Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610) was commissioned in 1599 to paint the lateral wall of the Contarelli Chapel — the side chapel reserved by the French cardinal Matthieu Cointrel — in Rome's San Luigi dei Francesi. He was in his late twenties, quarrelsome, frequently in debt; within a decade this commission would make him the most sought-after painter in Rome.

The composition looks simple and is unrepeatable. On the left wall, five men count money around a table; from the right, Christ enters the frame and points at Matthew. The painting captures not an action but a *gaze* — Matthew's expression asking, 'me?'. Caravaggio set the scene not in biblical antiquity but in his own Rome: the figures wear sixteenth-century Roman street fashion, the table belongs to a middle-class Roman home. The choice was radical — rather than distancing the sacred, he placed it in the viewer's room.

The handling of light is the real revolution. Descending diagonally from the upper right, where a windowlike opening is implied, it splits the scene into lit faces and hands left in shadow with an almost architectural force. The technique — soon labelled *tenebrismo* — was not Caravaggio's invention, but it matured in his hands into a narrative device. Ribera, Zurbarán, Rembrandt, and Vermeer all trace their treatment of light back through this canvas.

The painting still hangs on the lateral wall of the Contarelli Chapel and can be viewed for free. It is shown alongside the *Martyrdom of Saint Matthew* and, above the altar, *Saint Matthew and the Angel* — Caravaggio's triptych, completed in those same years, stands as the founding monument of Roman Baroque painting.