Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (50 page)

Caravaggio was being touchy about status again. The fight may have been sparked by a question about butter and olive oil, but the argument was really about something else. The painter was accusing the waiter of a quasi-racist insult. The Romans were proud of their olive oil – Montaigne had remarked on its quality when he visited the city – and scorned northern Italians for lacking the discrimination to appreciate its fine but faintly bitter taste. Lombards were easily caricatured as cowherds from far-off plains and mountains, who thought a meal was not a real meal unless it was dripping with butter and cheese. The painter accused the waiter of taking him for a
barone
, which has been imperfectly translated above as ‘vulgar provincial’. Its literal meaning is ‘baron’, but used ironically, in the language of demotic insult, it means the opposite – a low parody of an aristocrat, somebody from the sticks who thinks he has taste but actually has none.

Caravaggio responded to the implied slight by hurling a plate at the man’s mouth. It was an impetuous act, but as usual the painter had put thought into his violence. The punishment mirrored the perceived crime: ‘You think I have no taste? Taste this.’ The insult that accompanied the assault,
becco fottuto
, or ‘fucked-over cuckold’, was the same phrase that had been used at the end of the poem addressed to ‘Johnny Bollock’. Caravaggio must have used it fairly frequently.

Despite only three major commissions in these troubled years, Caravaggio certainly had work to do. His altarpiece for
The Death of the Virgin
was years overdue and he still had the picture of the Madonna of Loreto to paint. But he seems to have found it increasingly difficult to concentrate for prolonged periods. In the past he had been a conscientious respecter of deadlines, but now he had a growing reputation for unreliability. It was with the Caravaggio of these years in mind that Karel van Mander wrote his comment about the painter spending a month in the streets for every two weeks in the studio, swaggering about with his sword at his side, ‘with a servant following him, from one ball-court to the next, ever ready to engage in a fight or argument’.
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It was probably in the summer of 1604, between fights, that Caravaggio painted the hauntingly intense
St John the Baptist
now in the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City. The picture was almost certainly painted for the Genoese banker Ottavio Costa. There is an early copy in the church of the Oratory of the Confraternity at Conscente, in Liguria, which was a fief of the Costa dynasty. The family had paid for the building of the church, so it may be that Caravaggio’s painting was originally destined for its high altar, and subsequently replaced by the copy for reasons unknown. Perhaps Ottavio Costa was so impressed by the work when he saw it that he decided to keep it for his art collection in Rome.

The picture is very different to the
St John the Baptist
painted for Ciriaco Mattei a couple of years before. As in the earlier painting, the saint occupies an unusually lush desert wilderness. Dock leaves grow in profusion at his feet. But he is no longer an ecstatic, laughing boy. He has become a melancholy adolescent, glowering in his solitude. Clothed in animal furs and swathed in folds of blood-red drapery, he clutches a simple reed cross for solace as he broods on the errors and miseries of mankind. The chiaroscuro is eerily extreme: there is a pale cast to the light, which is possibly intended to evoke moonbeams, but the contrasts are so strong and the shadows so deep that the boy looks as though lit by a flash of lightning. This dark but glowing painting is one of Caravaggio’s most spectacular creations. It is also a reticent and introverted work – a vision of a saint who looks away, to one side, rather than meeting the beholder’s eye. This second
St John
is moodily withdrawn, lost in his own world-despising thoughts. The picture might almost be a portrait of Caravaggio’s own dark state of mind, his gloomy hostility and growing sense of isolation during this period of his life.

Only one other painting by Caravaggio can be securely dated to 1604. It is
The Entombment
, a large and ambitious altarpiece for the Oratorian church in Rome, Santa Maria in Vallicella, a few hundred yards west of the Piazza Navona, close to where the Tiber snakes around the Vatican. He finished it some time shortly before 1
September
, when the picture is described as ‘new’ in a document recording that it had been paid for by a man called Girolamo Vittrice. Girolamo commissioned the work for the burial chapel of his uncle, Pietro, who had died in 1600. Like many of the painter’s most important patrons, the Vittrice family was closely connected with Filippo Neri’s Oratory and therefore directly allied with the emphatically populist, pauperist wing of the Roman Church. Pietro Vittrice had been particularly close to Filippo Neri himself and had strongly supported the core values of the Oratory, with its stress on the importance of charitable works, its antipathy to elaborate ritual and its ambition to revive the simple and direct faith associated with the early Church.

Caravaggio’s monumental and dramatic altarpiece for Vittrice’s burial chapel was immediately recognized as one of his most accomplished paintings. Baglione baldly stated that ‘this is said to be his best work’, a judgement that was echoed rather more circumstantially by Bellori:

One of the best works by Caravaggio is the
Deposition of Christ
[
sic
] in the Chiesa Nuova of the Oratorians which has received well-deserved praise. The figures in the painting are placed on a stone in the opening of the sepulchre. In the centre Nicodemus supports the Sacred Body under the knees, embracing it, and as the hips are lowered, the legs jut out. On the other side St John places one arm under the shoulder of the Redeemer whose face is upturned and his breast deathly pale; one arm hangs down with the sheet and all the nude parts are drawn forcefully and faithfully from nature. Behind Nicodemus are seen the mourning Marys, one with her arms upraised, another with her veil raised to her eyes, and the third looking at the Lord.
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Caravaggio had Michelangelo in mind again when he created
The Entombment
. Pietro Vittrice’s burial chapel was dedicated to the Pietà, the solitary lamentation of Mary over the dead Christ. Caravaggio deliberately harked back to one of the most hallowed images of that earlier event in the story, namely Michelangelo’s marble
Piet
à
in St Peter’s. The limp right arm of Caravaggio’s dead Christ, with its prominent veins, is a direct paraphrase in paint of the same element in Michelangelo’s composition. The flesh of the arm gently bulges over the supporting hand of St John, just as it does over the hand of the Virgin Mary in the marble
Pietà
. But in Caravaggio’s painting, John’s hand inadvertently opens the wound in Christ’s side. For the pathos and poetry of Michelangelo’s sculpture, in which Mary mourns the man she once cradled as a child, Caravaggio substitutes his own intense morbidity. Caravaggio’s dead Christ is punishingly unidealized. He truly is the Word made flesh: a dead man, a real corpse weighing heavily on those who struggle to lay him to rest. John strains not to drop the sacred burden. Nicodemus stoops awkwardly as he clasps the body around the knees in a bear-hug, locking his right fist like a clamp around his left forearm.

Once more, the painter emphasizes the bare feet of Christ and his disciples. Nicodemus’s feet, so firmly planted on the tomb slab by the heavy load of the corpse, are veined and creased at the ankle. Christ’s feet dangle limply in space. Such details could be controversial elsewhere, but the Oratorians’ sense of decorum was evidently undisturbed by Caravaggio’s insistence on holy poverty. Christ’s drapery has been given strong emphasis, shining with particular force in the darkness of Calvary. His winding sheet dangles below the tomb slab, touching the leaves of a plant – a juxtaposition perhaps meant to symbolize the hope of new life brought even to the darkness of the grave. Pietro Vittrice had especially venerated the Holy Shroud of Turin, fabled as the winding sheet in which Christ had been interred.

The Entombment
is a powerfully sculptural painting. It alludes to Michelangelo’s
Pietà
but ultimately looks back again to the polychrome
mises-en-sc
ène
of the
sacri monti
and the vivid terracotta sculptures of northern Italian tradition. The figures are tightly grouped, each responding to the tragedy of death in a different way. Caravaggio’s Madonna, who has been given a wimple so that she resembles a nun, gazes solemnly at the dead body of her son. The other two female figures are more overtly expressive. Mary Magdalen, eyes uptilted in a trance of sorrow, raises her hands to the heavens. The third Mary bows her head and weeps. Both these figures were modelled by Fillide Melandroni. She had dropped out of Caravaggio’s art for a while, but was clearly still part of his life. Her continued presence in Rome at around this time is confirmed by a communion census report of Easter 1603, in which she is recorded as living with her brother and aunt from Siena in the parish of Santa Maria del Popolo. By now she was twenty-two years old.

There is a hint of theatricality about the pair of figures modelled by Fillide, which jars with Caravaggio’s prevailing rhetoric of brutal realism. Perhaps he was trying to sweeten the bitter pill of his art, at least to a degree. There would be hints of compromise in one or two other Roman pictures of the period, a sign perhaps that his confidence had been knocked by rejection. In fact the whole composition of
The Entombment
has a slightly staged and artificial feel to it, although this may reflect a specific aspect of the image’s meaning. There was a tradition
of painting Christ’s entombment not as a dramatic event but as a moment of votive stasis – a presentation of his sacrifical body both to the congregation of the church and, symbolically, to all mankind. Caravaggio’s Nicodemus looks directly out of the picture as he and John seem, indeed, to hold Christ’s body up to view, and Bellori’s description of the painting repeatedly refers to the image of Christ as ‘the Sacred Body’. This element of the composition may well have been created to complement the actual liturgy of the Mass, as the painting originally hung directly above the altar in the chapel: at the moment when the priest elevated the host, the actual flesh of Christ, he was obliged by the design of Caravaggio’s composition to align it with the painted body of Christ.

STONES THROWN AND A DOOR DEFACED

On 4 June 1604 Caravaggio was sentenced for his attack on the waiter, along with several people convicted of unrelated offences. The other men and women in the dock included a furrier, a launderer and a recent convert to Christianity from Judaism. Their various crimes and punishments are detailed in the judicial Latin of the document, but whereas the entry under Caravaggio’s name gives the nature of his offence – wounding a man under the left eye with an earthenware plate – it fails to specify the penalty. Perhaps he was again let off with a warning, thanks to his powerful friends.

On 19 October he was back in prison at the Tor di Nona. This time he and some friends were accused of throwing stones at some police officers. The alleged incident had taken place two days earlier, at 9.30 in the evening, on the Via dei Greci. His fellow defendants were Ottaviano Gabrielli, a bookseller; Alessandro Tonti of Civitanova, a perfume-maker; and Pietro Paolo Martinelli, a courier to the pope. Their testimonies are contradictory, but they give at least a piecemeal picture of the incident.

Caravaggio had eaten with Martinelli and Gabrielli that evening at the Osteria della Torretta, the ‘Tavern of the Little Tower’. After dinner they had decided to walk to the Piazza del Popolo. They were halfway there when they were arrested for throwing stones. ‘We were arrested because a stone had been thrown and they wanted me to tell who had thrown it, whereas I didn’t know,’ Caravaggio testified. ‘I told the constables, “Go and look for the man who threw the stone, and no more abusive words.”’
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In his version of events, he had been walking along with his old friend Onorio Longhi, as well as the bookseller Gabrielli and someone else whose name he did not know. They had stopped to chat in the street to a girl called Menicuccia – a nickname for the courtesan Menica Calvi – when he heard stones flying through the air. He was under the impression that the stones had been thrown at his friends. He insisted that he was just an innocent bystander.

The pope’s courier, Martinelli, distanced himself from the whole affair. He claimed to have walked on ahead with another friend. Ottaviano Gabrielli denied having been present at dinner with the others. He asserted that he was on his way to meet the girlfriend of a friend of his when he got caught up in the evening’s events. Gabrielli admitted having been in prison once before, on suspicion of selling prohibited books. On the evening in question, he said, he had witnessed Caravaggio’s arrest but had not been involved in the events leading up to it. As the
sbirri
had taken Caravaggio away, the painter had appealed to Gabrielli for help. The bookseller recalled his precise words: ‘Go to the house of the Illustrious Cardinal del Monte and speak to Monsignor the Cardinal del Monte, or to his majordomo . . . and go to the house of Signora Olimpia Aldobrandini.’
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Gabrielli had taken the message but had been arrested himself later.

For his part, the perfume-maker said that he had had nothing to do with any of it. He had never been in prison before, he said. It was unfair. He had only been going for a walk on the Via del Babuino. During his one night in jail, he had clearly been struck by Caravaggio’s confidence in his powerful patrons. The perfumier remembered the painter saying, ‘Whatever happens, I’ll be out tomorrow.’

It is clear from Caravaggio’s testimony that this had been only one of several run-ins with the police in the autumn of 1604. He was accused of using offensive language to the
sbirro
who had arrested him, Corporal Malanno. Caravaggio answered that the said Malanno had a grudge against him. The policeman was hostile and insulting whenever he bumped into him, the painter complained, but he stoutly denied having called the arresting officer a ‘cocksucker’ on the night in question.