Born in Amersfoort, near Utrecht, Matthias Stom is among the scores of seventeenth-century Northern artists who made their way to Italy in search of firsthand knowledge of the art of both the past and the present. The hallmark of Stom’s art is his personal interpretation of the Caravaggesque vocabulary, learned initially from Dutch artists working in Utrecht and strengthened in Rome, Naples, and Sicily by direct exposure to Caravaggio’s works.

Ultimately based on Caravaggio’s painting of the same subject executed thirty years earlier for the church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome, Stom’s Calling of Saint Matthew is a tour de force of baroque internalized drama and compositional sophistication. Stom employs a number of formal devices popularized by Caravaggio: sharp light-dark contrasts, which create a theatrical play of light across the forms; careful attention to realistic detail and surface textures; and, most significant, the interpretation of sacred events in terms of everyday life, acted out by ordinary people.

The painting illustrates the moment when Christ challenges the Roman tax collector Levi to forsake the privileges of his imperial post to “Follow me” (Luke 5:27-28). Levi, the man seated at the far right, will indeed follow Jesus’ lead and will thereafter be known as the apostle Matthew. The psychological tie between Jesus and Levi, to which the attending figures seem largely oblivious, is reinforced by the coloration of their two costumes. Similar shades of red and blue frame the scene like parentheses and redirect the attention to the center of the figural group. There the grouping of hands, book, and scales is a virtuoso display of convincing spatial effects.

-Lynn Federle Orr, Masterworks of European Painting in the California Palace of the Legion of Honor (1999)