San Girolamo scrivente

Caravaggio painted this in 1607, and by then he was a man on the run, fleeing a death sentence in Rome for killing someone in a fight. He had reached Malta and was courting the Knights of Saint John, the warrior order that ran the island, hoping they would make him one of them. In the corner is the coat of arms of the knight who owned it. Jerome, the old scholar who translated the Bible into Latin, leans into the one shaft of light with his pen still moving, a skull on the books beside him. In 1984 thieves cut this canvas out of its frame in the cathedral. It was recovered two years later and now has its own room.