The Contarelli Chapel was sensational.
Everybody flocked to see it because nothing so lifelike
and immediate had really been seen in a chapel before.
And nobody really before had ever painted large-scale religious paintings that made
the viewer feel, when they walked into the church, that these
scenes are taking place before them in contemporary reality.
And it’s this that makes these paintings so new.
The other thing of course is the effects of light and shade.
First of all in 'The Calling of Saint Matthew'; he has a single shaft of light coming in through
the window and falling on Matthew’s face. So he uses natural light but he turns it into
an astonishing symbol of divine illumination. And the other painting; the light again is
identified with the real light of the chapel, but it’s much more irrational, it’s much darker.
And Caravaggio, here for the first time really,
creates very harsh shadows of dark, black isolating light, that creates a sense
of terror around the paintings.
When he came along and made these pictures,
he was using people off the streets, and they’re very relatable.
People could come in and see that guy with his dirty feet and his messed-up little knuckly hands.
But the scene that it created was endowed
by this spiritual aura; partially to do with the light, partially
to do with the characters that he'd chosen, partly to do with the drama and the action
that he'd composed. It was about people and scenes from the here and now
that are blessed with the spirit of God.