies are those of evasion. Crop the figures to extreme close-up, to avoid problems of anatomical articulation. Arrange the faces at odd or oblique angles, to obviate the need for accurate depictions of human physiognomy. Smother any awkward areas in blankets of shadow. Wherever gleams of illumination do pierce the darkness, they reveal the imprecision of the painter’s touch. His draughtsmanship, the way he draws with the brush, has collapsed altogether. Peter’s hands are like flesh-coloured mittens, his left thumb so botched it resembles the claw of an animal. Light flaring in darkness had once been Caravaggio’s signature, the source of all his pictorial magic. Now it exposes his illness and incapacity, and shows us how that magic has evaporated.

Only one other painting survives by Caravaggio’s hand. Darker still than The Denial of Peter, and yet more abbreviated in style, The Martyrdom of St Ursula is his last picture. Once more, a group of fragmentary figures has been arranged in a frieze-like composition within the shallowest of shadowy spaces. There is almost no light at all, and very little sense of scene or background, save for some shadowy drapery intended perhaps to signify the inside of a tent. It is a picture so entirely lacking in the connective tissue of illusion that it is like language without conjunctions or prepositions: killer’s face, hands; shocked