Contrast is what makes one part of a painting jump forward while the rest falls back. It can come from light against dark, warm color against cold, or a sharp edge among soft ones.
It can even be one small figure lost in a huge empty space. Twelve paintings, from a chapel in Rome in 1600 to a studio in Paris in 1921, are each built on one such jump.
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It works because of the eye. The eye registers differences before it recognizes objects, so on any canvas it lands first where the gap between two neighboring areas is widest.
That gives painters a way to choose for the viewer. A pale face in a dark room, one warm spot in a cold field, a single hard edge among blurred ones: each works like a pointing finger, and moving it would change what the picture says.
12. The Calling of Saint Matthew, Caravaggio (1599-1600)
In The Calling of Saint Matthew, a beam of light enters from the upper right, crosses the bare back wall of a room where taxes are counted, and lands on five men seated at a table with coins on it. At the right, two standing figures stay almost entirely in shadow.
Caravaggio painted the picture in 1599 and 1600 for a side chapel of the French national church in Rome, San Luigi dei Francesi. The chapel bears the name of its founder, Contarelli. In the Gospels, Matthew collects taxes, and the scene shows the moment Christ calls him to follow.
The two men in shadow are Christ and Saint Peter. Christ raises his arm and points at the table, and the light runs just above his hand in the same direction, as if it carried his call across the room.
Painters have a name for this meeting of a lit surface and a dark one: chiaroscuro, Italian for light and dark. Here it picks out a handful of faces and Christ's pointing hand, and leaves the rest of the wall in darkness.
Caravaggio planned that beam around the chapel itself. The chapel gets its daylight from one window, and he made the painted light fall from the same side, so the real light and the painted one seem to share a single source.
The Calling went up on the left wall in July 1600, with a second canvas facing it on the right wall, the Martyrdom of Saint Matthew. A third, showing Matthew writing his Gospel, was later placed above the altar.
These were Caravaggio's first church commission, and he was twenty eight. The painter Giovanni Baglione, his rival and later his biographer, wrote that these pictures made his name in Rome.
All that darkness had a cost. In 1672 the Roman art writer Giovan Pietro Bellori complained that the dim chapel and the dark canvases made the paintings hard to see.
The chapel is still dim. The lamps above the three paintings come on only when a visitor drops a euro coin into a metal box.
At a Glance
Artist: Caravaggio, born Michelangelo Merisi (1571 to 1610)
Painted: 1599 to 1600
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 322 × 340 cm (127 × 134 in)
Where to see it: Contarelli Chapel, San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome
11. The Magdalen with the Smoking Flame, Georges de La Tour (c. 1635-1637)
A single oil lamp burns in a room gone completely black, and its light falls on a young woman holding a skull on her knees. The woman is Mary Magdalene. Christian tradition made this companion of Christ a sinner who repented, and the skull keeps death before her eyes.
Georges de La Tour painted The Magdalen with the Smoking Flame in Lorraine, in eastern France, around 1635 to 1637, and in his lifetime he held the title of painter to the King of France. Then his name vanished so completely that for two and a half centuries his night scenes passed from sale to sale under other painters' names.