The painting that once occupied the altar wall of the Oratorio di San Lorenzo in Palermo was stolen on the night of 17–18 October 1969 and has not been recovered. All that survives of its appearance is a colour transparency taken in 1968 and a set of large-format black-and-white glass-plate negatives produced during the painting’s last restoration in 1951.
The traditional dating places the work in 1609, during Caravaggio’s passage through Sicily. Giovanni Baglione (c. 1566–1643), writing in 1642, recorded that Caravaggio had passed through Palermo after leaving Messina; Giovan Pietro Bellori (1613–1696) expanded the claim; Francesco Susinno (c. 1670–c. 1739) placed the work squarely within the Sicilian itinerary. No document has ever surfaced attesting to Caravaggio’s physical presence in Palermo, but the biographers’ agreement seemed sufficient, and for three centuries the dating went uncontested. More recent archival research, principally by Giovanni Mendola and Michele Cuppone, has unsettled it. A contract dated 5 April 1600, registered in the house of the Sienese merchant Fabio Nuti, records a commission from Caravaggio for a painting ‘with figures’, specifying dimensions of twelve Roman palmi in height by seven or eight in width. The height corresponds closely to the Palermo canvas. Nuti’s commercial network connected him to a member of the Compagnia di San Francesco, the confraternity that owned the oratory, and further archival findings confirm financial payments from Nuti to Palermo around this date.
Cuppone has identified the Palazzo Madama in Rome, where Caravaggio was then living, as the probable place of execution, which would make the Nativity the artist’s first altarpiece, painted in the same working space where Maffeo Barberini (1568–1644), the future Pope Urban VIII, had sat for his portrait only a year or so earlier. The argument has gained support from scholars including Claudio Strinati and the late Maurizio Calvesi (1927–2020), but has not yet displaced the traditional dating. The question remains open, and it matters: if the painting belongs to 1600, it sits alongside the Contarelli Chapel commissions at San Luigi dei Francesi; if to 1609, it belongs to the same desperate Sicilian months that produced the Burial of St Lucy (1608, Church of Santa Lucia alla Badia, Syracuse), the Raising of Lazarus and the Adoration of the Shepherds (both 1609, Museo Regionale, Messina). The technique, as far as the photographs allow us to judge, sits more comfortably with the early Roman works: tighter, more resolved, more deliberate in its modelling than the loose, abbreviated handling of those late three Sicilian canvases, where forms emerge from dark grounds in broken, almost febrile strokes. This is one of the strongest formal arguments for the earlier dating, though it is not conclusive.
The composition is quiet for so large a canvas. The Virgin sits directly on the ground in the Madonna dell’Umiltà tradition, an iconographic type established in Italian devotional art from the early fourteenth century by painters including Simone Martini (c. 1284–1344). The Christ Child lies before her on a thin scattering of straw. There is no manger, no stable architecture, no ox, no ass: none of the apparatus that had accumulated around the Nativity subject over centuries of Northern Italian and Flemish tradition. The setting is barely specified, a deep undefined darkness against which a few figures are gathered in a concentrated fall of light.
St Lawrence kneels at the left in a golden diaconal dalmatic, one hand resting on the gridiron, his gaze inclined towards the infant. Behind him, in deeper shadow, St Francis of Assisi kneels hooded in a dark Conventual habit. The two saints occupy the same side of the canvas but inhabit different registers of light: Lawrence catches it fully, his dalmatic gleaming; Francis recedes, his face barely distinguishable from the surrounding dark. In Caravaggio’s work, proximity to the light source is never arbitrary, and a devotional logic may be at play: the deacon-martyr, whose cult is bound to the physical and the sacrificial (the gridiron, the distribution of the Church’s goods to the poor), receives direct illumination, while the contemplative saint withdraws into something closer to self-effacement.
At the right, Joseph stands in a green cloak with his back almost entirely to the viewer, leaning towards a companion figure variously identified as a shepherd or as Friar Leone, the companion of St Francis. If the latter, the scene becomes a specifically Franciscan meditation on the Incarnation rather than a conventional Nativity with pastoral witnesses. The question cannot be settled from the photographs. What is clear is Joseph’s unusual treatment: turned away, his face hidden, excluded from the devotional circuit of gazes connecting the other figures to the Child. He also appears unusually young, departing from the aged patriarch standard in Western art since its consolidation through Byzantine convention and the Meditationes Vitae Christi [Meditations on the Life of Christ]. Was this deliberate, or was it simply the model available? The painting invites the question and can no longer answer it.
Above, a foreshortened angel unfurls a banderole inscribed Gloria in Excelsis Deo. The pose closely anticipates that of the angel in the second St Matthew and the Angel (1602, formerly Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum, Berlin; destroyed 1945), and the resemblance has become a fixture of the dating dispute: prototype or self-quotation, depending on where you stand.
Since December 2015, a high-resolution facsimile produced by the Madrid studio Factum Arte, generated from the transparency, the 1951 negatives and a comparative study of Caravaggio’s technique in surviving paintings, has occupied the original frame above the altar. The colours are extrapolated rather than recorded; the surface is flat, printed, without the physical density of oil on canvas. It serves as the oratory’s liturgical image, but it is not a Caravaggio.
References
Cuppone, M. (2013) Review of Il Caravaggio di Palermo e l’Oratorio di San Lorenzo by G. Mendola, The Burlington Magazine, 155(1327). Available at: https://www.academia.edu/18851931/M_Cuppone_Il_Caravaggio_di_Palermo_e_l_Oratorio_di_San_Lorenzo_in_The_Burlington_Magazine_1327_2013_p_709 ( Accessed 8 June 2023)
Gregori, M. (1985) The Age of Caravaggio. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art
New evidences in the following
Carrabino, D. (2026) Caravaggio in Early Modern Sicily. London: Routledge
Cuppone, M. (2020) ‘Caravaggio e Mario Minniti tra Roma e Siracusa’, in Cuppone, M. and Romano, M. (eds.) Caravaggio a Siracusa. Un itinerario nel Seicento aretuseo. Ragusa: Le Fate Editore