The Taking of Christ

Ciriaco Mattei, a Roman nobleman, paid Caravaggio 125 scudi in January 1603 for a picture of Christ seized in the garden. That entry sat in the family's account books, unread, for nearly 400 years. In 1786 a guidebook writer put the name of the Dutch painter Gerrit van Honthorst on the canvas, an inventory repeated the mistake, and Caravaggio's name came off it altogether. It was sold as a Honthorst, left Italy, and by the 1930s was hanging in the dining room of a Jesuit house on Leeson Street in Dublin, given to the priests by Marie Lea-Wilson, a doctor who had bought it years earlier. It was still on that wall in 1990 when the Jesuits asked the National Gallery of Ireland about having it cleaned. In those same years two graduate students, Francesca Cappelletti and Laura Testa, were working through the Mattei family papers, which had ended up in an archive at Recanati, and found the record of the payment. The man at the right, holding up the lantern and craning to see over the soldiers, is generally taken to be Caravaggio himself.