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Caravaggio’s painting, like that priest’s sermon, has also provoked ribald comments and has inevitably been susceptible to erotic interpretation. That ambiguity has perhaps always been part of its meaning. To borrow a phrase applied to Caravaggio’s work as a whole by his contemporary Cardinal Ottavio Paravicino, it is a picture that seems poised ‘between the sacred and the profane’ – in this case, concealing a devout message within an apparently profane, secular subject. To those who would be blind to its spiritual dimensions, the painting was designed to remain a merely enchanting parade of sensual delights – a picture of a boy with a puzzlingly languorous expression on his face, carrying a basket of fruit. But to those who knew how to see through the sensual surface, the boy reveals himself as the Groom in the Song of Songs and therefore as the type of the young Jesus Christ, an image at once of love and vulnerability.

He is bare from the shoulder, not only because he is rapt in symbolic love for his divine mother, but also in anticipation of his crucifixion, the sacrificial gift of love he bears to all humanity. The shadows that flicker on the wall behind him, set against the light that illuminates his face, are shadows of death from which his own image, and with it the promise of eternal life, radiantly emerges. The same Christian message, that eternal life can be salvaged from the jaws of death, lurks in his basket of fruit. Withered, worm-eaten leaves of the vine contrast with ripened bunches of grapes. From death, once more, shall come life. The fading foliage is decay, transience, the passing of all things here on earth. The grapes are wine, the wine of the Eucharist that is the sacrificial blood of Christ. The picture offers not only a gift but a stark contrast of alternatives. What will you have? Death or life? Darkness or light?

BOY BITTEN BY A LIZARD

Caravaggio’s Self-Portrait as Bacchus and Boy with a Basket of Fruit are subtle and ambitious paintings, not the work of a painter likely to be satisfied with long hours and low pay working as another artist’s fruit and flower specialist. They corroborate Bellori’s assertion that Caravaggio ‘worked reluctantly’ at whatever hack work was assigned to him and ‘felt deeper regret at not being able to paint figures’.

With the Bacchus, Caravaggio asks to be taken seriously, to be recognized as a painter not only of inspiration and intelligence but of something more than that. The picture announces Caravaggio’s spirit of unruly unpredictability, and shows for the first time the face of a man quite capable of overthrowing the tired artistic conventions of his time. With the Boy with a Basket, he demands to be regarded as better than a mere still life painter, and expresses the hope that one day – one day soon – he might be allowed to try his hand at devotional pictures.

Even this early in his career, at a time when so much of his life and personality are obscure, certain things are clear. Caravaggio wants to paint the human figure and he wants to treat what, for his contemporaries, are the deepest and most serious subjects – the great Christian themes of salvation and damnation. His art is both sensually and intellectually seductive. It is carefully calculated to appeal to the more discerning and well-educated type of Roman patron – someone likely to be high up in the hierarchy of the Roman Church, keenly attuned to the subtle devotional symbolism of a picture such as the Boy with a Basket, or to respond to a secular, mythological painting like the Self-Portrait as Bacchus.

So it is no coincidence that the young Caravaggio should have gravitated towards the company of churchmen. The more he could infiltrate the higher circles of the Roman clergy, the more likely he would be to win meaningful patronage. At first he had stayed with the unsatisfactory Pandolfo Pucci, ‘Monsignor Salad’. Around the beginning of 1595, after eight months in the Cesari workshop and a spell in hospital, he lodged