Die Auferweckung des Lazarus

Caravaggio painted this in Messina in 1609 while he was a man on the run. The year before he had escaped from prison in Malta and crossed to Sicily, still under a death sentence for killing a man in Rome. A Genoese merchant named Giovanni Battista de' Lazzari commissioned it for a church here, and the fee was a thousand scudi, more than double anything Caravaggio had earned before. He gives the story its darkest possible reading. Lazarus is being hauled upright out of the tomb, his body still slack, one hand falling open toward a skull on the ground while the other reaches toward the light of Christ. Around them a crowd presses in from deep shadow. There was an old rumour that Caravaggio had a corpse dug up so his models could hold a real dead body while he worked.