San Francisco de Asís en éxtasis

This is thought to be the first religious painting Caravaggio ever made, done around 1595, just after he entered the household of Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte in Rome. The cardinal was his new protector, and Francis was the cardinal's name-saint, so the choice of subject was partly a thank-you. It shows the moment Saint Francis receives the stigmata, the wounds of the crucifixion appearing on his own body, but Caravaggio stages it with almost no drama. There is no blaze of heavenly light. Francis has swooned back into the arms of a young angel in the dark, more like a man fainting than a saint in glory. The light picks out only a few things, a shoulder, a face, the fold of a robe, and lets everything else fall into shadow. That habit of pulling a sacred scene down into the quiet of night was new, and he had barely begun.