L'Adoration des bergers

Caravaggio painted this in Messina in 1609, a year before he died, and by then he was a fugitive. He had killed a man in a brawl in Rome and fled south, moving through Naples, Malta and Sicily one step ahead of his troubles. The Capuchin friars in Messina were among the few patrons who still wanted his stripped-down, unglamorous religious pictures. There is no palace and no crowd of angels here. Mary lies exhausted on the ground of a bare stable, the newborn held loosely against her, while the shepherds lean in from the shadows. A single raking light picks them out of near-total darkness. It hangs today in the regional museum of Messina, the city it was made for.