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in a picture designed primarily as a vehicle for the depiction of a human being gripped by sudden, strong emotion. Contrary to Bellori’s assertion that Caravaggio turned away from all artistic tradition to pursue an art rooted solely in study from life, the figure of the boy is extremely sculptural. He was painted from a model, but he also evokes that very tradition of classical statuary which, according to Bellori, Caravaggio despised. The most obvious precedent for the boy who screams in pain was the celebrated classical statue of Laocoön and his sons, wrapped in the coils of snakes, which had been excavated in Rome less than a hundred years earlier. Even the lizard may have been inspired by a classical sculpture, namely the so-called Apollo Sauroctonus, or Lizard Apollo, which is now in the Louvre but was probably in Rome in Caravaggio’s time. The reptile climbing up a tree trunk in that sculpture is shown from the same, sharply profiled angle – seen as if from above – as Caravaggio’s lizard.

The German art historian, painter and engraver Joachim von Sandrart, who travelled widely in Italy between 1628 and 1635, gave Boy Bitten by a Lizard a prominent place in the short account that he wrote of Caravaggio’s early years. To judge by its tone, he must have spoken to artists or collectors who still remembered the picture’s thrilling impact from some forty years before: ‘In the beginning, he painted many faces and half-length figures in a sharp, dry manner. One of these is that of a child with a basket of flowers and fruit, from which a lizard emerges, biting the hand of the child who begins to cry bitterly, so that it is marvellous to look at and it caused his reputation to increase notably throughout Rome.’

Sandrart mistakenly refers to the picture’s vase of flowers as a basket. Perhaps he confused its still life, in his memory, with that in the earlier Boy with a Basket. But his report vividly demonstrates the extent to which the exploits of the young Caravaggio were still remembered, still talked about, in Rome even as late as the 1630s. His informants, whoever they were, also gave him to understand its startling combination of emotional intensity and artistic naturalism as a gauntlet thrown down at the feet of Giuseppe d’Arpino and his followers: ‘Because Arpino generally painted large works in fresco, which does not in itself have the same strength of colour or the intrinsic truth of oil colours, and because Caravaggio was very excellent in the latter, he offered Giuseppe and many others a challenge which resulted in endless quarrels. This brought them to swords’ points …’ Sandrart also tells the story that Caravaggio painted a picture in the Roman church of San Lorenzo in Damaso, next to an altarpiece by Giuseppe d’Arpino, in which ‘he represented a nude giant who sticks out his tongue at Giuseppe’s work as if he wished to ridicule it.’35 The tale of the nude giant with the mischievous tongue is certainly apocryphal, nor is there any other evidence to suggest that Caravaggio and Giuseppe Cesari, the Cavaliere d’Arpino, ever came to blows (if they had, Cesari might never have lived to a ripe old age). But there is perhaps a glimmer of fire behind all the smoke. In Sandrart’s telling of the story, Caravaggio becomes far more than a disgruntled studio assistant with the nerve to walk out on his boss. He becomes a rival, someone who turns away from his former master’s style and subject matter because he has his own ideas.

The most original aspect of Boy Bitten by a Lizard is the fact that it depicts an ordinary person – someone distinguished by no particular signs of rank or status – in the grip of a strong emotion. One of the few known precedents for this lay in late sixteenth-century Bolognese art. Giorgio Vasari tells of a female painter called Sofonisba Anguissola, originally from Cremona, who created a drawing for Tommaso de’ Cavalieri – once a close friend of the great Michelangelo – in which she depicted ‘a little girl laughing at a boy who is weeping because one of the cray-fish out of a basket full of them,