Painting from the Neapolitan period. In contrast to the vienna version, here the young David has an expression of human compassion painted on his face, and contemplates Goliath's screaming head without boldness. seventeenth-century biographers identify the physiognomy of the defeated giant as a self-portrait of Caravaggio. the painting would actually be a double self-portrait, or more precisely a double self-identification: that is, Merisi represents himself both as Goliath and as David, a sort of idealised image of the adolescent painter.