The Tribute Money

Of the four Gospels, only one tells this story, the Gospel of Matthew, which tradition credits to a former tax collector. In Capernaum the men who collected the Temple tax asked Peter whether his master paid it. Christ sent Peter to the lake to cast a hook, and in the mouth of the first fish he caught Peter found a silver coin, enough to pay for both of them.

Mattia Preti, still a young painter in Rome between about 1638 and 1642, shows the end of the episode, when the money changes hands. The museum notes that he had some of Caravaggio's innovations in mind. A light slants down across the figure of Christ, runs along the faces and comes to rest on the fish and the coin.

Only Christ and Peter wear the robes that tradition gave them. Everyone else is dressed in 17th-century clothes, and the setting is an interior of Preti's own day, the kind of room in which the painter and the people who would own the picture actually lived.