Caravaggio (7 page)

Under Pope Clement VIII, ecclesiastical fortunes and huge infusions of energy were being expended on making Rome's churches ever more glorious and ornate. The pope took on the task of completing Saint Peter's, and in
1603
, his favorite artist, Cesari—Caravaggio's former employer—was hired to design the mosaics for the inside of the dome. Cesari had already painted the fresco of Christ's ascension in the Cathedral of Saint John Lateran, where Giovanni and Cherubino Alberti had frescoed the vaulted ceilings in the sacristy; they were later employed to paint the Sala Clementina, a grand audience hall in the Vatican.

It must have galled Caravaggio to see inferior talents like Cesari creating majestic altars while he was still producing teenage lutenists for the cardinal and his friends. But wisely, he waited and bided his time, meanwhile embarking on a series of religious paintings that combined the time-tested elements proven to please Del Monte—music, half-naked boys, references to Netherlandish still life and Venetian art—with subject matter that reached for an audience wider than a small coterie of cultivated older men. Perhaps, in depicting the Magdalene, Caravaggio was trying to transform himself, and the way in which he was perceived, from a portrayer of grifters into a painter of saints—fittingly, in this case, the patron saint of prostitutes.

It's not hard to believe what Bellori says about Caravaggio's
Penitent Magdalene
—that its subject was yet another neighborhood girl whose appearance, like those of the Gypsy fortune-teller, appealed to the artist. He painted her seated, drying her hair, her hands folded in her lap, dressed in ordinary street clothes, surrounded by a jar of oil, a necklace of pearls, and some jewels—and pretended, for his purposes, that she was the former prostitute known for washing Jesus's feet with her hair. Again it's worth noting that other painters used the subject of the Magdalene as an occasion for portraying lots of repentant, naked female flesh barely concealed by the saint's flowing hair. This was precisely the sort of picture in which Caravaggio displayed scant interest. And yet the most striking thing about Caravaggio's Magdalene was not the artist's lack of lascivious admiration for his subject but rather the intensity of his compassion and protectiveness toward the remorseful young woman. At a time when the pope and the church were instituting increasingly punitive measures against prostitution, Caravaggio's portrayal is utterly free of moralism or moral judgment; his subject displays not the slightest trace of criminality, lewdness, hardness, or vulgarity. You feel that this was a woman he knew, someone whose essential sweetness—and plight—touched him deeply.

Prostitutes would play a major role in Caravaggio's work and in his private life. Many of the street brawls in which he participated were sparked by quarrels over the honor and the affections of celebrity courtesans such as Fillide Melandroni, who modeled for several of his paintings, and who is believed to have been somehow connected with the dispute that would lead to the murder in which Caravaggio was involved.

The same model who sat for the Magdalene makes another appearance as the Madonna in
The Rest on the Flight into Egypt
, a portrayal of the Holy Family pausing during their arduous journey. Dividing the canvas straight down the middle is the back of a graceful young angel whose pretty blond curls contrast sharply with a pair of darkly feathered wings. The angel's buttocks are barely covered by a wisp of translucent white drapery as he plays, on a violin, a Flemish motet for the Virgin Mary with lyrics from The Song of Songs, which we know because the elderly, bearded Saint Joseph thoughtfully holds the score so that we can read it over the angel's shoulder.

On the other side of the angel, the lovely red-haired Mary sweetly rests her cheek on the head of the plump, slumbering baby she cradles against her breast. Behind them stands a mournful donkey, amid one of the only landscapes Caravaggio is known to have painted, its leafy trees rendered in the botanically detailed yet dreamlike style of Netherlandish or Lombard art. It's all very much to Del Monte's taste: the music, the landscape, the boy. And it somehow manages to more or less successfully press the homoerotic and the hedonistic into the service of the spiritual and the religious.

Meanwhile, from the left of the painting, something marvelous and new is emerging, or preparing to emerge, from an area of darkness, from the donkey's obsidian eye and Saint Joseph's homespun robe. It's Joseph who most compels us with his weariness and weight, his graying beard and unkempt hair, with the compassionate fixity of his gaze and the furrows beneath his receded hairline. He's a very different sort of holy man from the Saint Francis who faints in the arms of yet another barely clothed angel in
The Ecstasy of Saint Francis
, another canvas that Caravaggio painted for Del Monte. Though older and more hirsute than the angel who supports him, Saint Francis is darkly handsome, with chiseled, youthful features. But the Saint Joseph resting from his journey has not been young for a very long time, and never will be again.

If critics read some of Caravaggio's early works—
The Basket of Fruit
and
Boy with a Basket of Fruit
, for example—as allegories on the cruel speed with which age and mortality overtake youth and beauty, Saint Joseph is the living proof of that cruelty, yanked out from behind the safety of the symbol and the allegorical mask. No one remotely resembling him had yet appeared in Caravaggio's work, but we will see more and more of him as, over the next few years, the artist trades seduction and charm for complexity, power, and greatness. The violin-playing angel may be the official celestial messenger, but it is Saint Joseph who is the harbinger of what is to come as Caravaggio exchanges loyalty to his patrons for loyalty to the truth, and as he finds the courage to portray what is not yet fully present in the painting, and what at the same time matters most: the dust and grit, the wear and tear of Saint Joseph's journey.

 

Soon enough, Caravaggio would be offered the chance to convey his profound and unblinking vision of that painful, complex truth. Through Del Monte's influence, he was commissioned to decorate the walls of the Contarelli Chapel in the French national church of Rome, San Luigi dei Francesi.

By the time he took on the assignment, the painting of the chapel had been the cause of decades of political wrangling, false starts, failures, broken contracts, and delays. The last artist responsible for the completion of the chapel was none other than Caravaggio's former boss, Giuseppe Cesari, who finished the undistinguished vaulted ceiling, and then—busy traveling with the pope and renovating Saint John Lateran—lost interest in this relatively humble venue, which was unlikely to advance his career. At that point, the priests of San Luigi were understandably willing to hire a relatively untried artist with no experience painting churches, but with a strong reputation and the backing of a powerful cardinal.

In the summer of
1599
, Caravaggio signed a contract to paint the side walls of the chapel for the same fee that had been promised to Cesari. The work was to be completed in six months, by the end of the year, presumably in anticipation of the crowds of pilgrims who would be flocking to Rome for the Holy Year of
1600
.

 

Just as the angel divides the
The Rest on the Flight into Egypt
into two opposing realms of light and shadow, male and female, infancy and old age, so its creator straddled two irreconcilable worlds, and his survival depended on his instinct for negotiating the perilous chasm between them. As soon as Caravaggio left his rooms in the Palazzo Madama and stepped outside the sheltered, genteel milieu of Del Monte's circle, he flung himself into the roiling, ongoing dramas of insult, grudge, and violence that moved from the taverns to the whorehouses and spilled out into the street.

Another artist might have let the comfort and security of a generous, dependable patronage lull him into a life of gentility and refinement. But Michelangelo Merisi fled in the opposite direction. Perhaps the pressures and politesse of all those formal musical evenings at the cardinal's palace served to increase the eruptive force with which Caravaggio and his friends—including the painters Prospero Orsi and Orazio Gentileschi, the architect Onorio Longhi, and the art dealer Constantino Spata—exploded into the dark alleyways of the Campo Marzio.

Caravaggio's reputation for disputatiousness grew along with the fame of his work. His early biographers seem to delight in finding the perfect adjectives—
sarcastic
,
arrogant
,
quarrelsome
,
dissolute
,
tempestuous
,
restless
,
peculiar
—with which to express the general low opinion of his temperament and moral character. According to Baglione, he was dismissive and contemptuous of his fellow painters and was always on the lookout for occasions to break his own neck and endanger the lives of others. Bellori claims that, after spending some time in his studio, Caravaggio would arm himself and take to the streets, swaggering like a professional swordsman. Mancini claims that Caravaggio's excessive behavior shortened his life by a decade, while Sandrart mentions the perpetual quarrels engaged in by Caravaggio and his friends, men whose self-consciously romantic motto was “Without hope, without fear.”

Van Mander writes that after working two weeks, the artist would spend months going from ball court to ball court, armed, accompanied by a servant, and looking for a fight. When van Mander published this observation in
1604
, Caravaggio's reputation had spread as far as the Netherlands, and the Dutch biographer was writing him without ever having seen his paintings.

Around the same time that Caravaggio's popularity—and the prices he was able to command for his work—were increasing in proportion to the ingeniousness and the power of his art, his name was beginning to turn up in the Roman police and court records. In the first of these cases, in
1597
, he appears to have been an innocent witness to an assault on a barber's apprentice. Still, the testimony makes it clear that Caravaggio rarely ventured outdoors without his sword. The next year he was arrested in the Piazza Navona for carrying weapons without a license.

Indeed, the more celebrated he became, the more brutishly he behaved. Less than six months after the paintings in the Contarelli Chapel were unveiled, the records show him in trouble with the law again, this time for attacking an art student with a cudgel and a sword. And from the turn of the century on, the complaints become more frequent, and the incidents grow more violent and more disturbing.

But in that eventful Holy Year of
1600
, the city and church officials had so much scandal, discord, and disaster to contend with that the charges brought against a certain Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio must have seemed very minor and inconsequential.

The population had barely recovered from the catastrophic flood that, in December
1598
, swept over the banks of the Tiber and inundated the city as far as the Piazza di Spagna, destroying the bridge of Santa Maria, and leaving the ruin now known as the Ponte Rotto. Before the river finally receded, it had filled the churches, washed the dead from their graves, ruined the food supply, and killed fourteen hundred people. Nor had the city entirely emerged from under the cloud of sympathetic grief that had collected around the public execution of the beautiful Beatrice Cenci, imprisoned and tried—along with her stepmother, Lucrezia; her brother, Giacomo; and the bailiff of the gloomy family fortress in the mountains of the Abruzzi—for conspiring to murder Beatrice's heartless and abusive father, Francesco.

Early in
1599
Beatrice, Lucrezia, and Giacomo were arrested; the bailiff died under the torture that served as his interrogation. And on September
11
, the Cencis were executed. Wrapped in a black veil, Lucrezia was beheaded first. Giacomo was drawn and quartered. Even by the standards of the day, Beatrice's death was horrific. Recoiling from the executioner, the proud girl placed her own head beneath the ax, where she waited for an unimaginably long time while Clement VIII, who had refused to pardon her, finally granted her absolution. That good news—though she would still be executed, she would not be damned—was brought from the Vatican to the Piazza di Ponte Sant'Angelo. Frightened and restless, Beatrice lifted her head and almost stood, then knelt again as soon as the pope was heard from. The force of the blow made her body rear up as her head rolled away, and, as a final indignity, the monks dropped her corpse from the platform as they settled her into her coffin.

The execution was well attended. It has been suggested, persuasively, that contemporary artists were among the witnesses, and that the horror of the beheadings seeped into Caravaggio's
Judith and Holofernes
, which was completed around that time.

Painted for the Genoese financier Ottavio Costa, Caravaggio's rendering of the biblical scene cuts straight to the climactic moment at which the brave Jewish widow saves her people by killing the Assyrian general as he lies drunk in bed. It's not one of Caravaggio's most affecting works, partly because we feel that he has only a cerebral or formal interest in his subject. In his scenes of violence, or of the aftermath of violence, Caravaggio moves us most deeply when he can enlist our sympathies on the side of the victim—the nobly suffering Saint Peter or the fragile, martyred Saint Lucy. But here the victim is also the villain. Judith is the heroine, Holofernes' death is divinely sanctioned, which may be why we intuit something slightly off center and forced in this otherwise compelling image.

There's a faintly distasteful sexuality in the general's naked muscular writhings, the blade just slicing through the neck, the spurting blood that looks more like blood in a painting—indeed, like red paint—than like blood in “real life.” And the nipples visibly hardening under Judith's white blouse do little to decrease our sense that we are being shown something far more unsavory than a mere murder. Judith seems to share this distaste, as—observed by a bronzed crone who evokes Leonardo's sketches of geriatric grotesques—she performs her odious task at arm's length and with the repelled determination of a schoolgirl dissecting a frog.