The Calling of Saint Matthew

What you're looking at

A bare, dim room with a single shuttered window high on the back wall. At a table on the left sit five men dressed in the clothes of Caravaggio's Rome: slashed doublets, feathered caps, a sword at one hip. They are counting money. A youth at the far end bends over the coins on the table, not looking up; an old man in spectacles peers down at them beside him. A boy in a feathered cap turns toward the door, and a bearded man in the middle raises his left hand and points, either at himself or at the youth beside him.

At the right, two barefoot figures in plain robes have just come in. The one in front, partly hidden, is Saint Peter. Behind him, almost in shadow, is Christ, his face in profile and lit only along the edge, his right arm stretched out across the room with the hand pointing at the table.

Above Christ's hand a broad beam of light enters from the right and falls diagonally across the wall and onto the faces at the table. It is the real subject of the painting. The canvas is enormous, about 322 by 340 cm, and the figures are life size, so that a viewer standing in the chapel sees the scene at eye level, as if from just inside the door.

What is The Calling of Saint Matthew about?

The subject is from the Gospel of Matthew (9:9): Jesus, passing by, saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax office and said to him "Follow me," and Matthew got up and followed him. Tax collectors were despised as collaborators and cheats, which is why Caravaggio sets the scene in a gaming den or counting house full of men who would have been at home in the backstreets around the church.

Caravaggio paints the instant before Matthew responds, the moment the call arrives. Everything turns on the gesture of Christ's hand, which reaches across the room the way God's hand reaches toward Adam on the Sistine ceiling. Many scholars read the echo of Michelangelo's Creation of Adam as deliberate: Christ, the "second Adam" of Saint Paul's letters, calls a sinner to new life just as God called the first man into being.

Which figure is Matthew?

This is the picture's famous puzzle. The traditional reading, argued by the art historian Irving Lavin and still the consensus, identifies Matthew as the bearded man in the center, pointing to his own chest as if to say "Me?" A minority view, proposed among others by Angela Hass, makes Matthew the young man at the end of the table, still hunched over his money, with the bearded man pointing at him. The painting supports both readings, and the ambiguity is part of its power: the call reaches the whole table, and the viewer is left to wonder who will answer.

The commission

The painting hangs in the Contarelli Chapel of San Luigi dei Francesi, the church of the French community in Rome. The chapel was endowed by the French cardinal Matthieu Cointrel (Contarelli in Italian), who died in 1585 and left funds and instructions for scenes from the life of his name saint. Work stalled for years. In July 1599 Caravaggio, then known mainly for smaller pictures painted for private collectors such as his patron Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, was contracted for two large side paintings: this one and The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew opposite. He was paid in July 1600.

They were his first public commission, and they made his reputation almost overnight. Technical studies show he reworked both canvases heavily; in The Calling, Saint Peter appears to have been added at a late stage. In 1602 he painted the altarpiece between them, The Inspiration of Saint Matthew.

Light and legacy

The painting is one of the founding works of the Baroque. Its tenebrism, strong light against deep darkness, its ordinary models and its contemporary dress turned the Gospel into something happening now, in the next street. Painters across Europe absorbed it, from the Utrecht Caravaggisti to Velázquez, and the scene of figures at a table caught by a raking light became one of the most imitated compositions in seventeenth-century art. For more of Caravaggio's religious pictures, see Caravaggio paintings; The Conversion of Saint Paul shows the same idea of a sudden call, this time as a fall from a horse, and Supper at Emmaus another moment of recognition at a table.

The picture still speaks to modern viewers in a direct way. Pope Francis said that before his election, on visits to Rome, he often went into San Luigi to contemplate it, and that he recognized himself in Matthew holding on to his money.

Where to see The Calling of Saint Matthew today

The painting is still in the place it was made for, on the left wall of the Contarelli Chapel in San Luigi dei Francesi, near Piazza Navona in Rome. The chapel is at the end of the left aisle, close to the high altar, and the three Matthew canvases can be seen together from its entrance. Entry to the church is free.