Caravaggio (4 page)

After his unsatisfactory sojourn with
Monsignor Insalata
, Caravaggio briefly and barely supported himself by making pictures to sell on the street. The biographical accounts of whom he stayed with and how he survived are as jumbled and contradictory as his life must have been during this unsettled period. He was said to have spent time in the atelier of a Sicilian who produced cheap art, and it was there that he may have met Mario Minniti, a young Sicilian artist with whom he lived, possibly for years, and who served as a model for several of the luscious, dark-eyed boys in Caravaggio's early paintings. Ultimately, Minniti returned to Sicily, married, and had children—and was later called upon to be his old friend's protector, host, guide, and business agent in
1608
, when Caravaggio turned up in Syracuse, in flight from Rome, Naples, and Malta.

In a marginal note, written by Bellori in the manuscript of Baglione's biography of Caravaggio—the same inscription that notes that Caravaggio was forced to leave Milan after having committed a murder—Bellori writes that the young painter found work painting three heads a day in the studio of Lorenzo Siciliano, and from there moved on to the employ of Antiveduto Grammatica, a more esteemed and established painter of heads. But the first job that has been convincingly documented took Caravaggio, for eight months or so, into the busy, prosperous studio of Giuseppe Cesari, later known as the Cavaliere d'Arpino.

A favorite of at least two popes and several powerful cardinals, Cesari was nearly as prickly and difficult as Caravaggio, but far more tractable and eager to please—qualities reflected in the safe presentability of his art. After working on the Vatican frescoes, he was awarded a series of prestigious commissions that included frescoes in the Churches of Santa Prassede and San Luigi dei Francesi, and in the Basilica of San Giovanni in Laterano, where he demonstrated his ability to manipulate perspective and foreshortening in order to give the viewer a sense of rising into the firmament in the company of the apostles and saints.

If Caravaggio's paintings are brilliant, nearly photographic representations of miracles in progress, Cesari's frescoes more often evoke the illustrations in Sunday school textbooks. Indeed, Cesari is one of the many of Caravaggio's contemporaries whose work reminds us of what it is easy to forget or overlook—that is, how revolutionary Caravaggio was, how much he changed and rejected: the baby-blue heavens, the pillowy clouds, the airy ascensions accompanied by flocks of pigeonlike cherubs and choirs of attractive angels. For Caravaggio, the lives of the saints and martyrs and their dramas of suffering and redemption were played out among real men and women, on earth, in the here and now, and in almost total darkness.

In addition to his religious frescoes, Cesari turned out stylish canvases, quasi-erotic treatments of such mythological themes as Perseus rescuing a nude, provocatively posed Andromeda from the jaws of a predatory monster. These smaller works were sold, for respectable prices, to patrons and collectors. It's possible that Caravaggio helped Cesari with his church commissions, but Bellori informs us that Caravaggio's duties were more limited, that Cesari deployed Michelangelo Merisi's talents solely in the decorative representation of flowers and fruit, an activity that was considered to be inferior to figure painting. As a consequence of this reluctant apprenticeship, Caravaggio became a skillful painter of still lifes, although he resented being “kept away from figure painting.”

Ultimately, Caravaggio could not be prevented from using his masterful renderings of flowers and fruit as a decorative element in the kind of figure painting for which he was so temperamentally suited. Two of his earliest paintings—the so-called
Sick Bacchus
and
Young Boy with a Basket of Fruit
—were probably done when Caravaggio was still working in Cesari's studio. Both works graced Cesari's collection until, in
1607
, they were seized by Pope Paul V and given to the acquisitive Cardinal Scipione Borghese. Perhaps the impecunious young Michelangelo sold them to his employer, or perhaps Cesari appropriated them when Caravaggio left his studio under the shadow cast by his lengthy and mysterious stay in the Hospital of Santa Maria della Consolazione.

This long, unexplained illness was described as resulting from a kick by a horse, though the so-called equine mishap may have been the era's equivalent of running into a door. Rumors of violent crime linked Caravaggio, Giuseppe Cesari, and Giuseppe Cesari's brother (and fellow painter) Bernardino Cesari, who was already a well-known felon. And there were hints of dark reasons why the brothers failed to visit their friend during his protracted recuperation.

It could hardly be mere coincidence that Caravaggio's enigmatic self portrait as the
Sick Bacchus
was painted at around the time of this serious illness. In the painting, a young man in a classical toga with an ivy wreath on his dark curls and a bunch of grapes in his hand regards us over his alluringly bare and muscular shoulder. Everything about his posture and his knowing, ironic ghost of a smile would suggest lasciviousness and sexual invitation, except for one little problem: Bacchus looks diseased, hollow-eyed, bilious. Green. What he offers is sex and death neatly combined in one simultaneously appealing and repellent package. His expression is unfathomable. Is he inviting the viewer to kiss him, or is he pleading to be rushed to a doctor? In the complicated art-historical debate about the painting's symbolism, iconography, and meaning, few critics have bothered to point out the obvious: how deeply strange the painting is. It's almost as if Caravaggio had discovered surrealism more than three centuries prematurely, and found himself unable to resist the impulse to produce something this outrageous and peculiar while employed in the studio of one of Rome's most conventional painters.

Sick Bacchus
is the evil twin of
Boy with a Basket of Fruit
, which features another young man with bare shoulders, dark curls, and bunches of grapes. Here the straw basket is filled with the slightly overripe, imperfect fruit. Even at this early stage, Caravaggio was asserting his right to paint accurately, without idealization, a flawed and imperfect nature. It's hard to imagine two more dissimilar figures than Bacchus and the fruit bearer. For this boy is as rosy, as luscious and healthy, as the ripe peach in his basket.

Through the boy's pink, half-parted lips, we can glimpse the tip of his tongue. His head is tipped back, his eyes sleepy and half lidded, as if he has just had sex or is just about to. His smooth, lovely neck swans up from the deep well of his clavicle. Every cell of his being communicates enticement and seduction, and seems intended to make viewers long to remove that one last obstacle that separates us from him, to take the basket of fruit from his hands, set it down, and embrace him.

The intention of the boy, the painting, and painter is essentially the same: to so completely seduce us that we feel we can't live without this boy, or at least his representation. Ambitious, restless, probably bored in Cesari's employ, eager to strike out on his own but understandably uneasy about how he could support himself, Caravaggio was, at this point, one of those streetwise young men who cannily and shrewdly—and sometimes with unhappy consequences—understand that seduction is a likely route to survival. Nearly all his early paintings read like calculated attempts to charm and beguile the viewer, the collector, the patron, the buyer. His musicians, his singers, his chubby Greek gods fix us in their vampish sights and won't let us look away, while his cardsharps and fortune-tellers coyly pretend not to see us while they work their ruses and scams, knowing full well that we are watching.

But then the most remarkable thing is how drastically all of that changes. Begining with the earliest of his great religious paintings—
The Calling of Saint Matthew
and
The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew
—the players in his dramas turn their backs on the viewer and focus their full attention on the mystery they are enacting. In his later works, the come-hither glance has given way to the anguished grimace; the bare smooth shoulder has been replaced by the torturer's muscular buttocks and the filthy feet of the pilgrim. And the paradox is that even as these figures lose all interest in us, and in how we are reacting, we are caught up and drawn in even more strongly than we were when they were trying to invite us. In fact, everything is still calculated to work its magic on the viewer, to make us feel that a miracle is transpiring in front of our eyes, that it is happening to people like us, that we can touch and feel and smell it.

One of Caravaggio's last paintings portrays the full figure of a nearly naked boy, said to represent the youthful Saint John the Baptist. Beside him, a fat old ram, thickly horned, shows us his hindquarters. The painting is thought to be one of the works that Caravaggio made to present as a gift of propitiation or thanks to the patrons who were arranging the pardon that would let him return to Rome. It was presumably one of the paintings on the boat that sailed away without him and left him to die on the beach at Port'Ercole.

In the boy's dreamy, slightly melancholy prettiness, you sense that old urge to charm and beguile. But somehow it fails, and the final effect is anything but seductive. The boy looks wan, exhausted, used up. His dark eyes and the childish slope of his shoulders make us feel vaguely anxious and oppressed. He seems to have seen and suffered some of what his creator has endured. Caravaggio may still have been trying to charm and please, but his heart—worn out by travel and trouble—was no longer in it.

 

Eventually, Caravaggio recovered from his “kick from a horse” and was pronounced well enough to leave the Hospital of the Consolation. And whatever he experienced there seems to have strengthened his resolve to quit Cesari's art factory.

Now, Bellori tells us, “he began to paint according to his own genius…and nature alone became the object of his brush.” This is when it was suggested to him that a figurative painter should seek inspiration in the idealized and pleasing proportions of classical sculpture, and when Caravaggio replied that he would rather find his models among the Gypsy women in the street. Throughout Caravaggio's work—in the poses and gestures of his sinners and saints, in the stance of a Madonna, the grimace of Medusa, the languor of Bacchus—you can see his familiarity with Greek and Roman art, and the extent to which that knowledge formed him. And yet you never feel that he is simply dressing up an idealized and imaginary Greek figure in a sixteenth-century costume, or that he is following the example of the ancient Greek painter whose image of Helen of Troy was said to be a composite combining five perfect body parts from five different women. Rather Caravaggio persuades us that he is finding the classical grace in the prosititutes he employed as a models, or borrowing the techniques that the Greeks used to render expression and animation in his efforts to depict the awe and terror of the neighbors he paid to pose as witnesses to a miracle or a martyrdom.

Obviously, Caravaggio did not invent the idea of direct observation from nature. Leonardo da Vinci's sketchbooks are full of drawings of elderly or grotesque men and women that the artist made after spending hours following his subjects through the streets of the city. But this practice had fallen off among Caravaggio's contemporaries, who were far more interested in imitating Michelangelo and Raphael than in rethinking the relation between everyday reality and artistic representation.

To emphasize further his point about his preference for painting street folk over classical statuary, Caravaggio is supposed to have recruited the first Gypsy woman who walked by and brought her back to his quarters, where he painted her in the act of telling a baby-faced young man's fortune—and in the process covertly stealing her unwary client's ring. Still, for all the vehemence with which he insisted on the importance of copying directly from nature without falsification or adornment (“When he came upon someone in town who pleased him,” wrote Bellori, “he made no attempt to improve on the creations of nature”), the painter appears to have given nature plenty of help.

Somehow it seems unlikely that the first Gypsy woman he happened to meet would have been quite so beautifully and luxuriously dressed—in a pristine white blouse and turban, cross-stitched in black—as the sly, pink-cheeked, and lovely fortune-teller in his painting. And it seems oddly convenient for the purposes of the narrative that she and her customer are both around the same age and similarly attractive; they even look vaguely alike. Even so, you can observe Caravaggio seeking out the convincing detail, such as the way the handsomely costumed young man has removed only one of his leather gloves in order to have his palm read. You can imagine the artist watching or asking his model exactly how she would proceed, taking her client's hand in both of hers, tracing the lines with one finger while she gently and provocatively prods the mound beneath his thumb, distracting and transfixing him—a tactile sleight of hand.

The con game is rougher, more raucous, and less sweetly eroticized in
The Cardsharps
, another scene from the low-life demimonde Caravaggio painted at around the same time as
The Gypsy Fortune-teller
. Again the innocent dupe is a well-dressed, prosperous, naive young man, who intently contemplates the cards in his hand as if he were playing a regular, straightforward game of cards. But the viewer knows what the boy does not. Within seconds of looking at the painting, we have grasped the sketchy situation—namely, that the boy's two companions are cheats, in league against him. Peering over his shoulder is an older, bearded, seedy fellow who uses his right hand—in a fingerless glove, which in itself seems to augur no good—to his youthful partner, who faces their victim across a table. The younger swindler is shown in three-quarter view, turned away from us, just enough so that we can see the cards he has concealed behind him, tucked into his striped doublet.