Homer

Homer was the blind poet at the root of Greek storytelling, and painters liked to imagine him as a grand old man who saw everything except the world in front of him. Mattia Preti painted this early, around 1635, when he was a young man newly at work in Rome. Caravaggio had died about 25 years before, yet his way of pulling figures out of deep shadow was still the lesson every ambitious painter wanted. You can see Preti learning it here. The poet leans out of a dark ground, lit hard from one side, the beard and the folds of cloth catching that light while the rest sinks into brown. There is no landscape and no scene around him, just the head and shoulders of a blind man held close to us, caught as if mid-thought.