The Denial of Saint Peter

Caravaggio painted The Denial of Saint Peter around 1610, one of his last works produced in his final years of flight and exile. The composition depicts the Gospel scene in which Peter, warming himself by a fire in the high priest's courtyard, denies three times that he knows Jesus. Caravaggio's late style gives the subject a quiet, almost intimate quality: the figures gathered around the firelight — a soldier, a maidservant, the shamed Peter — enacting the betrayal in a small compressed space that concentrates the psychological drama within a minimal compositional statement. The work is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

The three half-length figures are rendered with Caravaggio's late, summary brushwork, the candlelit faces emerging from deep shadow with a raw emotional power that speaks to both Peter's shame and Caravaggio's own desperate circumstances.