Perspective | This masterpiece captured the special intimacy of betrayal

This Caravaggio at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is regarded as one of the final two works he painted. Dated 1610, the yr of his dying — an occasion nonetheless shrouded in mystery — the portray is about the intimate, custom-made design of betrayal.

The artist had addressed the theme earlier than, in his nice “The Taking of Christ.” In that portray, Caravaggio seems to have used the similar mannequin for Judas (who betrays Jesus with a kiss) as he makes use of right here for Peter, who’s proven being accosted by a soldier after following Jesus into the courtyard of the excessive priest Caiaphas. Peter — who will change into the rock of the Christian church — denies any affiliation with Jesus, thereby fulfilling his grasp’s prophecy that Peter will deny him 3 times earlier than the cock crows. The scene takes place at night time. Firelight lends the picture its environment of flickering contingency.

Caravaggio, who had a expertise for making enemies, was curious about all the methods people are not rocks — all the methods wherein we’re flimsy, inconstant and to not be depended upon. Since he was no saint himself (the Met’s catalogue entry, sounding just a little prefer it got here from the head of human sources, notes the artist’s “proclivity towards violence and his inability to get on with his colleagues”), we would prolong the thought to say that he was beguiled by all the methods wherein — not wishing to be martyrs to advantage — we crave transformation.

Peter would, of course, die a martyr to advantage. He was crucified the other way up for his troubles. (Caravaggio painted that, too.) But on this work, he reveals Peter at his lowest level, morally talking.

Caravaggio thrusts us into the scene in all the methods we’ve come to affiliate with baroque artwork. He crops the composition tightly, setting the three figures in opposition to a darkish background in order that they virtually push out of the canvas and into our personal house. You can virtually really feel Peter’s sizzling and treacherous breath.

The painter removes all the pieces inessential. But as an alternative of bathing the figures in clarifying, rational gentle — as in a Renaissance portray by Raphael or Piero della Francesca — he emphasizes gentle’s shortage, its transience, in order that we really feel we’re witnessing a fleeting and precarious second. Note how the shadows fall irrationally on the girl’s face, leaving her trying like a cubist portrait by Picasso.

Compounding the portray’s visceral cost, the figures are frail and acquainted quite than idealized. We can see the filth and wrinkles on Peter’s brow, the grime baked into his arms. Those arms reply to his accusers’ pointing fingers with an imploring gesture that mixes protest (“Who, me?”) with one thing extra agonized, virtually implying the beginnings of repentance (“Please, I’m begging you …”)

The scene is congested with unknowns and completely missing in readability. Caravaggio is inviting us to contemplate the image extra deeply, to tease out its ambivalence.

What all the time appears unusual about Christ’s Passion just isn’t solely its predestined high quality, but additionally Jesus’ bizarre involvement in “engineering” his personal struggling. In the instances of first Judas after which Peter, occasions unfold in ways in which counsel the virtually erotic intimacy of betrayal. It is as if (to adapt a phrase from Saul Bellow) the knife and the wound have been aching for one another.

Betrayal is terrible. It is the worst. But in entrance of Caravaggio’s astonishing portray, it’s tempting to register a side of it that I think the artist not solely understood, but additionally discovered deeply alluring. In a provocative essay about Judas, the author Adam Phillips wrote of betrayal’s central function in creativity, transformation and progress. Recasting it as a present, he lamented “all the opportunities to betray and be betrayed that we have missed,” the “risks that for various reasons we have avoided,” the “failures of nerve that we have re-described to ourselves as commitment, or loyalty, or integrity, or kindness.”

That is a really fashionable take. And, of course, to see betrayal in such phrases is to purchase right into a mixed-up, Machiavellian world of motives and means confused with ends and beliefs. A world wherein the risk of a rocklike moral consistency is frequently being eroded. A world of flickering gentle and ceaseless change. It’s a world that Caravaggio was one of the first to color.