Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (42 page)

The Bible says that the village of Emmaus ‘was from Jerusalem about threescore furlongs’, but Caravaggio imagined a place much closer to home. His
Supper at Emmaus
is served up in a rough Roman tavern, the kind of place where the painter would meet his friends and start arguments with his enemies. As the Saviour announces himself, a hardbitten innkeeper looks on with an expression of uncomprehending suspicion, as if he might be wondering whether this pale, plump-faced young man and his ragged companions will be able to pay their bill.

Meanwhile the two disciples are frozen in the throes of astonished, dawning recognition. One has his back to us. As he prepares to lever himself upright, his hands are braced on the arms of the same savonarola chair that Caravaggio had used in
The Calling of St Matthew
. At the point of his bony elbow, there is a small rent in his rough green tunic, through which his white undershirt shows. The other disciple, who wears a pilgrim’s shell on his mantle, spreads his arms as wide as he can, measuring the extent of his amazement like an angler demonstrating the size of a fish that got away. His gesture also mirrors the Crucifixion, as if to shape the question springing to his mind. How is it possible that a man whom he so recently saw nailed to the cross, a bleeding corpse, should live and breathe and speak once more?

The hands of Christ and the wondering apostle seem to reach out of the painting, through the membrane that separates illusion from reality. The effect is worked through skilful foreshortenings of perspective. The apostle’s outspread arms plot the whole depth of the picture. His right hand, half lost in the darkness, seems blurred by movement. His other hand, so close to the picture plane as to seem almost touchable, is sharply in focus. From the tip of Christ’s thumb, back along the dappled sleeve of his red shirt to his shoulder, his arm is a piece of art that measures distance, in graded lights and darks, with such illusory precision that it is almost impossible to look at the painting and believe it truly flat.

Yet Caravaggio’s intense realism is also, on this occasion, shot through with a strong sense of the uncanny. It is as if the painter has asked himself a series of direct, straightforward questions about the story that he was given to depict. What happens to the world when a miracle takes place? How might it be possible to tell, should the risen Christ suddenly come among us? What do things actually look like at such moments?
The Supper at Emmaus
contains Caravaggio’s answers to those questions.

The idea that divine visitations are inevitably accompanied by thunderclaps and clouds of angels is dismissed as naive and childish. Caravaggio, himself so keen-eyed and attentive to every last nuance of visual experience, imagines the process to be subtler than that. God is light, so he announces his presence among men in the elusive forms of a shadowplay. The innkeeper cannot see it, but by standing where he does he casts a shadow on the wall that gives Christ a dark but unmistakable halo. Below, a basket of fruit is balanced precariously on the leading edge of the table. It is the same basket that Caravaggio had painted for Federico Borromeo, and its contents are nearly the same too – a worm-eaten apple, a pomegranate and fig, withered grapes and trailing vine leaves, embodying decay but also symbolizing the hope of Christian redemption. The fruit and the teetering basket cast a second meaningful shadow, this one shaped like the tail of a fish, the ancient mnemonic sign for Christ used by his earliest followers. Caravaggio’s painting suggests that those who would prefer to be saved, rather than damned, might do well to pay attention to such details. Even those in the presence of a miracle might easily miss it.

Bellori unwisely chose to single out
The Supper at Emmaus
as an example of the painter’s thoughtless literalism and lack of decorum: ‘in addition to the vulgar conception of the two Apostles and of the Lord who is shown young and without a beard, the innkeeper wears a cap, and on the table is a dish of grapes, figs and pomegranates out of season. Just as certain herbs produce both beneficial medicine and most pernicious poison, in the same way, though he produced some good, Caravaggio has been most harmful and wrought havoc with every ornament and good tradition of painting . . .’ The biographer concluded this little homily with the reflection that many other painters had been bewitched by the ‘error and darkness’ of Caravaggio’s painting, ‘until Annibale Carracci came to enlighten their minds and restore beauty to the imagination of nature’.
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Bellori’s misreading of
The Supper at Emmaus
does at least have the virtue of highlighting some of the picture’s most effective devices. The writer found his eye drawn to Caravaggio’s wicker basket of fruit, so beautifully painted, only to complain that the fruits within were ‘unseasonal’. He clearly felt they should have been the fruits of Easter, the time of Christ’s crucifixion. Guilty of the very literalism for which he blamed Caravaggio, Bellori was oblivious to the symbolic meanings concealed within the basket of fruit, and completely blind to the significant shape of its shadow.

He was also perturbed by the disrespectful figure of the innkeeper, who wears his cap in the presence of Christ. But this is no mere oversight, or vulgar lapse, on the part of the painter; it is a detail essential to his telling of the story. The innkeeper fails to doff his cap because he does not realize whom he serves. He remains in darkness, even though a miracle is taking place before his eyes. In Caravaggio’s interpretation, the story of the meal at Emmaus becomes a parable about those who see and those who do not.

Bellori disliked the evident poverty of the two disciples and can almost be heard tut-tutting over that prominent torn sleeve. More telling is his other complaint, about Caravaggio’s depiction of Christ as ‘young and without a beard’. The painter’s decision to depart from the traditional image of a solemn, bearded Christ – such as he had recently painted in
The Calling of St Matthew
– was certainly
unusual
. But once again, it is essential to his understanding of the story as a tale of hard-won recognition.

The principal source for the story of the Supper at Emmaus is the gospel of Luke, Chapter 24, but there is also a fleeting reference to it in Chapter 16 of the gospel of Mark: ‘After that he appeared in another form unto two of them, as they walked, and went into the country.’ Caravaggio seized on the three words, ‘in another form’. They are the only explanation given in the Bible for the apostles’ failure to recognize Christ. Risen from the dead, he took on a different physical appearance. It seems that Caravaggio’s inspiration for the picture’s main idea – the idea of an unobvious miracle, a miracle that men must struggle to see – had its origins in a careful reading of the Bible.
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Back in the 1540s Michelangelo had placed a similarly controversial, young and beardless Christ at the centre of his
Last Judgement
, on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel. The image was meant to evoke the early traditions of Christian Rome, where Christ had often been depicted in the guise of the sun god, Apollo. There are strong echoes of Michelangelo’s Apollonian Christ, judging all mankind at the end of the world, in Caravaggio’s own figure of Christ in
The Supper at Emmaus
. In the fresco of
The
Last Judgement
, Christ’s left arm is turned against the seething mass of the damned, while with his right he beckons the blessed up into heaven. Caravaggio appropriated those same gestures, adapting them with surprisingly little modification for his own figure’s act of blessing the bread. It is another formal echo charged with spiritual meaning. Christ’s appearance to his two disciples at Emmaus prefigures his final appearance to the whole human race on the day of judgement.

Two more payments were made to Caravaggio by Ciriaco Mattei in 1602, one in July, the other in December. These were for a painting which has been plausibly identified with the
St John the Baptist
now in the Capitoline Museum in Rome. Once again, Caravaggio treated his appointed subject in an unusual and idiosyncratic way. The saint, who is shown during his legendary retreat into the desert, appears without several of his usual attributes. He carries neither a cross nor
a banderole. The lamb of God who usually accompanies him has meta
morphosed into a sheep with horns. He embraces the animal, which nuzzles his cheek. It was conventional to depict St John as a haggard ascetic in animal furs, but Caravaggio presents him as a cheerfully smiling, ruddy-cheeked adolescent. Most unusual of all, he is stark naked. The boy reclines on a scrap of fur, but his discarded clothes lie around him in a heap.

The picture is so unconventional that even its very subject has been
called into question. As early as 1620 the author of a guidebook to the
Mattei collection gave the work a mythological title, referring to it as a
Pastor Friso
, which identified the naked young man as a pagan shepherd.
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A number of subsequent scholars have taken that attribution seriously. Others have argued that Caravaggio intended to depict the biblical Isaac, son of Abraham, stripped for sacrifice and rejoicing after his sudden stay of execution.
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None of these hypotheses has much merit. Ciriaco Mattei presented the picture to his son, Giovanni Battista Mattei, whose name saint it certainly depicts and for whom it was almost certainly intended from the outset. An inventory of his possessions drawn up in 1616 refers to ‘A painting of San Gio: Battista with his Lamb by the hand of Caravaggio’,
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and it is safe to assume that the picture’s owner knew its true subject. When Giovanni Battista made his will, seven years later, he gave instructions that the painting ‘of St John the Baptist by Caravaggio’
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be left to none other than Cardinal Francesco del Monte. This implies that the Mattei family felt an abiding sense of obligation to del Monte for releasing Caravaggio into their service.

Although its subject is easily established, the work is still intriguingly unusual. Why did Caravaggio paint John the Baptist in this strange, splay-legged pose? Why is the figure smiling so enigmatically? Why, above all, is he nude? Part of the answer to those questions lies in the art of the immediate past.

During the early years of the seventeenth century, when Caravaggio was forging his style and making his reputation, he gave a great deal of thought to the works of Michelangelo. He had been born just seven years after the death of ‘the divine Michelangelo’, as Vasari had called him. Like every ambitious painter of his generation, he would have regarded Michelangelo’s works as a summit of excellence. And as if to force such comparisons upon him, Michelangelo also happened to be his own namesake. Caravaggio had already been invited to compete with the older artist by the choice of subjects for the Cerasi Chapel. In that case, he had asserted his independence from his predecessor by reconceiving his two canonically Michelangelesque themes in a radically un-Michelangelesque manner. But in other works of the period, he complicated the game of rivalry and homage.
The
Supper at Emmaus
, with its Michelangelesque Christ, is just one of several instances. The Capitoline
St John the Baptist
is another.

The picture is a variation on the theme of Michelangelo’s
ignudi
, the idealized male nudes which frame the nine great narrative paintings telling stories from the Book of Genesis on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Michelangelo’s male nudes are the only non-Christian elements in the whole of his scheme. They had been included as a compliment to Pope Julius II, who commissioned him to paint the ceiling: they bear festoons of oak leaves and acorns, emblems of the pope’s family name, della Rovere. Collectively, they symbolize the idea of a golden age described in the writings of antiquity, the conceit behind them being that the reign of Julius amounted to another such blessed period in the lives of men. But by the second half of the sixteenth century the
ignudi
had become controversial. Their nudity was deemed unbecoming, their pagan symbolism judged suspect, and a painter called Daniele da Volterra was hired to fig-leaf their genitalia.

The pose of Caravaggio’s smiling
St John the Baptist
has been directly borrowed from one of the four
ignudi
who frame
The Sacrifice of Noah
on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. The seventeenth-century writer who believed the painting to be an image of a pagan shepherd was probably responding, unconsciously, to its neo-pagan source in the art of Michelangelo, and in this sense the Capitoline
St John
is another of Caravaggio’s pictures on the borderline between ‘the sacred and profane’, in Cardinal Paravicino’s phrase. But the true subtlety of the work lies in its double inversion of the famous but controversial prototype that inspired it.

Whereas Michelangelo’s nudes collectively represent a languorously beautiful ideal, an imaginary museum of male beauty raised up to the vault of heaven, Caravaggio has clearly painted a picture of a real, flesh-and-blood boy. The fact that the model has been posed just like an
ignudo
emphasizes the gulf between Michelangelo’s idealizing aesthetic and Caravaggio’s countervailing realism. The flesh of Michelangelo’s nudes is chiselled, marmoreally perfect. Caravaggio’s
adolescent saint is slight and skinny. His ribcage shows through the l
ight-dappled flesh of his side and there is dirt under his toenails. He i
s an
ignudo
brought down to earth, but not in a spirit of homage. The echo is there to assert Caravaggio’s difference, to make it unavoidable.

Caravaggio has also reversed the sense of Michelangelo’s nudes in the act of appropriating their form. Those who have seen the Capitoline
St John
as a daringly sexy depiction of a Christian saint, laughing provocatively as he turns to face the viewer, miss the point of the picture entirely. The truth is that Caravaggio has taken Michelangelo’s notoriously pagan imagery, a classically phrased compliment paid to a pope, and fully reclaimed it for Christianity. His
ignudo
is no sleepy, sensual emblem of a vanished golden age, but an ecstatic prophet bathed in the light of divine revelation. The naked, rejoicing boy embraces the animal by his side because it has been sent to him by God to show him what will come to pass. He sees in it the destiny of Christ the saviour, with whose fate his own is intertwined, and whom he will one day baptize.