Saint Francis in Meditation

By 1606 Caravaggio was a wanted man. He had killed someone in a fight in Rome that May, a death sentence hanging over him, and he worked on the run, in borrowed rooms and safe houses. This Saint Francis kneels in a rough brown Capuchin habit, a skull cradled in his hands, the whole scene pulled out of darkness by a single low flame. It is close to the penitent solitude the painter himself was living through. Two nearly identical versions of this composition survive, one here at the Capuchin church in Rome and one in the Palazzo Barberini, and scholars still argue over which came from Caravaggio's own hand and which is an early copy.