Caravaggio's key

A writer and presenter on art and history for the BBC has described in detail how he came to hold a key depicted in Caravaggio's painting during a visit to film in Malta.

Simon Schama, a professor of history and art history at Columbia University, recounts the episode in a book that accompanies the BBC TV series Power of Art, as he stood with an unnamed priest in the oratory of St John's Co-Cathedral. Prof. Schama was interviewed in yesterday's The Sunday Times of London's Culture magazine which reproduced an extract of his book under the title The Key to Caravaggio.

"'Please', said a wizened man with the beaky nose and the black cassock, nudging me in the ribs. 'Please take.' I wasn't in the mood to be nudged. It had been yet another embarrassing day with Caravaggio, attempting to say something that illuminated his drama while painfully conscious that he did his own lighting, thanks very much; and that words were a feeble, fluttering thing beside the muscular heft of his painting.

"In the cathedral oratory at Valletta, my back to The Beheading of St John the Baptist, face to the camera, speech had never seemed so redundant. I wanted to be out of the musty dimness of the church. The bar stool at The Ship pub, from which Oliver Reed had terminally tumbled, was calling for an act of homage. I had had my fill of art.

"Still, courtesies were called for. Rule No. 1 in location filming is to show proper gratitude to those whose premises you have occupied. Besides, the small man in the cassock was giving me a wry grin as he did his poking: 'Please, take.' So I sighed, looked and took. In my hand was an ancient iron key about 5in long. The lopped handle end had got furry in the way very old pieces of metalwork do, but the entry end sported massive, squared off teeth. Why was I getting this key?

"I smiled uncomprehendingly back at the verger, now vaguely aware I had seen this particular key before. Indeed I had, just two minutes before. The gnomic figure in black now tightly grasped my free hand, as if I were a child and he my schoolteacher, and turned me round to face Caravaggio's painting. And, of course, there it was: one of three keys hanging from the belt of the grimly handsome prison officer who was pointing to the basket in which the head of the Baptist was about to be deposited."

Mr Schama explains that Caravaggio always used live models and, since the figures in the Beheading are life-sized, it was painted in situ. "He needed the keys - emblems of incarceration - to ramp up the nightmarish claustrophobia that manages to pervade even this huge painting. So he had posed his grizzled model and then, perhaps, asked for a set of keys to hang from the man's belt. The cathedral clergy were probably as accommodating to him as they had been to us, lending whatever was to hand. The key in my hand matched precisely, tooth for tooth, the one in the painting. 'See, yes, see,' said the verger. 'His'... I was nervously shaking hands with a 400-year-old genius sociopath. Caravaggio, the jailbird, was haunting me at the scene of my own venial crime: cutting him down to television size."