手提歌利亚头颅的大卫

David has just done the impossible. He holds up the severed head of Goliath, the giant he felled with a single stone, and looks at it with something closer to calm than triumph. Caravaggio painted this around 1607, during the years he spent on the run after killing a man in Rome, moving between Naples, Malta and Sicily with a death sentence hanging over him. He returned to this subject more than once. In the more famous Roman version, Goliath's face is his own, a strange act of self-punishment. Here in Vienna the giant's head is not the painter's likeness, and the mood is lighter, the young victor more openly pleased with himself. The whole scene emerges from near-total darkness, a single fall of light catching David's shoulder and the dead man's brow.