Caravaggio

by Francine Prose

  At some point between November 1600 and June of the following year, Caravaggio, for reasons that have never been explained, left Del Monte’s residence at the Palazzo Madama and moved into the palace of Del Monte’s friend Cardinal Girolamo Mattei, a member of an extremely wealthy and prominent Roman family. The cardinal’s brothers, Ciriaco and Asdrubale Mattei, both avid collectors of art, lived in the palace next door.

  Ciriaco Mattei was already, or would soon become, one of Caravaggio’s most supportive and eager patrons, acquiring his work for (by current standards) astronomical prices, sums equaling those the artist received for several of his church commissions and that were far beyond the relatively modest means of Del Monte. Baglione suggests that Ciriaco was duped by all the publicity and gossip surrounding Caravaggio; he adds that the artist relieved the gentleman of many hundreds of scudi. Duped or not, Ciriaco bought Saint John the Baptist as a gift for his son, again raising the question of whether the suggestive male nude would really have seemed as lubricious to Caravaggio’s contemporaries as it appears to us, which would have made it an odd present for a respected aristocrat to give his son.

  Ciriaco Mattei also purchased The Supper at Emmaus, a depiction of Luke’s account of the incident that occurred on the road to Emmaus, when Christ fell in with two disciples who had previously refused to believe reports that he had risen from the dead. Not until they shared a humble meal, and Christ broke bread and gave it to them, did they understand who it was that walked among them—and at that very instant Jesus disappeared.

  Typically, Caravaggio cuts straight to the dramatic climax, to the moment when realization is nearly rocketing the two pilgrims out of their seats. The old man on the right has thrown his arms open in the gesture that, in Caravaggio’s work, signals not only shock but the helpless and reflexive baring of the heart. And the pilgrim on the left grips the arms of his chair as if to prevent himself from levitating through the top of the painting. The innkeeper still hasn’t figured it out. Although he is in the presence of the resurrected Lord, he has not yet removed his hat.

  The use of light and shadow, and of perspective—the way the table recedes into space even as the elderly pilgrim’s hand leaps out of it—is masterful. Young, plump, beardless, his radiance undimmed by the agony he has just endured, Jesus gazes downward with a beneficent but unreadable expression. On the table is a basket of damaged fruit that recalls Caravaggio’s earlier still life. Bellori complained that the figs and pomegranates were out of season for the meal that would have taken place in the spring.

  It’s the bright, redemptive aftermath of The Taking of Christ, which Caravaggio also did for the Mattei family, and which is believed to have hung in the palace together with The Supper at Emmaus. In many ways evocative of The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew, it, too, offers a searing vision of chaos and grief that focuses on the perversely intimate bond between the betrayed and his betrayer. It’s another turbulent crowd scene, but here there is no architecture, no background; the figures filling the picture space could hardly be jammed in more tightly. Wearing a visored helmet and dark armor, the soldier seizing Jesus commands the center of the painting. Reaching across Judas to get at Jesus, whom Judas is embracing, the soldier seems to be grabbing them both at once, or else sandwiching Judas between himself and Jesus.

  Inscribed on Christ’s and Judas’s pained faces is the perfect comprehension of everything that this kiss will mean for themselves, and for mankind. At the far left, fleeing in terror, is an older version of the boy who ran from Matthew’s murder, and on the right, Caravaggio himself makes another appearance as a witness, though now without the distress he showed over Matthew’s killing. This time his face is lit by the glow of sheer curiosity, as well as by the lamp he holds, illuminating the scene. He’s just trying to see what’s going on. And really, why should it matter if the light from his lamp enables the soldiers to find their man, the one whom Judas is kissing? The artist is showing us what God ordained; there is no way he could have changed that.

  These works, along with a third religious painting Caravaggio did during this period—a remarkably clinical and graphic Doubting Thomas in which the skeptical apostle is shown accepting Christ’s invitation to probe, with his finger, the wound in Jesus’s side—must have been satisfying for their creator. By deploying his technical virtuosity and his amazing gift for rendering the psychology of a spiritual drama, he had been able to please his audience without compromising his vision.

  This was highly unlike his experience with the Contarelli and Cerasi Chapels. The pressures and complications surrounding his public commissions had been, and would continue to be, very different from the circumstances under which he worked for the appreciative private patrons who competed among themselves to acquire his latest efforts.

  In the winter of 1602, Caravaggio signed a contract to paint Saint Matthew being inspired by an angel. The painting was to hang in the space between the two that he had already done for the Contarelli Chapel, in the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi.

  In the first version Caravaggio submitted, Matthew—elderly, stocky, barefoot, bearded, nearly bald—sits cross-legged in a chair, holding an open book in his lap. His forehead wrinkles with strain as he peers at the Hebrew letters. A winged, androgynous, diaphanously clad angel leans over his shoulder, gently resting his slim fingertips on the back of Matthew’s rough meat hook of a hand.

  The painting was summarily rejected by the Fathers of San Luigi, evidently because Matthew looked more like a laborer who might have built the church than any accepted or acceptable portrait of the apostle who helped found it. By contrast, the adjacent images of the saint as the startled tax collector and the murdered (or about to be murdered) priest look aristocratic and patrician. According to Bellori, the painting was taken down because the priests claimed that the figure, with his crossed legs and his feet rudely exposed to the public, had neither the appearance nor the decorum of a saint.

  Only the bare feet, the beard, and the baldness carry over into the second, approved version. Now the haloed saint wears a flowing orange robe, beneath which is the tall, attenuated body—and the feet—of a man who seems more accustomed to intellectual activity than to physical labor. And the angel, who has backed off and ascended to the top of the painting, no longer seems to be teaching Matthew how to read.

  Describing Caravaggio’s response to the French priests’ lack of enthusiasm for the first Saint Matthew, Bellori twice uses the word despair and adds that the painter was extremely disturbed by the effect the rejection might have on his reputation and by this affront to his public work. As with the first version of The Conversion of Saint Paul, the day—and Caravaggio’s pride—was saved when the rejected work was acquired by a private collector, in this case Vincenzo Giustiniani.

  By now, the ecclesiastical authorities responsible for planning the decoration of the great churches of Rome would have had plenty of opportunity to form a reasonably accurate idea of the potential advantages and possible dangers of choosing Michelangelo Merisi. Doubtless they would have heard about other priests’ experiences and observed the results. And they would have been able to decide for themselves if the benefits of hiring a painter whose brilliant originality might increase both the exaltation of the faithful and the fame of their congregation would outweigh the problems that might ensue if his work turned out to be too original, too inconveniently daring.

  The Oratorian Fathers of the Church of Santa Maria in Vallicella, the so-called Chiesa Nuova, or “new church,” were willing to take the risk, perhaps because their order was so strongly committed to the virtues of humility, simplicity, and naturalness, the spiritual principles that Caravaggio had turned into an aesthetic. Sometime in 1601 or 1602, Caravaggio was asked to paint The Entombment of Christ for Santa Maria in Vallicella’s Chapel of the Pietà, thus forming a sort of narrative bridge between two adjacent chapels, one commemorating the Crucifixion, the other celebrating the Ascension.

  Until now the majority of Cara
vaggio’s religious paintings had fixed on the terror of revelation, on surprise and shock, brutality and violence, suffering and endurance. But the mood of The Entombment of Christ is one of tenderness and compassion, and the moment we see is transpiring after the agony of the body has ended and the mourners’ grief is about to be relieved by a glimmer of the light that awaits on the far side of sorrow and pain.

  The painting is still sometimes referred to as The Deposition of Christ, as both Bellori and Mancini call it. But in fact it’s not the traditional image of the awkward, dolorous labor of lifting the lifeless Savior down from the cross. One can imagine that Caravaggio, with his passionate interest in the physical effort required for a miracle to occur, might have been tempted to picture that scene. But perhaps inspired by the sympathies of the Oratorian Fathers, he so thoroughly resisted this impulse that the cross—the instrument of cruelty, torture, and death—does not even appear in this redemptive and compassionate painting.

  Five ordinary, humble people, three women and two men, have gathered to carry, and lament over, the body of Christ. The barefoot, burly Nicodemus, his face strikingly similar to Michelangelo Buonarroti’s, gazes out of the painting. But sadness has turned him inward, and he doesn’t engage with the viewer as he bends to hold Jesus’s knees. He’s the kindhearted equivalent of the laborer in The Crucifixion of Saint Peter, the one who impassively holds the saint’s shins while the cross is being raised. Weightless enough so that Saint John needs only one arm beneath his back, Christ can no longer be hurt, not even when his disciple’s fingertips accidentally press his wound. We are the ones who feel the pain of his terrible vulnerability.

  Christ’s mouth is open, his head is tipped back, his arm hangs plumb and grazes the stone. Only the careful imitation of nature—made possible by staging a tableau in which the live model held his uncomfortable pose until his body assumed the precise curve of the dead Jesus—could have made the reality of recent, undeserved death so palpable and so convincing. Confronted by the sadness of the scene, we take our cue from the middle-aged Madonna, who extends her arms in a blessing that conveys forbearance and forgiveness, and also from the young woman, who raises her hands and catches the light like Saul on the road to Damascus.

  How could the Oratorian fathers not have admired and valued this affecting depiction of human loving-kindness, and of the instant when despair turns phototropically toward hope? The altarpiece was such a huge success that even Baglione felt obliged to report that it was said to be Caravaggio’s finest. Many artists would copy it, including Paul Cézanne, who painted it in watercolor without having seen the original. The acclaim, and the ease with which it came, should have set the tone for this innovative and inspired period in Caravaggio’s career.

  But, sadly, he would soon begin to undergo a series of bruising experiences that more closely resembled the difficult time he’d had in his work on the Contarelli Chapel. That cautionary, troubling glimpse of the gap between Caravaggio and his ecclestiastical patrons, of how far they lagged behind him and of how reluctant they were to keep up with the leaps of his visionary genius, would prove to be a portent of the near and distant future.

  To contemplate the work of Giovanni Baglione alongside that of Caravaggio restores our faith in those hopeful clichés that promise that posterity will prove wiser and clearer-sighted than the myopic present. Time will separate the wheat from the chaff. Cream will rise to the top even if it takes centuries to complete its erratic and uncertain percolation.

  From this distance, it’s astonishing to contemplate the notion that the two painters were considered, and considered each other, to be serious rivals. By now, at least, common sense has prevailed, since Caravaggio is everywhere acknowledged as a genius, while Baglione has become—to quote the press release for a recent scholarly volume bravely attempting to salvage the painter’s reputation—“one of the most reviled artists who ever lived.”

  Meanwhile, it’s sobering, instructive, and useful to realize how many of their contemporaries failed to notice that Baglione’s work, especially during one particular interval in his career, was not merely an imitation of Caravaggio’s style but a parody that simplified what was most complex, stiffened what was most fluid, and trivialized what was most profound about the great painter’s vision. Though the original is in a private collection, it’s worth tracking down a reproduction of Baglione’s Saint Sebastian Healed by an Angel—a treacly and bizarre depiction of an angel extracting an arrow from the swooning saint’s creamy side—to see how very wrong things could go when the themes and techniques that would become known as “Caravaggism” were employed by a lesser talent. The intimation of an eroticized, sadomasochistic charge between the prepubescent martyr and the even younger boy playing the heavenly messenger is only the most blatant of the painting’s creepy, disquieting elements.

  The posthumous correction of the two artists’ relative standing occurred despite the fact that Baglione did everything in his power to have the last word. His biography of Caravaggio—which was probably written around 1625 and which appeared in 1642—provides the most detailed firsthand account of his rival, a portrait characterized by a tone that is not only dismissive and censorious (“Some people thought he had destroyed the art of painting”) but deeply unsympathetic (“He died as miserably as he lived”).

  During the 1580s, Baglione was commissioned by Pope Sixtus V and then by Clement VIII to take part in the decoration of the Vatican and the Cathedral of Saint John Lateran. Later, he was hired by Cardinal Nicolò Sfondrato to work on Rome’s beautiful Church of Santa Cecilia. Deeply impressed by Caravaggio’s originality, he became the first of Caravaggio’s numerous imitators. His Divine Love Overcoming the World, the Flesh, and the Devil was a direct response to, and an attempt to outdo, Caravaggio’s Victorious Cupid.

  In Baglione’s effort, a decidedly over-the-top silliness dulls the faintly pornographic, homoerotic, and sadomasochistic sheen of the scene in which a muscular youth costumed as a winged angel, with long ringlets and armor resembling metal underwear, rudely interrupts whatever has been going on between the devil and the naked-boy Cupid, who delicately recoils from the physical punishment that Divine Love threatens. After dedicating the painting to Cardinal Benedetto Giustiniani, the brother of Vincenzo, who was Caravaggio’s loyal collector, Baglione redid the work to accommodate the criticisms of fellow artists, who suggested that the figure of Divine Love should be younger, and naked. In the second attempt, the angel bares one shapely leg, and the devil twists around to leer at the viewer with a grotesque face that, some have suggested, resembles Caravaggio’s.

  Oblivious to the painting’s obvious flaws, Giustiniani rewarded Baglione with a gold chain, at the time an important public symbol of accomplishment and success that the most celebrated painters desired and proudly displayed in their own self-portraits. The very idea of Baglione’s gold chain must have been like a dagger in Caravaggio’s heart, and his sense of outrage and injustice spiked when in 1602 Baglione received the important and widely coveted commission to paint the altarpiece for the Church of the Gesù. It may be that the Jesuits, who would have heard about the difficulties associated with Caravaggio’s work on the Cerasi and Contarelli Chapels, felt safer hiring the more conventional and predictable Baglione.

  Baglione darkened his ambitious, overly busy, and unfocused vision of the Resurrection with some Caravaggesque touches—specifically, a group of hunky soldiers lounging in the recesses of the shadowy crypt. First exhibited on Easter Sunday in 1603, the altarpiece was reviled by Baglione’s peers, whose irrritation might have been tempered had they known how soon the painting would disappear from history. Its replacement, by Carlo Maratta, was installed at the end of the seventeenth century, and only a preliminary drawing survives to illustrate Baglione’s design. Yet Baglione appears to have been one of those artists with a gift for failing upward. He worked on Saint Peter’s and Santa Maria Maggiore; he was knighted and appointed president of the artist’s association, the Ac
cademia di San Luca.

  After the unveiling of the Gesù altarpiece, the tensions between Baglione and Caravaggio—both supported by rival camps of followers—worsened. In his biography of Caravaggio, Baglione tells us how the arrogant Michelangelo Merisi, convinced of his own unique brilliance, often spoke ill of his predecessors and his contemporaries.

  Interestingly, however, Baglione neglects to mention the fact that he himself was so upset by one of these insults that, in August 1603, he lodged a complaint with the governor of Rome, alleging that Michelangelo Merisi, Orazio Gentileschi, and Onorio Longhi had been slandering him and defaming his art ever since his depiction of the Resurrection had been unveiled. The reason, he suggested, was that they were jealous because his work was more highly respected than theirs, and because they—or actually, only Michelangelo Merisi—had wanted the prestigious commission from the Jesuits. Specifically, claimed Baglione, the three rival painters had written a series of scurrilous poems about him. He requested that his tormentors and their accomplices be brought to justice and prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

  The scandal, the poems, and the testimony at the hearings open a window through which we can glimpse the gladiatorial combat that passed for daily life in the Roman art world: the competition, the gossip, the nervous monitoring of every minuscule decline and uptick in a rival’s reputation, and the very real threats lurking beneath the deceptively collegial surface. Anxiety, contempt, rage, and an aggrieved sense of injustice are the not-so-hidden subtext of the scatological and obscene poems directed at Baglione.

  The verses predict that Baglione’s utter lack of talent would soon reduce him to the point at which he could no longer afford the cloth for breeches to cover his naked behind. They suggest that he bring his drawings to the grocer, or use them for toilet paper, or give them to the wife of Baglione’s friend Tommaso Salini (a hugely unpopular and notoriously nasty painter), who could put them in her vagina so as to prevent Salini from having sex with her. The poems refer repeatedly to the sore subject of the gold chain: Baglione is undeserving and unfit to wear it; an iron chain around his ankles would be more appropriate.