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the Contarelli Chapel and tried to imagine how he could put everything he believed about art and human nature, everything he had seen and learned and suffered, into two widely separated and resonant moments from the life and death of Saint Matthew.
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    By all accounts, including the mute but incontrovertible testimony of the X-rays that reveal the various versions and revisions of the Contarelli paintings, Caravaggio did not have an easy time of it. To begin with, Cardinal Mathieu Cointrel, or Matteo Contarelli, who had endowed the chapel and died years before Caravaggio was hired to complete it, left a series of elaborate directions as a sort of addendum to the contracts with the earlier artists who had been commissioned to carry out what the French cardinal had in mind. His plans included, first, a scene of Saint Matthew in his countinghouse, dressed for business and surrounded by the tools of the tax collector’s trade. These specifications stated that Matthew should be rising from his desk and going out into the street, from which Christ—who had been passing by with a group of his disciples—had called to him and summoned him from his old life into a new existence.
    The cardinal’s vision of how Matthew’s martyrdom should look was even more detailed. The scene should be set in a temple, which should include an altar with from three to five steps. Matthew was to be shown in the process of being murdered by a group of soldiers, assassinated while celebrating mass, depicted at the very moment at which he had just been wounded and had fallen, or was falling but was not yet dead. And all this was to be observed by a crowd of men, women, and children, old and young, each one responding to the tragedy with pity, terror, and disgust.
    With characterisitic bravado, Caravaggio began with the more challenging and complex scene of the martyrdom—and almost immediately ran into trouble. Perhaps the cardinal’s emphasis on the design of the temple pressured or guided the painter into designing an early version in which the figures were dwarfed, and frozen in place, by the architectural grandeur of their surroundings. Marching in, with his sword drawn, from the left of the composition, the executioner looks more like a warrior in a processional on a Greek vase than the simultaneously frenzied and purposeful hands-on assassin who would appear in the finished work.
    In another attempt, Caravaggio modeled his composition after Raphael and focused on the crowd and its response—a woman who has raised her hand to her face, a little boy slipping beween the legs of a soldier who turns his back to us and bisects the painting much as the angel did in The Rest on the Flight into Egypt . But the static, stopped-time quality of The Rest on the Flight into Egypt was not what Caravaggio wanted, and so he left off work on the martyrdom and turned to the less crowded and turbulent scene in which Matthew is extracted from the countinghouse and transformed into the messenger of a new religion.
    In The Calling of Saint Matthew, we can see Caravaggio finding the inspiration and the courage to reinvent history and tradition by returning to the stark simplicity of the Gospels, to reimagine an iconic text according to his own experience, to bring the sacred down from the realm of the eternal and the ethereal into the temporal and earthly, and to exchange his contemporaries’ fantasy of how the world looked in Jesus’s era for the observable reality of his own surroundings and his own time. The scene in Matthew’s countinghouse recalls The Cardsharps . More boys in plumed hats and striped doublets are gathered around yet another table again for reasons involving money, though their business is less obviously suspect. It’s almost as if Caravaggio realized that the solution to his dilemma was to picture Jesus appearing to the con men in the earlier painting. And the grifters’ stupefaction could hardly