A Negação de São Pedro

By the summer of 1610 Caravaggio was a wanted man, four years on the run after killing someone in a Rome street brawl, working his way up the coast in the hope of a papal pardon that never came. This is among the very last things he painted, probably finished in Naples that same year. Three heads crowd a shallow band of darkness. A soldier in armour points, a servant girl points, and Peter, caught between them, lifts two hands to his own chest as if to say who, me. The paint is thin and fast, the brushwork rougher than his earlier polish, worked wet in the dim light. Within weeks he was dead on a beach further up the coast, aged 38.