Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (43 page)

The painter’s decision to give the animal horns is unusual, but underscores the significance of the scene. It recalls the image of a sacrificial ram, and may also have been inspired by a detail of the Sistine Chapel ceiling: only a few feet from the
ignudo
whose pose is closest to that of Caravaggio’s
St John
, Michelangelo had painted a ram being prepared for slaughter in
The Sacrifice of Moses
. Those who have misinterpreted Caravaggio’s picture as an image of Isaac delivered from sacrifice are in one way simply overreacting to a genuine element of the painter’s intended meaning. He meant to emphasize the idea of sacrifice by giving the sheep horns, but the sacrifice he had in mind was not that of Isaac but of Christ himself.

In the upper-right-hand corner, barely visible in the shadows, a small detail clarifies the picture’s iconography: the foliage of a vine, symbolizing grapes and the wine of the Eucharist. The sacrificial sheep and the vineleaves are the outward signs of the saint’s inner contemplation. In his mind’s eye, he is looking into the future, seeing Christ’s blessed death and the salvation of mankind. That is the reason for the smile on his face. It is the beatific smile of a mystic, a seer.

The last of the three pictures commissioned from Caravaggio by Ciriaco Mattei was
The Betrayal of Christ
. It was paid for on 2 January 1603, and probably painted just a few weeks or months before. The picture has had an eventful history. It remained in the Palazzo Mattei in Rome for nearly two centuries, after which it disappeared into the obscurity of a Scottish private collection. In 1990 it was rediscovered in the possession of the Irish Jesuit Fathers of the house of St Ignatius in Dublin, who placed it on indefinite loan to the National Gallery of Ireland.

The story of Christ’s betrayal by Judas is told in all four gospels. Caravaggio followed certain stage directions, but ignored others. According to Matthew, at the time appointed for Christ’s arrest, ‘Judas, one of the twelve, came, and with him a great multitude with swords and staves, from the chief priests and elders of the people.’ (Matthew 26:47). John adds a detail crucial to Caravaggio’s nocturnal conception of the scene, equipping Judas and his men ‘with lanterns and torches’ (John 18:3). Mark gives the most economical account of the treacherous kiss given to Christ by Judas: ‘And he that betrayed him had given them a token, saying, Whomsoever I shall kiss, that same is he; take him, and lead him away safely. And as soon as he was come, he goeth straightway to him, and saith, Master, master; and kissed him. And they laid their hands on him, and took him’ (Mark 14:44–6). Only in Luke could Caravaggio have found the idea that Christ showed his foreknowledge of Judas’s treachery by flinching at the kiss: ‘Judas drew near unto Jesus to kiss him. But Jesus said unto him, Judas, betrayest thou the Son of Man with a kiss?’ (Luke 23:48).

Despite his academic prejudices, Bellori often responded instinctively to the sheer humanity and psychological depth of Caravaggio’s painted dramas. His is by some distance the most eloquent early account of the picture: ‘Judas is shown after the kiss with his hand on the Lord’s shoulder; a soldier in full armour extends his arms and his ironclad hand towards the chest of the Lord, who stands still, patiently and humbly, his hands crossed before him, as John runs away behind with outstretched arms. Caravaggio rendered the rusty armour of the soldier accurately with head and face covered by a helmet, his profile partially visible. Behind him a lantern is raised and we see the heads of two other armed men.’
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Earlier artists had often envisaged the betrayal as a chaotic crowd scene, confusing the eye with a multitude of soldiers and panicking disciples. Caravaggio’s new technique of emphatic chiaroscuro was the perfect editing device for avoiding such unnecessary complications. He used it here as a ruthless means of exclusion, spotlighting the figures at the very centre of the drama and casting everything else into deepest shadow. In his interpretation, the whole story becomes an elemental conflict between good and evil, innocence and malignity. The pale, delicate, emotionally sensitive face of Christ is set hard against the brutish, sunburned face of Judas. There is great sorrow, mingled with resignation, in Christ’s half-closed eyes. In the moment of betrayal, Judas seems to lament the fatal move he has only just made. He stares into space like a man possessed, as if he is already haunted by the guilt that will soon drive him to suicide.

To this drama of juxtaposed faces, the painter has added a subplot of hands. Judas reaches out to grasp Christ with his left hand, the sinister side. Christ instinctively shrinks from the clutching embrace. Below, isolated and emphasized by a bright pool of light, Christ’s own hands are clasped in a gesture of great pathos. His fingers are entwined, palms pushed away, in a movement that speaks at once of regret and acceptance of his fate. It is a detail that suggests the influence of Cardinal Mattei: the Franciscans placed the concept of
Abnegatio
, the complete denial of self and dedication to others, at the centre of their teaching. According to the Franciscan ethic of the
Imitatio Christi
, ‘the imitation of Christ’, his calm acceptance of cruelty and torture was a constant source of wonder and inspiration. Carav
aggio’s
Betrayal of Christ
is one of the most powerfully moving images
of that Christian ideal.
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It is a work that allies Caravaggio, once again, with the deepest strains of severity in Counter-Reformation spirituality.

But there is more to the eloquently compressed composition of the picture than the figures of Christ and Judas alone. To the left, just behind Christ, a terrified disciple runs away into the night. Two soldiers approach from the other side to make the arrest. They are grim and impersonal, as lacking in compassion as the stolid executioners in
The Crucifixion of St Peter
. They stand for the implacable forces unleashed by the act of betrayal. Just enough of the face of the soldier on the right is visible, beneath his helmet, to reveal that Caravaggio used the same model who had sat for the open-armed disciple in
The Supper at Emmaus
. This would have been all the more evident when both pictures hung in Ciriaco Mattei’s palace. The effect must have been slightly disconcerting, like watching the same actor playing utterly contrasting roles simultaneously. Did Caravaggio do it on purpose, to demonstrate the versatility of his method? The other soldier is so obscured by the burnished steel of his helmet that almost nothing can be seen of his features. He is faceless as well as pitiless.

The encounter of Judas and Christ is charged with feeling, an exchange through which guilt and saddened acquiescence flow. Those emotions are amplified by the fleeing disciple, whose red cloak billows excitedly above the heads of Christ and Judas, linking his form so closely to theirs that he seems less like a person in his own right than like their psychic emanation – a scream forced out into the night sky by their inner turmoil. But the soldiers feel nothing and they show no capacity for feeling. They are all murderous efficiency, armoured against compassion. Christ, Judas and the disciple are beings of yielding flesh; the soldiers seem made of the very steel that they wear. Bellori was particularly struck by the horrid contrast between dark metal and soft human tissue: ‘a soldier in full armour extends his arms and his ironclad hand towards the chest of the Lord.’

Caravaggio took the idea for this vivid distinction from a woodcut of Christ’s arrest in the garden of Gethsemane by the German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer. In Dürer’s image the soldier’s chain-mailed arm, which calls to mind the scales of an armadillo, reaches across the kissing Judas to the vulnerable figure of Christ with exactly the same gesture. In his own picture, Caravaggio sharpened that ugly juxtaposition and made it even more shocking. The soldier’s black armour, j
ointed at shoulder and elbow, looks like the carapace of some giganti
c insect. His black hand points into Christ’s neck like the sting of a scorpion about to pierce its prey.

Caravaggio was in the habit of pillaging prints and engravings for compositional ideas during the early years of the seventeenth century. He probably kept a stock of such images, ready catalysts for his imagination. Dürer’s woodcut was not his only source for
The Betrayal
. There is another borrowing in the composition, this time from an engraving actually commissioned by the man for whom the picture was destined, Ciriaco Mattei himself. In 1601 Mattei had asked the engraver Francesco Villamena to commemorate a particularly brutal Roman street battle between members of the city’s pro-French and pro-Spanish factions. From this bruising scene of affray, Caravaggio took one detail: that of the crescent-shaped, billowing cloak that connects the fleeing disciple to the figures of Christ and Judas. Once again, the painter makes the detail an organic part of his own, very different composition. The actual borrowing is less interesting than the fact that Caravaggio should have been thinking about a scene of modern-day violence in Rome when he devised the composition of his
Betrayal
. It seems that he envisaged the scene, from the start, as just the kind of fracas with which he was personally familiar – a nocturnal scuffle, with figures crying out in the dark Roman night as the
sbirri
pounce on their man.

At the back right of the scene, set slightly apart from its principal action yet straining to witness it, the painter included his own self-portrait. He holds up a lantern with his right hand, a gesture which some have seen as a proud flaunting of his new and very particular method – a demonstration of exactly that technical revolution in studio lighting which Bellori attributed to Caravaggio when he spoke of him ‘placing a lamp high so that the light would fall straight down, revealing the principal part of the body and leaving the rest in shadow so as to produce a powerful contrast of light and dark’. The trouble with this is that the light that Caravaggio holds up is actually rather feeble. It fails to illuminate anything much except for the painter’s own face and intent expression. The light that falls across Christ’s saddened face and clenched hands, the light that gleams in the metal armour of the soldiers, comes from somewhere else. It is fluid and cannot be easily located.

Caravaggio knew very well that studio lighting, the trick for which he was fast becoming famous, can only ever be a device. What counts is what is done with it. The dim paper lantern in Caravaggio’s hand may indeed be the emblem of his method. But its ineffectiveness is significant. The painter brings light to the scene, but in a symbolic rather than a literal sense. The real light-source is his imagination.

DIRTY FEET

Caravaggio was increasingly well known in Rome – the volatile, aggres
sive painter with the lightning-strike style, who made stories from the Bible look as though they were taking place right here, right now. He was also becoming famous as the painter of feet: the overlapped feet of Joseph, feeling the chill during the flight to Egypt; Christ’s bare feet, on the stone flags of Matthew’s counting house; the nail-pierced feet of
St Peter and the dirt-ingrained feet of his coldly indifferent executioner.

Feet were controversial. Here is a passage from a book about the Christian saints and martyrs, written by the theologian Niccolò Lorini del Monte in the second decade of the seventeenth century:

In sum, feet may be taken by the holy Church as symbolising the poor and humble. In addition to the authority of the Holy Fathers, there are also fundamental reasons [for this], because the poor may be called the feet of the Church, and to caress the feet is to caress the poor of Christ. Because if the feet are the last and most lowly part of the human body, the poor and humble are the last part, and those who hold the last place in the Church. The poor carry the heaviest burdens of the world. They are exposed to all the blows, bumps and knocks . . . And if the feet are a member [of the body], then nude and uncovered they lack rosiness, and it is not a shameful thing to discover them: the poor servants of Christ were not guilty and had nothing of which to be ashamed . . . But yet, as they are vile the poor may be humiliated; nevertheless, God has honoured them so much that he has willed the greatest Heroes of the world serve them, and caress them, and fatten them up with servitude and earthly sustenance.
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Lorini’s paean to feet was part of a discussion of the life of a popular thirteenth-century saint, Elizabeth of Hungary. The daughter of a king, she was famous for receiving the poor into the apartments of her palace, where she fed them, dressed their wounds and washed their feet as Christ himself had washed the feet of his disciples. Francis of Assisi, whose followers called him
alter Christus,
‘another Christ’, had also abased himself at the feet of the poor and needy. In Caravaggio’s time wealthy members of certain religious confraternities emulated such venerable examples – clothing, feeding and washing the feet of poor pilgrims coming to Rome. To do so was quite literally to embrace humility, to lower the proud self to the ground in emulation of Christ. The Latin root of
humilitas
is the word
humus
, meaning ‘ground’. The word ‘humble’ is part of the same linguistic family. To honour the foot is to honour the lowest part of the human body, and implicitly to humble the self in the sight of God.

When Caravaggio painted the saints and martyrs with bare feet, he was firmly allying himself with the pauperist wing of the Catholic Church. Not only was he explicitly welcoming the poor into his pictures, making them feel part of the same impoverished family as that of Christ and his followers, he was also implicitly calling on the rich to follow the example of those such as St Francis, the merchant’s son, and Elizabeth of Hungary, the princess, who had given away all their worldly possessions to minister to the poor. The message would not always be well received.