Crocifissione di san Pietro

Around 1600 Caravaggio got his first big public commission, a pair of paintings for a side chapel in the church of Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome, and they are still there today. This is one of them. By tradition Peter asked to be crucified upside down, feeling unworthy to die exactly as Christ had, and Caravaggio catches the raising of the cross mid-effort. Three laborers strain to lever it upright, one heaving from below, one pulling a rope, one pushing with his back and his bare dirty feet right in the foreground. Peter, already nailed to the wood, twists to look at the nail through his own hand. There are no angels, no glow, no crowd. Just the physical labor of killing an old man, shown with the weight and grunt of real work. Caravaggio lit it so a single hard light rakes across the bodies out of the dark, which was the thing that made him famous and imitated across Europe.