The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula

This was very likely the last thing Caravaggio ever painted. In early 1610 a Genoese nobleman, Marcantonio Doria, commissioned it, and Caravaggio finished it in Naples by May. Two months later he was dead, at 38, on a beach further north. The subject is the moment the king of the Huns, having offered to marry Ursula and been refused, draws his bow and shoots her at point-blank range. Caravaggio paints the arrow already in her, her hands lifting toward the wound, all of it half-swallowed by darkness with only a few faces caught in light. Look just behind her, straining to see, and you find the painter himself, one of the last onlookers he ever put into a picture. When it reached Genoa the varnish was still wet, and left in the sun it was damaged almost at once.