Contarelli Chapel
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 Smarthistory - Caravaggio's paintings in the Contarelli Chapel, San Luigi dei Francesi ] |
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Smarthistory - Caravaggio's Calling of Saint Matthew ] |
The Contarelli Chapel is located within the church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome. It is famous for housing three paintings on the theme of Saint Matthew the Evangelist by the Baroque master Caravaggio. The chapel commemorates the French cardinal Matthieu Cointerel.
On his death in 1585 the French cardinal, Matthieu Cointerel (Contarelli in Italian), left an endowment and instructions for the decoration of the chapel, first one to the left of the apse, which he had purchased within San Luigi dei Francesi ("Saint Louis of the French"), the church of the French community in Rome in 1565. The cardinal was rich—he had already paid for part of the construction of the church facade and put a large sum towards the high altar—and he specified that his chapel be decorated with scenes from the life of his name-saint, Matthew the Evangelist.
Cointerel's executor, Virglio Cresenzi, commissioned a Flemish sculptor, Jacques Cobaert, to make a marble statue of Matthew and an angel for the altar. Giuseppe Cesari, one of the foremost artists then active in Rome, was contracted to fresco the two side walls and the vault. The details were clearly set out in the contract—Cobaert's altarpiece would show Matthew sitting in a chair, about to write the Gospel, with an angel standing and "appearing to reason or in other suitable pose." Cesari's side walls would show, on the right, Saint Matthew in his counting house (Matthew was a tax collector before becoming an apostle of Christ), suitably dressed, rising "to go to Our Lord, who, passing by with his disciples in the street, calls him..." On the left, Matthew at the moment of his martyrdom, celebrating Mass at the altar, with "a crowd of men and women, young and old and children...some appalled and others pitying..."
Cesari finished the vault by 1593, but then his attention and time were taken by Papal commissions. Cobaert produced nothing. In 1597 the money for the project was transferred to the Fabbrica di San Pietro, which administered the Church's buildings, yet still nothing happened. In 1599 preparations began for a Jubilee. "France...is not yet suffiently cleansed from the thorns and weeds of heresy and corruption," the Pope had told his French bishops. The new French king, Henry IV, had recently converted from Protestantism to Catholicism, but much remained to be done. Conversion, no less than martyrdom, was to be the Pope's theme with regard to France, Rome would be crowded with French pilgrims, and the chapel threatened to be boarded up. The clergy in charge of San Luigi became alarmed. The prefect in charge of the Fabricca, and of the money, Cardinal Francesco Maria Del Monte, suggested that his own personal painter, Michelangelo Merisi, known from his home town as Caravaggio, should be contracted to paint oils on canvas for the two side walls where Cesari would obviously never put his murals.
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Wikipedia