Caravaggio's The Calling of Saint Matthew shows the moment Christ walks into a room where tax collectors are counting coins and points at one of them. The man gets up and follows him. Caravaggio painted it in 1599 and 1600, and he dressed the tax collectors in the fashionable clothes of his own Rome.
The Gospel of Matthew tells the story in a single sentence: Jesus sees a man named Matthew sitting at the tax office, says "Follow me," and the man rises and follows him. Mark and Luke call the same man Levi. Caravaggio's canvas, 322 by 340 centimeters (about 127 by 134 inches), hangs on the left wall of the Contarelli Chapel, a side chapel of San Luigi dei Francesi, the church of the French community in Rome.
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The scene looks easy to read. Five men gather around a table, and Christ and his disciple Peter have just come in from the right. A beam of light follows Christ's hand to the faces of the men at the table.
At the center, a bearded man points at his own chest, as if to ask, "Me?" For about four centuries, viewers have taken him for Matthew.
The argument over who Matthew is
The usual case for the bearded man rests on the two other canvases Caravaggio painted in the chapel, the Martyrdom of Saint Matthew and the Inspiration of Saint Matthew. In both, he gave the saint a similar face.
That shows who Caravaggio pictured as Matthew a few years later, which is not quite proof of who he meant here. I still find it the strongest argument on the table, and I side with the bearded man.
Pope Francis also found himself in the picture. In an interview published in America magazine on September 30, 2013, he said he used to visit San Luigi dei Francesi to look at it. "That finger of Jesus, pointing at Matthew. That's me," he said. What struck him was the way Matthew holds on to his money, as if to say, "No, not me! No, this money is mine."
In 1985, the art historian Andreas Prater argued in the German journal Pantheon that the bearded man is a decoy. The real Matthew, he said, sits at the end of the table with his head down over the coins. He has not looked up, because Christ's call has not reached him yet.
On that reading, the men beside the bearded figure turn toward Christ while the man at the end stays bowed over the coins. The bearded man's hand points along the table, and his question is "Him?" and not "Me?" Both readings rest on the same gesture, and the painting does not settle which way the hand points.
Other historians objected that Prater's reading would make generations of viewers wrong. The art historians Herwarth Röttgen in 1991 and Irving Lavin in 1993 rejected it, Lavin with the stronger objections. Neither ended the doubt.
In July 2025, at the German art-history institute in Florence, the art historian Jürgen Müller announced a new hypothesis: Caravaggio misleads the viewer on purpose. Christ's hand, which starts the whole question, is itself a borrowing from another painter.
What You'll Discover
Whose hand Christ is borrowing.
What Caravaggio added to the Gospel.
Who was meant to paint the chapel.
What became of the first altarpiece.