We have one of his etchings from the days when he was the pupil of the Cavalier d’Arpino, the subject of which indicates that it was made during his period of genre painting. In this etching, which is dedicated to his teacher and signed MA. I. F., we see again the motif of the Bohemian woman that he used in the painting in the Musei Capitolini, but here more elaborate. It is possible that the monochromatic work gave him the idea. It depicts a gypsy telling a young man his fortune, while between them an old man appears as an independent witness and to the left is a boy, who is pulling a purse out of the youth’s suit, with which the young man must pay the woman whose advice he requests. In the top left-hand corner are words filled with resignation: Fur. Demon. Mundus senex fraude. (A thief. The devil. The world at the hand of an old man’s ruse).
The best-known of Caravaggio’s bambocciate, though not mentioned by his biographers, is that of The Cardsharps in the Kimbell Art Museum in Texas[43]. The demonic terror within the subject, so obviously highlighted in this work, matters less than the strength of expression of the figures, which Caravaggio seems to have almost sculpted, foregoing the depiction of any surroundings. The painting, on a coarse canvas and of a relatively small size, shows half-length figures. It demonstrates a vital change in the evolution of the artist’s work, which took place following progress in Baroque art in Rome, forcing him to move beyond his Venetian experiences. Despite the fact that his earlier techniques can be seen in the fine colouring and the sweetness of the young faces, the neutral background of dark green and black, as well as the attempt to highlight the forms with light, indicate strongly the new direction that Caravaggio’s work would take.
From 1599 onwards, Caravaggio received his first commissions from the congregation of the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi, for whom he painted The Calling of Saint Matthew, The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew, and the famous Saint Matthew and the Angel. “Regarding the works created for the Cardinal del Monte in the Cantarelli chapel of the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi, Saint Matthew and the Angel could be found beneath the altar; on the right-hand side, the apostle is being called by the Redeemer and on the left he is being stabbed by his persecutor, with a crowd of onlookers.”[44] These works, which can still be found in part in that very chapel, are closely linked to the renown of the artist from Lombardy. Caravaggio’s teacher, Giuseppe Cesari, who had already decorated the ceiling of this chapel with frescos, is likely to have helped him to obtain this commission[45]. Caravaggio, who, it seems, never painted frescos, integrated his work into the completed decoration with monumental paintings set into the chapel. These canvases painted in oils did not really contribute to the budding Baroque style of the salons of the time, but the subtle technique and sombre colouring of their execution blended harmoniously with the light stucco of the space. The position of the chapel as the last on the left just before Rainaldi’s choir cupola, encouraged the painter to delve deeper into his imagination and resources. As the chapel was deliberately kept in darkness, the painter immediately set himself the task of introducing a scheme throughout the portrayals whereby the masses of light and shade and the coloured and neutral forms would be distributed between the works. In this way, only when all the works were seen together could their true effect be appreciated. A consideration for the architectonic conditions of the church building are clearly noticeable in the quieter composition of the left wall (The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew) and the scene of the right wall, which is built in a rising diagonal (The Calling of Saint Matthew), lending the chapel decorations as a whole an extremely organic integration into the building. The colouring is reduced to the strict minimum and the events are calculated in an almost authoritative manner, as is the setting of these events. On the whole, the light and colour are carefully shed on the elements that the painter chooses to stress. This realisation encouraged the artist to highlight the attributes of the figures as he had never done before, so that they almost became an artistic phenomenon.
Jakob Burckhardt explains that Caravaggio enjoyed proving to the observer that, despite all the holy events of former times, everything had happened in as ordinary a way as in the streets of end of the 16th century. He adds that Caravaggio loved nothing more than passion, whose volcanic eruption he could represent so well, even if he expressed it in numerous powerful, hideous characters[46]. This observation of the Romanesque element of the paintings positively highlight the way in which Caravaggio, and Baroque art as a whole, must have found essential. This counts as much for the representation of a being capable of arbitrary movement and its surroundings as for the use of purely sensual means, or even through the use of characteristic traits in the case of a portrait for example. It is on this that Caravaggio concentrates in his cycle of Saint Matthew in the Contarelli Chapel, much more so than in his bambocciate[47].