If I could paint a masterpiece, it would not look like Caravaggio's "The Supper at Emmaus". I would not confine myself to such a mossy palette, touched in the center with an incarnadine flare. I would not be so concerned with establishing perspective arranging hands and arms and incline of head so that the viewers eye is drawn first into the fictitious depth of the canvas to land on the figure of a youthful Christ. I would not be so concerned with painting my figures as if they were floating in a sea of melting light and shadow. But the fact that Caravaggio did all of these things that I would not do is what defined him as a genius in his time and place.
The painting depicts an event from the Gospel of St. Luke (24:13-32). This section of this gospel relates the meeting between two apostles with a resurrected Christ. At first they do not recognize him: It is only when he breaks the bread and blesses it that they understand who it is - but as soon as they see him for who he truly is he vanishes. This painting illustrates what we take to be the moment of that epiphany, when the apostles - and through them their host - recognize the man before them.
The use of lighting in this painting is especially important more so even than is typically the case in a work by this artist who was defined by his use of light. Whle most of the great baroque painters achieved their emotional and formal effects at least in part through the manipulation of light, Caravaggio was a master of the use of the dramatic light-and-dark effects of chiaroscuro (Dutoit, 1999, p. 12). His ability to use light in his paintings not merely as a source of illumination but in allegorical and narrative ways is clearly demonstrated in this work in which the light streaming down on the figures from the upper left section of the painting both allows us to see the expressions on the faces of these characters and also represents to us their own understanding of the presence o...