He has a murderer’s face, which is to say that he looks like any one of us. A workman, obedient without pleasure, his hand in a paralyzed clutch of the hair on the decapitated head.

left: Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Salome Receives the Head of Saint John the Baptist, c. 1606–10. Oil on canvas. The National Gallery, London.

There are other portraits in this painting on loan from the National Gallery, London, of the aftermath of John the Baptist’s killing. One of them is a Salome, not willing to test her bored composure with a direct look at what’s bleeding on the plate. Or, is it her at all? Instead, could she and the other woman in the background be from among the palace’s foundation of servants, arranging the details of the imminent presentation to the king’s table? And then there is the rictus face of John, where Caravaggio finds the vanishing of the self that is death’s clearest presence. It is impossible not to imagine Gericault recalling this portrayal in those later, fearful documents that are his studies of guillotined prisoners. artes fine arts magazine

But it is the executioner who is the center around which this picture turns. The bleak humanity of his expression is not a caricature of violence. He might be one of Beckett’s woeful tramps, wondering if there is any way that he can be saved. The same uncertainty and dismay mark the face of the apostle in the Denial of Peter, as the sparks of an unseen fire spit towards him like a hint of damnation. There is a self-awareness to his betrayal even as he pronounces himself ignorant and a stranger. A soldier, his profile perfect even in darkness, is audience to the two competing testimonies of Peter and the insistent woman, adjudicating in silence, but never heard to pronounce his decision.

What makes a wilderness? In the largest scale of the Caravaggio paintings among the five in this show, the one from the Nelson Atkins Museum, in Kansas City, shows the young John the Baptist, eyes darkened by some fantasy of his dying, like an unthroned king, or the exiled duke of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, considering the possibility that he has not been punished, but rewarded. Oak leaves form the cloudy pageant of the background, while at John’s feet, two fleshy mullein plants wait like temptations to escape from his future.

In Martha and Mary Magdalen, the Baptist’s’ wilderness has become a single flower in the Magdalen’s hand, while in Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy, the Caravaggio owned by the Wadsworth, the botanical catalogue of the foreground presents the saint as a genius loci of the natural world, at the same moment that he is receiving the marks of Christ’s passion.

left: Martha and Mary Magdalen, c. 1595–96. Oil and tempera on canvas, Detroit Institute of Arts, Gift of the Kresge Foundation and Mrs.Edsel B. Ford; below, right: Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness, c. 1604–05 Oil on canvas. Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri, William Rockhill Nelson Trust.

But in the background of the Francis painting, with its darkness broken only by a fragment of distant bonfire and the lines of what might be either dawn or sunset in the unstable time frame of religious ecstasy, there is a story hidden. In the near distance is a cowled figure who might be a monk companion to the saint or some tempter in religious disguise, while further away, a group of figures are pointing to some other history outside the frame as if completely unaware of the divine making itself, visible in the foreground.

What narrative painting since Caravaggio can escape him as a point of reference? In Picasso’s Guernica, the inheritance is as clear as any, given the way that the painter has found to depict a terror which transforms the ordinary world into a stage for agony, and which creates a distance for our visual resolution of the image that keeps us from being distracted by technique. Caravaggio’s insight is not a matter of chiaroscuro, but of storytelling.

Left: Francisco de Zurbarán, Saint Serapion, 1628. Oil on canvas. Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT. The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund

This is why the gaggle of followers assembled here—with the significant exceptions of Francisco de Zurbarán (above, left) and Georges de la Tour—read as unintentionally comic parodies. They simply do not struggle to believe, as Caravaggio does. He is the damaged, faithful servant desperate to find the sacred in the midst of an unruly, fierce world. But his only discovery in the end is the detail of the broken comb on the table in front of Mary Magdalene. Here the closest that the painter can get to the truth of it all is to be found in a perfectly rendered imperfection. What other story does this world tell?

By Stephen Vincent Kobasa, Contributing Writer

Burst of Light: Caravaggio and His Legacy: through June 16

Wadsworth Atheneum

600 Main Street, Hartford, CT

860-278-2670

www.wadsworthatheneum.org