During the first half of the seventeenth century this subject was one of the most illustrated, true to the iconographical traditions of the latter part of the late sixteenth century and the Counter-Reformation. This was, above all, the case with artists who painted in the Caravaggesque style and who benefited from an immediate precedent and absolute model in the painting with an identical subject by Caravaggio himself. There were two versions of Caravaggio’s painting which were destined for the Contarelli Chapel in the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome; the first version (which had been rejected) was destroyed in Berlin during the Second World War.

In the present painting the figure of the elderly evangelist is depicted slumped over his writing desk as if just roused from sleep by the adolescent angel who rests his hand on the saint’s shoulder. In its strong and evocative narrative conception, it recalls the first Saint Matthew and the Angel which Caravaggio had painted for the Contarelli chapel in San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome. This painting was famously rejected because of its uncomfortable imagery and the perceived indecorous pose of the Saint, and as a result was purchased by Vincenzo Giustiniani, one of the greatest collectors of the day.

A variety of markedly obvious elements from examples of Caravaggio’s works in Rome and Naples can be found in the present painting. These range from a thin beam of light skimming over surfaces in a dark and tenebristic environment, highlighting the texture of the clothes, objects and complexions to sharp chiaroscuro contrasts as well as the “true nature” of the angel’s position - almost intimate in a close, familiar way - which while writing the gospels leans with his left arm on the shoulder of the hunched-up old man, attentive and concentrated, unlike the behaviour of most young students.

The painting shown above has previously been attributed to the work of both Neapolitan artist Battistello Caracciolo and French artist Nicolas Régnier. After initial inspection, the present work was included by Annick Lemoine in her catalogue raisonné on the works of Nicolas Régnier but without a definite attribution to the artist. The work was auctioned at Sotheby’s in 2007 as being by Régnier but it was not reproduced as such in her book, published a year later. From both these deductions however it can be concluded that the painting is probably by a French artist in Rome and can be dated to between 1615 and the early 1620s. Most recently Annick Lemoine has in fact confirmed that she now believes the work to be part of the oeuvre of Nicolas Régnier.