Caravaggio (16 page)

But no one who knew Caravaggio could have imagined that this interval of happiness and tranquillity would last. Indeed, less than three months after his induction into the order, yet another official notice records a catastrophic downturn in his fortunes. Having been incarcerated in the Castel Sant'Angelo, he had somehow escaped Valletta's unimpregnable fortress-prison and had left the district without permission—in itself a crime sufficiently serious to deprive a knight of his membership in the order. Two knights were assigned to search for him, to bring him to justice and to find out how he had managed to achieve the impossible.

The investigators delivered their report, which has since been lost. Later, it was claimed that a rope had been used in the escape, but no one has ever been able to discover exactly how Caravaggio pulled off his phenomenal disappearing act, or who helped him—or, for that matter, what got him thrown into prison in the first place.

Given what we know about Caravaggio's history and personality, the most plausible theory about his fall from grace is that he got into a dispute with a fellow knight, and that his temper and hair-trigger sensitivity caused him to forget that the Brothers of Saint John were strictly forbidden to fight one another. That is what Bellori and Baglione thought. As a result of what Bellori diagnosed as his “tormented nature,” Caravaggio, he claimed, got into an ugly disagreement with a Knight of Justice.

It is at this point that another voice joins the chorus of early commentators on Caravaggio's life. Francesco Susinno, the priest whose
Lives of the Messinese Painters
, published in
1724
, tracks Caravaggio from Malta through Sicily and then on his final journey to Naples and toward Rome, tell us that wearing the Maltese cross on his chest not only failed to ennoble Caravaggio but gave him the delusion that he
was
a nobleman. In a display of markedly unknightlike behavior, he got into a sword fight with a
Cavaliere de Giustizia
. Imprisoned by Wignacourt, he somehow succeeded in scaling the prison wall and escaping to Sicily.

Summonses and proclamations, propagated throughout Malta, failed to turn up any sign of the vanished painter. And on December
1
, a general assembly met to expel Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio from the Order of the Knights of the Brotherhood of Saint John.

Convened in the oratory in which
The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist
had so recently been installed, the ceremony was calculatedly portentous. Four times Caravaggio's name was called, and each time the fugitive failed to appear. The hearing ended in a unanimous and irrevocable verdict: Brother Michel Angelo had been deprived of his habit and thrust forth from the order and community “like a rotten and putrefying limb.”

 

But by then, Caravaggio was already safe—or apparently safe—in Sicily. There, in the ancient Greek city of Syracuse, he was reunited with Mario Minniti, the roommate with whom he had mostly likely shared living quarters in Del Monte's palace, and the model for the pink-lipped, curly-haired, smooth-skinned boy who appears in so many of Caravaggio's early paintings for the cardinal.

After returning to his native Sicily four years before, Minniti seems to have tried to distance himself from the dissolute life of the Roman streets and the sybaritic pleasures of Del Monte's court. He married, had children, and after an inconvenient interlude involving a murder he committed, most likely in a fight, he was pardoned. Subsequently, he had gone on to become a successful and popular painter.

Minniti must have been genuinely glad to see his old friend, since all his effort seemed aimed at arranging matters so that Caravaggio could remain as long and as comfortably as possible in Syracuse. His endeavors were facilitated by the fact that, once again, Caravaggio's fame had preceded him, and by a rare instance—rare, that is, for Caravaggio—of good timing. In preparation for the upcoming feast day of Syracuse's patron, Saint Lucy, the city government commissioned Caravaggio to paint a large work for the saint's newly refurbished church.

Like
The Death of the Virgin
,
The Burial of Saint Lucy
depicts a group of mourners who have gathered around the body of a dead woman. But Caravaggio seems to have learned his lesson from his experience with the earlier painting. Lying directly on the ground, the delicate, pale Saint Lucy is an innocent and ethereal virgin martyr. Already she has become pure spirit, and nothing about her reminds us of the flesh or of the body that her spirit has so recently departed. No one would ever mistake her for “some dirty whore from the Ortaccio.” The ecclesiastical officials and onlookers stand, looking down at her with expressions of sorrow and deep compassion. But though one old woman covers her face with her hands, their grief never threatens—like the pain of those left behind by the Virgin's death—to become too unbearable, too much like our own, to behold.

As in
The Beheading of Saint John
, the entire narrative is crowded into the bottom of the enormous painting that again reflects Caravaggio's lifelong fascination with those who do the physical toil—the stoop labor—of the miraculous. Here they are the gravediggers, one of whom has turned his massive back toward us, as if to shield us from the horror or to hide the shameful deed in which he and his coworker are engaged, except that he has no interest in anything but the spading and digging that must take place before the martyr can be buried. The rippling of his muscles and the pull of the drapery drawn diagonally across his huge buttocks—which, along with the saint's lovely face, her upturned chin, and painfully frail shoulder, catch and reflect the light—are the most animate elements in the scene, the only things that break the silence and the stillness of the moment.

Saint Lucy is at once the luminous center and the hidden secret of the painting. You have to look for her, to peer around the vital, healthy gravediggers, just as in
The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist
, you have to wrest your attention away from the pointing finger of the warden and the hand of the executioner pulling the saint's hair. Nothing here approaches the brutality and violence of
The Beheading
. Only a clean cut at the base of her throat remains as evidence of how the saint met her death, though in earlier versions the wound was gorier and more bloody. Still, the painting itself seems to have been done with the same furious urgency that caused Bellori to remark on the fact that the raw canvas of
The Beheading
was visible through the halftones.

But though the rendering of Saint Lucy and her mourners may be less provocative and wrenching than that of their counterparts in
The Death of the Virgin
, the painting seems somehow, if possible, even more audacious and moving. What makes it so daring and affecting is the vast expanse of emptiness—of dark, earth-toned space—that occupies the top two-thirds of the painting. If the Virgin was laid to rest beneath a swirl of crimson drapery and a humble beamed ceiling, here there is nothing. No heaven, no cherubs, no angels. Only dirt and earth and darkness. It is hard to think of a bleaker, less comforting painting. But what consoles us is its courage, its truthfulness, and, of course, its great beauty. It's startling to look at
The Burial of Saint Lucy
and to think that it was painted by the same artist who, less than a decade before, painted those pretty lutenists for Cardinal Del Monte.

 

Once more, he could have stayed where he was.
The Burial of Saint Lucy
was enthusiastically received by the citizens of Syracuse, where he was entertained by such local luminaries as the famous archaeologist Vincenzo Mirabella, who took him on a tour of the quarries that, it was said, had been used as prisons by the Greek tyrant Dionysius the Elder. One of these caves has unusual acoustical properties: If someone whispers in one corner, it can be heard clearly on the far side of the cavern. Caravaggio, who had spent enough time in prison, and had plenty of experience with paranoia and with the fear of being overheard, christened it “The Ear of Dionysius,” a name that immediately spread and by which the cave is still called today.

Presumably, there would have been other commissions from wealthy Syracusans. But by winter, Caravaggio (impelled, Susinno suggests, by his restless, peripatetic nature and by the awareness that nothing is so marketable as the novelty of being a new face in town) had traveled up the coast to Messina. There he was engaged to create an altarpiece for the Church of the Padri Crociferi, an order that ministered to the sick. In honor of his patrons, the Lazzari family, and perhaps in consideration of the venue where his work would be installed, Caravaggio chose as his theme
The Resurrection of Lazarus
.

According to Susinno, Caravaggio requested a room in the Crociferi hospital to use as a studio and was given the best
salone
, together with the services of several members of the hospital staff, who were drafted to pose for the painting, in which there are thirteen figures. Susinno also claims that, in his uncompromising pursuit of naturalism, the artist insisted that a decomposing corpse be brought in to serve as a model for the dead Lazarus. When the laborers holding the corpse complained about the stench, Caravaggio attacked them with a dagger and forced them to keep working.

It seems an unlikely story. In the painting, only one laborer supports the dead body, which looks more like an emaciated young man than a rotting cadaver. In an effort to make the tale more credible, Susinno cites the rumor (which he himself claims not to believe) that Michelangelo Buonarroti once nailed a man to a board and pierced him with a lance in order to paint a more persuasive Crucifixion.

But another of Susinno's anecdotes seems more plausible and faithful to what we know about Caravaggio's personality. The work-in-progress remained hidden until it was finished. Finally
The Resurrection of Lazarus
was unveiled, and the citizens of Messina—proud of their cultural sophistication and confident in their ability to discuss art intelligently—made a few humble but dim observations that so enraged Caravaggio that he pulled his dagger and cut the canvas to ribbons. Instantly, he reassured his horrified patrons that he soon he would make them an even more beautiful version of Lazarus's miraculous return from the dead. He fulfilled this promise so satisfactorily that the city council of Messina promptly commissioned him to paint another major altarpiece, this time a nativity scene,
The Adoration of the Shepherds
, for the church of the Capuchin monastery of Santa Maria della Concezione. In return, he received the huge sum of a thousand
scudi
—ironically, a hundred times the amount of the bet that sparked the fatal quarrel with Ranuccio Tomassoni.

Economically, at least, Caravaggio's fortunes had improved since the days when he was begging the duke of Modena's representative for an advance of twelve
scudi
. But the increase in his fees apparently failed to offer the beleaguered painter any sense of comfort or security. He was growing steadily more restless, impulsive, and out of control. The adjectives Susinno employs—
barbaric
,
bestial
,
impatient
,
envious
,
restless
,
distracted
,
foolish,
and
crazy
—would be damning enough, but he takes matters even further, implying that Caravaggio questioned the sacred articles of faith and was suspected of being an unbeliever. His unquiet spirit, says Susinno at one especially lyrical moment, was more turbulent than the sea at Messina with its dramatically rising and falling tides.

Susinno informs us that the painter was always armed and slept with his dagger constantly by his side. And we can also thank Susinno for the disturbing story of why Caravaggio was obliged to leave Messina. Allegedly, he spent his off hours watching schoolboys play near the arsenal, observing and getting ideas from how they moved and positioned their bodies. But when their teacher, a certain Don Carlo Pepe, suspiciously questioned the painter's motives for hanging around the boys, Caravaggio became enraged, hit the teacher on the head—and fled the city. In sum, Susinno tells us, he marked everywhere he went with the imprint of his deranged mind.

From Messina he went to Palermo, where he painted the
Adoration of the Shepherds with Saint Lawrence and Saint Francis
for the Oratorio of San Lorenzo; the work has since been lost. A short time later he left Palermo and returned to Naples.

 

There is nothing, not one document or report, to shed the faintest light on his motives for leaving the island on which he had found not only new celebrity (he was by now the best known painter in all of Italy) but also where he was receiving the most lucrative commissions of his career. His biographers—that is, all but Mancini—concur: He was in danger, and being pursued, and had to keep moving to remain one step ahead of his enemies.

Susinno says Caravaggio was chased back to Naples by an offended antagonist. Bellori tells us that bad luck did not abandon him, that fear drove him from place to place, and that he left Sicily because he no longer felt safe there. And Baglione writes that he returned to Naples because his enemies were pursuing him. But they are maddeningly unforthcoming about who those enemies were. It's possible that they were wrong, that they were merely seeking a reason for the painter's otherwise inexplicable behavior. Perhaps he wasn't being chased, perhaps he had been led to believe that a papal pardon would soon let him return to Rome, and that Naples represented a stop on the long journey home.

It's also conceivable that he was being followed by a group of vengeful Knights of Malta, and less likely, an official party dispatched by the grand master than agents of the knights whom he had so grievously offended, and who might have been doubly enraged by the ease with which he had escaped from prison and evaded serious punishment. But why had it taken them so long to pick up his trail and find him?