Caravaggio (10 page)

It took nerve to be known as the creator of both
The Crucifixion of Saint Peter
and
Victorious Cupid,
and inevitably that courage amplified Caravaggio's reputation—and his notoriety. His work was discussed and widely admired by many of Rome's most famous writers and literary figures, and it became a mark of status to have one's likeness painted by Caravaggio. Poets and musicians wrote lyrics and madrigals in praise of his style, which was said to possess a kind of magic that so bewitched the viewer that people became confused: Were they looking at the real world or one of Michelangelo Merisi's paintings?

Caravaggio became a close associate of the well-known poet Giambattista Marino, who also had parallel careers in art and crime. Marino had been accused both of sodomy and of impregnating an unmarried girl—yet more evidence of the fact that, at the time, these two activities would not have been considered mutually exclusive. Before leaving Naples for Rome, Marino had been jailed for forging papers on behalf of a friend who was eventually executed. Doubtless because of the fact that Marino was not a painter—and therefore not a potential rival—he and Caravaggio appear to have had a friendship that inspired them both without the anxiety of the competition that so often soured Caravaggio's associations with his fellow artists.

Caravaggio painted Marino's portrait, and the poet responded by composing a sonnet extolling the painting's virtues. Marino wrote laments for Narcissus, the Greek youth who was so harshly punished for his excessive self-regard, and Caravaggio painted his sensitive study of Narcissus gazing at his reflection in the water.

Unlike Caravaggio's Cupid and his Saint John the Baptist, his Narcissus has no interest in us, or in anything but his own image. Likewise, the painter's attention seems focused less on the work's potential effect on the viewer than on the formal—the geometric—aspects of its composition. As Narcissus kneels at the edge of the pool with his head turned to one side, his body describes a sort of arch, the two columns of his arms traversed by the horizontal of his shoulders. That shape is repeated in his reflection, so that the mirror image and the reality join in an oval, its two halves linked at the points at which Narcissus appears to be holding hands with himself and thus forming his own one-man, off-center circle.

 

At some point between November
1600
and June of the following year, Caravaggio, for reasons that have never been explained, left Del Monte's residence at the Palazzo Madama and moved into the palace of Del Monte's friend Cardinal Girolamo Mattei, a member of an extremely wealthy and prominent Roman family. The cardinal's brothers, Ciriaco and Asdrubale Mattei, both avid collectors of art, lived in the palace next door.

Ciriaco Mattei was already, or would soon become, one of Caravaggio's most supportive and eager patrons, acquiring his work for (by current standards) astronomical prices, sums equaling those the artist received for several of his church commissions and that were far beyond the relatively modest means of Del Monte. Baglione suggests that Ciriaco was duped by all the publicity and gossip surrounding Caravaggio; he adds that the artist relieved the gentleman of many hundreds of
scudi
. Duped or not, Ciriaco bought
Saint John the Baptist
as a gift for his son, again raising the question of whether the suggestive male nude would really have seemed as lubricious to Caravaggio's contemporaries as it appears to us, which would have made it an odd present for a respected aristocrat to give his son.

Ciriaco Mattei also purchased
The Supper at Emmaus
, a depiction of Luke's account of the incident that occurred on the road to Emmaus, when Christ fell in with two disciples who had previously refused to believe reports that he had risen from the dead. Not until they shared a humble meal, and Christ broke bread and gave it to them, did they understand who it was that walked among them—and at that very instant Jesus disappeared.

Typically, Caravaggio cuts straight to the dramatic climax, to the moment when realization is nearly rocketing the two pilgrims out of their seats. The old man on the right has thrown his arms open in the gesture that, in Caravaggio's work, signals not only shock but the helpless and reflexive baring of the heart. And the pilgrim on the left grips the arms of his chair as if to prevent himself from levitating through the top of the painting. The innkeeper still hasn't figured it out. Although he is in the presence of the resurrected Lord, he has not yet removed his hat.

The use of light and shadow, and of perspective—the way the table recedes into space even as the elderly pilgrim's hand leaps out of it—is masterful. Young, plump, beardless, his radiance undimmed by the agony he has just endured, Jesus gazes downward with a beneficent but unreadable expression. On the table is a basket of damaged fruit that recalls Caravaggio's earlier still life. Bellori complained that the figs and pomegranates were out of season for the meal that would have taken place in the spring.

It's the bright, redemptive aftermath of
The Taking of Christ
, which Caravaggio also did for the Mattei family, and which is believed to have hung in the palace together with
The Supper at Emmaus
. In many ways evocative of
The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew
, it, too, offers a searing vision of chaos and grief that focuses on the perversely intimate bond between the betrayed and his betrayer. It's another turbulent crowd scene, but here there is no architecture, no background; the figures filling the picture space could hardly be jammed in more tightly. Wearing a visored helmet and dark armor, the soldier seizing Jesus commands the center of the painting. Reaching across Judas to get at Jesus, whom Judas is embracing, the soldier seems to be grabbing them both at once, or else sandwiching Judas between himself and Jesus.

Inscribed on Christ's and Judas's pained faces is the perfect comprehension of everything that this kiss will mean for themselves, and for mankind. At the far left, fleeing in terror, is an older version of the boy who ran from Matthew's murder, and on the right, Caravaggio himself makes another appearance as a witness, though now without the distress he showed over Matthew's killing. This time his face is lit by the glow of sheer curiosity, as well as by the lamp he holds, illuminating the scene. He's just trying to see what's going on. And really, why should it matter if the light from his lamp enables the soldiers to find their man, the one whom Judas is kissing? The artist is showing us what God ordained; there is no way he could have changed that.

These works, along with a third religious painting Caravaggio did during this period—a remarkably clinical and graphic
Doubting Thomas
in which the skeptical apostle is shown accepting Christ's invitation to probe, with his finger, the wound in Jesus's side—must have been satisfying for their creator. By deploying his technical virtuosity and his amazing gift for rendering the psychology of a spiritual drama, he had been able to please his audience without compromising his vision.

This was highly unlike his experience with the Contarelli and Cerasi Chapels. The pressures and complications surrounding his public commissions had been, and would continue to be, very different from the circumstances under which he worked for the appreciative private patrons who competed among themselves to acquire his latest efforts.

In the winter of
1602
, Caravaggio signed a contract to paint Saint Matthew being inspired by an angel. The painting was to hang in the space between the two that he had already done for the Contarelli Chapel, in the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi.

In the first version Caravaggio submitted, Matthew—elderly, stocky, barefoot, bearded, nearly bald—sits cross-legged in a chair, holding an open book in his lap. His forehead wrinkles with strain as he peers at the Hebrew letters. A winged, androgynous, diaphanously clad angel leans over his shoulder, gently resting his slim fingertips on the back of Matthew's rough meat hook of a hand.

The painting was summarily rejected by the Fathers of San Luigi, evidently because Matthew looked more like a laborer who might have built the church than any accepted or acceptable portrait of the apostle who helped found it. By contrast, the adjacent images of the saint as the startled tax collector and the murdered (or about to be murdered) priest look aristocratic and patrician. According to Bellori, the painting was taken down because the priests claimed that the figure, with his crossed legs and his feet rudely exposed to the public, had neither the appearance nor the decorum of a saint.

Only the bare feet, the beard, and the baldness carry over into the second, approved version. Now the haloed saint wears a flowing orange robe, beneath which is the tall, attenuated body—and the feet—of a man who seems more accustomed to intellectual activity than to physical labor. And the angel, who has backed off and ascended to the top of the painting, no longer seems to be teaching Matthew how to read.

Describing Caravaggio's response to the French priests' lack of enthusiasm for the first Saint Matthew, Bellori twice uses the word
despair
and adds that the painter was extremely disturbed by the effect the rejection might have on his reputation and by this affront to his public work. As with the first version of
The Conversion of Saint Paul
, the day—and Caravaggio's pride—was saved when the rejected work was acquired by a private collector, in this case Vincenzo Giustiniani.

By now, the ecclesiastical authorities responsible for planning the decoration of the great churches of Rome would have had plenty of opportunity to form a reasonably accurate idea of the potential advantages and possible dangers of choosing Michelangelo Merisi. Doubtless they would have heard about other priests' experiences and observed the results. And they would have been able to decide for themselves if the benefits of hiring a painter whose brilliant originality might increase both the exaltation of the faithful and the fame of their congregation would outweigh the problems that might ensue if his work turned out to be
too
original,
too
inconveniently daring.

The Oratorian Fathers of the Church of Santa Maria in Vallicella, the so-called Chiesa Nuova, or “new church,” were willing to take the risk, perhaps because their order was so strongly committed to the virtues of humility, simplicity, and naturalness, the spiritual principles that Caravaggio had turned into an aesthetic. Sometime in
1601
or
1602,
Caravaggio was asked to paint
The Entombment of Christ
for Santa Maria in Vallicella's Chapel of the Pietà, thus forming a sort of narrative bridge between two adjacent chapels, one commemorating the Crucifixion, the other celebrating the Ascension.

Until now the majority of Caravaggio's religious paintings had fixed on the terror of revelation, on surprise and shock, brutality and violence, suffering and endurance. But the mood of
The Entombment of Christ
is one of tenderness and compassion, and the moment we see is transpiring after the agony of the body has ended and the mourners' grief is about to be relieved by a glimmer of the light that awaits on the far side of sorrow and pain.

The painting is still sometimes referred to as
The Deposition of Christ
, as both Bellori and Mancini call it. But in fact it's not the traditional image of the awkward, dolorous labor of lifting the lifeless Savior down from the cross. One can imagine that Caravaggio, with his passionate interest in the physical effort required for a miracle to occur, might have been tempted to picture that scene. But perhaps inspired by the sympathies of the Oratorian Fathers, he so thoroughly resisted this impulse that the cross—the instrument of cruelty, torture, and death—does not even appear in this redemptive and compassionate painting.

Five ordinary, humble people, three women and two men, have gathered to carry, and lament over, the body of Christ. The barefoot, burly Nicodemus, his face strikingly similar to Michelangelo Buonarroti's, gazes out of the painting. But sadness has turned him inward, and he doesn't engage with the viewer as he bends to hold Jesus's knees. He's the kindhearted equivalent of the laborer in
The Crucifixion of Saint Peter
, the one who impassively holds the saint's shins while the cross is being raised. Weightless enough so that Saint John needs only one arm beneath his back, Christ can no longer be hurt, not even when his disciple's fingertips accidentally press his wound. We are the ones who feel the pain of his terrible vulnerability.

Christ's mouth is open, his head is tipped back, his arm hangs plumb and grazes the stone. Only the careful imitation of nature—made possible by staging a tableau in which the live model held his uncomfortable pose until his body assumed the precise curve of the dead Jesus—could have made the reality of recent, undeserved death so palpable and so convincing. Confronted by the sadness of the scene, we take our cue from the middle-aged Madonna, who extends her arms in a blessing that conveys forbearance and forgiveness, and also from the young woman, who raises her hands and catches the light like Saul on the road to Damascus.

How could the Oratorian fathers not have admired and valued this affecting depiction of human loving-kindness, and of the instant when despair turns phototropically toward hope? The altarpiece was such a huge success that even Baglione felt obliged to report that it was said to be Caravaggio's finest. Many artists would copy it, including Paul Cézanne, who painted it in watercolor without having seen the original. The acclaim, and the ease with which it came, should have set the tone for this innovative and inspired period in Caravaggio's career.

But, sadly, he would soon begin to undergo a series of bruising experiences that more closely resembled the difficult time he'd had in his work on the Contarelli Chapel. That cautionary, troubling glimpse of the gap between Caravaggio and his ecclestiastical patrons, of how far they lagged behind him and of how reluctant they were to keep up with the leaps of his visionary genius, would prove to be a portent of the near and distant future.