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Having left the Cesari studio, Caravaggio certainly needed to sell his paintings. His stay with Monsignor Petrigiani may not have lasted long. Baglione says that, soon after leaving Cesari, Caravaggio ‘tried to live by himself’ and that he painted some self-portraits at this time, lacking the funds to hire a model. ‘He also painted a boy bitten by a lizard emerging from flowers and fruits; you could almost hear the boy scream, and it was all done meticulously.’33

There are two extant versions of this subject, one in the Roberto Longhi Foundation in Florence, the other in the National Gallery, London. Technical analysis, as well as its slightly more crude and direct style, suggests that the Longhi picture was created first, probably in late 1594 or at the start of 1595.34 The handling of the drapery is more assured in the London picture, which also points to a slightly later date. Yet the very existence of this second, slightly more sophisticated variation indicates that Caravaggio had scored enough of a success with his original version to create a market for replicas.

Once again, Caravaggio paints a single figure in an interior lit by raking light. But this time he animates the figure, having him actively recoil in pain and, as Baglione says, utter an almost audible scream. The painter emphasizes the effects caused by his use of a single light source, pushing the contrast between light and dark to an unprecedented degree.

The subject is a moment of compressed drama. A young man has been unpleasantly surprised during what should have been a quiet moment of unalloyed pleasure. Reaching out towards the selection of fruit laid out on the table before him – two bright red cherries, some figs and some grapes are visible – he finds that he himself is being bitten, by a creature that has been lurking unseen. The animal, a lizard, buries its fangs into the fleshy part of his middle finger. The boy’s face, startled and flushed with the sudden consciousness of pain, is strongly illuminated. His bare shoulder and tensed right hand, from which the lizard still dangles, are thrown into sharp relief.

There is a slightly clumsily painted pink rose behind the boy’s ear, while the artist has also included a vase on the table in front of him, which is three quarters full of water and contains another rose and some stalks of flowering jasmine. Light slows and thickens to a texture like that of milk in the depths of the water. Reflections play in the convex surface of the vase, and two drops of condensation trickle down its fatly curved side. This is a piece of painting that evokes Giorgio Vasari’s description of a work by the young Leonardo da Vinci, the most famous painter to have worked in Caravaggio’s home town of Milan – a picture of the Virgin ‘in which, besides the marvellous vividness, he had imitated the dewdrops so that the picture seemed more real than life’.

The exquisite still life is a naked demonstration of skill – a reminder that when Caravaggio painted it he was working for the open market and therefore, in a sense, crying out his wares. He included the detail to impress his mastery of certain virtuoso techniques in oil painting on his prospective Roman audience – ways of painting the reflection and refraction of light, of capturing the precise wetness and viscosity of a drop of sweat, a drop of water or a drop of blood, which could make the practice of art seem almost like a form of magic. Despite Vasari’s encomium to Leonardo, such skills were primarily associated with artists from Flanders. Jan van Eyck had been the first Renaissance master to master them, followed by Rogier van der Weyden, Hans Memlinc and others. Caravaggio’s inclusion of such effects in his own work advertised his roots in Lombardy, in northern Italy, where Flemish art was better known than in the rest of the peninsula. His handling of the vase and its reflections indicate that he was familiar with the work of later Flemish masters such as Jan Bruegel.

But the still life detail is only a detail, a grace note