Caravaggio and his Italian, Dutch, Flemish, and French followers working in the wake of his radical naturalism and dramatic use of light in early seventeenth-century painting.
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610), The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, c.1601–02, Oil on canvas, 107 × 146 cm, Bildergalerie Sanssouci, Potsdam
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610), The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, c.1601–02 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.
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610), Salome Receives the Head of Saint John the Baptist, 1609/10. Oil on canvas, 91.5 × 106.7 cm. The National Gallery, London
Painted during Caravaggio’s second Neapolitan period, in the final months of his life, this work belongs to the small group of late canvases in which themes of violence and mortality are presented with uncommon directness. By this stage Caravaggio was a fugitive, living under sentence of death in Rome following the killing of Ranuccio Tomassoni in 1606. The precise character of that encounter remains contested. Contemporary avvisi cited a quarrel over a pallacorda wager, and the incident was long absorbed into a narrative of honour culture and formal duelling. Subsequent scholarship, drawing on archival evidence including a barber-surgeon’s report, has proposed rather different readings — among them that the fighting was organised as a pretext to settle a personal account, and that the fatal wound was no accident but an act of deliberate symbolic injury (Graham-Dixon, 2010; Balduzzi, cited in Calvesi, 1990). Whatever the precise sequence of events, the legal consequences were unambiguous: Caravaggio was condemned to death under a bando capitale, and the bounty on him required no body — only his head.
The London Salome is the later of two treatments of the same subject; the Madrid version, now at the Palacio Real, almost certainly dates from his first Neapolitan stay of 1606–7, while the looser handling and pared-down palette of the National Gallery canvas place it in the final months of the artist’s life. Against a void of darkness, the executioner lowers the Baptist’s severed head onto a platter that Salome receives, while an older woman, marked by grief, turns her gaze aside. None of the figures look at one another. Their averted eyes create an atmosphere of deliberate silence, stripping the scene of any theatrical resolution. What remains is the transaction of death, handed over as though by contract.
Technically, the painting is characteristic of Caravaggio’s late manner: the handling is freer than in earlier works, with a broad application of paint in place of finely modelled gradations, and the dark ground left deliberately exposed in several areas to provide the mid-tone in the shadows. The palette, already darkening in the late Roman works, restricts itself almost entirely to earth tones and silvery whites, with only occasional flashes of warmer colour. The effect is unsparing: nothing is offered to soften the brutality or place it at a safe aesthetic distance. As Keith’s technical examination of the canvas confirms, this economy was deliberate, not unfinished (Keith, 1998).
Created as Caravaggio was still awaiting a papal pardon that might allow his return to Rome, the painting carries an intimacy with the subject of killing that is difficult to attribute to coincidence. A man who had made decapitation a recurring subject in the years after his own condemnation, and who had recently survived what may have been a retaliatory attack in Naples, was here again handing a severed head across the picture plane (Graham-Dixon, 2010; Puglisi, 1998). The violence in the image is neither heroic nor condemned. It simply is — which is, in the end, what makes it so hard to look away from.
References
Graham-Dixon, A. (2010) Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane. London: Allen Lane
Langdon, H. (1998) Caravaggio: A Life. London: Chatto & Windus.
Puglisi, C. (1998) Caravaggio. London: Phaidon
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610), Salome Receives the Head of Saint John the Baptist, 1609/10. Oil on canvas, 91.5 × 106.7 cm. The National Gallery, LondonMichelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610), Salome Receives the Head of Saint John the Baptist, 1609/10. Oil on canvas, 91.5 × 106.7 cm. The National Gallery, LondonMichelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610), Salome Receives the Head of Saint John the Baptist, 1609/10. Oil on canvas, 91.5 × 106.7 cm. The National Gallery, LondonMichelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610), Salome Receives the Head of Saint John the Baptist, 1609/10. Oil on canvas, 91.5 × 106.7 cm. The National Gallery, LondonMichelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610), Salome Receives the Head of Saint John the Baptist, 1609/10. Oil on canvas, 91.5 × 106.7 cm. The National Gallery, LondonMichelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610), Salome Receives the Head of Saint John the Baptist, 1609/10. Oil on canvas, 91.5 × 106.7 cm. The National Gallery, LondonMichelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610), Salome Receives the Head of Saint John the Baptist, 1609/10. Oil on canvas, 91.5 × 106.7 cm. The National Gallery, London
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610), Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy, c.1595 Oil on canvas, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut, on temporary loan to The National Gallery, London
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610), Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy, c.1595 Oil on canvas, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut, on temporary loan to The National Gallery, London
Writing for his Capuchin brethren in the second half of the sixteenth century, the chronicler Bernardino da Colpetrazzo (1525–1593) described the sequence in which the wounds arrived on Monte La Verna in September 1224. The mind of Francis of Assisi (1181/82–1226) turned first to God, and only then did the body begin to change, the right hand before the left, the feet after that, the side last of all, and when it was over the saint dropped to the ground as though he were dead. That final clause names a moment no earlier painter had wanted, and it is the moment Caravaggio (1571–1610) chose for his first religious picture. Nearly everything readers have found strange in the canvas follows from that choice.
Three departures from the standard treatment govern the composition, and they pull in one direction. No seraph occupies the sky and no shaft of light descends to the saint; the wounds in the hands and feet on which the texts dwell are nowhere shown; and Francis, rather than kneeling upright to receive the marks, has fallen back into the arms of a young angel. The single wound Caravaggio grants is at the side, and the saint’s hand moves towards it. Bonaventure (c.1217–1274) had in a sense licensed the omission, since in the Legenda maior [The Major Legend of Saint Francis] the marks appear only once the vision has faded, which left a painter free to separate the two events and still claim the text.
The pose given to that collapse came from a body of images with no Franciscan content at all. A figure held up by an angel repeats the types of Christ supported by angels, above all the Agony in the Garden before the crucifixion, the Lamentation after it, and the devotional Man of Sorrows (Askew 1969, pp. 290–294). Read through those types, the surviving side wound stops looking like a remnant and begins doing the work of the picture, since it is the wound that bleeds most freely in images of the Man of Sorrows and the one Thomas was invited to touch. Keeping that mark and dropping the others lets the canvas assert in paint what Franciscan writers had asserted for three centuries in words, that Francis was an alter Christus [another Christ], conformed to the Passion in his own flesh.
Whatever the theology, the picture was assembled from objects in a room. Under examination in the libel suit brought by Giovanni Baglione (c.1566–1643) in the late summer of 1603, Orazio Gentileschi (1563–1639) let slip that he had lent his Lombard friend a Capuchin habit and a pair of wings, which is as close as the documents come to an inventory of Caravaggio’s props. The loan is recorded a decade after the Hartford canvas was painted and cannot be attached to it, though it establishes that such things circulated between painters and that the wings in this picture, stiff and rather too small for the body they are fixed to, need no supernatural explanation. The habit is worth attention for a different reason, since its cut is the reformed Capuchin one rather than the Conventual Franciscan, which places the image inside the most austere and most rapidly expanding branch of the order. The angel’s face, meanwhile, recurs in the Cardsharps and among the musicians, near enough that one studio boy served for the lot.
Explaining the darkness as the plain fact of a night scene has become harder to sustain. The blacks belong to a Lombard habit of mind reaching back through Savoldo to Leonardo, in which deep shadow carried a devotional charge, and behind that habit lies the Franciscan reading of Pseudo-Dionysius, for whom union with God is reached in a darkness beyond seeing and knowing rather than in light (Muraoka 2024). On that account the black closing around Francis functions as the medium of his experience rather than its setting. His eyes are all but shut and he has ceased to attend to the visible; the light falls instead on the angel, who in the celestial hierarchy belongs to the rank appointed to lead human beings towards God. Painting the slack, weighted body from a posed model is what makes that inward movement, from the seen towards the unseen, something a viewer can follow.
Which moment Caravaggio meant remains unsettled, and the ablest readings disagree. One takes the picture for the ecstasy that followed the stigmatisation and rests its case on the Capuchin account of the swoon (Treffers 1988); another argues from Franciscan and Capuchin texts that the stigmatisation itself is shown, anomalies and all (Lingo 1998); a third treats ecstasy and stigmatisation as a single instant, Francis dying as a man in order to be reborn in Christ (Moir 1982). A canvas able to sustain three such readings has been built to hold an inward event answering to no single outward moment, which is why the sacred pictures could strike Giovanni Pietro Bellori (1613–1696), writing in 1672 of the Cerasi Chapel laterals, as scenes without action.
The documents that survive concern a banker’s health rather than a cardinal’s taste. The old suggestion that Francis wears the face of Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte (1549–1626), in whose household Caravaggio was then living, has lost ground as the papers have accumulated, and the earliest secure owner is Ottavio Costa (1554–1639), banker to the papal court, who by 1606 held three canvases by the painter, this one with the Judith and Holofernes now in Palazzo Barberini and the Saint John the Baptist now in Kansas City. Believing himself mortally ill, Costa drew up a will on 6 August 1606 in which the abbot Ruggero Tritonio (1543–1612), secretary to Cardinal Montalto, was to choose between the Saint Francis and the Martha and Mary Magdalene, the rejected picture passing to his banking partner Juan Enriquez de Herrera (d. 1610). Tritonio chose the Francis and Herrera took the Magdalene, now in Detroit. Costa then recovered, and on the reconstruction that best fits the surviving receipts he honoured the bequest with a copy while keeping the original, exactly as he did with the Baptist promised to his Ligurian oratory, which received a copy that hangs today in the diocesan museum at Albenga . The picture the abbot got is recorded in Tritonio family inventories from October 1607 and stayed with his heirs until the last of them gave it in 1894 to the parish church at Fagagna; it is now in the Musei Civici at Udine, and it is not by Caravaggio. Costa also had a private reason to want the subject, a second son lately baptised Pier Francesco, for whom the saint stood as namesake (Ebert-Schifferer 2012).
References
Armstrong, R.J., Hellmann, J.A.W. and Short, W.J. (eds) (1999–2001) Francis of Assisi: Early Documents. 3 vols. New York: New City Press
Askew, P. (1969) ‘The angelic consolation of St Francis of Assisi in post-Tridentine painting’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 32, pp. 280–306.
Christiansen, K. (1986) ‘Caravaggio and “L’esempio davanti del naturale”‘, The Art Bulletin, 68, pp. 421–445.
Ebert-Schifferer, S. (2012) Caravaggio: The Artist and His Work. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum
Lingo, S. (1998) The Capuchins and the Art of History: Retrospection and Reform in the Arts in Late Renaissance Italy. PhD dissertation, Harvard University
Moir, A. (1982) Caravaggio. New York: Harry N. Abrams
Spezzaferro, L. (1974) ‘The documentary findings: Ottavio Costa as a patron of Caravaggio’, The Burlington Magazine, 116(859), pp. 579–586. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/i236690 (Accessed 10 June 2023).
Spike, J.T. (2001) Caravaggio. New York and London: Abbeville Press.
Treffers, B. (1988) ‘Caravaggio’s Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy’, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz [Reports of the Art-Historical Institute in Florence], 32, pp. 145–172.
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610), Supper at Emmaus, 1601, Oil and tempera on canvas, 141 × 196.2 cm, The National Gallery, London
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610), Supper at Emmaus, 1601, Oil and tempera on canvas, 141 × 196.2 cm, The National Gallery, London
Painted in 1601 for Ciriaco Mattei, and commissioned in the wake of the public sensation caused by the Contarelli Chapel paintings in San Luigi dei Francesi, the Supper at Emmaus belongs to the most confident phase of Caravaggio’s Roman career. Ciriaco, together with his brother Asdrubale, was among the most active collectors in the city, and their patronage gave Caravaggio access to a cultivated audience willing to absorb the demands of his naturalism. Within two years the Mattei circle commissioned three canvases from him, a degree of sustained investment that speaks to how seriously his work was being taken in the highest levels of Roman collecting.
The canvas captures the instant in the Gospel of Luke when the risen Christ reveals himself to the disciples at Emmaus. Cleopas, in a brown jacket bearing the scallop-shell pilgrim badge, flings his arms wide in astonishment, while his companion shoves back from his chair in disbelief. Between them, Christ raises his right hand in blessing, his stillness holding steady against the commotion around him. The fruit basket, balanced perilously at the edge of the table, carries both symbolic resonance and a calculated challenge to pictorial space, drawing the viewer into the scene as though they might catch it before it falls.
Contrary to the long-standing impression that Caravaggio worked impulsively, without preparation, technical examination has shown that he sometimes laid down outlines with a brush — the abbozzo — and traces of brushed underdrawing in dark brown paint survive here, slightly above the final contour of the wine glass, indicating that the still-life arrangement was carefully placed before paint was applied. Caravaggio did not sketch in light tones; he began with a graphic trace in burnt umber, then, while it was still wet, built over it with fast, firm brushwork that merged the underdrawing with the first paint layer. What reads as spontaneous presence was the product of close observation and deliberate construction.
This was painted when Caravaggio was still secure in Rome, sustained by powerful patrons and admired for his startling directness of vision. The killing of Ranuccio Tomassoni in 1606 ended that. He fled Rome under a bando capitale, his life forfeit to anyone who caught him within papal territory. The Brera Supper at Emmaus was most likely painted on the Colonna estate at Paliano, where he sought refuge in the immediate aftermath of the killing. The work was subsequently sold, through the intermediary Ottavio Costi, to the Costa brothers; by 1624 it appears in an inventory of the Palazzo Patrizi in Rome.
The contrast between the two versions is worth dwelling on. The London canvas is expansive and brightly lit, with a youthful Christ and figures whose gestures reach outward, into the viewer’s space. In the Brera version, the poses and gestures have shed their theatricality; the colours remain varied but are less insistent, the light softer, the handling looser. Presence becomes more important than performance. Where the London canvas announces itself as a display of virtuosity for a patrician collection, the Brera picture has the quality of something painted for the painter’s own need, with little between him and the subject. Together they trace a path through Caravaggio’s career: from the ambitious naturalist working for one of Rome’s great households, to the fugitive painter on the run, turning back to a familiar subject under very different circumstances.
References
Graham-Dixon, A. (2010) Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane. London: Allen Lane.
After Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610), Nativity with St Francis and St Lawrence, 1600 or 1609/2015, Oil on canvas, 268 × 197 cm. Palermo, Oratory of San Lorenzo. Stolen 1969; replica installed in 2015
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.
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
Hendrick Jansz ter Brugghen (1588–1629), A Man playing a Lute, 1624. Oil on canvas, 101.6 × 74.9 cm. The National Gallery, London
Hendrick Jansz ter Brugghen (1588–1629), A Man playing a Lute, 1624. Oil on canvas, 101.6 × 74.9 cm. The National Gallery, London
The most immediately arresting fact in the catalogue raisonné of Hendrick Jansz ter Brugghen (1588–1629) is a conspicuous absence. Of the eighty-nine paintings accepted as autograph, not one can be securely attributed to the years he spent in Italy (Slatkes and Franits, 2007). Both Gerrit van Honthorst (1592–1656) and Dirck van Baburen (c. 1595–1624), who followed him to Rome at a later date, received documented commissions there, built reputations, and returned with traceable bodies of Italian work. Ter Brugghen, who arrived first and stayed longest, left nothing behind that has survived identification. The first monograph on the artist, published by Benedict Nicolson (1914–1978) in 1958, acknowledged the difficulty without fully resolving it; Nicolson organised ter Brugghen’s development around what he could see in the Utrecht paintings rather than around any Italian foundation. Scholars subsequently proposed candidates for Italian-period attribution, with estimates ranging from eight to fifteen possible works (Slatkes and Franits) but every one has been rejected on stylistic or evidential grounds in the 2007 catalogue raisonné. A Turin Crucifixion, previously placed in the Italian period by Robert Schillemans on the basis of its North Italian provenance and certain formal qualities, was subsequently argued to belong to ter Brugghen’s Utrecht maturity (Franits, 2017). The Italian period remains, in the specialist literature, perplexing.
The catalogue raisonné was itself an unusual document. Its lead author, Leonard J. Slatkes (1929–2003), had devoted decades of research to the project but died before completing it; his former graduate student Wayne Franits took on the task of finishing and publishing the work, and the resulting volume contains, somewhat exceptionally, open disagreements between the two scholars. Franits disavows, for instance, Slatkes’s enthusiasm for the Toledo Museum of Art’s Supper at Emmaus as the earliest of ter Brugghen’s certain works, setting aside objections from other specialists about both its authenticity and date (Slatkes and Franits, 2007; HNA Reviews, 2017). The internal wrangling is one of the book’s distinguishing features. It also serves as a reminder that a catalogue raisonné is not a settled verdict but a position, coloured by the differing judgements of its authors at a particular moment in the discipline.
Against the background of that gap in the record, the one first-hand document that survives from ter Brugghen’s Italian years carries unusual weight. On 1 April 1615, appearing before the Utrecht court as a witness in a minor legal dispute, ter Brugghen described himself as having spent ettelicke jaren in Italy exercising his art. The phrase translates as ‘some years.’ The Dutch term ettelicke characteristically implies fewer than ten, which is precisely what made the statement significant, since the older biographical tradition had assumed a Roman sojourn of a full decade. That tradition derived from a family-commissioned engraving of 1708, produced nearly eighty years after the artist’s death, which stated that he had ‘travelled from Utrecht to Rome, and ten years later returned.’ The legal testimony, in ter Brugghen’s own words, quietly undermined it (Franits, 2017).
The dispute over dates has not resolved itself tidily, and no consensus has emerged. A document of 1607 identifies a man of the same name in military service, which has led some scholars to place his Italian departure no earlier than that summer. If correct, this would mean he arrived in Rome after Caravaggio (1571–1610) had fled the city in 1606 following the killing of Ranuccio Tomassoni, making any direct encounter between the two painters impossible (Franits, 2017). The National Gallery, London, maintaining the earlier chronology, continues to state that ter Brugghen ‘travelled to Rome in about 1604, within the lifetime of Caravaggio’ (National Gallery, n.d.). Others, working from the sequence of his Bloemaert training and the probability that he left Utrecht around the age of sixteen or seventeen, have supported the earlier date of c. 1604–05. Neither position has produced a decisive piece of documentary evidence, and what is established on firm archival ground is simply that ter Brugghen was in Milan in the summer of 1614 on his way home, and present in Utrecht by April 1615.
What he encountered during those years can be partially reconstructed from what subsequently emerges in his Utrecht paintings. The Contarelli Chapel at San Luigi dei Francesi, with its three large Caravaggio canvases completed by 1602, was the most publicly discussed painting commission of the period in Rome and effectively unavoidable for any painter working there. Ter Brugghen’s two versions of the Calling of Saint Matthew (1617, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Le Havre; 1621, Centraal Museum, Utrecht) respond directly to the Contarelli composition: the arrangement of figures around a table, the frozen moment of recognition, the figures pressed close to the picture plane. His handling of light is entirely his own in both versions, cooler and more diffuse than Caravaggio’s raking beam, but the compositional debt is legible (Slatkes and Franits, 2007). He also knew the Cerasi Chapel paintings in Santa Maria del Popolo (c. 1600–01), and the Giustiniani collection, which housed Caravaggio’s Lute Player (c. 1596) among other works, was not inaccessible to visiting painters of serious purpose.
What Rome did not give him, it is equally important to note, was the Manfredi manner. Bartolomeo Manfredi (c. 1582–1622), Caravaggio’s most persistent direct follower in the city, developed the half-length genre scene of musicians, drinkers, and card-players into the format that would eventually dominate Utrecht painting in the early 1620s. That manner arrived in Utrecht not through ter Brugghen but through van Baburen and van Honthorst on their return from Rome in 1620–21, which explains why ter Brugghen’s own genre scenes begin only in 1621, six years after he came home (Dayton Art Institute, n.d.). The North Italian dimension of his Italian formation is in some ways more visible in his early Utrecht pictures. His 1619 Adoration of the Magi (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam), the earliest painting attributable to him with certainty, carries clear traces of Carlo Saraceni (c. 1579–1620), a Venetian-born Caravaggist whose cooler palette and more decorative handling of light distinguished him sharply from the Manfredi tradition. The workshop of Jacopo Bassano (c. 1510–1592) also left marks on his approach to multi-figure compositions that persist through the 1620s (Slatkes and Franits, 2007). The quality of crisp, lateral light moving across solid forms that intensifies in ter Brugghen’s work from 1621 onward has been traced by Franits to the example of Orazio Gentileschi (1563–1639), another North Italian painter active in Rome during ter Brugghen’s years there, with the same light quality appearing in van Baburen’s mature work, suggesting both men absorbed it from the same source independently (Dayton Art Institute, n.d.).
Whether ter Brugghen made a second Italian journey, somewhere between 1619 and 1621, was debated across much of the twentieth century. The hypothesis was first advanced by Roberto Longhi (1890–1970), the Italian art historian who did more than anyone else to reconstruct the Caravaggist movement as a European phenomenon, and was taken up by others who found the sudden deepening of Italianate elements in ter Brugghen’s post-1621 work difficult to account for otherwise. Franits, the most recent and most thoroughly documented voice on the question, concluded that the return of van Baburen and van Honthorst to Utrecht provided sufficient stimulus without any second journey being necessary (Slatkes and Franits, 2007). The Rijksmuseum catalogue entry for the 1619 Adoration of the Magi states more bluntly that ‘the notion that he made a second trip to Italy has been rejected by most recent scholars’ (Rijksmuseum, n.d.). The Utrecht archives record ter Brugghen’s presence in the city with increasing frequency from 1622 onward, and no document places him elsewhere between 1615 and his death.
The one contemporary writer who knew ter Brugghen personally and committed his impressions to paper was Joachim von Sandrart (1606–1688), who spent time in Utrecht during the second half of the 1620s. In his Teutsche Academie [German Academy of the Building, Sculptural and Painting Arts] (1675), Sandrart described the artist in terms that have since generated their own scholarly literature: ‘in line with his inclination to harbour profound but melancholic thoughts he followed nature and its unpleasant defects in his works very well, but disagreeably.’ Marten Jan Bok, in a 2009 article in the Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art specifically devoted to the passage, concluded that Sandrart genuinely intended to characterise ter Brugghen’s personality as melancholic, and that this assessment was based on direct acquaintance with the man during those Utrecht years rather than on biographical convention (Bok, 2009). The remark about following nature ‘unpleasantly’ is usually read as distaste for unflattering physiognomies and unglamorous flesh. It is also, unintentionally, a precise description of what ter Brugghen had kept from Caravaggio’s example: not the theatrics, not the lighting system, but the refusal to make a face more presentable than it was.
A Man Playing a Lute (oil on canvas, 101.6 × 74.9 cm, National Gallery, London), signed in monogram at the upper right and firmly dated 1624, belongs to a single remarkable year in ter Brugghen’s career. In that year alone he produced no fewer than five separate compositions devoted to musical subjects, including bagpipe players and a violinist as well as the lute players (National Gallery of Art, Washington, n.d.). The concentration is striking, and it was not accidental. Dirck van Baburen had died early in 1624, aged around twenty-nine, ending an association that had energised ter Brugghen’s genre output since 1621 and possibly, for a period, taken the form of a shared workshop (Slatkes and Franits, 2007). The year of van Baburen’s death is the year in which ter Brugghen appears to have made the musician subject fully his own.
The type had a longer history than the Utrecht context might suggest. Images of solo instrumentalists existed from the early sixteenth century, but it was Caravaggio’s paintings of a lute player, made for Vincenzo Giustiniani (1564–1637) around 1596 and subsequently for Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte (1549–1626), that restored the subject to contemporary currency in Rome. Those paintings are semantically layered: they include music scores, flowers, a violin, a recorder, instruments pointing toward love poetry, the transience of pleasure, and the five senses. When van Baburen produced his Lute Player in 1622 (Centraal Museum, Utrecht), now the earliest securely dated Utrecht example of the type, he stripped most of that iconographic apparatus out. He wanted the figure, the instrument, and the confrontational directness of a face aimed at the viewer. Ter Brugghen, beginning with his first musical genre pieces of 1621, moved in the same direction, though toward a quieter outcome.
The National Gallery painting shows a man entirely absorbed in playing, rendered at close range with an intimacy that carries a slight edge of comedy. The reddened nose and moist lips have conventionally been read as signs of inebriation, and the image permits a moralising interpretation in which sensory pleasure shades toward excess. A second autograph version, a singing lute player of similar dimensions now in the Kremer Collection, dates to the same year or very shortly after (RKD, n.d.), and an engraving made in 1624 after a related composition was inscribed with a Dutch couplet: ‘I play expertly on the sweet full strings of the lute; thereby I can also sing lustily and know that it sounds good’ (National Gallery, n.d.). The breezy self-congratulation of the rhyme, written from the perspective of the painted figure, gives no sign of moral alarm. How much moralising weight the original audience would have brought to an image like this ? Ter Brugghen does not seem particularly inclined to disapprove of his lutenist.
Within the Utrecht Caravaggisti, the painting occupies a position that is easier to define by contrast than by direct description. Van Honthorst (1592–1656), who had by 1624 largely redirected his practice toward the polished courtly portraits and mythologies that would secure his success in The Hague and London, worked in his genre pieces with deep, artificial candlelight and a theatrical surface. Van Baburen’s figures are more physically insistent, their modelling blunter, their gaze more confrontational. Ter Brugghen worked at a different register altogether. The light in the 1624 lute player is cool and lateral, moving across the surface of fabric and flesh in soft gradations rather than abrupt contrasts. The figure does not perform for the viewer so much as offer access to a private moment that the viewer is permitted to overhear. In his two Flute Players of 1621, ter Brugghen had already experimented with placing dark figures against lighter grounds, an inversion of the standard Caravaggesque tonal arrangement (Nicolson, 1958), and that interest in atmospheric delicacy rather than dramatic impact distinguishes him consistently from his Utrecht contemporaries. It also explains why his influence, once traced, reaches forward rather than staying within the Caravaggist circle.
Ter Brugghen died on 1 November 1629, still in Utrecht, at forty-one. His recovery into the scholarly canon was slow: Nicolson’s 1958 monograph marked the first serious attempt to establish his place in seventeenth-century painting, more than three centuries after his death, characterising him as ‘a link between Caravaggio and Vermeer’ but also, and more durably, as a painter of independent achievement in the first spring of Dutch realism (Nicolson, 1958). What the lute player of 1624 makes plain is that ter Brugghen had, by the middle of his brief career, arrived at something that his contemporaries recognised as distinct. Sandrart called it disagreeable. The painting has worn that description rather well.
Seaman, N.T. (2012) The Religious Paintings of Hendrick ter Brugghen: Reinventing Christian Painting after the Reformation in Utrecht. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate
Slatkes, L.J. and Franits, W.E. (2007) The Paintings of Hendrick ter Brugghen (1588–1629): Catalogue Raisonné. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins
Matthias Stom (1600–after 1649), Esau Returning from the Hunt, Selling his Birthright to Jacob for a Bowl of Lentils, c.1639–43, Oil on canvas,155.7 × 204.5cm, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin
Matthias Stom (1600–after 1649), Esau Returning from the Hunt, Selling his Birthright to Jacob for a Bowl of Lentils, c.1639–43, Oil on canvas,155.7 × 204.5cm, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin
In 1637, the Neapolitan Holy Office investigated a complaint lodged by a pupil of a foreign painter residing in the city. The painter, Matthias Stom, was accused of holding and promoting heretical beliefs within his household (Osnabrugge, 2019). Records such as this appear sporadically, at various times and locations across Italy, making it challenging to construct a continuous biography of the artist. Instead, Stom’s movements and activities must be pieced together from these scattered references, which are often separated by several years and sometimes consist of only a brief mention in archival documents.
The Status Animarum [state of souls] of San Nicola in Arcione, compiled in Rome in 1630, lists a lodger on the Strada dell’Olmo as Mattheo Stom, fiamengo pittore, aged thirty. This places his birth around 1599 or 1600 (Hoogewerff, 1942; Osnabrugge, 2019). The designation fiamengo (Flemish) suggests he originated from the Spanish Netherlands. However, Amersfoort, near Utrecht in the Dutch Republic, was proposed as his birthplace in 1942 but has since been deemed erroneous (Bok, 1986; Osnabrugge, 2019). Art scholars also suggest that his surname, Stom, was common only in the southern Netherlands but rare in the Dutch Republic, where it was primarily found among immigrants from the south, particularly from the Brussels and Ostend regions (Bok, 1986; Osnabrugge, 2019).
The date of Stom’s arrival in Rome remains unknown. A document from 1625 mentioning the name Matthia Strozzer has been recovered, but its Italianised distortion makes this identification uncertain (Vodret,2011). The 1630 Roman census document, however, places Stom within an established international artistic community. His rooms had previously been occupied by the Amersfoort painter Paulus Bor (c. 1601–1669), and he shared them with the French painter Nicolas Provost (1604–1670). Rome’s northern and French artists maintained their own social and professional networks, including the drinking confraternity known as the Bentvueghels, which provided newcomers with accommodation, introductions, and credit. Stom may have entered the city through this network (Hoogewerff, 1942; Osnabrugge, 2019).
After Rome, the records indicate a succession of moves across Italy. Stom is documented in Naples by July 1635, though he may have settled there earlier, and reappears in Neapolitan records from 1637 and 1638 (Osnabrugge, 2014; Osnabrugge, 2019). By 1640, he was in Palermo, where an illegitimate son, also named Matthias, was baptised. The godfather was the consul of the Flemish nation, a body representing foreign merchants in Palermo, who was himself a painter. The following year, Stom signed and dated the work that provides the firmest point in his chronology: the Miracle of Saint Isidore the Farmer, an altarpiece for the Augustinian church at Caccamo in Sicily (Osnabrugge, 2019; Papi, 2025). The last known records mentioning the artist are two entries in Venice, dated 1643 and 1645, after which Stom completely disappears from the documented historical record. Older studies placed him in Sicily until about 1649 or linked him with a disputed altarpiece at Chiuduno in Lombardy dated 1652. A more cautious modern reconstruction concludes the secure evidence in 1645 and leaves the date of his death unknown (Nicolson, 1977; Osnabrugge, 2019).
The silence of the archives is striking given the number of paintings attributed to him that are found in major art collections worldwide. More than 250 are currently known, and many entered important collections as early as the 17th century. Antonio Ruffo (1610/11–1678), Prince of Scaletta and a patrician of Messina who would later commission three works from Rembrandt (1606–1669), owned three of Stom’s paintings by 1648 (Osnabrugge, 2019; Papi, 2025). A northern painter working in Italy often occupied a different segment of the market from his Italian contemporaries, who competed for altarpieces, chapel commissions, and fresco cycles—the types of commissions through which a local reputation and a more sustained livelihood could be built (Haskell, 1980). Cabinet paintings were smaller, portable, and easier to sell to collectors whose tastes were less tied to local traditions, while expatriate networks offered the credit and introductions needed to maintain such a career (Malice, 2017; Spear and Sohm, 2010). Stom appears to have followed this second route, which may also explain why so few of the records that typically anchor an Italian painter’s career survive in his case.
Since the recovered documents currently provide no information about his training, this question has always been approached through the paintings themselves, and here, older academic opinions are beginning to shift. Bartolomeo Manfredi (1582–1622), the celebrated follower of Caravaggio, was once identified as Stom’s master. This attribution is difficult to sustain, however, if Stom only reached Rome around 1630, eight years after Manfredi’s death. Other proposals, involving Abraham Bloemaert (1564–1651) and the French Caravaggist Nicolas Régnier (c. 1588–1667), have likewise failed to resolve the question (Osnabrugge, 2019). The strongest visual connection has long been with the Utrecht Caravaggisti, especially Gerrit van Honthorst (1592–1656), who had returned from Italy to Utrecht in 1620, and alongside him Dirck van Baburen (c. 1592/3–1624) and Hendrick ter Brugghen (1588–1629). Together, these artists established the Caravaggesque manner in the city during precisely the years a young Stom might have spent in the north (Gesino, 2019; Papi, 2020). Honthorst’s technique of concealing a candle behind a hand or figure, casting light across a darkened interior, became one of the most persistent themes in Stom’s work (Neumeister, 2003).
Recent scholarship has complicated this artistic lineage by looking further west, towards Antwerp and the circle of Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640). The luminous passages and fluid, almost liquid handling in parts of Stom’s work are difficult to derive solely from the Utrecht Caravaggisti and could equally reflect training in Flanders before he crossed the Alps (Papi, 2025). If so, why does his candlelight remain so closely associated with Utrecht? The census description fiamengo, the southern Dutch surname, and the lost Messina altarpiece signed Flandriae Stomus—’Stom of Flanders’—all point towards a Flemish connection, while the paintings retain a strong Utrecht Caravaggesque character (Osnabrugge, 2019; Papi, 2025). The distinction between the two cities may, however, be less clear than it seems. Antwerp lay in the Spanish Netherlands and Utrecht in the Dutch Republic, which were at war for much of Stom’s youth, but both formed part of a broader Netherlandish artistic culture. Painters, families, and artworks continued to cross the frontier; artists trained on one side and worked on the other, married across it, and maintained networks of pupils and patrons. Rubens himself travelled from Antwerp to The Hague in 1627 to visit Honthorst’s studio (Judson and Ekkart, 1999). Utrecht retained an unusually large and relatively prosperous Catholic minority, particularly among the landowning gentry, long after the Reformation had reshaped the northern provinces. Its continuing connections with Rome help explain the number of Utrecht painters who travelled to Italy, returning with Caravaggio’s manner and with Catholic subjects suited to a clientele that was less readily available elsewhere in the Dutch Republic (Spicer and Orr, 1997). A formation drawing on both Utrecht and Antwerp may therefore have been less unusual for a Netherlandish painter of Stom’s generation than the modern division between the two cities suggests. The attempt to assign him exclusively to one or the other may impose a distinction that his own artistic world probably did not maintain so firmly.
One early painting provides firmer ground for the Antwerp side of the argument. An Old Woman and a Boy by Candlelight (Birmingham Museums Trust), painted on an oak panel and probably dating from the 1620s, adopts the composition of a night piece by Rubens made around 1616–17. This work depicts an old woman shielding a candle from which a boy lights his own (Mauritshuis, The Hague). Rubens kept the panel in his studio, and it never left Antwerp, making it unlikely that Stom saw the original. He could, however, have known it through the print started by Rubens and completed by Paulus Pontius (1603–1658), published in Antwerp from about 1620. The print carries Rubens’s chosen line from Ovid (43 BC–AD 17/18), Quis vetet apposito, lumen de lumine tolli [‘who could forbid one light to be kindled from another set beside it’], alongside the flame passed from wick to wick without diminishing (Mauritshuis, n.d.; Treves et al., 2016). That transmitted flame recurs throughout Stom’s candlelit paintings. It therefore offers a possible Antwerp source for one of the motifs most closely associated with his work, alongside the Utrecht Caravaggisti tradition usually invoked to explain it.
The transformation of Stom’s style in Italy can be observed in his paintings. In Naples, the heavy bodies and unidealised heads characteristic of Jusepe de Ribera (1591–1652) appear to influence Stom’s figures; in the Sicilian works, gestures become larger and stiffer, often held as if caught between one movement and the next (Nicolson, 1977; Osnabrugge, 2019). The stylised heads and heavily worked surfaces of the later Sicilian paintings have also been compared to baked clay, a treatment associated with the 1640s (Nicolson, 1977). Stom continued to work in the Caravaggesque manner even after it had lost much of its prominence elsewhere in Italy, which makes the chronology of his work particularly difficult to establish. The same broad, almost carved treatment of a head can suggest either a young northerner still adapting to the Roman style or a mature painter working within an established vocabulary. Depending on the preferred interpretation, the same painting can be dated two decades apart.
The Berlin canvas belongs to a small group of Old Testament subjects within his large oeuvre, which is otherwise dominated by New Testament scenes and devotional half-lengths. A single candle, screened at the centre of the table, illuminates three faces from the darkness: Jacob on the left, bare-chested beneath a gold wrap, holding out the bowl of lentils; Esau on the right in hunting red, a hare over his shoulder and a dog at his feet; and their mother Rebecca between them, one hand raised to her breast (Genesis 25). The bargain that will alter the line of descent is reduced to the two hands meeting over a blue faience bowl. Stom allows the transaction to carry the scene. The dating has shifted considerably. Nicolson placed the painting in the Roman years, around 1630, close to the Honthorst style from which it derives (Nicolson, 1977). The museum and more recent scholarship have moved it into the 1640s, based on its handling and a possible connection with a Neapolitan inventory, placing it closer to the Sicilian and Venetian works than to the Roman paintings (Osnabrugge, 2019; Gemäldegalerie, n.d.).
This painting’s history under the Honthorst name is the clearest illustration of the entire problem. It entered the Berlin collection in the nineteenth century as a Honthorst, and the attribution held for decades because the resemblance to Honthorst’s candlelit interiors is genuinely close (Gemäldegalerie, n.d.). A reproductive engraving from 1663 had already labelled the composition as after Honthorst rather than Stom, so the confusion is nearly as old as the painting (British Museum, n.d.). Berlin was not alone in this. That a canvas could pass for two generations as the work of the Utrecht painter most often proposed as Stom’s teacher, while current scholarship looks beyond Utrecht to Antwerp for his origins, shows how unsettled the basic account of him still remains. His style travelled between Utrecht or Antwerp,Rome, Naples, Palermo, and Venice in the baggage of a painter who changed patrons and markets as he went, and whose paintings have survived but not the facts of his life; the BerlinEsau, painted by a man his own century could only classify asfiamengoand the next could only call Honthorst, is among the clearest measures of how much about him is still unknown.
References
Birmingham Museums Trust (n.d.) Old Woman and a Boy by Candlelight, 1630–1650, Matthias Stom, oil on panel, Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery. Available at: Birmingham Museums Trust Digital Asset Bank (Accessed 1 June 2023).
Bok, M.J. (1986) ‘Matthias Stom’, in Blankert, A. and Slatkes, L.J. (eds.) Nieuw licht op de Gouden Eeuw. Hendrick ter Brugghen en tijdgenoten [New Light on the Golden Age. Hendrick ter Brugghen and Contemporaries]. Exhibition catalogue, Centraal Museum
British Museum (n.d.) Esau selling his birthright; after Honthorst, after Matthias Stom. Engraving, 1663, museum no. 1928,0313.45. London: The British Museum. Available at: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_1928-0313-45 (Accessed: 1 June 2023).
Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (n.d.) Esau Selling His Birthright (Matthias Stom).Available at: https://search.smb.museum/object/obj-868621 (Accessed 1 June 2023).
Gesino, A. (2019) ‘Tracce di Matthias Stom nel collezionismo tra la Sicilia e Genova’ [Traces of Matthias Stom in the collecting culture of Sicily and Genoa], in Orlando, A. (ed.) Caravaggio e i genovesi. Committenti, collezionisti, pittori [Caravaggio and the Genoese. Patrons, collectors, painters]. Exhibition catalogue, Palazzo della Meridiana, Genoa. Genoa: Sagep
Haskell, F. (1980) Patrons and Painters. A Study in the Relations between Italian Art and Society in the Age of the Baroque. Rev. edn. New Haven and London: Yale University Press
Hoogewerff, G.J. (1942) Nederlandsche kunstenaars te Rome (1600–1725): uittreksels uit de parochiale archieven [Netherlandish artists in Rome (1600–1725): extracts from the parish archives]. The Hague: Nijhoff
Judson, J.R. and Ekkart, R.E.O. (1999) Gerrit van Honthorst 1592–1656. Doornspijk: Davaco
Neumeister, M. (2003) Das Nachtstück mit Kunstlicht in der niederländischen Malerei und Graphik des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts [The nocturne with artificial light in Netherlandish painting and graphic art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries]. Petersberg: Michael Imhof Verlag
Nicolson, B. (1977) ‘Stomer Brought Up to Date’, The Burlington Magazine, 119, pp. 230–245. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/i236720 (2 June 2023).
Osnabrugge, M. (2014) ‘New Documents for Matthias Stom in Naples’, The Burlington Magazine, 156(1331), pp. 107–108.
Osnabrugge, M. (2019) The Neapolitan Lives and Careers of Netherlandish Immigrant Painters (1575–1655). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press
Papi, G. (2020) ‘Alcune riflessioni su Dirck van Baburen e il primo tempo di Matthias Stom’ [Some reflections on Dirck van Baburen and the early period of Matthias Stom], in Un misto di grano e di pula. Scritti su Caravaggio e l’ambiente caravaggesco [A mix of wheat and chaff. Writings on Caravaggio and the Caravaggesque milieu].Editori paparo, Naples
RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History (n.d.) Matthias Stom, Esau Selling His Birthright, c. 1642–1645. RKDimages, image no. 62038. The Hague: RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History. Available at: https://rkd.nl/images/62038 (Accessed: 1 June 2023).
RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History (n.d.) Peter Paul Rubens, Old Woman and Boy with Candles, c. 1616–1617. RKDimages, image no. 62554. The Hague: RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History. Available at: https://rkd.nl/images/62554 (Accessed: 1 June 2023).
RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History (n.d.) Peter Paul Rubens (etcher) and Paulus Pontius (engraver), A Boy Lighting a Candle from One Held by an Old Woman, c. 1620–1630. RKDimages, image no. [to be confirmed]. The Hague: RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History. Available at: https://rkd.nl/explore/images/[to be confirmed] (Accessed: 1 June 2023).
Rubens, P.P. (etcher) and Pontius, P. (engraver) (c. 1620–1630) A Boy Lighting a Candle from One Held by an Old Woman, etching and engraving, published by P.P. Rubens, Antwerp. British Museum, London, reg. no. S.7263. Available at: https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog/16732927 ((Accessed: 25 August 2026).
Spear, R.E. and Sohm, P. (2010) Painting for Profit. The Economic Lives of Seventeenth-Century Italian Painters. New Haven and London: Yale University Press
Spicer, J.A. and Orr, L.F. (eds.) (1997) Masters of Light: Dutch Painters in Utrecht during the Golden Age. Exhibition catalogue, Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; The National Gallery, London. New Haven and London: Yale University Press
Treves, L. et al. (2016) Beyond Caravaggio. Exhibition catalogue, The National Gallery, London. London: National Gallery Company
Vodret, R. (2011) Alla ricerca di “Ghiongrat”: Studi sui libri parrocchiali romani (1600–1630). Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider
Later updates
Papi, G. (ed.) (2025) Matthias Stom. Un caravaggesco nelle collezioni lombarde [Matthias Stom. A Caravaggesque in the Lombard Collections]. Exhibition catalogue, Pinacoteca Tosio Martinengo, Brescia, 18 September 2025 – 15 February 2026. Milan: Skira
