La vocazione dei santi Pietro e Andrea

For more than 300 years this hung in royal storerooms catalogued as a copy, worth almost nothing, by nobody in particular. Charles I bought it in 1637 as a Caravaggio. After his execution the Commonwealth sold it off, Charles II got it back, and somewhere in the shuffle its author was forgotten. A cleaning that began in the 1980s and finished in 2006 changed that. Under the grime the Royal Collection found the real thing: Christ reaching in from the left, calling two fishermen, one of them still gripping a large fish that seems pushed almost into our space. It belongs to Caravaggio's Roman years, around 1603, when he was painting saints as ordinary weathered men and lighting them like figures caught in a doorway.