How do you conceal politically critical thinking in papal Rome around 1600? Caravaggio's Taking of Christ isn't quite what it seems once its subversive meaning is deciphered. The painter places himself among the traitors by holding the lantern, or rather the brush. This self-portrait, I will argue, shows his critical position toward the potential of painting itself. My essay thus proposes a new reading: In the light of a new pictorial source as well as new textual material, Caravaggio appears as an artist highly sceptical of the Catholic cult of images, indeed as a painter who delivers something of a self-referential accusation of painting.