Michelangelo Merisi aka Caravaggio. He was a Baroque artist that didn’t quite fit in with the Baroque period. He was known mostly for his tenebrism, or extremely dark, shadowy style.
Today, however, I will simply point out a couple things from his piece the Call of St. Matthew.
The first question is Who is Matthew? The scene is this: Christ and another apostle (Peter?) have just entered as Matthew is counting money, he was a tax collector, after all. Jesus points to the man and says: “Him.”However, who is it exactly that Jesus is pointing toward? Accepted interpretation is that the man in the center looking up at Christ is Matthew and is pointing at himself in disbelief as if to say, “Me?!”
However, another interpretation is that that man is not pointing at himself, but at the young kid sitting to his right as if to say, “Him?!” This interpretation makes more since historically, since Matthew would not have been that old at his calling.
And if this interpretation is accepted, the whole mood of the piece changes. In the first, Matthew is faced with a decision, to follow or not…now, as good Bible readers, we already know the answer to that. However, with the second, Matthew is sitting there, still engrossed in money, and we are witnessing him the moment before his entire life changes…and he has no clue. You know that in a second, he’s going to look up and have to face a decision…but he doesn’t know that yet.
Another interesting thing about this piece is Christ’s pointed finger. It looks suprisingly similar to the hand used in the Creation of Adam by an arguably more famous Michelangelo. However, one would think the similarity would be that Christ’s finger is like that of God’s…but no, in Caravaggio’s piece, Christ’s finger is like that of Adam. Perhaps an allusion to the fact that Christ is the Second Adam…?
