The Flagellation of Christ

Caravaggio reached Naples in 1606 as a wanted man. He had killed someone in a brawl in Rome and fled south with a death sentence hanging over him, and the paintings he made in that first Neapolitan year carry the weight of it. Tommaso de Franchis, a local nobleman, commissioned this one for his family chapel in San Domenico Maggiore. Three torturers work on Christ in the dark, one hauling him forward by the hair, another kicking his leg out from under him so the body sags off balance. There is no crowd, no architecture, almost no setting at all, just a shaft of light hitting the pale figure and the men bent over their task. Caravaggio arrived unknown in the city, and altarpieces like this made him the most talked-about painter in Naples within months.