Sudden Death

The Calling of Saint Matthew

On September 17, 1599, Caravaggio finished The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew. He brought the painting — a pure vortex of senseless violence and repentance — to the sacristy of San Luigi dei Francesi and then set a date for delivery of the second of the three paintings that would be hung in the chapel of the patron saint of accountants and tax collectors: the twenty-eighth of that same month. Since the delivery of the second painting would mean the possibility of finally dedicating the chapel — consecrating it, inviting the pope to the first service in affirmation of his impartiality in the eternal conflict between Spain and France — Caravaggio signed an addendum to the contract in blood, guaranteeing that this time he really would deliver promptly. In exchange for The Calling of Saint Matthew, he would be paid the second fifty scudi of the hundred and fifty — a fortune — that he would earn for the complete furnishing of the chapel when he had delivered the third painting, for which he would be allotted more time.

According to legend, Caravaggio didn’t sleep for the eleven days it took him to finish the painting, which he certainly hadn’t begun before he signed the addendum. The models didn’t sleep either. The ones who have been identified are Silvano Vicenti, knife sharpener; Prospero Orsi, soldier; Onorio Bagnasco, beggar; Amerigo Sarzana, arse-fanner; and Ignazio Baldementi, tattooist. Though Caravaggio had the taste to use unknown men as the models for Jesus of Nazareth and Saint Peter, a serious fuss was made because the other actors in the sacred drama were petty criminals and loafers who spent their days loitering around the tennis courts of Piazza Navona. But nothing came of it, beyond the rumors that circulated about the ire of the French clergymen. The paintings were simply magnificent, the pope had already been summoned for the consecration of the chapel, and the artist was still under the ironclad protection of Cardinal del Monte and Giustiniani.

The third painting, which he delivered much later and which was called Saint Matthew and the Angel, would be judged intolerable by the clergymen: in it, the saint is presented as a befuddled beggar; an angel guides the hand with which he writes the Scripture. It was returned. This was the first of many rejections that Caravaggio would receive for painting whatever he felt like painting and not what was expected of him by his patrons and the city’s enlightened circles. He had to redo it and was spared further trouble only because Giustiniani bought the painting spurned by the French Congregation. His Saint Matthew and the Angel was the best painting in a triptych of masterpieces, and the crown jewel of Giustiniani’s collection. Today it can be seen only in photographic form: it was in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin when it was bombed by the Allies in 1945.

The Calling of Saint Matthew measures one hundred and twenty-seven inches by one hundred and thirty inches. It’s a nearly square painting that — like the Martyrdom and Saint Matthew and the Angel—should really have been a fresco, but since Caravaggio was an artist with a method and his method required a dark room, controlled sources of light, and models who acted the scene instead of just posing, he had his way.

The artist couldn’t have crossed the piazza carrying this painting himself, since the thing was essentially a wall, but because the delivery meant the onset of celebrations for the consecration of the chapel, it must have been a procession full of pomp and circumstance, befitting the artist’s irritating conception of courtesy — if his barely controlled cutthroat ways could be called courteous.

One has to imagine Caravaggio exiting his studio in the early-morning hours, after eleven sleepless nights cooped up with seven half-civilized men. The rings under his eyes, the stench, the clenched jaw of someone nearly out of his mind from exhaustion, the impatience with which he must have knocked at the door of the sacristy to ask what time he should deliver the painting.

The Calling of Saint Matthew has all of what would become the artist’s signature elements, and it was by far the most revolutionary work of art seen in a Roman place of worship since the inauguration of the Sistine Chapel. Caravaggio paid eloquent testament to Michelangelo’s fresco, which he knew well: the hand with which Jesus of Nazareth points to the tax collector quotes the one with which God almost touches the Son of Man in the upper reaches of the Vatican.

As in nearly all of Caravaggio’s subsequent sacred paintings, most of the surface of the Calling is empty, a dark room whose black walls — plainly those of his studio — are scarcely interrupted by a window with darkened panes. The single source of light isn’t visible in the painting: it’s a skylight, open just a crack above the actors’ heads. Peter and the Messiah, almost in shadow, point to the tax collector, who gazes at them in surprise in the company of four sumptuously dressed cronies busy counting coins with sinful concentration. The attire of Jesus and his fisherman is traditional: biblical robes. But the money changers look just like Giustiniani’s moneylenders and are sitting as they must have sat on the lower level of his palace, open to clients of the money-changing tables.

Caravaggio, who was not a modest man, must have announced — still seized by the fierce exhilaration of someone who’s solved a riddle — that what he was about to deliver was his best painting to date, better than Saint Catherine of Alexandria, accosting a sacristan in breeches with flattened hair. It must have been agreed that he would bring the painting at midday, when the full flock of French clergymen — and not just the half-addled old man who said the early mass — would be present in their beribboned finest.

Maybe it was the two youngest actors in the painting — Baldementi, the tattooist, and Sarzana, the arse-fanner — who hoisted up The Calling of Saint Matthew in the studio, crossed the courtyard, and, instead of going through the kitchen or scullery door as usual, carried it out by the main door, following the tyrannical instructions of a frenetic Caravaggio. Surely the rest of the actors in the painting were waiting outside, still dressed in character. The arse-fanner and the tattooist would have crossed the piazza, by now crammed with parishioners and tradesmen, to the cheers of those perhaps moved by the thought that what was happening was truly important — which it was, though they couldn’t have known it, since the future has no place in memory. The artist must have gone before them, parting the waters, puffed up with pride. Prospero Orsi, the soldier, was the uninhibited type, ill-equipped to resist fatuity and borrowed glory. Surely at some point in the crossing of the piazza he would have ordered his fellow actors to stop, and demanded that they stage the scene again in front of the painting itself.

The people at the doors of the church — the sacristan, the acolytes, the priests — must have watched the painting go by in as much of a fright as those seeing a movie projected on a wall for the first time, or with the slack-jawed fascination with which my son and I witnessed the early rollout of a high-definition television in an electronics store. The painting must have been propped against the altar as the carpenters prepared to mount it on the wall. The priests must have been uneasy — before they began to be vexed — at the presence of the boy they had so often seen wipe the shit from his little nose in the latrines of the house of the French Congregation, who was now inside the parish twice over, in the painting and in the flesh, and in banker’s attire. But this is only conjecture: specialists in the material culture of the seventeenth century continue to debate what exactly an asciugaculi did. Pay the gentleman so that they’ll leave, the cardinal of Sancy must have said nervously to the sacristan.