San Luigi dei Francesi: The Contarelli Chapel
Why is it significant?
Walk down the left aisle of the church of the French nation to the last chapel before the altar, and give your eyes a moment. Three enormous canvases wrap around you, and in the one on the left, a beam of light cuts across a dark room toward a group of men counting money at a table.
Key Facts
| Place | San Luigi dei Francesi: The Contarelli Chapel |
|---|---|
| Address | Piazza di San Luigi de' Francesi, 00186 Roma RM, Italy |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.89960, 12.47450 |
| Part of Walk | Caravaggio's Rome: Masterpieces, Brawls and a Killing |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk down the left aisle of the church of the French nation to the last chapel before the altar, and give your eyes a moment. Three enormous canvases wrap around you, and in the one on the left, a beam of light cuts across a dark room toward a group of men counting money at a table.
The chapel was paid for by a French cardinal, Matthieu Cointrel, Contarelli in Italian, who died in 1585 and left money for scenes from the life of his namesake, Saint Matthew. The project stalled for years. In 1599 it went to Caravaggio, his first public commission, and in 1600 the Calling and the Martyrdom of Saint Matthew were unveiled. Almost overnight he became the most discussed painter in Rome.
In the Calling, Christ enters from the right, half hidden behind Saint Peter, and points with a languid hand that echoes Michelangelo's Adam on the Sistine ceiling. The light in the painting falls from the same direction as the real window above the altar, so the scene seems lit by the church itself. At the table, dressed in the latest fashions of 1600, the tax collectors look up. Which one is Matthew? The bearded man pointing at himself, as if to say, who, me?... or the young man slumped at the end, still counting coins? Scholars argue about it to this day.
Even here he had trouble. His first altarpiece for the centre, Saint Matthew and the Angel, showed the saint as a bald, bare-legged peasant, with an angel guiding his hand like a schoolboy's. The clergy refused it, and Caravaggio painted the more dignified version you see now. The rejected one ended up in a Berlin museum... and was destroyed at the end of the Second World War, in 1945.
Now look into the Martyrdom on the right. Behind the killer, a bearded man with a pained face peers out of the crowd: it is generally recognised as a self-portrait of Caravaggio, aged about twenty-nine, watching a murder. Six years later he would commit one. For the last stop, walk east past the Pantheon and on to Via del Corso, to a family palace that still keeps two of his earliest masterpieces.