David with the Head of Goliath (Caravaggio)
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| David with the Head of Goliath |
| Caravaggio, 1609-1610 |
| Oil on canvas |
| 125 × 101 cm |
| Galleria Borghese |
David with the Head of Goliath is a painting finished around 1609-1610 by the Italian Baroque painter Caravaggio. It is housed in the Galleria Borghese, Rome.
This painting, which was in the collection of Cardinal Scipione Borghese in 1613, has been dated as early as 1605 and as late as 1609-1610. It is included in the list of candidates as Caravaggio's last work. Its melancholy would suit in fact the gloomy thoughts of the artist's final years. The subject matter recalls the Beheading of St. John the Baptist in La Valletta, but this time there is no brilliant colour and, as a small picture, it has an intimacy that was not evident in the grand public work.
The boy handles his trophy with disgust. In that head [Caravaggio] wished to portray himself and in the boy he portrayed his Caravaggino, wrote Manilli in 1650. If Goliath's head is indeed Caravaggio's, there is an element of self disgust in this painting. The device recalls the way that Michelangelo, in the Last Judgment for the Sistine Chapel, placed an anguished face with features evidently his own onto the flayed body of St. Bartholomew, but Caravaggio's mood is closer to one of despair. As a witness to God's light, Bartholomew takes his seat in heaven: Goliath, God's enemy, is doomed to everlasting night.
Dirty silver, black and browns dominate the picture. The light shows David to look like a boy from the street, whose sword has just a drop of blood on it to show that, like Caravaggio once, he knows what it is to have just killed a man. Another drop of blood in the midst of the giant's forehead confirms that he has been felled by a stone. On the sword is an abbreviated inscription: H-AS OS, in Latin: Humilitas occidit superbiam ("Humility kills pride").
A decade later Cardinal Scipione commissioned a statue of David about to catapult a stone at Goliath. Bernini was far removed from the anxieties of the older master, and saw David's action as joyful and exhilarating, a triumph of the human spirit expressing itself through the athletic exertions of a beautiful human body.
