Ragazzo morso da un ramarro

This is one of the first things Caravaggio painted after arriving in Rome as a young unknown in the mid-1590s, still years from the church commissions that would make him famous. He was scraping by, selling small pictures of boys and fruit, and here he does something almost no one bothered with. He catches a single instant. The boy has reached for the fruit on the table, a lizard hidden among it has clamped onto his finger, and he recoils, shoulder up, mouth open, one finger still caught. Look at the glass carafe of water near his hand. You can see the window of the room and the flowers reflected and refracted in it, a passage of pure showing-off for a painter who wanted patrons to notice how closely he watched the world. He was in his early twenties when he made it, and painted a second, nearly identical version that survives in Florence.