Caravaggio did not begin as the obvious choice for the Contarelli Chapel. Arpino, then Rome's most fashionable painter, had originally been engaged to fresco its walls but left the work unfinished for years, and the clergy responsible for the church eventually tore up his contract in frustration^[1]. Caravaggio's patron, Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, is widely believed to have intervened decisively to secure the replacement commission for him, and on 23 July 1599 a new contract was drawn up for the same fee Arpino had been promised, four hundred scudi, to paint scenes of Matthew's calling and his martyrdom^[1]. It was an unusually large undertaking for Caravaggio at the time: he had never before painted figures at this scale, and the jubilee year of 1600 gave the clergy extra reason to want the chapel finished quickly, pressure that shaped the pace of a commission that would make his reputation in Rome.

The painting is built on a set of deliberate contrasts. Matthew and his companions wear the ornate, fashionable dress of contemporary Rome, while Christ and St Peter, standing beside him, go barefoot in plain, timeless robes, visually placing the two groups in different moral and historical registers within the same room^[3]. St Matthew, absorbed in counting money he has collected that day, responds to Christ's call with a gesture that reads as an incredulous who, me, and he is the only figure at the table to register that anything unusual has happened, marked out by being the only one directly touched by the light^[2]. One companion at the table wears eyeglasses, a detail some readings connect to the biblical association between usury and moral blindness, while a foreground figure with his back to the viewer, a repoussoir device common in Baroque composition, helps draw the eye into the scene from outside it^[2].

Christ's outstretched hand is not a generic gesture of command; it directly paraphrases the hand of Adam, not the hand of God, from Michelangelo's Creation of Adam on the Sistine ceiling, a borrowing precise enough that contemporaries steeped in that imagery would have recognised it immediately^[3]. By giving Christ the pose of the newly created Adam rather than the animating finger of God, Caravaggio casts him as a second Adam, made in God's image but free of sin, extending the same reach toward Matthew that God once extended toward the first man. The grouping around the table has also been read as a deliberately profane echo of the Last Supper, with the young man absorbed in his money resembling Judas and his thirty pieces of silver, reinforcing the sense that Matthew is being called out of one company of worldly figures and into another entirely^[3].