ABSTRACT
Monsignor Tiberio Cerasi was rich; the position of treasurer, which he was allowed to purchase, cost a fortune. Late in 1600, when Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio's side paintings for the St. Matthew. Contarelli Chapel were visible and the vault of the Galleria Farnese had been unveiled, it must have seemed obvious to Cerasi's adviser that an ideal chapel decoration would combine the talents of the two painters. Caravaggio was to finish the two paintings in eight months, but Cerasi died first, on 3 May 1601. The Cerasi Chapel itself is narrow, and Caravaggio's forms seem to be pushed out of the frames; the figures are bigger and fewer. The Cerasi paintings, which are relatively small, deliberately invoke comparison with these great frescoes. The powerful physicality of St. Peter and the plebeian types of all of Caravaggio's figures in the Cerasi Chapel lead directly to the first St. Matthew for the Contarelli Chapel, which was commissioned early in 1602.
