Caravaggio’s Masterpieces: Light and Realism in Sacred Art

The Calling of St. Matthew (1600)

The Calling of St. Matthew, painted by Caravaggio in 1600, recounts the religious event when Jesus Christ enters a tavern in search of Matthew, the tax collector. Darkness envelops the room, acting as a forum of light that forms the backbone of the composition, pulling figures out of the shadows. They appear as if emerging from a dark, special, viscous magma in such a manner that the figures do not have a defined contour, and some parts are plunged into darkness with no limit to the shadows. This technique makes the faces stand out particularly well, especially the hand of Jesus pointing, which acts as the real iconographic agent of the scene.

In the scene, there is no physical movement toward the treasury, but the author has cleverly managed to create tension through the murky light. The focus from the upper right provides a diagonal to the area of darkness where Jesus Christ is located. The violent contrast between light and shadows works in that sense. Naturalism is also present in the conformation of the characters' faces.

The Entombment of Christ and Tenebrist Style

In the whole composition, there is an abundance of superb, violent foreshortening, from the hands of the three women to the body of Christ. The characters holding the body of the Lord are not distinguished as elites, but as popular people. Therefore, some leading personages of the Roman Curia protested this, saying that the apostles seemed like rustic, barbaric figures burying a man killed in combat. Compared with Raphael's Entombment, an evolutionary change is observed in Caravaggio's work in a very short time. The Renaissance master conceived his work as a sort of parade of beautiful forms, while the Tenebrist painter went so far as to paint the deformity of the feet of one of the apostles.

Technical Analysis of the 1603 Painting

This work is a painting done on wood in 1603; the center of this large canvas is occupied by the naked body of the dead Christ on a horizontal plane that divides the canvas into two tiers. The Messiah, having died, appears completely human and is the light source itself, as if his flesh were a permanent source of radiance, accompanied by the brightness of the white fabric that supports him. The realism of the body is total, emphasizing the soft flesh, the arm fallen in total neglect, the side wound which is closed and no longer bleeding, and the slightly marked imprints of the nails and toes.

The body of the Redeemer is not torn and does not show any elements or symbols of the Passion. The painter shows his mastery of the perfect study of human anatomy through this nude, specifically in the muscles and veins that show through the skin. Actually, only the title of the painting identifies the character as Christ, as it shows a dead body in all its stark reality without any sign of divinity. This viewpoint is common in the painter's work, thus increasing the power of the monumentalized twisting and crossing of the figures. This is a work that is fully dark, with the background being neutral and dark, against which the figures of the scene are cut, serving as the only focus of the painter.