Caravaggio (6 page)

 

For the next few years, Caravaggio continued to live in the Palazzo Madama, supported by Cardinal Del Monte, who had become the director of the artists' guild, the Accademia di San Luca, and who introduced Caravaggio to prominent cultural figures and art collectors—among them, Cardinal Federico Borromeo, Cardinal Alessandro Montalto, the banker Ottavio Costa, and the Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani, who became one of Caravaggio's most important patrons and supporters. Quite a few of these men, who made up Del Monte's social circle, would later order and purchase work from Caravaggio, and they helped him obtain the major commissions that would transform him from a gifted artist into a great one.

Most of what we know about Caravaggio's relatively tranquil and untroubled early years with Del Monte can be inferred from what he painted—works in which he experimented with novel ideas, set off in new directions, and showed off the virtuosic skill he had already developed. What comes through in the paintings of this period is a lightheartedness and ease, the relaxation—that is, if we could imagine Caravaggio “relaxing”—of an artist who at long last knows where his next meal is coming from and that he will, at least in the near future, have a roof over his head.

Throughout this time, he was painting what his patrons asked him to paint and what he imagined they wanted him to paint. Still, he was insisting on his right to exercise his uncompromised and uncompromising genius and his theories about art. The canvases of this period seem wholly sincere and at the same time ironic, like private jokes on the subject of the artistic conventions that he was being encouraged to follow. Such contradictions may be part of the reason why even these—the most apparently “old-fashioned” of his works—still strike us as so modern. Whatever unease we may feel with these traditional themes and conventions, Caravaggio feels it also, along with us and
for
us—preemptively, so to speak—and his work at once celebrates, gently mocks, and transcends the subject matter (the portrait of the mythological figure, the sentimental religious scene) that, handled by a less original painter, can sometimes fail to translate across the intervening centuries.

The rendering of beauty together with the simultaneous joke about beauty is at the heart of Caravaggio's only surviving still life,
The Basket of Fruit
, which Del Monte's friend Cardinal Federico Borromeo is thought to have commissioned from Caravaggio, or possibly to have received as a gift from Del Monte. An ardent fan of still lifes in general and of Northern art in particular, Borromeo collected the work of Jan Breughel, who painted exuberant, splashy studies of glorious floral arrangements in which each showpiece tulip, iris, or peony is an honor to its species.

Anyone could have predicted that Caravaggio would have been unlikely to do anything of the sort, and in fact his painting can be seen as a kind of challenge to the vibrant bouquets of his Northern contemporaries. His still life is another avowal of his belief in painting from nature and at the same time making his audience aware that they are looking at a painting. It is also rebellious rejection and refutation of the months during which he toiled as the (no doubt underpaid) flower-and-fruit man in Cesari's studio.

Nearly every fruit in Caravaggio's basket looks as if it has spent too long on the vine or on the ground in the orchard. The pear is speckled with brown spots, the figs have begun to split, and no one has even bothered to turn the apple around so that the wormhole won't show in the painting. The leaves are in even worse condition, half wilted and autumnal, or disfigured by dry, discolored patches, frayed edges, and the ragged gnawings of insects. The water droplets sprinkled about only serve to make us aware that the fruit is anything but dewy or fresh.

Breughel's flowers seem to want to explode out of the painting, but Caravaggio's fruits rest heavily on the woven straw basket, each piece weighing on the other. Nothing, we'd think, could be more “real” than these decidedly unidealized fruits, and yet at the same time the artist is continually subverting our sense of reality. The grapevine on the right rises on a diagonal, countermanding the laws of gravity. The leaves and branches are attached to the fruits in ways we can't remember ever having seen. The only shadow in the painting is cast by the base of the basket, which hangs over the ledge on which it is set, and which seems to project into some disorienting dimension between us and the subject of the painting.

The relation of the fruit basket to its flat, golden, shadowless background reminds us of the fantastic, unreal space of ancient Roman wall painting, and of how the saints and Madonnas seem pasted onto the gilded panels of early Lombard and Sienese paintings. The effect is almost as if Caravaggio set out to paint a Netherlandish still life and wound up doing something utterly Italian, entirely his own, and far more compelling than anything that might have resulted from having done the expected. Except perhaps for the most committed botanist or serious student of Northern art, it's hard to spend very much time in front of a Jan Breughel painting. The magnificence of each flower and of the overall arrangement can be grasped within seconds. By contrast, the strangeness and originality of Caravaggio's still life reveals itself in stages, and can command our attention, our fascination, for hours.

If the pears and apples in
The Basket of Fruit
seem slightly beyond their prime, the fruit in
Bacchus
has progressed considerably further in the direction of outright rot. It's almost as if the painter had, on completing the still life, stored the fruit basket in a closet and brought it out later to adorn the table of his pleasure-loving god of wine. Of course, Bacchus is associated with autumn and the harvest, which would make the fruit appropriately past season, and yet you can't help thinking that a god could, if he wished, find it in his divine power to offer us something more appetizing than a wormy apple, a rotten peach, and a burst pomegranate.

The whole painting is full of humorous touches and clever contradictions. Yet though many critics have applied themselves to unraveling its allegorical nature as a parable on the theme of short-lived love and fleeting youth, few seem to have noticed how witty it is. Perhaps it's too perplexing to imagine that someone as aggressive and tormented as Caravaggio could have had a sense of humor.

But surely the painter must have noticed that his adorably fleshy young god—another heavy-lidded, dark-eyed, smooth-skinned, curly-haired vision of Mario Minniti, half reclining on a Roman couch draped in a white cloth that could be a continuation of Bacchus's revealing toga—makes no effort to hide a set of unmistakably dirty fingernails. The daintiness with which he holds his wine glass emphasizes the griminess of the fingers with which he grasps it, just as the smooth plumpness of his flesh and the outrageous campiness of his grape-leaf headdress contrasts with the muscularity of his biceps. His face and hands are as red as those of the
Sick Bacchus
were green, and though his seductive eyes meet ours as he gazes out of the canvas, it's his gorgeous rounded shoulder that the light of the painting wants us to admire.

Bacchus
represents one of the last times that one of Caravaggio's limpid, half-naked pretty boys would stare seductively at us, inviting us to contemplate and, if only we could, touch the living, embodiment of sheer carnal perfection. From now on, when Caravaggio found it impossible to resist the urge to paint—or the popular demand for—such subjects, the assumption would be that the lovely boy was the young Saint John the Baptist. The ironic touches and the excessiveness of the
Bacchus
was perhaps a signal that its creator had explored the limits of the magic that paintings like this could work on Del Monte and his circle. By then such depictions may have come to seem too easy, and Caravaggio, like any great artist, was in all likelihood growing restive with the work he could do with practiced assurance but without any particular sense of discovery or challenge.

And so we can watch him cautiously testing his own limits, as well as the boundaries of what he would be permitted to do by the rarified circles in which he moved. In two of the paintings he completed at the time—
Boy Bitten by a Lizard
and
Medusa
—he moved from the alluring and the charming to the grotesque and the extreme. Both works are animated by violence, not violent action so much as the dramatic and sudden response to violence. We can only speculate about what a relief it must have been for Caravaggio to edge toward a mode of expressing an element that must (whether buried or overt) already have been present in his personality.

Boy Bittten by a Lizard
is, like
Bacchus
, a bit of a joke. The lizard that has emerged from an arrangement of fruit to bite the boy on the finger has a sexual connotation that's hard to overlook, even for those reluctant to mine art for its symbolic content. This association has followed the tiny reptile from Caravaggio's time (when poems explicitly made the connection between the lizard and the male sexual organ) to our own, when boys sometimes refer to urinating as “draining the lizard.”

The drapery and the sweet, exposed shoulder of the child in the painting recall the boys in
The Musicians
and the
Boy with the Basket
of Fruit
, but this one is as distraught and disturbing as those youths are placid and appealing. Perhaps it's because—with that little rose tucked behind his ear, with those delicate hands and wrists—he's taken androgyny to the point of effeminacy, a quality that Caravaggio's culture found less sympathetic and attractive. There is nothing manly in the terror with which he's reacting to an injury which, however painful, most be minor. And there's a staginess, a theatricality in his turning toward us. Why isn't he looking down at the lizard, or at his hand?

Regardless of the smooth, bare shoulder that so often telegraphs Caravaggio's code for erotic attraction, the boy's carnal appeal interests the painter far less than the electric intensity of his startled reaction. The boy could be a study for the terrified youth who, though no fault of his own, is forced to witness Saint Matthew's brutal murder on the steps of the altar. The difference is that, unlike the lizard's victim, the boy in
The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew
is responding to something momentous and life-changing.

What's striking about Caravaggio's great religious paintings is that the contorted expressions he practiced in these earlier efforts were later reserved entirely for those who watch the horrors, rather than those who experience the torture and humiliation and who endure their sufferings with humility and stoic patience. Perhaps one of the things that Caravaggio learned from
Boy Bitten by a Lizard
was that fear and pain stir our sympathies less than courage and forbearance do.

Like
Boy Bitten by a Lizard
, Caravaggio's
Medusa
can be seen as an experiment in the representation of facial contortion. Feared for her ability to turn men into stone with a glance, the Gorgon with her headdress of living serpents was killed by Perseus, who realized that Medusa could be vanquished by tricking her into looking in a mirror and giving her, so to speak, a dose of her own medicine. Paralyzed by the sight of herself, the suddenly vulnerable Gorgon was swiftly beheaded by Perseus.

The brilliance of the Greek hero's approach would have appealed to Del Monte and his circle, who were fascinated by natural wonders, logical puzzles, scientific solutions—and also by mirrors. In one of Caravaggio's paintings from around the same time,
The Conversion of the Magdalene
, the saint's hand rests laightly on a dark convex mirror so large that, at first glance, it looks like a shield. Echoing this association between the mirror and the shield and compounding the paradox of the monster undone by her own monstrous apparition, Caravaggio painted the Gorgon's head on canvas attached to a convex wooden shield. But the portrait is rendered in such a way that the image appears to be concave. Like Perseus, Caravaggio captured the Gorgon at the moment of defeat and death. Jagged spikes of blood stream from the base of her severed head. Her mouth forms an oval of fear and shock, her eyes bulge from their sockets, as the painter succeeds in conveying the impression of a paralysis that is only a few moments old. Even the knotted serpents seem to have newly ceased their twisting and writhing.

This example of virtuosity, this show-offy tour de force was the perfect present for Del Monte to bring to Florence, for the Grand Duke Ferdinando de' Medici—who shared the cardinal's interest in science, optics, and alchemical explorations—to add to his collection of arcane and unusual armor. The work provided an opportunity for Del Monte to display the bravado, the technique, and the mastery of his new favorite painter, while it enabled Caravaggio to make his own contribution to a long and venerable tradition of shields decorated with the decapitated heads of the Medusa, images that were superstitiously half believed to turn the Gorgon's evil spell against the enemy.

One such shield, by Leonardo da Vinci, was in the collection of Duke Cosimo de' Medici. Another appeared in a painting by Andrea Mantegna. But neither of these attained quite the level of animated hideousnessness that Caravaggio reached, nor did they suggest the play of the concave and convex, the magical effects that could be achieved with mirrors, or the nightmare that might await anyone foolhardy enough to gaze too long in the glass. This last theme must have stayed on Caravaggio's mind, since, several years later, he would paint an image of Narcissus, mythology's most unfortunate mirror gazer.

 

For all their beauty and dazzling skill, works like
The Basket of Fruit
,
Bacchus
,
Medusa
, and
Boy Bitten by a Lizard
seem, in comparison with the masterpieces that Caravaggio would soon begin to paint, a bit like piano exercises performed by a musical genius. Perhaps we're just responding to the persuasive whispers of retrospect, but we can't help feeling that Caravaggio was contentedly biding his time, that he was (to extend the musical metaphor) vamping while he waited for his cue to begin the real performance.