Adoration of the Shepherds

Caravaggio executed this altarpiece for the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli in Messina, Sicily, where he had fled after escaping imprisonment in Malta in October 1608. His career at this point was defined by exile and urgency: he was a fugitive from a death sentence handed down in Rome following a killing in 1606, moving between Malta, Sicily, and Naples in the hope of obtaining a papal pardon. The Messina commission, along with the near-simultaneous Raising of Lazarus, belongs to a late group of works that shed almost every decorative impulse still present in his Roman and Maltese paintings. Art historians have long recognised this Sicilian period as the most formally severe expression of tenebrism, the extreme chiaroscuro technique associated with the Caravaggio line: figures emerge from shadow as if summoned rather than depicted, and the paint surface itself, applied with broad, summary strokes, shows a new economy. The altarpiece remained in Messina until 1783, when it was transferred to the Museo Nazionale di Messina, where it is housed today. Its influence on the Baroque painters of Naples, Spain, and the Low Countries, Ribera, Zurbarán, Rembrandt among them, was profound and traceable in specific pictorial decisions rather than general atmosphere.