Der heilige Matthäus und der Engel

This is the painting Caravaggio's clients sent back. In 1602 he delivered it for the altar of a chapel in the French church in Rome, and the priests refused it. The saint looked too much like a labourer: bare dirty feet thrust toward the viewer, a young angel guiding his hand across the page as if teaching a farmhand to write. Caravaggio painted a second, more decorous version that still hangs in that chapel, and this first one was snapped up by the marquis Vincenzo Giustiniani, a collector who admired exactly what the priests disliked. It passed down through his heirs to a museum in Berlin. In 1945, in the last months of the war, it burned in a fire in the city, and it survives now only in black-and-white photographs.