Johannes der Täufer an der Quelle

By 1607 Caravaggio had a price on his head. He'd killed a man in a Rome brawl and fled south, and on Malta the Knights of the Order took him in and even made him one of their own, before he brawled again, landed in a cell, and escaped. This small panel of the young Baptist stooping to drink at a spring belongs to those unsettled years, and it has long been given to his hand. Look at the soft, worked flesh of the boy against the dark, the same modelling scholars point to in the Sleeping Cupid he painted on the island. The landscape behind has been badly damaged over the centuries. Caravaggio never saw old age. He died in 1610, still trying to win a pardon back to Rome.