The Calling of Saint Matthew
Jesus points at the tax collector Matthew in a dark tavern. A sharp light falls in obliquely from the right. Caravaggio turns a sacred story into a scene with ordinary, contemporary people.
The light follows Jesus’s pointing hand – chiaroscuro used as a narrative device.
The painting is in the Contarelli Chapel in the church of San Luigi dei Francesi, the national church of the French in Rome. The chapel had been bought by the French cardinal Matthieu Cointrel, who died in 1585. His will called for images from the life of the apostle Matthew. In 1599 the commission went to Caravaggio, probably thanks to his patron Cardinal Francesco Del Monte. It was Caravaggio’s first major public commission.
Caravaggio painted two large pictures for the side walls of the chapel: The Calling of Saint Matthew and The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew. They were unveiled in 1600 and attracted great attention. The altarpiece, Saint Matthew and the Angel, was painted somewhat later. The first version of it was rejected and was destroyed in Berlin in 1945.
The picture shows Jesus calling the tax collector Matthew to follow him. Matthew and his companions sit at a table in a half-dark room counting money. They wear contemporary clothes with feathered hats and swords. Jesus stands on the right, almost hidden behind Peter. He points with a hand that recalls Adam’s hand in Michelangelo’s ceiling painting. The table, the bench and the window are simple and ordinary. The room looks more like a tavern or a counting house than a holy place.
Which figure is Matthew is actually debated. For a long time he was thought to be the bearded man in the centre pointing at himself, as if asking: “Do you mean me?” Some scholars argue instead that he is pointing at the young man at the far left, who sits hunched over the money and does not look up. The question has not been settled.
A sharp light falls in from the right, above Jesus, and illuminates the faces at the table. It does not come from the window in the picture but from an invisible source. The contrast between deep darkness and strong light is called chiaroscuro. In Caravaggio the light becomes an image of God’s grace reaching into a dark room. The beam of light runs parallel to Jesus’s arm and seems to carry his call to Matthew.
X-ray examinations show that Caravaggio changed the composition as he worked. Peter was probably added late. Caravaggio painted directly on the canvas without extensive preparatory drawings, and he often used real people as models. He was known for working quickly and for a violent life that often brought him into conflict with the law.
The picture had an enormous impact. Young painters from all over Europe came to Rome to see it, and a whole movement, Caravaggism, arose. Its influence can be seen in artists such as Rembrandt, Velázquez and Georges de La Tour. The painting still hangs in its original place and can be seen by visitors to the church. Today visitors pay a small fee to light up the chapel for a while.