Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (73 page)

Mancini’s letter apart, from October 1609 until May 1610 there is a striking absence of evidence about Caravaggio’s activities. He apparently does nothing, says nothing. The archive falls silent, like a cardiograph flatlining. It then flickers briefly, but only twice. Each flicker takes the form of a painting.

The seriousness of Caravaggio’s injuries is shockingly apparent in
The Denial of St Peter
, a melancholic and withdrawn devotional work painted some time in the summer of 1610.
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It is a terminally raw and ragged thing – an image snatched from the pit of darkest adversity, painted by a man who could barely hold a brush. The stark and pared down style evolved in Sicily has been appallingly coarsened. Three figures, two men and a single woman, confront one another in the shallowest of spaces. The conception is subtle, the composition strikingly original and the mood bitterly sad. But such is the uncertainty of the handling that the whole image looks disconcertingly unfocused. It is still recognizably a Caravaggio, but the brushwork is so broad, the definition of forms so unsure, that the painter seems to have fallen prey to some form of essential tremor, an uncontrollable shaking of the hands, as well as perhaps to damage of the eyes.

The story that the painting illustrates is told in all four books of the New Testament. According to the gospels, Christ prophesied that his disciple Peter would deny him three times before the cock had crowed twice. On the day of Christ’s arrest in the garden of Gethsemane, Peter followed his master into the courtyard of the high priest Caiaphas. He waited there as Christ was tormented by his accusers: ‘And some began to spit on him, and to cover his face, and to buffet him, and to say unto him, Prophesy: and the servants did strike him with the palms of their hands. And as Peter was beneath in the palace, there cometh one of the maids of the high priest: And when she saw Peter warming himself, she looked upon him, and said, And thou also wast with Jesus of Nazareth. But he denied, saying, I know not, neither understand I what thou sayest.’ Twice more, Peter was asked if he knew Jesus, and each time he gave the same answer: ‘And the second time the cock crew. And Peter called to mind the word that Jesus said unto him, Before the cock crow twice, thou shalt deny me thrice. And when he thought thereon, he wept’ (Mark 14:65–72).

Caravaggio has combined elements from all three denials in a single image. Behind the figures, a reddish-brown smudge and some scattered flecks of brighter pigment suggest the fire by which Peter warms himself, damp logs spitting sparks into the air. On the left, his face entirely in shadow, stands one of Caiaphas’s guards. He looks like a dim memory of the malign soldier in the much earlier
Betrayal of Christ
, which had shown the moment directly before Peter’s threefold denial. This soldier’s red shirtsleeve is indicated in a few summary strokes of red paint with swiftly dashed-in highlights. A wedge-shaped piece of light fragments and disperses in the darkness of his armour. His face and hands are a blur. Beside him, a single girl stands in for both maids challenging Peter. She stares intently at the soldier while pointing at Peter with a half-sketched hand.

The most eloquent figure in the picture is Peter himself, his bald head creased with lines and his face carrying an expression of deep, glassy-eyed self-recrimination. He points both of his own hands towards himself, as if to complete the triple accusation. He denies Christ and hates himself in the same moment. A tear wells out of a corner of his half-hidden right eye. He is the embodiment of saddened guilt, a man who knows he has done wrong and can hardly bear to confront himself.

Against the odds, it is a moving and powerful image. Caravaggio has drawn on all his long-practised ingenuity. But his strategies are those of evasion. Crop the figures to extreme close-up, to avoid problems of anatomical articulation. Arrange the faces at odd or oblique angles, to obviate the need for accurate depictions of human physiognomy. Smother any awkward areas in blankets of shadow. Wherever gleams of illumination do pierce the darkness, they reveal the imprecision of the painter’s touch. His draughtsmanship, the way he draws with the brush, has collapsed altogether. Peter’s hands are like flesh-coloured mittens, his left thumb so botched it resembles the claw of an animal. Light flaring in darkness had once been Caravaggio’s signature, the source of all his pictorial magic. Now it exposes his illness and incapacity, and shows us how that magic has evaporated.

Only one other painting survives by Caravaggio’s hand. Darker still than
The Denial of Peter
, and yet more abbreviated in style,
The Martyrdom of St Ursula
is his last picture. Once more, a group of fragmentary figures has been arranged in a frieze-like composition within the shallowest of shadowy spaces. There is almost no light at all, and very little sense of scene or background, save for some shadowy drapery intended perhaps to signify the inside of a tent. It is a picture so entirely lacking in the connective tissue of illusion that it is like language without conjunctions or prepositions: killer’s face, hands; shocked woman’s eyes; victim stunned; two men watching.

The painting’s subject is drawn from the life of St Ursula, as recounted in
The Golden Legend
. A chaste princess led 11,000 virgins on an ill-fated pilgrimage through Germany:

And then all these virgins came . . . to Cologne, and found that it was besieged with the Huns. And when the Huns saw them they began to run upon them with a great cry, and enraged like wolves on sheep, and slew all this great multitude. And when they were all beheaded, they came to the blessed Ursula, and the prince of them, seeing her beauty, so marvellous, was abashed, and began to comfort her on the death of the virgins, and promised to her to take her to his wife. And when she had refused him and despised him, he shot at her an arrow, and pierced her through the body, and so accomplished her martyrdom . . .

The convention was to paint a vast crowd scene, an orgy of death. Caravaggio did the opposite. He envisaged the scene of Ursula’s martyrdom as a horribly intimate ritual wounding. The murderous Hun, who seems horrified by the result of his own actions, has just shot Ursula at point-blank range in the stomach. The victim of a sexual insult – ‘she had refused him and despised him’ – responds by subjecting the woman who had scorned him to a vile parody of pregnancy. Her swollen belly has been impregnated by the tip of an imperfectly painted arrow. She looks down with an expression of quiet surprise as blood spurts from the entry point, making a gesture with her hands that suggests she wants to part the flesh of her stomach still further. She is about to give birth to her own death.

Three others complete the group. Ursula’s shocked maidservant hovers like a ghost between the killer and her mistress. In her left hand she holds the pole of a Christian banner, while with her right she reaches, too late, for the Hun’s bow. A soldier in black armour, shown in half-profile, approaches to catch the martyr should she swoon or fall. Directly behind Ursula’s stooped white mask of a face, another ghoulish face stares sightlessly into space. It is as if she has grown a second head. This is the last of all Caravaggio’s self-portraits.

What did he mean by this strange, haunting device? To suggest his own sympathy for the martyr, his wish to die like her? Or was he painting his realization that he was actually dying – and dying, like her, from a revenge wound inflicted at close quarters? His mouth is half open, as though to suggest that he is gasping, that he feels the arrow piercing his flesh too. Had Caravaggio turned the whole scene into a proxy for his own traumatic ordeal at the Osteria del Cerriglio? The assassin has the weatherbeaten face of a warrior. Is he too a portrait, an image dredged up from painter’s worst memories?

There are no answers to these questions. With the completion of the picture, darkness closes in on Caravaggio.

THE BOATMAN’S STORY

Caravaggio painted his last picture for Prince Marcantonio Doria of Genoa, who had probably sheltered him when he briefly fled Rome in the summer of 1605 after assaulting the notary Mariano Pasqualone. The prince, who had once tried to commission an entire fresco cycle from Caravaggio, had to content himself with a single canvas. He probably chose the subject of
The Martyrdom of St Ursula
in honour of his beloved stepdaughter Ursula, who like her namesake had committed herself to a lifetime of chastity by taking religious vows.

A small comedy of errors attended the delivery of the painting. It had been finished by 10 May 1610. But the very next day Doria’s procurator in Naples, Lanfranco Massa, apologized to his master for having nearly ruined it: ‘I thought to send you the painting of Saint Ursula this week, but to be sure that it was dry, I put it in the sun yesterday, and this instead caused the thick varnish which Caravaggio put on to liquefy; I want to obtain Caravaggio’s opinion on how to do it so as not to harm it. Signor Damiano has seen it and was amazed, like all the others who saw it . . .’
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It took more than two weeks to put the picture right, but by the end of May it was ready for despatch from Naples to Genoa. On 27 May, Massa wrote to Prince Doria: ‘I am sending with P. Alessandro Caramano on his boat a long box inside of which is the painting of
The Martyrdom of St Ursula
, carefully packed, for which [you] will be required to pay 50 soldi in conformance with the shipper’s policy.’

The correspondence is completed by a shipper’s manifest, dated the same day: ‘Sr Lanfranco Massa has loaded in the name of God and of good fortune in the present port of Naples onto the
felucca
named
Santa Maria di Porto Salvo
, owned by Alessandro Caramano, a box containing the painting of
The Martyrdom of St Ursula
, made by the hand of Michel’Angelo [
sic
] Caravaggio, very well packed, in order to consign it in the same condition upon arrival in Genoa to Sr Marcantonio Doria who will pay two and one-half libri of that money should God carry it safely.’ The manifest was signed by a certain Antonio Feraro, ‘on command of the above stated Alessandro Caramano who does not know how to write’.

God and the illiterate boatman indeed carried the painting safely to distant Genoa. According to a note of receipt in the margin of Massa’s second letter, it arrived on 18 June, precisely three weeks after it had left Naples. Three weeks after
that
, sometime around the second week of July, Caravaggio himself embarked on a
felucca
travelling from Naples to Rome.
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He left from the Colonna Palace at Chiaia. He had three paintings with him, two of St John the Baptist and one of Mary Magdalen.

The timing of Caravaggio’s departure suggests that he waited for Alessandro Caramano to return before leaving for Rome himself. He probably wanted to use Caramano for his own journey too. He was a trusted skipper, whose
felucca
had a sufficiently large hold to carry bulky pictures packed in wooden boxes. Caravaggio was very ill and no doubt more than a little apprehensive, so it made sense for him to choose a boatman whom he knew. But this time, the ‘St Mary of the Safe Harbour’ did not bring good luck.

According to Bellori, the painter felt confident to return to Rome because he had ‘by then obtained his freedom from the pope through the intercession of Cardinal Gonzaga’.
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The recently appointed Cardinal Ferdinando Gonzaga was the son of Vincenzo I Gonzaga, who had purchased Caravaggio’s
Death of the Virgin
. The family may have hoped eventually to obtain more pictures from the artist in return for their support. But the young cardinal seems not to have dealt with the pope directly, approaching him instead through the papal nephew, Scipione Borghese. Borghese was already the
proud owner of the artist’s first version of
St Jerome Writing
as well as
his
David with the Head of Goliath
. Insatiable collector that he was, Borghese agreed to help obtain Caravaggio’s pardon, but only if the artist gave him his entire stock of unsold pictures as soon as he got to Rome.
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A Roman
avviso
of late July supports Bellori’s report that Caravaggio had been granted his long-awaited pardon for the murder of Ranuccio Tomassoni some time before he left Naples, saying that the painter was travelling to Rome ‘because His Holiness had lifted the
bando capitale
which he was under’.
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But Baglione was not so sure: he makes it sound as though negotiations were still continuing, even as Caravaggio set out from Naples. The painter was travelling ‘on the word of Cardinal Gonzaga, who was arranging his pardon from Pope Paul V’.
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If the pardon had not yet been officially agreed, that may help to explain why things would go so badly wrong for him on his journey to Rome.

Each writer put a slightly different slant on what happened next.

In Baglione’s telling, it became the parable of a fittingly miserable death, brought on by the painter’s own impetuosity and the burning July sun:

When Caravaggio went ashore he was suddenly
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arrested. He was held for two days in prison and when he was released, the
felucca
was no longer to be found. This made him furious and in his desperation he started out along the beach in the cruel July sun, trying to catch sight of the vessel which was carrying his belongings. Finally he reached a village on the shore and was put to bed with a malignant fever. He was completely abandoned and within a few days he died miserably – indeed, just as he had lived.
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Bellori gives a broadly similar account, although he emphasizes that Caravaggio was still in agony from the injuries he had received in the vendetta attack. He also embellishes the painter’s detention on landing, turning it into a case of mistaken identity. The idea should not be taken too seriously, since Bellori probably just got it from misreading the phrase ‘suddenly arrested’ in Baglione’s considerably earlier account:
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