How does The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew (Caravaggio) elucidate its Analysis?
This painting marks the moment when the Mannerist orthodoxy of the late 16th century – rational, intellectual, perhaps a little artificial – gives way to the Baroque. It caused a sensation. Federico Zuccari, one of the most eminent painters in Rome and a champion of Mannerism, came to see, and sniffed that it was nothing. But the younger artists were totally won over, and Caravaggio became suddenly the most famous artist in Rome.
It takes concentration to understand that the confused melee is a victory of sainthood. Saint Matthew appears to recoil as he falls  before the naked fury of his executioner, burning in the glare of light, who withdraws his sword from the saint's chest. Around the saint are persons showing varied emotions, as required by Contarelli: terror, awe, and consternation, while an angel holds out the palm of martyrdom. Confusion about the image can be alleviated by understanding that Matthew is not quailing in fear at the executioner's strike, instead he reaches for the angel's gift. The executioner's grasp and the angel's reach are two parallel paths. Only Matthew is privy to the angelic visitation. Viewed as such, this is a painting not about a moment of general terror, but the death of a saint as the personal handshake of the divine. Italian Baroque painting and sculpture of the time commonly depicted martyrdoms not as moments of fear, but as moments of joy or ecstasy, as in for example, Bernini's Santa Bibiana.
One factor worth noting is that Caravaggio, unlike his Mannerist predecessors, has actually made a simple fact of early modern church architecture work in his favour: large cathedrals like Saint Peter's might be well lit, but small chapels like the Contarelli were not. They were, and are, dark and narrow. As Caravaggio's biographer Peter Robb puts it: "Anyone coming down the nave of San Luigi (the church which contains the chapel) would've seen the pale killer nudes looming out of the dark from a distance, in a space that seemed to open out of the wall into the church's real transept."
That said, the painting contains many references from Michelangelo, Raphael and others, which critic John Gash ascribes not so much to a need to find appropriate poses as to a desire for "a quality of monumental grandeur akin to that of the High Renaissance." The figures of the saint and the horror-struck boy on the left, for example, are borrowed "to the extent of almost 'quoting' directly" from Titian's altarpiece of The Assassination of Saint Peter Martyr in Venice.
Federico Zuccari Santa Bibiana Raphael Saint Matthew Michelangelo M Baroque High Renaissance Rome Caravaggio Mannerist Titian The Assassination of Saint Peter Martyr Bernini Venice Mannerism