Dr. Mitchell talked about the shadows... how they make things real. In "The Calling of St. Matthew" by Caravaggio there are lots of shadows. The light is not the realistic kind that we get in the work that inspired Dr. Mitchell... but this is a work to take a second look at.
Sometimes shadows make things real, they give man his shape. The shadows of light with the outside, and the shadows of character with the inside... but shadows can also hide the truth. In this painting Caravaggio uses shadows to hide everything that he feels is unimportant. Do these shadows give us the truth or are they distorting it?
What about the shadows of character? Can they hide some of the truth as well? The darkness inside man can sometimes blind us to the light. Not in the way the darkness in this painting hides things from our view, but in another way altogether. Sometimes all we can see are the shadows. Like this painting we see the world as a place of bright light and dark shadows. In reality each thing has a light and a shadow, and if we are overpowered by the shadow we cannot really see anything at all.
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