Caravaggio

by Francine Prose

  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.

  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 wea
r 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.