Christ at the Column

When this canvas came to Rouen in 1955, nobody thought it was a Caravaggio. It hung under the name of Mattia Preti, a later Neapolitan painter, and it took the eye of Roberto Longhi, the scholar who spent his life sorting real Caravaggios from copies, to argue in 1959 that the hand was Caravaggio's own. He'd have painted it around 1606, just after fleeing Rome with a death sentence over him for killing a man in a brawl. You can feel that pressure in the picture. Christ is shoved forward out of a black ground into a hard raking light, and the two men binding him to the column work at it without drama, like laborers on a job. The rope, the torso, the turned head are all lit; everything behind them stays in the dark Caravaggio built his late work around.