Vocation of the Apostle Matthew

Vocation of the Apostle Matthew, dated 1637 and in the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, depicts Christ's call to the tax collector Matthew — the moment described in Matthew 9 when Christ approached the tax table and said simply 'Follow me.' Caravaggio's two enormous canvases of the same subject (the Calling and the Inspiration of Saint Matthew, both in the Contarelli Chapel, Rome) had defined the scene's visual terms with such force that every subsequent treatment operated in their shadow. Preti, working in Rome by 1637 and thoroughly familiar with Caravaggio's work, produces a version that acknowledges the master while asserting his own formal priorities. The Kunsthistorisches Museum, assembled from the Habsburg imperial collections over centuries, holds this as one of its Italian Baroque works.

The tax table — with its coins, ledgers, and business paraphernalia — provides specific material context for the miraculous interruption of Matthew's professional world by the divine summons. Preti organizes the composition around the confrontation between Christ's authority and Matthew's moment of decision, with the table's mundane contents serving as visual shorthand for everything he is being called to leave behind. The handling shows Preti's mature Caravaggesque confidence, less tight than the earliest works but not yet the summary gestural approach of old age.