Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (71 page)

The biographer is more illuminating when he turns to the third and last of Caravaggio’s surviving Sicilian altarpieces,
The Adoration of the Shepherds
. Long neglected, because so far off the beaten track, it is one of the most startlingly direct, wrenchingly emotional religious paintings of the seventeenth century. A sombre and profoundly personal work, it is the last great painting of Caravaggio’s traumatic life. Susinno, who responded to it with heartfelt sincerity, believed it to be in fact the greatest of all his works:

In this canvas he represented the Nativity with life-size figures, and this in my opinion is the best of all his paintings, because here this great naturalist abandoned his sketchy, allusive style and demonstrated his naturalism once more without the use of bold shadows . . . This one great work of art would have been enough for Caravaggio’s glory for centuries to come, because here he removed himself completely from dryness and from exceedingly dark tones. Instead, on the ground is a basket with carpentry tools alluding to St Joseph’s trade. Above, on the right, the Virgin is seen stretched out on the ground, looking at the Christ child wrapped in cloth and caressing him. She is leaning on a haystack, behind which those animals are grazing; on the left side, at the foot of the Virgin, St Joseph is seated in attractive drapery, deep in thought. Nearby the three shepherds adore the newborn child; the first one has a staff in his hand and is dressed in a white garment, the second with his two hands joined in prayer shows a bare shoulder that looks like living flesh, and finally the third one looks on admiringly, his bold head painted marvellously. The rest of the canvas consists of a black background with rough wood that constitutes the shed. Indeed, the background was higher, and it was necessary to cut off a large section in order to fit the canvas into the chapel.
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Caravaggio’s
Adoration of the Shepherds
is the most tragic of nativities. Mary has just given birth to her tiny, swaddled child. She slumps, exhausted from her labours, not against a haystack as Susinno mistakenly said, but against the side of a manger. Behind her, in the half dark, the biblical ox and ass stand patient and impassive. Mary is the
Madonna del Parto
– the ‘Madonna of childbirth’ – and also the Madonna of humility. She reclines on the bare earth of the cattleshed, strewn with strands of straw that catch the light like threads of gold. Those pieces of light are her only riches, but her eyes are closed to them. She is a refugee mother, utterly alone in the dark with her defenceless child.

Joseph is singled out by his halo, but he is not with her – he is with the shepherds, part of her audience. None of the men are truly with her, and there is no sense that any of them can help her. The bald shepherd closest to Mary and her child reaches out to touch them. But his hand is kept back from actually making contact, as if by an invisible force. The men are suspended in an eternal agony of empathy. Their faces radiate compassion and helplessness. What can be done? Does the world really have to be like this?

Once again, Caravaggio in Sicily reached back to the oldest popular traditions of Christian art. The motif of the tiny baby, crawling on his mother’s body, pressing his face to hers and reaching to touch her with his little hand, is drawn from Byzantine art.
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The whole scene has been conceived as another of the painter’s assemblages of sculpturally realized figures, but this time what is evoked is not the sacred mountain with its chapels, but the tradition of the Christmas crib, begun by St Francis at the monastery of Greccio in the chill winter of 1223.

It is no coincidence that
The Adoration of the Shepherds
was painted for one of Messina’s Franciscan churches. Such was the depth of the friars’ attachment to Caravaggio’s painting that they later fought tooth and nail to keep it. ‘At various times princes have been attracted by this Nativity and sought to take it away,’ wrote Susinno, ‘but they were unable to do so because the Capuchin Fathers made an appeal to the Senate, which in those days was more important, and its authority made them realize that those Fathers were its only custodians. As a result the picture remained in Messina, and I can affirm in truth that this unique work is the most masterly painting by Caravaggio.’
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All of Caravaggio’s great Sicilian pictures reach back – back to the oldest and most direct forms of Christian art, and back to his own oldest and most painful memories. Whether he was conscious of it or not,
The Adoration of the Shepherds
is an uncanny allegory of his own emergence into the dark world of Milan under plague back in the 1570s – born to a mother soon to be bereaved, born to be abandoned by all save her. That is why the men in the picture look on but cannot touch, like dreams or ghosts. They see the mother and child’s abandonment, but can do nothing to assuage it. They are hardly in the same place, but in another shadowland. Iconographically, the gnarled and saddened men are Joseph and the shepherds. Emotionally, they are Caravaggio’s father, his uncles, his grandfather – all the men in the family that he might have had, but lost. Caravaggio’s own father’s tools had been those of a simple stonemason. Here they are replaced by the equally humble tools of the carpenter, placed with such desolation to the other side of Mary.

The set square, the saw, the adze, the white rag, lie there unused, a
memento mori
, oblique memorial to an ordinary man who left an extraordinary child to fend for himself. This is Caravaggio’s last still life. These are among his last truly meaningful, eloquent brushstrokes. The picture is almost unbearable.

‘LIKE A CRIMINAL ESCAPING FROM HIS GUARDS’

It is hard to know what Caravaggio did during his time in Messina, other than paint. Susinno says that he paraded himself as a heretic: ‘Apart from his profession, Caravaggio also went about questioning our holy religion, for which he was accused of being a disbeliever . . .’
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But he also tells that dark story of the painter’s visit to a Messinese church, where he refused holy water on the grounds that it was only good for washing away venial sins. ‘Mine are all mortal’ were Caravaggio’s words, hardly those of a man untroubled by questions of salvation or damnation. Regrettably, there is no hard evidence about his beliefs. In religion, as in so much else, Caravaggio was perhaps a man divided – torn between doubt and faith, angry rebellion and sullen obedience.

He stayed longer in Messina than he had in Syracuse. He had won the favour of the Senate – which commissioned and paid for the
Adoration
, according to Susinno – and perhaps that added to his sense of security. But his behaviour remained erratic. ‘He used to have his meal on a slab of wood, and instead of using a tablecloth, most of the time he would eat on an old portrait canvas; he was foolish and crazy, more cannot be said.’
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Susinno’s weirdest story about Caravaggio concerns his alleged sexual interest in a group of adolescent schoolboys who used to play near the dry docks at the eastern end of Messina. It is an unusual anecdote in the context of the Sicilian author’s
Lives
, which are not otherwise salacious:

He used to disappear during holy days to follow a certain grammar teacher called Don Carlo Pepe, who escorted his pupils for recreation to the arsenal. There galleys used to be built . . . Michele went to observe the positions of those playful boys and to form his inventions. But the teacher became suspicious and wanted to know why he was always around. The question so disturbed the painter, and he became so irate and furious . . . that he wounded the poor man on the head. For this action he was forced to leave Messina. In short, wherever he went he would leave the mark of madness.’
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Having seemingly implied that the schoolteacher was accusing Caravaggio of an indecent interest in his pupils, Susinno himself asserts that the painter’s real motive for following the boys was artistic. The priest-biographer ends up by writing off the whole incident as yet another instance of Caravaggio’s mental instability. But because of its very oddity and untidiness, the story has the reek of truth. Caravaggio was hunted, haunted and lonely in Messina. It is by no means inconceivable that he should have sought companionship, even sexual solace, in the company of young men. Susinno’s anecdote might even help to explain one of the most enigmatic and homoerotic paintings of Caravaggio’s Sicilian period, his last depiction of
St John the Baptist
, now to be seen in the Borghese Gallery. Was this one of Don Pepe’s pupils? Did Caravaggio persuade him to model for him, and perhaps more?

Placed in a cursory wilderness, landscape lost in shadow, accompanied by a cursory lamb of God, the boy reclines on a swag of red drapery and fixes the viewer with a sullen, sultry, knowing gaze. Is this really John the Baptist, prophet and seer, possessor of secret knowledge, or a swarthy Sicilian boy, older than his years and conscious of his sexual appeal? The artist still had the picture with him when he died: it was in the inventory of his last effects, which suggests that it was not painted to order but on impulse.

Caravaggio had evaded capture, first in Syracuse, then in Messina. He may have been forced to leave Messina because of the fracas with the schoolmaster, but he was probably planning to leave anyway because he suspected that his enemies were closing in on him. According to Bellori, ‘misfortune did not abandon Michele, and fear hunted him from place to place. Consequently he hurried across Sicily and from Messina went to Palermo, where he painted another Nativity for the Oratorio of San Lorenzo . . . The Virgin is shown adoring her newborn child, with St Francis, St Lawrence, the seated St Joseph, and above an angel in the air. The lights are diffused among shadows in the darkness.’
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From this moment on in the painter’s story, the light is diffused among a great many shadows. But certain facts are clear. As Bellori said, Caravaggio left Messina for Palermo, sometime around the height of summer 1609. Once again, he painted an altarpiece for the Franciscans, this time for an oratory in the possession of a confraternity known as the Compagnia di San Francesco. Perhaps in deference to the sensibilities of its members he painted a rather sweeter version of the heartbreakingly bare
Adoration
in Messina. The Virgin is still weary, still seated on the ground, but without the same sense of desolation and isolation. Comparison between the two works is no longer possible, since the Palermo version was allegedly stolen by order of a Sicilian Mafia boss in 1969, and has never been recovered.

Caravaggio did not stay long in Palermo. Within two months, at most, he was on the move again. By the middle of September 1609 he was back in Naples.
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Baglione says he left because ‘his enemy was chasing him’.
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Bellori agrees: ‘he no longer felt safe in Sicily, and so he departed the island and sailed back to Naples, where he thought he would stay until he got word of his pardon allowing him to return to Rome.’
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On his return to Naples, Caravaggio stayed in the Colonna Palace at Chiaia.
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With its vast terraced gardens, close to the sea, it was an idyllic retreat from the cares of life, with the added bonus of thick walls. The fact that Caravaggio had evidently been accepted back into the Colonna fold suggests not only that Marchesa Costanza had forgiven him, yet again, but also that she had negotiated some kind of truce with Alof de Wignacourt and the Knights of Malta. Her own son, Fabrizio Sforza Colonna, remained in post as admiral of the Grand Master’s galleys. He owed both his liberty and the rescue of his reputation to Wignacourt. In such circumstances, it would have been inconceivable for Costanza Colonna to have protected a known fugitive from the order. Whatever it involved, a deal must have been struck on Caravaggio’s behalf. He would presumably have been required to send some paintings to the Grand Master, as well as putting an end to the absurd pretence that he was still a Knight of Magistral Obedience.

News that Caravaggio was back in Naples soon got around and offers of work followed. ‘In Sant’Anna de’ Lombardi he painted the
Resurrection,’ Bellori wrote.
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The picture does not survive, because the
chapel that once housed it in the Neapolitan church of the Lombards was destroyed by an earthquake at the turn of the nineteenth century. But documents and eyewitness accounts confirm that Caravaggio, himself a Lombard by origin, did indeed paint a large altarpiece of
The Resurrection of Christ
for Sant’Anna. To judge by the praise heaped on it, it was a strange and morbidly enthralling picture, the lost masterpiece of Caravaggio’s later years.

Caravaggio’s patron, Alfonso Fenaroli, had obtained the rights to the third chapel on the left side of the church on 24 December 1607, six months after the painter had left for Malta at the end of his first stay in Naples. Fenaroli must have commissioned the new altarpiece as soon as the artist arrived back from Palermo, probably sometime around the beginning of September 1609. Working in the abbreviated and fluent style of his Sicilian altarpieces, Caravaggio finished it before the end of the following month.
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Nearly a hundred and fifty years later, the travelling French connoisseur Charles-Nicolas Cochin was bowled over by it. By then the picture had darkened with age, and the identity of its creator had been forgotten. Cochin had every reason to pass it over, but it seemed so bizarrely original, so memorable and so sinister, that it drew him in:

In the third chapel on the left, one sees a painting representing the resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is a singular invention, Christ is not even shown rising into the air and he walks past the sentries [who guard the holy sepulchre]. All of which gives a low idea of him, and makes him look like a criminal escaping from his guards. Also, he has been given the character of a scrawny suffering man. From a purely pictorial point of view the composition is really beautiful and the style is strong and felt with great taste. It is much blackened. No one knows the name of the artist. This piece is beautiful.
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