Caravaggio’s masterpiece in Cleveland is his only altarpiece in the U.S.

of the crucifixion of Saint Andrew — one of the Cleveland Museum of Art’s most prized works and the only altarpiece by Caravaggio in the United States.

So the whole picture is involving. But what I am repeatedly drawn to is not the baroque space or Caravaggio’s tenebrism . It’s not the operatic drama of the two elevated bodies, one curving slackly to the right, the other listing leftward, like heavy, three-day-old tulips in a vase. Who was Saint Andrew? One of Jesus’ twelve apostles, he was, according to the Golden Legend — a medieval compilation of hagiographies — an “old man full of gentleness and piety,” who died in Patras, Greece. The Roman proconsul Aegeus had him crucified for Christian evangelizing.

In Caravaggio’s distilled rendition, the old woman, her throat swollen by a goiter , stands in for the crowd — and for us, too: We immediately identify with her rapt stare and wet, pitying eyes.

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