In the Galleria Borghese in Rome hangs a small painting of a young shepherd holding the severed head of a giant by the hair. The shepherd is David. The giant is Goliath. The face of Goliath, as art historians recognized centuries ago, is the face of the painter — Caravaggio. Who the young David is remains open: some read him as Caravaggio himself rejuvenated — the man as he was before the killing he committed in 1606 — others as Cecco, the studio assistant who modeled for him. No independent portrait of Cecco survives, so the question cannot be settled.
The Painter's Two Faces
Two self-portraits in one painting. An older self held by a younger one. A painter who has made enemies of who he once was.
The Sorrow on the Living Face
What startles most about this picture is that David is not triumphant. He is sad. His lips are parted slightly, his head tilted, his brow shadowed. He holds the head by the hair almost gently, as if the weight troubles him. His sword is held low, pointed away, not raised in victory. There is no trumpet, no crowd. Only the boy and what he has done. Behind him, a muted darkness.
Caravaggio painted this in the last years of his life, probably 1609–1610, on the run after killing a man in a Roman street brawl. He was trying, through the patronage of Cardinal Scipione Borghese, to secure a pardon. The painting may have been part of that plea. It shows the painter offering his own head for judgment, carried by his younger, still-innocent self.
What the Verse Says
"So David prevailed over the Philistine with a sling and with a stone, and smote the Philistine, and slew him; but there was no sword in the hand of David. Therefore David ran, and stood upon the Philistine, and took his sword, and drew it out of the sheath thereof, and slew him, and cut off his head therewith."
Notice the twice-told killing. Verse 50: David kills Goliath with a stone. Verse 51: he cuts off the head with Goliath's own sword. There was no sword in the hand of David. The Hebrew narrator wants to make sure the reader understands. The boy had nothing of his own that matched the giant's weapons. The sword he ends up holding is the giant's.
Caravaggio knew this verse. The sword in his David's hand, by the Hebrew text's insistence, is not his. It is Goliath's — which is to say, it is the painter's own. David holds what he did not bring.
Write It Out
Copy the verse out for yourself — just the half-line: there was no sword in the hand of David. By the time you finish it, you notice the line is built on something that is not there. Whatever triumph one achieves against one's own monsters comes late, costs more than was expected, and is carried out with borrowed weapons.
The sword is Goliath's. The hand is David's. Both faces belong to the same painter.