Caravaggio (14 page)

Violent struggles are of course difficult to observe clearly, to recall, sort out, and describe with accuracy. But there seems to have been a rare degree of concurrrence about this one, though Baglione presents Ranuccio as the “very polite” victim of a sociopath always on the lookout for a chance to risk his own life or endanger someone else's. According to Baglione, Ranuccio fell to ground after Caravaggio had stabbed him in the thigh. Only then did Caravaggio finish him off. Mancini takes the opposite view, claiming that Caravaggio was defending himself when the death occurred.

Ranuccio and Caravaggio fought, one on one. Caravaggio was wounded, and the Bolognese captain came to his aid. Finally, Ranuccio tripped and faltered. And Caravaggio killed him.

 

It took two days before the wounded artist was well enough to leave the city. During that time, the last he would spend in Rome, he hid, probably in the palace of the Marchese Giustiniani. His injuries could not possibly have healed by the time he fled, by most reports to the Alban Hills, where he stayed under the protection of the Colonna family.

Until the end of that summer, he remained in the vicinity and painted, doubtless out of some combination of the compulsion to keep working and the need to stave off a financial emergency. One of the canvases he completed was a Mary Magdalene, her head tipped back, one shoulder bared, gestures reminiscent of the boys he had painted for Del Monte. But the Magdalene's central prop is not a lute but a skull, and she projects the opposite of coyness and seduction. The power of remorse and regret has rendered her nearly unconscious, taken her so far outside herself that she is bordering on the ecstatic. The painting reads like a barely encoded message to God and to the world: an image of Christianity's most exemplary penitent depicted by a sinner who has every reason to long for forgiveness from heaven and from the state.

Again, unlike the luscious Magdalenes who make you think first of the ways in which they have sinned rather than the fervor with which they are repenting, Caravaggio's penitent is almost anti-erotic. For one thing, she has the shoulders of a young man. For another, she has retreated so far from us that, unlike the darling and highly approachable lutenists and fruit bearers in his earlier work, she makes us feel that any attempt to communicate with her, let alone to touch her, would be an insult and an affront.

Caravaggio also did another depiction of
The Supper at Emmaus
, far darker, more serious, and profound than his earlier version. The glossy, umarred Christ has been replaced by one who has suffered, and the pilgrims at the supper are less shocked than moved and touched by this evidence of what Caravaggio himself must have longed to believe: that one can find a miracle and discover salvation at the end of what had seemed to be merely a hard day on the road. But if these paintings had personal and spiritual significance for their creator, they were also intended to secure him the funds that he would need during the uncertain period that lay before him.
The Supper at Emmaus
was promptly sold to another loyal longtime patron, Ottavio Costa.

When autumn came, Caravaggio departed for Naples, which was then under Spanish rule, and which might as well have been a different country. Even today Naples can make you feel as if you have left Italy and been magically transported to North Africa or Asia. The streets of the old city are narrower and more mazelike than those in the capital, and they're darker, shadowed by ancient dwellings that loom like skyscrapers, compared with the relatively low-rise buildings of Rome. The population was and is poorer and more likely to be unemployed, the prevailing atmosphere more volatile and anarchic.

Happily for the exiled painter, part of what tied the two cities together were the tendrils of influence exerted by families like the Colonnas, who had played such a critical role in Michelangelo Merisi's life, beginning when his father was employed in their palace in Milan. Caravaggio had thoughtfully brought the Neapolitan Colonnas his Mary Magdalene as a gift, and they were proud to introduce him to the local aristocracy and its privileged art collectors. The Neapolitan artists were also thrilled to have in their midst not only a great painter but also one with the glamor of Caravaggio's stature, his reputation, and his notoriety. Perhaps uniquely susceptible for reasons of temperament and natural predisposition, the painters of Naples were drawn to Caravaggism with the zeal of new converts, and for decades afterward, Neapolitan painting would reflect the dramatic lighting and the theatrical scenarios that the master had brought down from Rome and left with them in trust.

Presumably, their admiration for the brilliant newcomer was such that the local painters hardly resented it when, almost immediately, Caravaggio began receiving some of their city's most sought-after commissions. He was hired to paint an altarpiece for the Pio Monte della Misericordia, a church recently constructed by the circle of aristocrats who had formed a confraternity dedicated to performing charitable deeds, to ministering to the poor and the incurably ill. Caravaggio was requested to depict the seven acts of mercy as enumerated in the
Gospel of Saint Matthew
: clothing the naked, visiting the sick and the imprisoned, feeding the hungry and giving drink to the thirsty, sheltering the wanderer. He was also directed to include, in the same painting, the Madonna della Misericordia.

The Seven Acts of Mercy
was a daunting assignment, but Caravaggio rose to the challenge, setting his nocturnal drama in a cramped piazza and crowding the lower half of his canvas with figures involved in scenarios corresponding to each of the seven good works. The most startling and most brightly lit of these illustrates the ancient Roman legend of Cimon and Pero, an exemplary tale of filial devotion concerning a woman who saved the life of her imprisoned and starving father by nourishing him with her breast milk. Here, in an astonishingly naturalistic touch, Pero has lifted the hem of her skirt as a sort of bib beneath the chin of her grizzled father, whose head protrudes between the prison bars as he suckles her bare breast. Half turning from him, Pero regards the spectacle around her: Samson drinking from the jawbone of an ass, Saint Martin dividing his cloak to clothe a naked beggar, an innkeeper directing pilgims to his establishment. Just behind Pero, a priest raises his torch to aid a man grasping the ankles of what appears to be a corpse. Above it all soars Mary, tenderly holding her radiant child, and from a tangle of angels, feathered wings, and swirling drapery, she surveys the world beneath her with perfect and absolute compassion.

Lacking a central emotional core, a vibrantly intimate interaction of the sort that allowed Caravaggio to achieve his most powerful effects, the painting seems chaotic, almost circuslike, and unfocused. It's hard to know what we should look at first, or what impression we should take away from this jittery, hyperactive carnival of competing activity—that is, until we realize that what we are seeing is Naples itself. Even now the darkness, the light and shadow, the frenetic buzz of the crowd makes the altarpiece seem less like a biblical or mythical narrative than like a cityscape, like reportage.

In the heart of the city's historic center, the Church of Pio Monte della Misericordia is directly around the corner from the Duomo, and on one of the busiest blocks of the ancient road that has become the terrifyingly and thrillingly congested Via dei Tribunali. The modestly proportioned church's vaguely beehive-like shape makes you think, for just a moment, of a church by Francesco Borromini. But as you step into the circular, whitewashed interior, that one moment of peace and reflection is all you can hope to get before Caravaggio's masterpiece draws you in and makes you feel as if the vertiginous and endlessly fascinating street life of the
centro storico
has somehow followed you inside. It's a kind of magic, really, a miracle of transformation—to have set out to depict the seven faces of charity, and to have painted, in the process, an impressionistic portrait of an essentially unforgiving and recklessly passionate city.

Once more we can watch Caravaggio testing the aesthetic boundaries and the squeamishness of his patrons, juxtaposing the audaciously highlighted naked breast of the ordinary Neapolitan woman who modeled for Pero with the bare feet of the corpse on its way to an unceremonious burial. But this time the artist was not disappointed. The painting pleased its intended audience, the Confraternity of the Misericordia and the faithful who came to worship in their church. It must have been a great comfort to Caravaggio, after his troubles with the altarpieces he had painted in Rome, which had been rejected.

He was soon receiving other commissions from yet more Neapolitan patrons, most importantly for a portrayal of
The Flagellation of Christ
, destined for the chapel of the di Franco family in the Church of San Domenico Maggiore. In reimagining the scene of the flagellation, Caravaggio was returning—after the complications and the mass chaos of
The Seven Acts of Mercy
—to the sort of image at which he excelled: a simple drama in which the innocent victim, the object of our religious veneration as well as our human sympathy, is pitted against his torturers or assassins in such a way as to extract the maximum emotion from a wrenching and tragic scene.

The flagellation was a perfect subject for Caravaggio, an occasion and an invitation for him to pull out all the stops. The scene is one that pious Christians have often been encouraged to meditate on as a means of releasing all their pity and grief for the scorned and tormented Jesus. In the Church of Santa Prassede in Rome is a section of the whipping post to which, it is claimed, Christ was bound during his scourging. One afternoon, I watched a monk kneeling in front of the relic, praying and weeping steadily for well over an hour.

The Flagellation of Christ
is one of Caravaggio's most beautiful and saddest paintings. Naples's shadows have changed him. His blacks have never been blacker. Much of the canvas is given over to dark and empty space. The drama is transpiring in a grim Neapolitan dungeon in which there is nothing, where nothing
exists
but the column to which Christ is tied. Light shines from the pillar, and from Christ's as yet unblemished chest. The beauty and brightness of his flesh only serve to remind us of how soon it will show the bruises and excoriations, the physical and visible evidence of his pain and humiliation. Every muscle, every cell in his perfect young body has tensed in order to ward off the pain as he twists away from his attackers. Already a few smears of blood testify to the harshness with which the crown of thorns has been jammed onto his forehead. And Christ has already drawn inside himself. His eyes are closed, his head tilted, his chin half tucked under his shoulder in the way that a bird might nestle its head beneath its wing.

In some ways, the painting resembles
The Crucifixion of Saint Peter
in the Cerasi Chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo. Both depict the moment of suffering before the real suffering has begun; both show the solitary victim outnumbered by, and at the mercy of, three executioners or tormentors. But the difference between them shows us how much darker and more desolate Caravaggio's vision has grown.

The laborers hoisting Peter's cross take no pleasure in their work. Their faces are hidden from us, as if to allow them to perform their assigned task in private. They are simply doing a job on someone else's orders. The same might be said of the man who kneels in the lower left corner of
The Flagellation
, efficiently and unhurriedly tying the bundle of branches with which he will soon begin to beat Jesus. Likewise, the workman on the right seems to be engaged, with no particular malice, in tightening the ropes that bring Jesus's wrists to the column. But that impression changes when you notice the detail of his foot, pressing for leverage into Christ's calf—an act of gratuitous cruelty, or at best of the most egregious sort of unconciousness. For we can safely assume that the same force and leverage could have been achieved had he braced his foot against base of the column and not felt compelled to step on Christ merely because he could. And there can be no doubt about how much the jailer on the left is enjoying his task. His eyebrows are raised, his teeth bared in a grimace of sadistic satisfaction as he yanks Jesus's hair, a brutal gesture accentuated by the sweet and melting angle at which Christ inclines his head.

In many paintings of the flagellation, the beating of Christ seems to have an almost balletic aspect; in their enthusiasm, the torturers draw back and twist their bodies to intensify the force of their blows. So perhaps what makes this version so painful to behold is, again, the realism with which labor is portrayed; what's transpiring here is not dancing, but rather a perversely rewarding form of hard labor.

In his religious paintings, beginning with
The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew
and even
Judith and Holofernes
, Caravaggio had never shied away from telling the truth about what human beings will, given half the chance, do to one another. But not until
The Flagellation of Christ
did he reveal what he knew, or suspected, about how much they enjoy it.

 

In the summer of
1607,
Caravaggio left Naples for Malta. Like the motives behind so much of what he did during those final years, his reasons for leaving remain mysterious and confounding, especially since his work was so avidly desired and so well received in Naples. Perhaps, as Bellori believed, he was driven by the ambition to be knighted and to receive the Cross of Malta. Perhaps he imagined that, as a knight, he would find it easier to get the pardon that would enable him to return to Rome. Perhaps he went in the hopes of receiving a commission to decorate the new Co-Cathedral of Saint John in Valletta, though that seems improbable, since he was already getting so many lucrative assignments in Naples, which must have seemed so much more enjoyable, entertaining, and lively than Malta—that peculiar and isolated island dominated by the militaristic, officially austere, but in reality (at that time) increasingly dissolute and contentious Knights of the Order of Saint John. Or perhaps the isolation was exacty what appealed to him, perhaps in his growing and possibly justified paranoia, he believed that the papal authorities were still after him, and that they remained so determined to bring him to justice for the murder of Ranuccio Tomassoni that Naples suddenly seemed dangerously close to Rome.