Le Souper à Emmaüs

Caravaggio painted this in 1606, and it helps to know where he was. That year he had killed a man in Rome, Ranuccio Tomassoni, and fled the city with a price on his head. He had painted this same subject five years earlier, and that London version is loud, all flung arms and a heaped table, the disciples recoiling as they recognise the risen Christ. This later one is hushed. The gestures are small, the shadows deeper, the supper meagre, the colours pulled down to browns and muted greens. He even adds a tired old serving woman at the back. The story is the same instant of recognition, but a hunted man has painted it, and everything theatrical has drained out of it into something quiet and inward.