David and Goliath

Caravaggio painted this around 1600, early on, while he was living under the roof of Cardinal del Monte in Rome and just starting to be noticed. He takes the familiar Bible story of the shepherd boy who killed the giant and drains all the triumph out of it. There is no crowd, no cheering, no sweeping gesture. A single light falls out of the dark onto young David as he leans over the body, gripping the severed head by the hair to tie a rope to it, his face quiet and almost businesslike. Everything else stays in shadow. That hard beam cutting across near-total blackness was Caravaggio's signature move, and here at the start of his career you can watch him testing how much of a picture he can leave in darkness and still tell you exactly what happened.