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.
Yet despite its shortcomings, Judith and Holofernes marks a major watershed, a sea change in its creator’s vision. His first study of sensational violence is also the first work in which a small and theatrically lit cast is posed against a nearly black, almost featureless background, empty but for the furled bloodred cloth that will keep reappearing in his work, above The Death of the Virgin, and half covering the dying Saint John in yet another beheading, this one in the Co-Cathedral of Saint John on the island of Malta.
It may well be that poor Beatrice Cenci’s ghost hovered over the burly, struggling, partly decapitated Holofernes, though it’s just as likely that the success of Caravaggio’s Medusa inspired him to try his hand at another subject involving beheading, blood, homicide, and the instant of death. Surely the artist must have had plenty of opportunity to observe random killing and ceremonial execution, in art as well as life.
For decades, decapitation—along with all manner of grisly and ingenious methods of achieving martyrdom and imposing it on others—had been a hugely popular and rich vein of creative inspiration, encouraged by the cult of martyrdom that swept through the church during the sixteenth century. Around the inside wall of Rome’s round church of Santo Stefano Rotondo is a kind of baroque cyclorama, a cylindrical fresco in sections, each depicting one or more saints in the process of being dismembered, boiled in oil, stabbed, beaten, burned, fed to the lions, and so forth—all painted with an ineptitude and cartoonlike childish glee that makes the effect of the whole all that much more loathsome and disturbing.
However chilling we may find them, the sorry fates of the martyrs were among the inspiriting images that spiked the Jubilee fever of the pilgrims who converged on Rome in 1600. During a Holy Year, which occurs every quarter century—the last was in 2000—the faithful who reach Rome are rewarded by a chance to have every last sin washed away and to return home with souls as clean as those of freshly baptized babies. In sol
idarity with the three million travelers who arrived in Rome that year, Clement VIII wept copious tears as he made his weekly barefoot visits to the major basilicas, washed the feet of the pilgrims, and invited twelve of them to eat daily at his table. He was notably less generous to the Protestants, Jews, and assorted heretics who were publicly executed and tortured during his pontificate. Perhaps the most famous of these was Giordano Bruno, who—for the crime of refusing to recant his views on morality, cosmology, and the nature of the universe—was led out, naked and muzzled to prevent him from denouncing his tormentors, and burned at the stake, on February 17, in the Campo de’ Fiori.
This, then, was the society—violent and intemperate, suffused by the specter of disaster and the spectacle of merciless death, trafficking in empty promises of salvation without hope, of redemption without a sign of where redemption might be found, of dispensations reduced to the price of an arduous journey—in which Caravaggio lived. And this was the world he brought with him as he contemplated the bare walls of the Contarelli Chapel and tried to imagine how he could put everything he believed about art and human nature, everything he had seen and learned and suffered, into two widely separated and resonant moments from the life and death of Saint Matthew.
By all accounts, including the mute but incontrovertible testimony of the X-rays that reveal the various versions and revisions of the Contarelli paintings, Caravaggio did not have an easy time of it. To begin with, Cardinal Mathieu Cointrel, or Matteo Contarelli, who had endowed the chapel and died years before Caravaggio was hired to complete it, left a series of elaborate directions as a sort of addendum to the contracts with the earlier artists who had been commissioned to carry out what the French cardinal had in mind. His plans included, first, a scene of Saint Matthew in his countinghouse, dressed for business and surrounded by the tools of the tax collector’s trade. These specifications stated that Matthew should be rising from his desk and going out into the street, from which Christ—who had been passing by with a group of his disciples—had called to him and summoned him from his old life into a new existence.
The cardinal’s vision of how Matthew’s martyrdom should look was even more detailed. The scene should be set in a temple, which should include an altar with from three to five steps. Matthew was to be shown in the process of being murdered by a group of soldiers, assassinated while celebrating mass, depicted at the very moment at which he had just been wounded and had fallen, or was falling but was not yet dead. And all this was to be observed by a crowd of men, women, and children, old and young, each one responding to the tragedy with pity, terror, and disgust.
With characterisitic bravado, Caravaggio began with the more challenging and complex scene of the martyrdom—and almost immediately ran into trouble. Perhaps the cardinal’s emphasis on the design of the temple pressured or guided the painter into designing an early version in which the figures were dwarfed, and frozen in place, by the architectural grandeur of their surroundings. Marching in, with his sword drawn, from the left of the composition, the executioner looks more like a warrior in a processional on a Greek vase than the simultaneously frenzied and purposeful hands-on assassin who would appear in the finished work.
In another attempt, Caravaggio modeled his composition after Raphael and focused on the crowd and its response—a woman who has raised her hand to her face, a little boy slipping beween the legs of a soldier who turns his back to us and bisects the painting much as the angel did in The Rest on the Flight into Egypt. But the static, stopped-time quality of The Rest on the Flight into Egypt was not what Caravaggio wanted, and so he left off work on the martyrdom and turned to the less crowded and turbulent scene in which Matthew is extracted from the countinghouse and transformed into the messenger of a new religion.
In The Calling of Saint Matthew, we can see Caravaggio finding the inspiration and the courage to reinvent history and tradition by returning to the stark simplicity of the Gospels, to reimagine an iconic text according to his own experience, to bring the sacred down from the realm of the eternal and the ethereal into the temporal and earthly, and to exchange his contemporaries’ fantasy of how the world looked in Jesus’s era for the observable reality of his own surroundings and his own time. The scene in Matthew’s countinghouse recalls The Cardsharps. More boys in plumed hats and striped doublets are gathered around yet another table again for reasons involving money, though their business is less obviously suspect. It’s almost as if Caravaggio realized that the solution to his dilemma was to picture Jesus appearing to the con men in the earlier painting. And the grifters’ stupefaction could hardly have been more intense than that of Saint Matthew, whose hand has already become a continuation of Jesus’s hand, as he points to himself, one finger extended, in unconscious mimicry of the gesture Christ makes, pointing to him.
What Caravaggio seems to have learned in the process of painting The Calling of Saint Matthew is the central importance of the human drama, of a psychological moment, and the way in which an event can be intensified by individualizing, rather than generalizing, the players who enact it. The generic saints of mannerist art have been replaced by a specific man, a recognizable portrait from nature, from life, a human being whose wonder and whose understandable concern affect us more than we could have been moved by a figure who looks like a saint in a painting—which is to say, like no one we know.
Even more consequential was Caravaggio’s new understanding of the critical difference between actor and bystander, between protagonist and supporting cast. Everything important in The Calling of Saint Matthew is transpiring in the highly charged and magnetized space between Jesus and his new disciple, and every trick the artist knows—the use of light and darkness, of proportion and composition—is being deployed to fix our attention on the sudden, vibrant connection between them. The boys in their brightly striped costumes and the old man in his spectacles serve as our stand-ins. Their presence, their importance, their extraneousness, and their efforts to understand or ignore what is happening before their eyes parallel the momentary shifts and readjustments in our reactions to this simultaneously comprehensible and ineffable narrative of the miraculous.
And that is what made all the difference when Caravaggio again took up his attempt to depict the apostle’s death. He stopped trying to set the murder in a Raphaelesque stanza and imagined it occurring in a Roman alley disguised as an early Christian temple. The woman in the previous draft has disappeared from the crowd, in which there is no longer anything female or pliant to soften the blow of what is occurring. The killing unleashes the chaos, the confusion, and the cyclonic turmoil of random street violence, except that it isn’t random. The assassin knows exactly what he’s doing. His costume—like many of the onlookers, he is naked but for a loincloth—suggests that he has pretended to be one of the newly converted Christians waiting to be baptized, and that he has risen up from their midst to carry out his mission. Matthew knows him, they are not strangers, and now they are playing out this final act together.
The killer and the elderly saint (who resembles Joseph in The Rest on the Flight into Egypt) have become the sinister mirror image of the younger Matthew being summoned by Christ. Again, their gazes are locked; no one exists for one but the other. Their connection is the center, the eye around which the hurricane swirls, and the killer’s rough grabbing of Matthew’s wrist is the final turn in the story of Jesus seizing and claiming Matthew’s life. Here the point of contact is the body instead of the soul, and therefore the meaning is clear enough so that everyone understands. In falling, the saint has almost struck a boy, who twists away, open-mouthed, screaming.
In the far background is Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, his face drawn by horror and grief, aged years beyond the pretty youths he painted for Del Monte. He has done more or less what Matteo Contarelli asked, but in doing so he has created something the cardinal never imagined, something distressing and new, a vision glimpsed from the edge of an abyss from which Caravaggio will never, after this, be
able to pull back.
Considerably after the time specified by his contract, he finished the Contarelli paintings, and though the date of their installation is uncertain, he was paid in July 1600, a fact that suggests that they had been completed. They were definitely in place by the end of the Holy Year, when a carpenter submitted the first of a series of invoices for his work on the final installation and framing. By then Caravaggio’s fame had skyrocketed, and he had begun to receive lucrative commissions for large and ambitious paintings.
Baglione notes that spiteful people praised his work to excess and goes on to relate how Federico Zuccaro, the celebrated painter and darling of the art establishment, remarked that he failed to see what all the commotion was about, since The Calling of Saint Matthew offered nothing new, nothing that Giorgione hadn’t already done before. Bellori observes that even though Caravaggio redid the painting twice over, the composition and the animation of The Marytrdom of Saint Matthew failed to do justice to the biblical story, and anyway, he remarks, both Contarelli paintings were difficult to see because of the dimness of the chapel, and because the paintings themselves were so dark. In addition, he tells us that though the younger painters were so impressed by Caravaggio’s ingenuity and skill in imitating nature that they tried to copy his method—finding their models in the street and lighting them from above—the old guard took every opportunity to criticize him, claiming that he was unable to come out of the cellar, that he lacked imagination and refinement, and that his technical limitations obliged him to paint all his figures in one light, and on a single flat plane.
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