San Juan Bautista recostado

This is very likely the last thing Caravaggio painted, in 1610, the year he died at 38, a wanted man working his way up the Italian coast trying to win a papal pardon for killing a man in a Roman brawl. He never got it, dying of fever on a Tuscan beach. The young Baptist lounges in the dark, one arm slung around a ram, glancing back with an almost teasing look, lit by the raking light Caravaggio built his whole art on. Because it later surfaced far from Italy, carried to Argentina and then to Germany, its attribution was doubted for many years. It now hangs quietly in a private collection in Munich, one of the least seen of his final works.