Incredulity of St. Thomas

Caravaggio painted the original of this scene around 1601 for a Roman collector, and it caused a stir: the risen Christ guiding the finger of doubting Thomas straight into the wound in his side, three apostles crowded shoulder to shoulder with ordinary, weathered faces. This canvas, made about 1615, is a copy after that composition, one of many that carried Caravaggio's blunt realism outward in the years after his death in 1610. The appeal is easy to feel. There is no golden glow, no distance. Salvation is examined at close range, by hands with dirt under the nails. The Uffizi version lets you stand in front of an idea that shocked Rome without traveling to the original, which now hangs far north in a palace near Berlin.