The Betrayal of Christ (Taking of Christ), 1602 Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610)

We create our paintings with museum quality and covering the highest academic standards. Once we get your order, it will be entirely hand-painted with oil on canvas. All the materials we use are the highest level, being totally artist graded painting materials and linen canvas.

We will add 1.6" (4 cm) additional blank canvas all over the painting for stretching.

High quality and detailing in every inch are time consuming. The reproduction of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio also needs time to dry in order to be completely ready for shipping, as this is crucial to not be damaged during transportation.
Based on the size, level of detail and complexity we need 8-9 weeks to complete the process.

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We not stretch and frame our oil paintings due to several reasons:
Painting reproduction is a high quality expensive product, which we cannot risk to damage by sending it being stretched.
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Additionally, due to the dimensions of the stretched canvas, the shipment price may exceed the price of the product itself.

You can stretch and frame your painting in your local frame-shop.

Once the painting The Betrayal of Christ (Taking of Christ) is ready and dry, it will be shipped to your delivery address. The canvas will be rolled-up in a secure postal tube.

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The scene unfolds in an almost suffocating proximity to the picture plane: seven tightly interlocked figures burst from darkness, the stark highlight of moon‑lit flesh and polished metal pitched against a void of black. Christ’s pallid face tilts left, eyes downcast in quiet resignation, while Judas, his brow creased and lips pursed, seals betrayal with a kiss. To the left, the crimson‑cloaked St John recoils in alarm, his green sleeve flung upward in a gesture that reads as both flight and futile protest. Opposite, a trio of soldiers in glinting cuirasses press forward, their steel surfaces catching the light like shards; one gauntlet clamps Christ’s wrists, another armoured shoulder edges into the foreground. Crowning the fray, a lantern—ostensibly held aloft by a bearded onlooker—fails to illuminate; its bearer is Caravaggio himself, a silent witness, a painter‑voyeur.

Caravaggio restricts the palette to earthen reds, deep greens, ochres and jet blacks, punctuated by icy flesh tones and the mirrored silver of armour. The chromatic economy heightens emotional intensity: the red of Judas’s cloak bleeds into Christ’s mantle, visually fusing treachery and sacrifice. Dark grounds swallow ancillary detail, so that the few lit zones—faces, hands, armour—flare with almost sculptural clarity. Colour is less descriptive than atmospheric; it turns light into a protagonist, isolating motives and psychology with surgical precision.

Technically, the painting exemplifies Caravaggio’s audacious handling of oil. Wet passages coalesce with brisk, loaded strokes, yet the surface remains restrained, devoid of flourish. Recent examination reveals pentimenti—ghost contours of repositioned hands and altered armour—tracing the artist’s method of staging live models, then revising on the canvas itself. Pigment sits thin in shadows, thicker in lit forms, the grain of the weave occasionally exposed, imparting a raw immediacy that belies the scene’s theological gravitas.

Compositionally, the canvas reads as a compressed frieze, a single horizontal charge frozen mid‑surge. Lines of force radiate from Christ’s downturned gaze: St John’s splayed hand arcs upward; the soldier’s gauntleted arm thrusts inward; Judas’s bent elbow forms a hinge at centre. Even Christ’s bound hands, clasped low, echo a silent prayer, anchoring the turmoil above. The viewer’s eye ricochets along these vectors, only to return to the understated expression of spiritual acceptance.

Painted in 1602 for Ciriaco Mattei at the height of Rome’s Counter‑Reformation, the work answers the Church’s call for visceral immediacy in sacred art. Yet its modernity lies in its psychological candour: salvation and sin are enacted not in celestial space but in the fugitive torchlight of ordinary men. The canvas’s subsequent disappearance, misattribution, and twentieth‑century rediscovery form a narrative almost as dramatic as the subject itself, underscoring its magnetic reputation among contemporaries and successors alike.

Today the painting stands as testament to Caravaggio’s short Roman epoch, where radical naturalism, uncompromising chiaroscuro, and acute human insight coalesced. Its power stems less from spectacular incident than from the palpable contradiction it stages: divine narrative articulated in the language of flawed flesh and mortal dread, rendered with a painter’s eye that refuses consolation, yet compels engagement.