Caravaggio’s First Public Commission | Beyond Caravaggio | National Gallery

This church is important in the Caravaggio because it is the first public commandment. It was also expected, we were waiting to see how it would produce. In this painting of the vocation of Saint Matthew, which is the most famous, what is very surprising is the time that is sustained. The word of Christ, which is there, is pronounced, but now the time is suspended. What is Matthew going to answer? Christ makes a sign, he calls, I go or I don't go, I am or I am not. The death or martyrdom of Saint Matthew is an extremely violent moment. That is, the soldier has just hit him, we see the blood flowing from the tunic, and then now he is going to give a second blow, he is going to kill him. Here we are in the moment of death, the ultimate moment, the last moment of the life of Saint Matthew. This painting is quite dramatic. It takes a trip, it takes the major questions of existence and it makes you see. The Conte Valley Chapel was sensational. Everybody flocked to see it because nothing so lifelike and immediate had really been seen in a chapel before. And nobody really before had ever painted large-scale religious paintings that made the viewer feel, when they walked into the church, that these scenes are taking place before them in contemporary reality. And it's this that makes these paintings so new. The other thing, of course, is the effects of light and shade. First of all, in the calling of Saint Matthew, he has a single shaft of light coming in through the window and falling on Matthew's face. So he uses natural light, but he turns it into an astonishing symbol of divine illumination. In the other painting, the light again is identified with the real light of the chapel, but it's much more irrational, it's much darker. And Caravaggio here, for the first time really, creates very harsh shadows, a dark, black, isolating light that creates a sense of terror around the paintings. When he came along and made these pictures, he was using people off the streets, and they're very relatable. People could come in and see that guy with his dirty feet and his, like, messed-up little knuckle-y hands. But the scene that he created was endowed by this spiritual aura, partially to do with the light, partially to do with the characters that he'd chosen, partly to do with the drama and the action that he'd composed. It was about people and scenes from the here and now that are blessed with the spirit of God.