Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (21 page)

Mancini’s finished life of Caravaggio is much less circumstantial than his notes, except on the subject of the artist’s stay in the hospital of the Consolazione. During his convalescence there, Caravaggio is said to have painted ‘many pictures for the prior, who brought them to Seville, his home’. Reversing the chronology suggested by his jottings, Mancini then asserts that it was
after
his illness that the painter ‘stayed with Cavaliere Giuseppe’. But whatever the precise sequence of events, a clear enough picture emerges of Caravaggio during this time of evident hardship. He is proud and touchy. He is growing in ambition, but increasingly disgruntled. He has not lost his knack for getting into trouble. He grudgingly performs his duties as a still life painter.

SELF-PORTRAIT AS BACCHUS, BOY WITH A BASKET OF FRUIT

None of the still lives that Caravaggio painted while he was with the Cavaliere d’Arpino seem to have survived. But there are two early pictures with a provenance that places them in the Cesari workshop. Both contain carefully worked still life elements, although neither is a pure still life painting:
Boy with a Basket of Fruit
and the so-called
Sick Bacchus
, or
Self-Portrait as Bacchus
.

They must have been done for Giuseppe Cesari in 1593–4, because both were still in his possession as late as 1607, the year when he unwisely clashed with the covetous papal nephew Scipione Borghese. Borghese was an avid art collector, as well as a great admirer of Caravaggio’s work, who had long had his eye on Giuseppe Cesari’s considerable backroom stock. He made an insultingly low offer for the pictures, and when Cesari had the temerity to refuse, Borghese used his influence to have the troublesome painter-dealer arrested on trumped-up charges. He then appropriated Cesari’s entire collection of 105 paintings. The two pictures by Caravaggio have been in the Borghese collection ever since – and may still be seen in the Galleria Borghese today.

They are unusual works, with more than a hint of awkwardness
about them, especially the
Self-Portrait as Bacchus
, which two of Cara
vaggio’s early biographers found sufficiently memorable to single out from the rest of his juvenilia. Mancini refers to ‘a beautiful Bacchus who was beardless’,
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while Baglione mentions ‘a Bacchus with different bunches of grapes, painted with great care but a bit dry in style’.
25
‘Dry’ seems a more appropriate epithet than ‘beautiful’.

The ancient god of wine and mystic revelry holds a bunch of white grapes in his right hand. At the same time he brings up his shadowed left hand to clasp and even crush them, as in a wine-press. The bloom on the grapes, which dusts them with a layer of whiteness and dulls the reflected light caught in their opalescent skins, is echoed by the dry and whitish lips of the god himself. His pallour is an enigma, which the dark pools of his eyes – mocking and mysterious – do nothing to dispel. The still life that lies before him has an unsettling pathos. Two ripe, furred peaches lie beside a bunch of purple grapes on a forbiddingly cold and otherwise bare ledge of stone. Vine leaves trail off into darkness.

The title frequently used in modern times,
Sick Bacchus
, is a legacy
of the Italian art historian Roberto Longhi. Longhi believed that Cara
vaggio painted it as an allegorical self-portrait just after his discharge from the hospital of the Consolazione. Whether the work alludes to the artist’s illness is open to question, but it is certainly a self-portrait. Baglione groups it with a number of other, long-since vanished ‘portraits of himself in the mirror’. The distorted right shoulder of the figure, so close to the picture plane as to seem almost touchable, may reflect the painter’s use of a faintly convex mirror. The effect is at once intimate and disconcerting. The promise of a close relationship is held out by the figure’s proximity, but denied by the cool evasiveness in his eyes. His right leg, so lost in semi-darkness as to have become little more than a blur, is half raised, which suggests that he could be about to get up. Sensual gratification is the half-promised gift that he brings. But he might disappear at any moment, leaving behind just darkness and the taste of ashes, not of wine.

Why would Caravaggio have painted himself like this? What might he have meant by it? The notion that he intended the work as a record of his own illness is ingenious, but there is a better and simpler explanation for the artist’s liverish complexion. The picture is set at night, the time for Bacchic revelry. The light that flares so brightly on the figure’s shoulder, giving his face its greenish cast, is simply the light of the moon.

The significance of this hypnotizing self-portrait is best sought in its symbolism, although that is anything but straightforward. In one sense Bacchus is an apt alter ego for an artist, because according to his legend he is subject to fits of divine inspiration. Caravaggio was not the first painter to associate himself with the god of wine. In Borromean Milan, the city of his upbringing, a group of painters, including the well-known artist and theorist Gian Paolo Lomazzo, had formed a mock-academy dedicated to the cult of Bacchus. The young Caravaggio’s appropriation of the same Bacchic symbolism may have been his way of announcing his strong sense of his own capabilities, in which case there may have been an element of personal manifesto involved in the play-acting. It is tempting to imagine that he painted this truculent picture to show Giuseppe Cesari that he could be much more than a hack studio assistant.

While Bacchus symbolizes inpiration, he also stands for disorder, anarchy, an unruly surrender to the senses. He is passion, opposed to the reason embodied by Apollo. He is the enemy of civilization, cap
able of laying waste to an entire society: in Euripides’ tragedy
The
Bacchae
he destroys Thebes by luring its people into the mountains to join in his revels. The city’s outraged king, Pentheus, is torn limb from limb by the god’s intoxicated female followers, the Bacchantes. Pentheus’ mother, Agave, is at their forefront, bearing her son’s head aloft in triumph. In her ecstasy she sees him as a lion, fit to be slaughtered.

The madness and the maenadism associated with the myth had been painted most memorably – and most disconcertingly – by Titian in his celebrated
Bacchus and Ariadne
, now in London’s National Gallery. As Bacchus leaps down from his chariot to join the mortal woman with whom he has suddenly fallen in love, his rowdy mob continues with its orgy. The god’s followers include the fat Silenus, drunk beyond coherence, and a young satyr with glazed eyes who drags behind him, as if it were a toy, the severed head of a sacrificed calf. It had been Titian’s achievement to distil the violence and weirdness of the Bacchic cults to a single image. He had conjured up a Renaissance equivalent to the frenzy described in Catullus’ famous 64th poem – which was, almost certainly, one of his principal sources:

Bacchus was rushing up and down with his dancing band of satyrs . . . looking for you, Ariadne. Some of them were waving thyrsi with covered points, some were tossing about the limbs of a mangled steer,
some were girding themselves with writhing serpents; some were bearing in solemn procession dark mysteries enclosed in caskets, mysteries which
the profane desire in vain to hear. Others were beating tambourines with uplifted hands, or were raising sharp ringings from cymbals of rounded bronze . . .

All this is relegated to the background of Caravaggio’s self-portrait, which, in its dryness, restraint and small scale, is a world away from Titian’s seductively orgiastic mythology. But it is there by implication. The violence that impends, the rending of the flesh, the drunkenness, the cannibalism – these things lurk in the teasing expression on the painter’s face. Might he have actually painted the picture behind his master’s back? Could it have been an act of truancy from the demeaning drudgery of the pure still life painting to which he had been assigned in the Cesari workshop? It has a sorceror’s apprentice feel to it, with its hints of illicit goings on, after dark and away from prying eyes. By the light of the moon, the young painter dares to dress up as a god of misrule.

Boy with a Basket of Fruit
is a fresher, brighter painting. But there is maybe more to this work too than at first meets the eye. The viewer is confronted by a blushing, smooth-skinned adolescent, with dark curly hair and an expression of amorous intensity on his face. On the admittedly slender evidence of a later self-portrait by Mario Minniti, it is possible that this was one of the pictures for which Caravaggio persuaded his new Sicilian friend to model. The boy carries a woven basket filled to overflowing with fruit – a cornucopia by comparison with the mere pair of peaches and the solitary bunch of grapes perched before the figure of Caravaggio-as-Bacchus. The basket contains four bunches of grapes, one red, two black and one green, as well as three apples, a peach and a pair of medlars. A pomegranate, split open to reveal its purple seeds, and four figs, two green and two black – the latter so ripe that they too have split to disclose the yellow and purple flesh within – also appear.

The picture has been interpreted in a number of sharply differing ways. It is plainly a kind of demonstration piece, painted to exhibit the young Caravaggio’s skill in depicting not only fruits and foliage, but also the human face and form. Some writers have regarded it as a straightforward genre painting, a portrait of a handsome young
fruit-seller plying his trade. Others claim to detect echoes of classical literature
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– in particular, the fables of Pliny the Elder, whose
Natural
History
is the principal source of information about the painters of antiquity. Pliny’s encyclopedic book contains several stories and parables intended to demonstrate the heights of virtuosity reached by the artists of ancient Greece, as they competed to create an art of perfectly deceptive illusionism:

The contemporaries and rivals of Zeuxis were Timanthes, Androcydes, Eupompus, Parrhasius. This last, it is recorded, entered into a competition with Zeuxis. Zeuxis produced a picture of grapes so dexterously represented that birds began to fly down to eat from the painted vine. Whereupon Parrhasius designed so lifelike a picture of a curtain that Zeuxis, proud of the verdict of the birds, requested that the curtain should now be drawn back and the picture displayed. When he realised his mistake, with a modesty that did him honour, he yielded up the palm, saying that whereas he had managed to deceive only birds, Parrhasius had deceived an artist.
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Pliny adds that, as a riposte to Parrhasius, Zeuxis also painted a picture of a child holding grapes. Once more the birds tried to eat the fruit, but this time Zeuxis felt he had failed. He disconsolately pointed out that if his picture had been perfectly lifelike, the birds would have been too frightened by the painted boy to peck at the painted grapes in his hands.

It was not uncommon for Italian artists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to create their own versions of lost paintings from the classical past. So perhaps Caravaggio’s choice of subject was intended to evoke that same picture of a child holding grapes by Zeuxis – and, indeed, to surpass it. No birds would ever dare to pick at the fruit in
this
basket. The blushing boy, whose tunic has slipped off his shoulder, is tremblingly alive. There is a slight awkwardness in the handling of his anatomy – an uncertainty in the juncture of his collarbone and right shoulder, which seems as a result unnaturally enlarged – but he is a compelling presence none the less. While the basket of fruit advertises Caravaggio’s ability to capture different tones, textures and colours, the figure of the boy demonstrates a yet rarer gift: the ability to suggest human emotion. Those ardent, intently gazing eyes are filled with longing, even love. This striking intensity of feeling is inconsistent with the notion that the picture is simply a genre painting, a snapshot of daily life. Neither can it be readily explained by reference to the classical past.

How should we think about this remarkable face? Those who subscribe to the romantic myth of Caravaggio as a social and sexual outsider, boldly expressing the love that dares not speak its name, are obliged to twist the fruit-bearer’s expression of amorous yearning into the come-hither eyelash-flutterings of a rent boy. Howard Hibbard’s biography of Caravaggio, published in 1983, contains a brief but exemplary statement of this line of argument: ‘There is a soliciting aspect to this picture, and since some of Caravaggio’s other paintings of the 1590s are apparently homosexual in implication, we may read at least unconscious elements of this kind into the
Boy with a Basket
, whose fruits have various potentially symbolic meanings.’

Although Hibbard’s interpretation is, I believe, thoroughly misguided, it contains an element of truth. There
is
a link between the figure’s mood of sensual abandon and the luscious fruits that he bears, many of which – especially the figs, apples and pomegranate – had ancient sexual connotations. But the explanation for that lies not in the artist’s supposedly devil-may-care determination to flaunt his homosexuality. It lies in the words of an ancient Persian love poem, absorbed long ago into the Judaeo-Christian tradition and known as the Song of Songs or the Song of Solomon, the most flagrantly erotic text in all of the Old Testament.
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It takes the form of a poetic dialogue between two lovers, the Bride and the Groom, who express their feelings for one another in imagery of a rich and fecund natural world.

The Groom compares his beloved to a garden: ‘A garden inclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed. Thy plants are an orchard of pomegranates, with pleasant fruits . . .’ (4:12–13). For her part, the Bride describes the Groom as ‘white and ruddy, the chiefest among ten thousand. His head is as the most fine gold, his locks are bushy, and black as a raven . . . His mouth is most sweet: yea, he is altogether lovely. This is my beloved, and this is my friend, O daughters of Jerusalem’ (5:10–16). Finally, the Groom describes the fruition of their desires: ‘How fair and how pleasant art thou, O love, for delights! This thy stature is like to a palm tree, and thy breasts to clusters of grapes. I said, I will go up to the palm tree, I will take hold of the boughs thereof; now also thy breasts shall be as clusters of the vine, and the smell of thy nose like apples; and the roof of thy mouth like the best wine for my beloved, that goeth down sweetly, causing the lips of those that are asleep to speak’ (7:6–9).