Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (66 page)

Shockingly he has made a botch of the job, cutting deep into the saint’s neck, deep enough to sever the jugular, but leaving the head still attached to the trunk. Now he reaches behind him for the sharpened knife in the scabbard at his belt, which he needs to cut the last flap of flesh connecting John’s head to his body. He grabs the saint by his hair so that he can get at the place he needs to with his knife. He might be a butcher working at his slab.

Does the saint still live? His pale face seems animated, as if he were in his last death agonies, recoiling from the gurgled, choking rush of his own blood. In the frozen world of Caravaggio’s painting, he must wait forever for the
coup de gr
âce
. A swathe of red drapery has been thrown carelessly across his otherwise naked body. This sudden shock of colour in the prison gloom emphasizes the atrocious nature of what is taking place. It is like a pictogram or symbol of bloodletting in the dark. The martyr lies on a sheepskin, which symbolically makes of him a blessed Christian lamb, brought to sacrifice. The painter has contrived to pick out the martyr’s naked left foot with a stray shaft of light. Surrounded by pools of darkness, placed next to some twisting coils of rope, it is almost like a still life detail – separate from the rest of the scene and yet emblematic of the poor and painfully solitary death which the saint endures.

The novices of the Order of St John listened to sermons and received instruction in the oratory for which Caravaggio’s painting was destined. The place was both a school for the martyrs of the future and a burial ground for the martyrs of the past – the bones of the knights who had died at the Great Siege were interred beneath its stone-flagged floor. Within the oratory, novices were trained in the hard ways of the Knights of Malta and made to understand that they too might have to face death in a distant land at the hands of unbelievers. Caravaggio’s altarpiece was designed to make sure that they could be under no illusions about what that might mean. A martyr’s death brought the reward of eternal glory with the saints in heaven, but there would be nothing glorious about the death itself. It could be a death much like this one, a sordid act of butchery in a dark and lonely place. The picture is like a catechism, an asking of questions. Are you sure you have it in you to be a Knight of the Order of St John? Are you ready to die? To die like this?

Next to the executioner, underscoring Caravaggio’s transposition of John’s legend to a cruel present, stands the figure of a Turkish jailor with heavy black keys dangling at his belt. He directs operations with an air of weary impatience, pointing unnecessarily at the richly chased and gilded plate onto which the severed head must be placed. Beside
him stands an old woman with her head in her hands, distraught at the
spectacle of the martyrdom. She is another version of the goitrous peasant woman gazing piteously at the crucified body of the saint in
The Crucifixion of St Andrew
. She stands for Christian pity and prayer. The main group of five figures is completed by that of the serving girl who has been sent to collect the head.
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Her pose has an eloquent woodenness about it. She is trying her best to carry out a task that appals her, affecting a mechanical workaday demeanour that the expression on her face belies. She stares fixedly down at the plate in her hands, pursing her lips like somebody desperately stifling the impulse to puke.

What she cannot bear to look at is the spurting of the saint’s blood from the deep gash in his nearly severed neck. It is so thick that it resembles a skein of red wool laid on the ground. Beneath the main pool of coagulating gore, there lie some thinner threads of blood. Anyone looking closely at the picture sees that they have been made to spell out the letters of Caravaggio’s own name: ‘F. Michelangelo’. Inscribed in the blood of St John the Baptist himself, this is the only example of the artist’s signature. He had never signed a painting before, and would never do so again.

This boldly idiosyncratic gesture has been subjected to a variety of anachronistic modern interpretations. It has been read, for example, as the veiled retrospective confession of Caravaggio, the murderer; and as a proto-Freudian token of his fetishistic obsession with violence and death. But the true meaning of the signature in blood is clear and unambiguous. The key to it lies in a tradition of Christian symbolism to which Caravaggio had already alluded earlier in his
career. Years before, when painting
The Martyrdom of St Matthew
for
the Contarelli Chapel in Rome, he had evoked the ancient link between martyrdom and baptism by having Matthew’s blood flow into a baptismal pool. The blood signature alluded to the same association, although its meaning was subtly different. In
The Martyrdom of Matthew
, it was Matthew and Matthew alone who had been reborn into
immortality through his own martyrdom. In
The Beheading of St John
,
it is not only the martyr who gains eternal life. Caravaggio himself has been symbolically reborn, through his acceptance into the ranks of those dedicated to the martyred John the Baptist.

The Beheading of St John
was Caravaggio’s gift to the Knights of Malta, a due paid in lieu of his
passaggio
into the Order of St John. Its completion, therefore, marked his entry into the brotherhood of knights. Hence that prominent ‘F’ before his name. It stands for ‘Fra’, or ‘Brother’, the official prefix of any Knight of St John.
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The artist’s signature, written in John the Baptist’s blood, was a public proclamation. It was Caravaggio’s way of asserting that his own mortal sin, the murderous letting of a man’s blood, had been washed away by the blood of his new patron saint. Now he could return to Rome, not as a criminal but as a proud Christian soldier.

COMPETING WITH MICHELANGELO

Caravaggio must have added his signature to the work some time shortly after 14 July 1608; because it was on that date, exactly a year and two days after his arrival on Malta, that he was invested with the habit of a Knight of Magistral Obedience and given the title ‘Fra Michelangelo Merisi’. The address given by the Grand Master at the ceremony of the investiture can only have increased the artist’s pleasure in his newfound status. In the Bull of his reception, Wignacourt went so far as to compare Caravaggio with Apelles of Kos, the celebrated painter of ancient Greece:

Whereas it behooves the leaders and rulers of commonweals to prove their benevolence by advancing men, not only on account of their noble birth but also on account of their art and science whatever it may be, so that human talent, hopeful of obtaining reward and honour, might apply itself to praiseworthy studies:

And whereas the Honorable Michael Angelo, born in the town Carraca, in the vernacular called Caravaggio, in Lombardy, having been called to this city, burning with zeal for the order, has communicated to us his fervent wish to be adorned with our habit and insignia.

Therefore, as we wish to gratify the desire of this excellent painter, so that our island of Malta, and our order, may at last glory in this adopted disciple and citizen with no less pride than the island of Kos (also within our jurisdiction) extols her Apelles; and that, should we compare him to more recent artists of our age, we may not afterwards be envious of the artistic excellence of any other outstanding man of equally important name and brush . . . and as we wish to comply with the pious wish of the aforesaid Michael Angelo, we receive and admit him, by the grace of God almighty and by a papal authorization especially granted to us for the purpose, to the rank of Brethren and Knights known as Brethren and Knights of Obedience . . .
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This pretty sequence of tributes pays the greatest compliment of all to Wignacourt himself, because if Caravaggio is a new Apelles, the Grand Master is by implication a second Alexander the Great. The author of the encomium, with its flowery phrases and polished rhetoric, was almost certainly Wignacourt’s erudite secretary, Francesco dell’Antella, who had also played a part in lobbying for Caravaggio’s knighthood some months earlier.
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Dell’Antella was a learned Florentine, who for a Knight of Malta prided himself on his sophistication and classical learning. He also took an unusually strong interest in art. He was himself a gifted amateur draughtsman, who produced an impressively detailed drawing of Valletta as one of the illustrations for his friend Giacomo Bosio’s history of the Order of St John. Dell’Antella would eventually become an official member of the Accademia del Disegno in Florence, the first Italian art academy, founded by Giorgio Vasari in the mid sixteenth century.
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Like Caravaggio, dell’Antella
was a proud and stormy man with a tendency to violence. He had even
killed Wignacourt’s own nephew in a swordfight, but had been magnanimously forgiven by the Grand Master on the grounds that he had been unjustly provoked. This similarity of temperament and history may have given the two men some affinity.

Perhaps as a gesture of gratitude to dell’Antella, perhaps to commission, Caravaggio painted a wry and learned cabinet picture for him,
Sleeping Cupid
. The mischievous and malign child-god lies sleeping, one wing folded beneath him, the other reduced to the barely perceptible rim of a feathery arc. In his left hand he limply holds a bow, of Indo-Persian design, and a feathered dart of love. A dim light illuminates the scene, suggestive of the first glimmers of dawn. The picture is a darker, drowsier, dreamlike version of the
Omnia vincit amor
painted in 1602 for Vincenzo Giustiniani. This time the Cupid is not an adolescent boy but a child, with the plump, fleshy body and heavy, lolling head of a toddler.

The painting is close in spirit to a poem about a statue of sleeping Cupid in Giambattista Marino’s
La
Galeria
, an anthology of verse inspired by works of art both real and imaginary. Marino was a close contemporary of Caravaggio, and had been a friend of his in Rome, so it is possible that the painter had the poet’s verses in mind when he painted his picture.

Marino begins by warning the prospective visitor to his poetical museum against waking the image of the sleeping child:

Guàrdati Peregrino

non gli andar si vicino,

nol desar, prega, ch’egli

dorma in eterno pur, né mai si svegli.

Se tu’l sonno tenace

rompi al fanciul sagace,

desto il vedrai più forte

trattar quell’armi, ond’è

e peggior che Morte
.

Look out, Pilgrim

do not get so close,

do not rouse him, pray that he

sleeps forever and never wakes up.

If you break the clever boy’s sleep,

right away you will see him yet more strongly

take up those weapons that make him

worse than death.
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Marino’s sleeping child is lost in cruel dreams of deceptions, massacres and sufferings. Dawn is breaking and he will soon awake to visit more miseries of love on his countless victims. The poem ends with a question, and a joking reminder that the subject of all these fears and fantasies is after all merely a work of art:

Qual tu ti sia, che ‘l miri,

temi non vivi e spiri?

Stendi securo il passo:

toccal pur, scherza teco, egli è di sasso
.

Whoever you are, who gaze upon him,

do you fear lest he live and breathe?

Lengthen your stride with confidence, do not tiptoe,

Touch him even – I was teasing you – he is made of stone.

Caravaggio’s painting also plays teasingly on the boundary between art and reality. The sleeping boy is an image, but of a disconcertingly lifelike kind. His teeth can be seen glinting behind his half-closed lips. The abandon with which his head is thrown back and the look of absorption on his face powerfully conjure the illusion of a real child caught up in a vivid dream. But there are other ways of looking at this picture too. Like Marino’s poem, Caravaggio’s painting looks back knowingly to the world of antiquity. Not only does it evoke the myth of Cupid; it also calls to mind the many ancient Greek legends about images of art so deceptively convincing that they seemed real – the painted grapes of Xeuxis which, as Pliny the Elder relates, fooled the birds into pecking at them, or the statue of a woman infused with such love by the sculptor Pygmalion that she actually came to life and stepped down off her pedestal. In painting the
Sleeping Cupid
, Caravaggio was making his own contribution to the imaginary art gallery of the classical past – and living up to the classical compliment that had so recently been paid to him at his investiture as a Knight of Malta. He had been dubbed the new Apelles, and now he was wittily acting the part.

There was yet another layer of allusion for the learned Francesco dell’Antella to enjoy as he contemplated his new possession, this time to a more recent work of art. The subject of Cupid asleep was famously associated with Caravaggio’s namesake, Michelangelo Buonarroti. When Michelangelo was young, he had created a sculpture of a
Sleeping Cupid
so perfectly classical in spirit that he was able to pass it off as a genuine antique work of art. Giorgio Vasari tells the story:

[He] set himself to make from another piece of marble a Cupid that was sleeping, of the size of life. This, when finished, was shown . . . to Lorenzo di Pier Francesco [Medici] as a beautiful thing, and he, having pronounced the same judgement, said to Michelangelo: ‘If you were to bury it under ground and then send it to Rome treated in such a manner as to make it look old, I am certain that it would pass for an antique, and you would thus obtain much more for it than by selling it here.’ It is said that Michelangelo handled it in such a manner as to make it appear an antique; nor is there any reason to marvel at that, seeing as he had genius enough to do it, and even more.
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