Boy Bitten by a Lizard

Boy Bitten by a Lizard, painted around 1594–1595, belongs to the early Roman period of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. The painting captures an extraordinarily precise instant: a young man suddenly snatches his hand away after a small lizard has bitten his finger.

Caravaggio depicts the reaction at the very moment it occurs. The body contracts, the shoulder rises, the hand recoils violently and the face registers a combination of pain, surprise and shock. By choosing such a fleeting and sudden moment, Caravaggio gives the scene an immediacy that was highly unusual in late sixteenth-century painting.

The work is one of the earliest demonstrations of Caravaggio's ability to transform an everyday event into a scene of extraordinary intensity. The sudden gesture gives the otherwise still arrangement a vivid sense of passing time.