St Jerome 1607 Oil on canvas 117 x 157 cm St John Museum, La Valletta This picture of the holy scholar was made for Ippolito Malaspina, a Maltese knight whose coat of arms is on the wooden panel to the right. He was connected by marriage to Caravaggio's patron Ottavio Costa and was a confidant of the Grand Master, who may have been used as the model for the saint (similarly Van Dyck was to use the sister of the Queen of England as model for the Madonna). The saint does indeed look like the knight in a recently discovered portrait by Caravaggio, who has been identified by some as Wignacourt himself. The composition is planned in terms of triangles. One rises from the table to the saint's head, another has its apex at the cardinal's hat on the wall to the left, a third recedes to the bedstead at the back on the right. This simple design helps convey an idea of simplicity. St Jerome has no halo, his workbench is rudimentary, he does not own any folios, he has one candle to see by, a crucifix to meditate on, a stone to beat against his chest, and a skull to remind him of his mortality. He is partly naked because he lives an eremitical life in the desert of Judaea. A steady light shines on his torso and picks out the red cloak round his legs. The source of the light is outside the picture, and can be interpreted as Christ, Light of the World
St Catherine of Alexandria 173 x 133 cm Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Madrid The painting formerly belonged to Cardinal Del Monte, one of the artist's patrons. Here we see a single female figure in an interior devoid of architectural allusions. The image appears with a boldness and an immediacy that combine the nobility of the subject (St Catherine was a king's daughter) with the almost plebeian pride of the model (no doubt a Roman woman of the people, who appears on other paintings of the artist, too). The breadth of conception and realization, and the perfect mastery of a very difficult composition (the figure and objects completely fill the painting, in a subtle play of diagonals) are striking. Caravaggio here chose a "grand" noble approach that heralds the great religious compositions he would soon do for San Luigi dei Francesi. The extraordinary virtuosity in the painting of the large, decorated cloth is absorbed as an integral part of the composition. This is something his followers would not often succeed in doing, for they frequently dealt with the single components of the painting individually, with adverse effects on the unity of the whole.
The Martyrdom of St Matthew 1599-1600 Oil on canvas, width of detail: 90 cm Contarelli Chapel, San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome A boy who acts as altar-boy to the old man, whose service has been interrupted, flees screaming to the right. He is one of those expressive studies of emotion which, like the Medusa in Florence, have contributed greatly to Caravaggio's renown. Author: CARAVAGGIO Title: The Martyrdom of St Matthew (detail) , 1551-1600 , Italian Form: painting , religious
David 110 x 91 cm Museo del Prado, Madrid This painting addresses the subject of David and Goliath, which the artist repeatedly dealt with later in his career, with a perfect linearity of means and intelligence of iconographic invention. As in the early Renaissance, David is shown as the adolescent who triumphs not by his strength, but by his power of character and his faith. The oblique pose of the figure (David stands partly parallel to the picture plane) is constructed with admirable skill. Caravaggio has a particular importance for Spain, for he originated the realist and 'tenebrist' style of painting that enjoyed such development and popularity there in the work of such artists as Ribera and Zurbar?n. This mature work demonstrates the fundamentals of his art: an emphatic solidity created by a harsh contrast of light and shade; the immediacy created by staging the action right in the foreground, and eliminating all superfluous space around it (conventionally, David would have been given room to stand up, so to speak,', ', ', ', ', ', ', '); the elimination of decoration, such as colour or elegant posture, in order to concentrate on the drama alone