La inspiración de san Mateo

This altarpiece hangs where it was meant to, above an altar in a French church in Rome, but the version we see is Caravaggio's second try. In 1602 he delivered a first painting in which a rough, barefoot Matthew struggled to write while an angel physically guided his hand, like a schoolmaster steering a slow pupil. The priests refused it. In an age of strict Counter-Reformation taste, a saint who looked like an illiterate peasant, with a boyish angel pressed too close, was more than they would accept. Caravaggio quickly painted the replacement here, keeping the drama but restoring the saint's dignity. Matthew twists up from his desk while the angel, arriving from above, counts out the Gospel on its fingers. The rejected first version ended up in Berlin and was destroyed in the Second World War, so only photographs of it survive.