Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (41 page)

Paul’s retainer stands quietly to one side, lost in his thoughts and half lost in the shadows. A hard-faced balding man with a furrowed
brow, he tends with calm solicitude to the horse from which his master
has fallen. Below, almost beneath the animal’s hooves, the figure of Paul lies on his back with his eyes closed like a man dreaming of his lover. His arms are open wide, embracing the light that envelops him, filling him with truth and wisdom and humanity. He is considerably younger than the wizened, bearded Paul of the rejected version. This Paul is very much the tough Roman soldier described in the Acts of the Apostles – a hard-bodied athlete with a granite jaw who has suddenly been melted by the love of God. His sword lies by his side, resting in folds of red drapery as if to symbolize the rivers of Christian blood that he had meant to shed when he set out for Damascus.

In the moment of Paul’s ecstasy, the world is brought to a standstill. A physical journey has turned into a spiritual odyssey. Caravaggio’s decision to purge the story of visible narrative was brave and unorthodox, but expressive. Bellori, missing the point with perfect eloquence, described the picture as ‘the Conversion of St Paul, in which the history is completely without action’. On the contrary: the action has been completely internalized, so that we see or sense it unfolding within Paul’s soul. He is being moulded by the light that models his figure with its soft and gentle rays. In the chiaroscuro that plays along the length of his outstretched left arm, in the shafts woven through the tips of his fingers, in the gleams reflected in the dull sheen of his fingernails, light itself becomes palpable – something he feels, accepts, draws into the depths of his body.

This is a painting to be understood intuitively, instinctively. It is not an intellectual picture, nor one that shows any interest in beauty as conventionally understood. It is designed to speak not to the rich or theologically learned but to the poor – to roughshod peasants and sunburned labourers, ordinary people who had made the long pilgrimage south to Rome and found themselves, at last, inside the city walls. The composition is dominated by the solid, heavy form of the patiently standing horse, lifting a heavy hoof so as not to tread on the prone body of its master. The animal is no thoroughbred, but a stocky piebald beast of burden. Caravaggio paints the weight and density of its powerful flank. He paints the animal’s patience and loyalty. He even conjures up a feeling of the heat that emanates from its slow, heavy body – in rural parts, in the little town where he had been brought up, poor people kept their livestock in their homes in the winter months to keep themselves warm. This is an essential part of the picture’s plainspeaking intimacy. It is like a hearth, inviting cold bodies to gather round and warm themselves in the act of devotion.

The horse evoked other folk memories too. Like the benign ox and ass in traditional depictions and plays of the Nativity, the animal standing quietly in the dark recalls the manger in which Christ was born. Seen through half-closed eyes, the animal’s groom might almost be St Joseph. The association adds another level of meaning to the scene. In the moment of his conversion Paul is helpless yet blessed, bathed by the light of God, just as Christ was in his infancy.

Behind all this is the old idea of the
Imitatio Christi
, which was central to the ethics of the old pauperist orders such as the Franciscans. To understand Christ’s message is to become like him, to follow in his footsteps – to undergo a profound, internal metamorphosis. At the instant of his inner rebirth as a Christian, Paul mystically experiences the whole life of Christ, its beginning and its end. He becomes, in his own mind, both Christ the blessed child and Christ the doomed adult, sacrificed to save mankind. In the movements of his body are reflected the motions of his soul. He reaches his arms out like a baby. As he does so, his gesture mimes the Crucifixion.

The theological justification for pairing St Paul’s conversion with St Peter’s martyrdom was the belief that each event represented a mystical death. At his conversion, Paul dies to the world to be reborn in Christ; at his martyrdom, Peter literally dies, to meet his rewards in heaven. Such symmetry is implicit in the relationship between Caravaggio’s two paintings. The prone body of Paul, cruciform in a gesture
of spiritual empathy, is echoed by the actually crucified body of Peter.

According to legend, Peter insisted that he be crucified upside down because he felt unworthy to die the same death as Christ. In
The Crucifixion of St Peter
, Caravaggio shows him already nailed to the cross, defiantly half rearing up as his executioners toil to raise him into place. He exhales against the pain, stomach muscles tensing, and looks away out of the picture. His eyes are fixed on the actual chapel’s altar, as if to stress that death by martyrdom is another form of participation in the rite of the Mass. Even as his own blood is shed, he trusts that he will be saved by the flesh and blood of Christ. The rock in the foreground is the symbol of his hard, enduring faith, cornerstone of the Church itself: ‘thou art Peter, and upon this rock I shall build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it’ (Matthew 16:18–19).

The action takes place in some dim corner of a nocturnal world lit only by the flash of God’s grace. The light falls on Peter and the straining figures of his three executioners, but the martyr alone is alive to its message of salvation. The others grunt and sweat under the burden of his weight, grimly immersing themselves in the practical business of hoisting up a human body nailed to a cross. They look as though they
are trying not to think about what they are actually doing – or pretending
to themselves that it might be some more innocent and straightforward task, such as erecting a fence-post, or heaving the joist of a house into place.

The executioners are insensitive to the point of insentience, blind to the mystical significance of the death they so callously arrange. Their figures are pushed up so close to the front edge of the picture that they seem almost to spill out into the real world. Like
The Conversion of St Paul
,
The Crucifixion of St Peter
is a painting aimed squarely at poor and ordinary people. It is a challenge as well as a call to conscience: viewers are brought into its space and invited to take the place of Peter’s executioners, at least in the mind’s eye – to make good their failings, to show compassion and mercy, to open up to the light of God.

The Renaissance scholar and connoisseur Bernard Berenson, who published a short and rather tetchy book about Caravaggio in 1951, was offended by the aggressive directness of the picture:

But for the noble Titianesque head of the victim, the rest is a study in the raising of a heavy weight without the aid of machinery. Of the chief performers, the one who acts as crane and the other as booster, we see the back of one and the buttocks of the other. We do not see their faces. No need. They are mere mechanisms. Hard to conceive a more dehumanized treatment of the subject. No doubt the arrangement of the four figures as crossed diagonals taking up the entire canvas was a happy thought . . .
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The executioners were certainly intended to shock. The presence of these coarsely posed, unmistakably low-brow figures underscored Caravaggio’s total rejection of High Renaissance and Mannerist elegance. This is all the more apparent in the Cerasi Chapel, where Annibale Carracci’s large and centrally placed altarpiece perfectly embodies the traditions to which Caravaggio’s work is so brutally opposed. Carracci had sought to pre-empt his rival by creating a work designed to reassert the values of idealized beauty, splendid colour and lofty transcendence. In doing so, he may have hoped to sow seeds of self-doubt in Caravaggio’s mind. But the younger painter was only spurred on to a more blatant statement of his own, very different priorities. In place of Carracci’s emotionless splendour of effect he offered up his own spare, low-toned, militantly ‘poor’ art. Carracci had used rich colours, colours that literally embodied wealth and magnificence, like the celestial blue of the Madonna’s cloak, painted in the costly medium of ultramarine. In stark contrast, Caravaggio kept rigorously to a palette of humble, ordinary, cheap colours: the earth colours, ochre and umber, carbon black, lead white, verdigris. The use of costly ultramarine was actually specified by Cerasi, who doubtless wanted posterity to know that no expense had been spared. But Caravaggio used the colour in such a way as to reject its rich associations. The dying Peter’s robe, lying in a heap in the bottom corner of the
Martyrdom
, has been painted in murkily shadowed ultramarine. As Bellori noted, Caravaggio avoided more brilliant vermilions and blues, and even when he did use them generally ‘toned them down’.
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The lives of Christ and his followers were neither rich nor splendid. Their deaths were brutal. Caravaggio insists on these home truths in every detail of the Cerasi Chapel paintings, whether it be the glint of the crouching executioner’s spade or the black dirt so deeply ingrained in the upturned heel and ball of his left foot. Like Carlo Borromeo preaching in rags, the art of Caravaggio expressed an aggressively harsh piety. With
The Conversion of St Paul
and
The
Crucifixion of St Peter,
he took his uncompromisingly severe style of painting to an ascetic extreme. As a parting gesture to his rival, as if to stress the depth of his disdain for Carracci’s brand of vapid magnificence, Caravaggio contrived a cunning insult: the rump of St Paul’s proletarian carthorse is pointedly turned towards Carracci’s
Assumption of the Virgin
.

IN THE HOUSE OF MATTEI

Caravaggio finished his two lateral paintings for the Cerasi Chapel towards the end of 1601. Earlier in the year he had left the household of Cardinal del Monte to accept the hospitality of another powerful figure in the Roman Curia, Cardinal Girolamo Mattei.

The Mattei were powerful. They lived in a honeycomb complex of houses and palaces built over the ruins of the ancient Roman Teatro di Balbo, in the heavily populated district of Sant’Angelo, between the Tiber and the Campidoglio. The adjoining residences of the various branches of the family formed an entire block, known as the Isola dei Mattei. At its centre, looking out across the Piazza Mattei, was the massive Palazzo Mattei, home to Cardinal Girolamo.

Caravaggio moved there some time before 14 June 1601, when he gave his address on agreeing a contract for an altarpiece of
The Death of the Virgin
, for the church of Santa Maria della Scala in the district of Trastevere in Rome: he is described as ‘Michelangelo Merisi from Caravaggio, painter of the city, living in the palace of the illustrious and reverend lord cardinal Mattei’. The terms of the contract allowed
him twelve months to paint the new altarpiece. He would complete the
work eventually, but not until long after that deadline had passed.

Caravaggio probably remained in the household of the Mattei family until at least the beginning of 1603. His precise movements are hard to track following his departure from the household of Cardinal del Monte, who was himself friendly with the Mattei and may have been instrumental in the artist’s move. Caravaggio’s change of address should not be seen as marking a break between him and del Monte. The painter continued to rely on his old protector for support. On the evening of 11 October 1601 Caravaggio was stopped for carrying arms without a licence in the district of the Campo Marzio. The policeman who made the arrest reported that the painter ‘insisted that he was on the household roll of the Cardinal del Monte, and because he did not have a licence and I did not know if it was true, I took him to prison at the Tor di Nona.’
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Nothing came of it and the painter was soon released, probably with del Monte’s help. For his part the Medici cardinal seems to have remained on good terms with his protégé, continuing to make allowances for his erratic behaviour.

Cardinal Girolamo Mattei was one of three brothers. Although he was not the eldest, his elevated position in the Roman curia meant that it was he who lived in the principal family palace. He was a member of the strictest order of Franciscan friars, the Observants. Cardinal Mattei was noted for his dislike of conspicuous display and may have influenced Caravaggio’s turn towards a harsh and simplified language of Christian painting in 1601. The pictures for the Cerasi Chapel, so stark and ascetic, were finished when Caravaggio was living in the Palazzo Mattei.

Girolamo’s two brothers, Ciriaco and Asdrubale, shared a house close to the Palazzo Mattei. Ciriaco was a year older than the cardinal, while Asdrubale was ten years younger. Both men had added to their considerable inherited wealth by marrying advantageously. They were known as enthusiastic collectors of ancient Roman sculpture and as connoisseurs of contemporary art. The family account books show that it was they, rather than their brother the cardinal, who commissioned paintings from Caravaggio. For Asdrubale he created a painting of
St Sebastian
that has long since been lost. For Ciriaco he painted no fewer than three gallery paintings on sacred themes, all of which survive.

The archives of the Mattei family show that Caravaggio was paid by Ciriaco at the start of January 1602 for ‘A painting of Our Lord Breaking Bread’. This is
The Supper at Emmaus,
now in the National Gallery in London. The painting tells the biblical story of the risen Christ, days after the crucifixion, sharing a meal with two of his astonished followers. According to the gospel of Luke, at first they did not recognize him: ‘And then it came to pass, as he sat at meat with them, he took bread, and blessed it, and brake, and gave to them. And
their eyes were opened, and they knew him; and he vanished out of their
sight’ (Luke 24:30–31). Caravaggio paints the moment just before the vanishing. Dressed in robes of red and white, colours that symbolize his triumphant resurrection, Jesus reveals his identity with a gesture of gentle benediction. In the act of blessing the square and solid loaves of bread, he both confirms that he has indeed risen from the dead and affirms his own bodily presence in the Eucharist. The claws of a scrawny boiled chicken, pathetic image of mortality, are contrasted with the life-giving hands of Christ. A simple meal has become a sacrament.