THE SACRIFICE OF ISAAC

  In this painting painted for Pope Urban VIII, Caravaggio exposes the horror of a father's willingness to sacrifice his son. The spectator assists in distress at the moment in which an angel, of human appearance, stops with an energetic gesture the hand Abraham before he slams Isaac, his firstborn, while pointing to the ram. The scene is brutal. The young man, naked and with his arms tied., Is debated with his head resting on a stone, held by the neck by the hand of his father, who has already relaxed the tension at the intervention of the angel.

  The diagonal light illuminates the three characters, leaving in the gloom the lamb that is to replace Isaac, and highlights the face of the angel, Abraham, who becomes surprised and the victim. Likewise, the faces of Abraham and Isaac are turned towards the light, which makes it possible to accentuate the expressions of pain of both. With mastery, Caravaggio emphasizes the drama, although not the violence of the scene, in the way of painting the hands, assembled linearly. The arms the three characters bring the viewer's gaze and at the same time bring depth to the picture. The scene is located somewhere in the Roman countryside and not in the arid places where the biblical event took place.

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THE CRUCIFIXION OF SAN PEDRO

  Roberto Longhi affirms referring to this picture of darkness and half-open just what is necessary to not lessen his tragic and virile pessimism, everything happens with an unconscious evidence that each one fulfills his task. The desolation resides in the pure and simple event ... And the saint, a good model known on the Margutta road, already nailed to the cross, has a calm, conscious look of a modern lay hero.

  Caravaggio achieves the tone of equality that favors the naturalness of the scene with the distribution that makes the characters, but also with the use of color: there are neither stridencies nor contrasts, but harmonization of ocher and brown tones. Only the red doublet of one of the three executioners is imposed within this range of color, pointing to the viewer the correct direction of reading the work, from left to right. The truth of this picture is not in the story telling but in what is shown. The shadows frame and confer drama on Pedro's weight pinned to the cross and the effort made by the three men to lift it.

  There is in this scene a brutal intimacy between the three executioners whose faces are not seen, and their victim. As workers concentrated in any job, the three apply to lift the cross where the old man is nailed to put it in place. One of them hugs him by the feet to hold it, another with a shovel resting on the ground and his face very close to the face of the apostle, places his shoulder under the cross and the third, lifts it with the help of a rope, Like a draft animal

  The truth here lies in the horror, in that naturalness and impersonality with which the torture is executed before the eyes of a single witness: the spectator. And this is before the vertical pole of the cross where San Pedro has been nailed drawing a horizontal line that, slightly diagonally cuts, as in an imaginary cross, the vertical line that forms the executioner that pulls the rope and the one that has bent your back.

  The central point of the view of the bereavement that the spectator has is the face of an old man, clear on a dark background, disoriented by the position of his body, which seems to accept his death more as a biological fact than as a religious fact.

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