Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610), The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, c.1601–02, Oil on canvas, 107 × 146 cm, Bildergalerie Sanssouci, Potsdam
Oil on canvas, 107 × 146 cm, Bildergalerie Sanssouci, Potsdam
Vincenzo Giustiniani (1564–1637) was not a man easily impressed. A Genoese banker settled in Rome, he had assembled one of the most impressive collections in Europe and had written, in his Discorso sopra la pittura [Discourse on Painting], a careful taxonomy of artistic achievement that ranked working from life as the highest degree of skill a painter could attain. When he commissioned this picture from Caravaggio, probably around 1601, he was acquiring something that answered his own critical convictions almost point for point. Together with his brother Cardinal Benedetto, Giustiniani had already helped secure for Caravaggio some of the most importnat public commissions in Rome, both men steeped in the intellectual and devotional currents of Counter-Reformation culture. The painting joined a distinguished group of works by the artist in the family collection, among them the St Matthew and the Angel of c. 1602.
Three paintings attributed to Caravaggio from the Giustiniani holdings were destroyed in the fires that consumed the Friedrichshain flak tower in Berlin in May 1945. That this canvas survived the war is itself a miracle worth pausing over.
Two autograph versions of the composition are recorded. Giovanni Baglione (c. 1566–1643), Caravaggio’s biographer and lifelong antagonist, noted that an ecclesiastical version had been painted for Girolamo Mattei; that picture is now in a private collection in Trieste. The Potsdam canvas is the secular version, made for Giustiniani, which later passed into the Prussian royal collection. The composition became Caravaggio’s most widely copied work, with at least twenty-two replicas known from the seventeenth century alone. That rate of reproduction raises a question worth asking plainly: was it the subject that travelled so well, or the composition? Probably both. For Counter-Reformation audiences, faith confirmed through physical witness carried genuine theological weight, and for collectors, owning a version of a Caravaggio carried a rather more worldly prestige.
The passage is John 20:24–29. Thomas, absent from the earlier appearances of the risen Christ, refuses to believe unless he can put his hand into the wound. Caravaggio strips the scene to four figures pressed close together, heads bent into a tight cluster, hands converging on the opening in Christ’s side. The composition is arrestingly compact. Everything falls towards Thomas’s right hand, which Christ himself guides firmly towards the wound; the index finger presses carefully into the flesh. The other two apostles keep their hands hidden, though their curiosity is anything but concealed, their faces crowding in with an intensity scarcely less urgent than Thomas’s own. The motif of the probing finger is an old one in art, and the device may owe something to a Dürer print, though Caravaggio makes the gesture feel startlingly literal in a way no engraving could.
The palette is earthy, the chiaroscuro tightly controlled, and the effect is to hold doubt and physical proof in an unresolved tension. One difference between the two versions is worth noting: in this secular canvas, Christ’s thigh is left bare, while in the Trieste picture white drapery covers it. What are we to make of that? The absence of a halo pushes in the same direction, insisting on the body of the risen Christ as a body, warm and wounded and present. The paradox of the passage presses itself directly onto the viewer: Thomas must touch to believe, and in touching he refutes the very scepticism that brought his hand to the wound in the first place. Christ’s words from the Gospel linger over the image as its quiet counter-argument, never illustrated, never answered: ‘Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.’ Whether Giustiniani, a man who prized the evidence of his own eyes above almost everything, found that rebuke comfortable is another question entirely.
References
Gemäldegalerie, Berlin (n.d.) Lost Masterpieces. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Available at: https://www.smb.museum/en/museums-institutions/gemaeldegalerie/collection-research/research/lost-masterpieces/ (Accessed: 21 September 2023).
Langdon, H. (1998) Caravaggio: A Life. London: Chatto & Windus.
Schütze, S. (2009) Caravaggio: The Complete Paintings. Cologne: Taschen