The Calling of Saint Matthew

Around 1599 a young painter from Milan named Caravaggio got his first big public commission, for a side chapel in the French church in Rome, and he did something no one had quite done before. He set a Bible scene in a room that looks like a Roman tavern of his own day. The men counting coins at the table wear the slashed doublets and feathered hats you'd have seen on the street outside. A shaft of light cuts in from the upper right, and Christ's hand reaches out along it toward Matthew, the tax collector, who points at his own chest as if to ask, me? That beam isn't just painted light. Caravaggio lined it up with a real window high on the chapel wall, so at certain hours the sun in the room and the sun in the picture almost meet.