Caravaggio’s Paintings, Read Like Films: Light, Color and the Emotions They Carry

Caravaggio’s lighting: what the sources actually say

The word for his lighting is tenebrism, from the Italian tenebroso, darkened: chiaroscuro pushed until most of the frame sits near black. The definitions, and the film side of the family tree, are in Chiaroscuro in Film. How he built it is less documented than the legend. No letter of his describes a studio, and the two writers who do were at very different distances from him.

Giulio Mancini wrote between about 1614 and 1621, a few years after Caravaggio’s death, and his notes stayed unpublished until 1956. In Keith Christiansen’s translation for the Metropolitan Museum: “a characteristic of this school [of painting] is to use a focused light source from high up, without reflections, as though in a room with a [single] window and the walls painted black.” He is describing a school of painters, the black room is an “as though”, and he goes on to call the result “unnatural”. It is still the closest thing to a lighting diagram that survives.

Giovan Pietro Bellori, born in 1613 when Caravaggio was already dead, wrote the version everyone quotes in 1672: the figures set in “l’aria bruna d’una camera rinchiusa”, the brown air of a closed room, under “un lume alto, che scendeva a piombo”, a high light that fell straight down on the main part of the body and left the rest in shadow.

Hand that to a gaffer and it’s a complete plan: one hard source, high and to the side, no bounce because the walls eat it, and nothing on the background, so the background goes black on its own.

Caravaggio’s style: a dark ground, scratched lines, a short palette

The most useful single document on how a Caravaggio is built is Larry Keith’s “Three Paintings by Caravaggio” in the National Gallery Technical Bulletin (1998). Under Boy Bitten by a Lizard he found “a red-brown ground made up predominantly of calcite, earth pigments and a little lead white”, a layer “of great importance in providing a ready made middle tone in much of the painting of flesh and hair.”

So the ground is doing the half-tone: he paints the lights opaque, lays the darks on thin and lets the brown in between turn the form. In the late London Salome, some of what looks like bare ground is “priming-coloured brown paint applied near the end”, so the painter was faking his own shortcut. Bellori said it outright of the Malta Beheading, where Caravaggio “lasciò in mezze tinte l’imprimatura della tela”, left the priming of the canvas as the half-tones.

Keith describes “lines incised freehand into the still malleable priming in many mature works”, made “to fix the location of the figures within the composition, and also to help models to resume their established poses in subsequent sittings.” They’re blocking marks, the tape on a stage floor that tells an actor where to stand, and they are also why the lens theory, argued by David Hockney in 2001 and the restorer Roberta Lapucci in 2009, is not needed: nothing optical has been found in his paint.

No firmly attributable drawing survives, in Keith’s phrase; the drawing happened in paint, right on the canvas. The palette is short and earthy, flesh built from red earths, cinnabar and lake in lead white, in the survey of his Roman works edited by Rossella Vodret (2016). Bellori says he kept clear blue air out of his pictures and used black for grounds, depths and even flesh. Vittorio Storaro, who shot a television film of Caravaggio’s life, saw it with a cinematographer’s eye: “I noticed that he used blacks, orange to red colors, yellows, some whites, and very rich green tones, but you never see blue in his paintings. So I also completely avoided the use of blue.” One of the ten paintings below pushes back on him a little.

How to read a Caravaggio like a film

Scorsese explained what hooked him in conversations with Andrew Graham-Dixon in December 2005: “Initially I related to the paintings because of the moment that he chose to illuminate in the story . . . he was choosing a moment that was not the absolute moment of the beginning of the action, it’s during the action, in a way. You sort of come upon the scene midway and you’re immersed in it.” And then: “It was like modern staging in film.”

Paul Schrader had shown him the paintings while they were making Taxi Driver, and for The Last Temptation of Christ, Scorsese said, “The idea was to do Jesus like Caravaggio.” The filmmakers who followed, from Pasolini to Jarman, are in Caravaggio to Virgil Abloh.

The three figures below answer a crew’s questions for all ten at once: where the key comes from, how close the camera stands, and which second of the story he picked. After them, each painting gets a section for whatever it does that the others don’t.

Boy Bitten by a Lizard01 / 10 · c.1594–95 · key high left · black 49%

Medusa02 / 10 · 1595–98 · key left · black 40%

Judith Beheading Holofernes03 / 10 · 1599–1602 · key left, a little high · black 64%

The Calling of Saint Matthew04 / 10 · 1599–1600 · key high right, off-frame · black 75%

The Conversion of Saint Paul05 / 10 · 1600–01 · key from above · black 57%

The Supper at Emmaus06 / 10 · 1601 · key high left · black 66%

The Taking of Christ07 / 10 · 1602 · key high left; lantern dark · black 78%

The Entombment of Christ08 / 10 · 1600–04 · key high left · black 64%

The Beheading of Saint John09 / 10 · 1608 · key high left · black 42%

David with the Head of Goliath10 / 10 · 1606–10 · key high left · black 77%

1. Boy BittenBoy
2. MedusaMedusa
3. JudithJudith
4. CallingCalling
5. PaulPaul
6. EmmausEmmaus
7. TakingTaking
8. EntombmentEntomb
9. BeheadingBaptist
10. DavidDavid

Nine of the ten are lit from the left or from straight above, and the exception is the most famous one.

Line them up by the instant he picked and half of them sit in the middle of the action, Scorsese’s “midway”, while only one waits before it.

Rome, 1592–1599: the first close-ups

Caravaggio was baptised in Milan on 30 September 1571 and trained there under Simone Peterzano. He was in Rome by the mid-1590s, and by the later 1590s he was living in Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte’s palace, Palazzo Madama, painting single figures and heads at close range.

Boy Bitten by a Lizard

The National Gallery dates its picture about 1594–5 and calls a second version, in the Fondazione Longhi in Florence, “a high-quality replica … considered by many to be by Caravaggio himself.”

1. The flinch

   The bite has already happened. The fingers are still in the air, the shoulder has jerked up, the brows are knotted and the mouth is open on the start of a yelp. A tenth of a second later he would be on his feet.

2. The key

   Light comes high from the left, lands hardest on the bare shoulder and lays a pale wedge across the wall behind his head.

3. The far cheek

   The far side of the face turns on the red-brown of the ground.

4. The shirt

   The shirt is a different white from everything else, cooler and flatter, and Keith found out why: it is painted in “a mixture of oil and egg tempera, a medium which produced a cooler and more opaque white.”

5. The carafe

   Caravaggio paints the flinch, the frame a stills photographer keeps, from close enough to touch the carafe.

What it makes you feel is the jolt, and right behind it the embarrassment of the pose: half of it is theatre, and he has been caught in it.

Medusa

It’s a real ceremonial shield, canvas laid over convex wood, about 58 cm across, a gift from Cardinal del Monte to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Ferdinando de’ Medici, and now in the Uffizi.

It’s one head and nothing else, square-on, which on a film set is an insert, and it comes after. The head is already off, blood falling from the neck in strings, and she’s still screaming, eyes wide, aware. A horror film holds on the face exactly here, one beat past the cut.

Light from the left throws the head’s shadow across the green on its right, so the head seems to stand off the shield. A 2005 technical study found gilding on the upper part, which its authors relate to “an abandoned experiment to give the painting a mirror-like reflecting effect”: Perseus killed Medusa by watching her in a polished shield, and Caravaggio seems to have tried to build the mirror in. It is the least black of the ten, because the dark here is green.

The picture works on you the way the myth says she did: a face screaming at you that you cannot stop looking at, with fear and fascination in the same look.

Judith Beheading Holofernes

He painted it about 1599 for the banker Ottavio Costa, who forbade copies, and it was seen so little afterwards that it only resurfaced in 1951.

This one is staged like theatre, the figures cut at the thigh and spread flat across the frame like a frieze, with a red curtain across the top for a proscenium. The camera never moves in. It watches from a good seat while the blade is halfway through the neck and Holofernes’s eyes are still alive, and the light rakes in from the left along his torso and her white blouse, so nothing is lit that doesn’t belong to the act.

When Christiansen examined the canvas he found that the head of Holofernes “had been shifted from its initial position”, the eyes, nose and mouth first laid in somewhere else, which makes it a reshoot of the most important close-up in the frame.

The feeling lives in the gap between her arms and her body: revulsion in the lean, resolve in the straight arms that keep going anyway, and in the old servant Abra’s fists on the sack, the readiness for what comes next.

The public commissions, 1599–1604

On 23 July 1599 Caravaggio signed the contract for his first large public commission, two canvases on the life of Saint Matthew for the Contarelli Chapel in San Luigi dei Francesi, finished within a year.

The Calling of Saint Matthew

It’s 322 × 340 cm and still in the chapel. Christ calls the tax collector Levi, by tradition the bearded man pointing at his own chest.

This is the exception, the one lit from the right. In Storaro’s description, “There is a beam of light that goes from the top to the bottom of the painting, dividing it into two parts.”

1. The room

   The camera sits at table height, as if it had pulled up a chair. Five men at the table on the left, Christ and Peter standing at the right, a gap of dark between them, and across it a hand.

2. The key

   The key comes high from the right, from beyond the frame above Christ’s head, and lays a hard diagonal edge across the back wall that runs down toward the table.

3. The window

   The painted window in the middle of that wall lights nothing. It is set dressing; the real key is an off-screen source the audience never sees.

4. The hand

   The call has been made and the answer has not come.

5. Me?

   The bearded man points back at himself.

6. The lean

   The boy in the plumed hat leans in.

7. The coins

   The two at the end of the table are still counting money and have not looked up. Every face at the table gets its own reaction, half a second before anyone moves.

The source is off-screen: a 2010 computational study by David G. Stork and a colleague put it “a few meters outside the frame of the painting.” The light is the holy thing in the scene, and the men at the table are afraid of it and drawn to it at the same time.

The Conversion of Saint Paul

Tiberio Cerasi, treasurer-general to Pope Clement VIII, commissioned it in 1600 for his chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo, and the canvas, 230 × 175 cm, was finished by November 1601.

There’s no Christ in the frame, no angel, no visible source, just light falling from above, nearly vertical, on the piebald flank of the horse, on Paul’s face and on his open arms, and that light is the only visitor.

The horse fills two thirds of the frame and becomes the set. Paul lies foreshortened at the bottom edge, head toward us, arms up, as if he had fallen into the lens, eyes shut. The old groom looks down at the horse, unbothered. Two of them are in an ordinary working day, and the third is on the ground inside a vision.

The open arms carry the picture: the moment a man stops resisting and lets something change him.

The Supper at Emmaus

He painted it in 1601 for Ciriaco Mattei, and it is now in the National Gallery, London. Christ is young and beardless here, a stranger until the bread is blessed. Its light, hard and high to one side with a pale table catching it, is the top light the cinematographer Robert Richardson is known for, from Casino to Tarantino’s Kill Bill.

1. The near edge

   The deepest staging of the ten. The camera sits at the near edge of the table and three things come through the picture plane at it. A director stages into the lens like this to pull the audience into the room.

2. One: the chair

   The left disciple’s chair, pushed back toward us.

3. Two: the arm

   The right disciple’s arm, flung out toward the lens.

4. Three: the basket

   The basket of fruit hanging over the table’s edge, in the National Gallery’s words “teetering dangerously”.

5. The blessing

   It is the instant of recognition. Christ’s hand is raised over the bread, one disciple grips his chair to stand, the other throws his arms wide, and the innkeeper, who does not know whom he is serving, just looks.

6. The halo, inverted

   The key comes high from the left and throws the innkeeper’s shadow onto the wall behind Christ, so the lit face sits against a patch of dark. Caravaggio has turned the halo inside out.

Keith found bare ground left showing in the carpet’s pattern and in the shade of the goblet, the brown doing the half-tone again. He painted the subject again in 1605–06, a canvas now in the Brera in Milan, and in it the gestures shrink and the dark closes in.

The feeling is the second of recognition: awe in the two disciples, blank incomprehension in the innkeeper, and the basket about to fall, holding the whole scene in the present tense.

The Taking of Christ

He painted it in 1602 for Ciriaco Mattei, and then it was lost for centuries, until in 1990 Sergio Benedetti of the National Gallery of Ireland recognised it in the dining room of the Jesuit house on Leeson Street in Dublin, hanging as a Gerrit van Honthorst. It is on loan to that gallery now.

A crowd in medium close-up, cut hard on both sides, heads running in a chain from John fleeing out of frame to a man at the far right holding up a lantern. The National Gallery of Ireland says that in that man’s features “Caravaggio portrayed himself, aged 31, as an observer of events”, so the director is in the shot, holding a light.

And the light he’s holding does almost nothing. The highlights, above all the soldier’s black armoured arm flaring like a mirror in the middle of the picture, come from a key high on the left, outside the frame. The lantern is a practical, a source in the frame that gives the scene a reason while the real key works from somewhere else.

John’s red cloak arcs over the group, and Christ wears red under a mantle that reads in reproduction as deep blue-green. Storaro’s “you never see blue” holds for most of the work, and this mantle is where you’d argue with him.

Fear runs ahead in John’s open mouth, Christ’s hands are laced in surrender at the bottom of the frame, Judas’s forehead is furrowed with guilt, and the man with the lantern, the painter’s own face, has come only to watch.

The Entombment of Christ

Girolamo Vittrice commissioned it, about 1600–04, for his family chapel in the Chiesa Nuova; it is 300 × 203 cm. It went to Paris in 1797 under the Treaty of Tolentino, came back in 1817 and has been in the Vatican Pinacoteca since.

1. The low camera

   The camera is low, level with the stone slab, whose corner juts out of the picture toward us.

2. The slab

   We are standing in the tomb, and the body is being lowered to us.

3. The fan

   The figures stack in a fan from the dead arm at the bottom to the raised hands of Mary Cleophas at the top, lit from high left down the body and the white shroud, against a black with no landscape, no cross, no sky.

4. The look

   Nicodemus, bent under the legs, turns his face out of the picture and looks straight at us. Among the living in these ten paintings he is the only one who does, and he does it at the moment he needs help with the weight.

It is a painting about weight: grief as something carried, the bearers’ legs braced under it, the hands that keep holding, and Nicodemus asking you, with one look, to take some of it.

1606–1610: the run

On 28 May 1606 Caravaggio and three companions got into a brawl in Rome over a tennis match, the Metropolitan Museum says, with “likely gambling debts involved”, and Ranuccio Tomassoni died of his wounds. Under a capital sentence, Caravaggio fled to Naples, then Malta, where the Order of Saint John made him a knight in July 1608 and, after another brawl and an escape from prison, expelled him that December “like a rotten and diseased limb”, in Britannica’s English. Sicily and Naples again followed. He died at Porto Ercole on 18 July 1610, aged 38, of an illness the National Gallery says was “perhaps malaria”.

The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist

He painted it in 1608 for the Oratory of Saint John in Valletta, where it still hangs: about 360 × 520 cm, the largest canvas of his career, and the one with the signature in the blood.

For once the set is bigger than the cast. The action is pushed into the lower left, and everything else is wall, an arch, a hanging rope, and a barred window where two prisoners watch. The sword has done its work, but the head isn’t off yet, and the executioner is reaching behind his back for the knife to finish it: the pause in the middle of a killing, when everyone in the yard is waiting.

There’s no shaft of light in this one. The light comes high from the left, broad and dim, the wall glows a dull ochre, and the figures are modelled softly. The surface is thin and fast, the brown ground carrying the wall, and the dark here, this late, is a huge empty brown.

The wall carries the feeling, an emptiness that still holds what happened in it, while the executioner and the jailer go about a job and the prisoners watch it like an audience.

David with the Head of Goliath

The Galleria Borghese dates it “1606-07 or 1609-1610”, and it was in Scipione Borghese’s collection by 1613. In 1650 Iacomo Manilli was the first to write that Caravaggio “wished to portray himself” in the face of the giant. The blade carries the letters “H.AS O S”, read since Maurizio Marini in 1987 as Humilitas occidit superbiam, humility kills pride. In 1985 Maurizio Calvesi proposed that the painting was sent to Rome as a plea for a papal pardon. Another version, in Vienna, is the painting Virgil Abloh used for Westside Gunn’s Pray for Paris cover in 2020.

David comes out of the black from the left, arm out, holding the head toward us. Behind him there is nothing at all. The light from high left takes half his face, his chest and the white shirt, then falls on Goliath from the same side: the wound in the forehead, one eye half open, the teeth.

This moment is long after the fight, with no triumph and no crowd, one lit figure in a frame that’s three quarters black. Melancholy is the temperature of the whole picture, David’s face closer to pity than to victory, and if the head really is the painter’s own face, sent to Rome to ask for a pardon, the regret in it is his.

Of the ten, the Conversion of Saint Paul does the most with the least, one light from above and a body that gives in to it. Tetra’s SURRENDER, The Interval of Becoming takes the same pose, head thrown back, eyes shut, chest opened to a light from above, and turns it to cold colour: the skin burns blue-white against a cobalt field, and the lower band drops into black around a red profile.

Frequently asked questions

What is Caravaggio’s lighting technique called?

Tenebrism, from the Italian tenebroso, darkened: the extreme end of chiaroscuro, with most of the frame near black, one high light on faces and hands, and little or no reflected fill. Its oldest description, by Giulio Mancini, compares it to a room with one high window and black walls.

Where can you see Caravaggio’s paintings?

Rome has the most in place: the three Saint Matthew canvases in San Luigi dei Francesi, the Cerasi Chapel pair in Santa Maria del Popolo, and works in the Galleria Borghese, Palazzo Barberini and the Vatican Pinacoteca. The National Gallery in London has three (Boy Bitten by a Lizard, The Supper at Emmaus, Salome), the Uffizi has the Medusa, Dublin has The Taking of Christ, and the Beheading of Saint John is still in its oratory in Valletta.

Did Caravaggio use a camera obscura?

No physical evidence shows it. No lens, mirror or light-sensitive layer has been found in his paint, and the lines scratched into his grounds are placement marks for figures and for models returning to a pose.

Read next

• Chiaroscuro in Film: from Caravaggio to The Godfather
• Caravaggio to Virgil Abloh: the lineage
• Storaro: the meaning of color
• Scorsese’s red

References

• Larry Keith, “Three Paintings by Caravaggio”, National Gallery Technical Bulletin 19 (1998).
• Keith Christiansen, “Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi) (1571–1610) and his Followers”, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, Metropolitan Museum of Art (2003); and “Beneath the Surface”, The Brooklyn Rail (2019).
• Giovan Pietro Bellori, Le vite de’ pittori, scultori et architetti moderni (Rome, 1672), as quoted in Facchinetti, Fondazione Creberg.
• F. Bologna, “Merisi, Michelangelo, detto il Caravaggio”, Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani 73 (2009).
• David M. Stone, “Signature Killer: Caravaggio and the Poetics of Blood”, The Art Bulletin 94:4 (2012).
• M. Favaro et al., technical study of the Uffizi Medusa, Journal of Cultural Heritage 6 (2005), CNR record.
• Rossella Vodret (ed.), Caravaggio’s Works in Rome: Technique and Style (2016).
• Collection records: National Gallery, London; National Gallery of Ireland; Galleria Borghese; Vatican Museums; Gallerie Nazionali, Barberini.
• Andrew Graham-Dixon, Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (2010); Scorsese passages as reproduced by LACMA Unframed.
• Bob Fisher, “Vittorio Storaro on Caravaggio”, MovieMaker (2007).