“The Beheading of St. John the Baptist” was difficult to absorb into my understanding of whatever it was I thought painting was. More than a year would pass before I found a key that helped me process what I saw in Malta. That was when I saw two brief video clips from Libya made in 2017. The first clip is of men being sold at a slave market, filmed by an unnamed source. The second was made by CNN journalists who went into the suburbs of Tripoli to confirm the story. The men being sold are migrants from Niger, a few of them standing at night against a bare wall, a desolate courtyard like that in Caravaggio’s painting. The light is poor. It’s hard to see. The business is brisk and rapid: Prices are called out, unseen buyers bid and it’s over. In those clips, what I saw was life turned inside out, life turned into death, just as I had seen in Caravaggio’s painting. Not simply what ought not to be, but what ought not to be seen.
Teju Cole, In Dark Times, I Sought Out the Turmoil of Caravaggio's Paintings.
