The Calling of Saint Matthew

The Calling of Saint Matthew, painted by Battistello Caracciolo in 1627 and now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, takes as its subject the moment Christ calls the tax collector Matthew from his table to become an apostle — a passage (Matthew 9:9) that Caravaggio had made one of the most celebrated paintings in Rome with his version in the Contarelli Chapel. Caracciolo's engagement with this subject in 1627, twenty years after Caravaggio's death, shows the enduring vitality of the Caravaggist legacy in Naples. The Met's acquisition of this work as representative of the Neapolitan school reflects the museum's systematic collecting of Italian Baroque painting in the twentieth century. Caracciolo by this date had evolved his language: the chiaroscuro remains dramatic but the figural types are more generalized, the composition more confidently structured. The narrative moment — a figure interrupted at worldly business by a transformative call — was a powerful devotional image of conversion applicable beyond the apostolic narrative.

Oil on canvas with a multi-figure composition structured around a strong diagonal of light cutting across a dark setting. Matthew's response to the unseen Christ — or the pointing gesture identifying him — is the compositional pivot. Paint handling is accomplished and assured, reflecting a mature practitioner's control of the Caravaggist vocabulary.