Saint Matthew and the Angel

Savoldo painted this around 1530, and its real subject is light in the dark. Matthew sits writing his gospel while an angel leans in to inspire him, but Savoldo lights the room with separate small fires: the angel's own glow, a candle, and an oil lamp. Giorgio Vasari, who chronicled the painters of the age, praised Savoldo for exactly these night scenes with fires. They came decades before the young Caravaggio built a whole manner out of a single hard light in the dark, and he is thought to have studied pictures like this one. Look past Matthew into the far distance, where tiny figures gather around a bonfire beneath a lit night window.