Caravaggio

by Francine Prose

  It’s impossible to say if events occurred in the order and for the reasons that Bellori believed. We may never know whether Caravaggio was really hired to paint The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist for the oratory of the Co-Cathedral of Saint John in Valletta because the grand master was so delighted by his portrait. But it’s not unreasonable to suppose that the Maltese, who in all likelihood had never seen any of Caravaggio’s paintings, might have wanted some small indication of what he could do before they asked him to create the massive altarpiece, which, measuring almost twelve feet tall and more than seventeen feet wide, was to be his largest work.

  The composition of The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist marks a daring departure that would become characteristic of his last religious paintings—depictions of miracles, or of their preludes or aftermaths, transpiring in what appear to be the depths of an abyss. In these works the figures are crowded into a narrow band at the bottom of the painting, beneath a crushing expanse of space as weighty and earth-toned as the dirt under which, as every brush stroke reminds us, we will all be buried before too long. Bellori tells us that, in painting The Beheading, Caravaggio employed the full power of his brush, working so rapidly and fiercely that the canvas shows through the halftones.

  Everything of importance is happening in the lower left of a dismal streetscape that, alone in Caravaggio’s work, is based on an actual location: the entrance to the grand master’s palace. Nothing but architecture—the stones of an archway, a barred gate—exists to intercede between the grisly scene and the two witnesses on the far right, who are trying to see as much as they can despite the barred window restricting their view. Unlike those Caravaggios in which the worst is about to occur, this painting is set at the moment in which it already has. With his hands bound behind his back, the dead or nearly dead saint is pressed flat, belly down, on the ground. Like his cruel counterpart in The Flagellation of Christ, the executioner jerks on his victim’s hair, but this time, as in The Crucifixion of Saint Peter, it’s not so much about casual sadism as it is about business: the business of butchery. The tragedy isn’t finished, and lifting the victim’s head is simply a way to facilitate what will happen next.

  As blood streams from John the Baptist’s neck, the executioner reaches behind his own impressively muscular back for the dagger with which he will complete the tough part of the beheading. So maybe the worst is yet to come, because decapitation with a dagger cannot be a pretty sight. Yet no one—except an old woman who puts her hands to her face in horror—seems to mind terribly much. They all have a job to do.

  Years earlier, staging The Calling of Saint Matthew, Caravaggio discovered how a pointing finger can focus our attention, and now the finger is that of the warden who indicates the platter that Salome (not the familiar, veiled seductress but an ordinary young woman with her sleeves rolled up in anticipation of the messy chore before her) has just bent to pick up. The chilly impassivity of the warden’s gesture is so disturbing and compelling that it draws our eye and holds it until we can detach ourselves long enough to search for the saint’s body, or for the signature, in the Baptist’s red blood: f. michel—that is, Brother Michelangelo. This proud declaration suggests that by the time the painting was installed, its creator was already a Knight of Malta. And the connection that Caravaggio is drawing between paint and blood, an association that recalls his Judith and Holofernes, has a deeper, more autobiographically resonant—and more moving—significance than it did in the earlier painting.

  Luckily for history, the Order of Saint John believed in the value of archival documentation, and a series of official notices track Caravaggio’s brief and characteristically dramatic career as a cavaliere. Indeed, among the holdings of the archiodese of Malta is an anonymous oval portrait of Caravaggio, beneath which is the legend: FR. MICH/ ANGELUS MERISIUS/ DE CARAVAGIO. The sitter, who has dark hair, a mustache, and a goatee, is wearing a cloak on which we can see a part of his Maltese cross. Instantly recognizable from the cameo self-portraits in his religious paintings, Caravaggio looks dissatisfied and angry; his mouth is downturned and pouting. But the portrait makes you wish that it had been done by someone with a gift that even remotely approached the genius of his subject. The painting tells us little that we couldn’t have surmised on our own from the facts of Caravaggio’s life or from his own visual self-representations.

  At the end of December 1607, six months after Caravaggio sailed to Malta, Grand Master Alof de Wignacourt wrote to his ambassador to the Holy See, asking his emissary to sound out the pope on the subject of knighting two unnamed persons, one of whom who had committed a murder during a fight. The letter expressed the grand master’s hope that knighthood would persuade this anonymous person to remain in their community, a decision that, given Caravaggio’s prestigious reputation, would have represented a coup for the order. In February, an exchange of letters between Wignacourt and Pope Paul V secured papal permission for the still unnamed murderer to be knighted despite his crime, together with the second person alluded to in the previous letter, a French nobleman whose illegitimacy was considered far more problematic than a mere homicide or manslaughter.

  Finally, on July 14, 1608, approximately a year after his arrival in Malta, Michelangelo da Caravaggio was made a Knight of Obedience, a category of knights who were not obliged to take monastic vows. The official document explains that the pope had given his approval and leaves no doubt about why Caravaggio was being so honored—because the order welcomed not only aristocrats but also men with great artistic and scientific ability. It was hoped that the goal of knighthood would encourage men to apply themselves to these important pursuits. The cross and the belt of the Order of the Knights of Saint John were conferred on its newest inductee, and according to Bellori, Caravaggio was also given a gold chain and two slaves.

  With his gold chain and his knighthood, Caravaggio could have taken some satisfaction in the thought that he was finally on an equal footing with his old rivals, Baglione and d’Arpino. And, Bellori claims, Caravaggio was extremely happy to receive the Maltese cross, to have his work so enthusiastically appreciated, and to live with so much personal dignity and such an abundance of good things.

  But no one who knew Caravaggio could have imagined that this interval of happiness and tranquillity would last. Indeed, less than three months after his induction into the order, yet another official notice records a catastrophic downturn in his fortunes. Having been incarcerated in the Castel Sant’Angelo, he had somehow escaped Valletta’s unimpregnable fortress-prison and had left the district without permission—in itself a crime sufficiently serious to deprive a knight of his membership in the order. Two knights were assigned to search for him, to bring him to justice and to find out how he had managed to achieve the impossible.

  The investigators delivered their report, which has since been lost. Later, it was claimed that a rope had been used in the escape, but no one has ever been able to discover exactly how Caravaggio pulled off his phenomenal disappearing act, or who helped him—or, for that matter, what got him thrown into prison in the first place.

  Given what we know about Caravaggio’s history and personality, the most plausible theory about his fall from grace is that he got into a dispute with a fellow knight, and that his temper and hair-trigger sensitivity caused him to forget that the Brothers of Saint John were strictly forbidden to fight one another. That is what Bellori and Baglione thought. As a result of what Bellori diagnosed as his “tormented nature,” Caravaggio, he claimed, got into an ugly disagreement with a Knight of Justice.

  It is at this point that another voice joins the chorus of early commentators on Caravaggio’s life. Francesco Susinno, the priest whose Lives of the Messinese Painters, published in 1724, tracks Caravaggio from Malta through Sicily and then on his final journey to Naples and toward Rome, tell us that wearing the Maltese cross on his chest not only failed to ennoble Caravaggio but gave him the delusion that he was a nobleman. In a display of markedly unknightlike behav
ior, he got into a sword fight with a Cavaliere de Giustizia. Imprisoned by Wignacourt, he somehow succeeded in scaling the prison wall and escaping to Sicily.

  Summonses and proclamations, propagated throughout Malta, failed to turn up any sign of the vanished painter. And on December 1, a general assembly met to expel Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio from the Order of the Knights of the Brotherhood of Saint John.

  Convened in the oratory in which The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist had so recently been installed, the ceremony was calculatedly portentous. Four times Caravaggio’s name was called, and each time the fugitive failed to appear. The hearing ended in a unanimous and irrevocable verdict: Brother Michel Angelo had been deprived of his habit and thrust forth from the order and community “like a rotten and putrefying limb.”

  But by then, Caravaggio was already safe—or apparently safe—in Sicily. There, in the ancient Greek city of Syracuse, he was reunited with Mario Minniti, the roommate with whom he had mostly likely shared living quarters in Del Monte’s palace, and the model for the pink-lipped, curly-haired, smooth-skinned boy who appears in so many of Caravaggio’s early paintings for the cardinal.

  After returning to his native Sicily four years before, Minniti seems to have tried to distance himself from the dissolute life of the Roman streets and the sybaritic pleasures of Del Monte’s court. He married, had children, and after an inconvenient interlude involving a murder he committed, most likely in a fight, he was pardoned. Subsequently, he had gone on to become a successful and popular painter.

  Minniti must have been genuinely glad to see his old friend, since all his effort seemed aimed at arranging matters so that Caravaggio could remain as long and as comfortably as possible in Syracuse. His endeavors were facilitated by the fact that, once again, Caravaggio’s fame had preceded him, and by a rare instance—rare, that is, for Caravaggio—of good timing. In preparation for the upcoming feast day of Syracuse’s patron, Saint Lucy, the city government commissioned Caravaggio to paint a large work for the saint’s newly refurbished church.

  Like The Death of the Virgin, The Burial of Saint Lucy depicts a group of mourners who have gathered around the body of a dead woman. But Caravaggio seems to have learned his lesson from his experience with the earlier painting. Lying directly on the ground, the delicate, pale Saint Lucy is an innocent and ethereal virgin martyr. Already she has become pure spirit, and nothing about her reminds us of the flesh or of the body that her spirit has so recently departed. No one would ever mistake her for “some dirty whore from the Ortaccio.” The ecclesiastical officials and onlookers stand, looking down at her with expressions of sorrow and deep compassion. But though one old woman covers her face with her hands, their grief never threatens—like the pain of those left behind by the Virgin’s death—to become too unbearable, too much like our own, to behold.

  As in The Beheading of Saint John, the entire narrative is crowded into the bottom of the enormous painting that again reflects Caravaggio’s lifelong fascination with those who do the physical toil—the stoop labor—of the miraculous. Here they are the gravediggers, one of whom has turned his massive back toward us, as if to shield us from the horror or to hide the shameful deed in which he and his coworker are engaged, except that he has no interest in anything but the spading and digging that must take place before the martyr can be buried. The rippling of his muscles and the pull of the drapery drawn diagonally across his huge buttocks—which, along with the saint’s lovely face, her upturned chin, and painfully frail shoulder, catch and reflect the light—are the most animate elements in the scene, the only things that break the silence and the stillness of the moment.

  Saint Lucy is at once the luminous center and the hidden secret of the painting. You have to look for her, to peer around the vital, healthy gravediggers, just as in The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, you have to wrest your attention away from the pointing finger of the warden and the hand of the executioner pulling the saint’s hair. Nothing here approaches the brutality and violence of The Beheading. Only a clean cut at the base of her throat remains as evidence of how the saint met her death, though in earlier versions the wound was gorier and more bloody. Still, the painting itself seems to have been done with the same furious urgency that caused Bellori to remark on the fact that the raw canvas of The Beheading was visible through the halftones.

  But though the rendering of Saint Lucy and her mourners may be less provocative and wrenching than that of their counterparts in The Death of the Virgin, the painting seems somehow, if possible, even more audacious and moving. What makes it so daring and affecting is the vast expanse of emptiness—of dark, earth-toned space—that occupies the top two-thirds of the painting. If the Virgin was laid to rest beneath a swirl of crimson drapery and a humble beamed ceiling, here there is nothing. No heaven, no cherubs, no angels. Only dirt and earth and darkness. It is hard to think of a bleaker, less comforting painting. But what consoles us is its courage, its truthfulness, and, of course, its great beauty. It’s startling to look at The Burial of Saint Lucy and to think that it was painted by the same artist who, less than a decade before, painted those pretty lutenists for Cardinal Del Monte.

  Once more, he could have stayed where he was. The Burial of Saint Lucy was enthusiastically received by the citizens of Syracuse, where he was entertained by such local luminaries as the famous archaeologist Vincenzo Mirabella, who took him on a tour of the quarries that, it was said, had been used as prisons by the Greek tyrant Dionysius the Elder. One of these caves has unusual acoustical properties: If someone whispers in one corner, it can be heard clearly on the far side of the cavern. Caravaggio, who had spent enough time in prison, and had plenty of experience with paranoia and with the fear of being overheard, christened it “The Ear of Dionysius,” a name that immediately spread and by which the cave is still called today.

  Presumably, there would have been other commissions from wealthy Syracusans. But by winter, Caravaggio (impelled, Susinno suggests, by his restless, peripatetic nature and by the awareness that nothing is so marketable as the novelty of being a new face in town) had traveled up the coast to Messina. There he was engaged to create an altarpiece for the Church of the Padri Crociferi, an order that ministered to the sick. In honor of his patrons, the Lazzari family, and perhaps in consideration of the venue where his work would be installed, Caravaggio chose as his theme The Resurrection of Lazarus.

  According to Susinno, Caravaggio requested a room in the Crociferi hospital to use as a studio and was given the best salone, together with the services of several members of the hospital staff, who were drafted to pose for the painting, in which there are thirteen figures. Susinno also claims that, in his uncompromising pursuit of naturalism, the artist insisted that a decomposing corpse be brought in to serve as a model for the dead Lazarus. When the laborers holding the corpse complained about the stench, Caravaggio attacked them with a dagger and forced them to keep working.

  It seems an unlikely story. In the painting, only one laborer supports the dead body, which looks more like an emaciated young man than a rotting cadaver. In an effort to make the tale more credible, Susinno cites the rumor (which he himself claims not to believe) that Michelangelo Buonarroti once nailed a man to a board and pierced him with a lance in order to paint a more persuasive Crucifixion.

  But another of Susinno’s anecdotes seems more plausible and faithful to what we know about Caravaggio’s personality. The work-in-progress remained hidden until it was finished. Finally The Resurrection of Lazarus was unveiled, and the citizens of Messina—proud of their cultural sophistication and confident in their ability to discuss art intelligently—made a few humble but dim observations that so enraged Caravaggio that he pulled his dagger and cut the canvas to ribbons. Instantly, he reassured his horrified patrons that he soon he would make them an even more beautiful version of Lazarus’s miraculous return from the dead. He fulfilled this promise so satisfactorily that the city council of Messina promptly commissioned him
to paint another major altarpiece, this time a nativity scene, The Adoration of the Shepherds, for the church of the Capuchin monastery of Santa Maria della Concezione. In return, he received the huge sum of a thousand scudi—ironically, a hundred times the amount of the bet that sparked the fatal quarrel with Ranuccio Tomassoni.

  Economically, at least, Caravaggio’s fortunes had improved since the days when he was begging the duke of Modena’s representative for an advance of twelve scudi. But the increase in his fees apparently failed to offer the beleaguered painter any sense of comfort or security. He was growing steadily more restless, impulsive, and out of control. The adjectives Susinno employs—barbaric, bestial, impatient, envious, restless, distracted, foolish, and crazy—would be damning enough, but he takes matters even further, implying that Caravaggio questioned the sacred articles of faith and was suspected of being an unbeliever. His unquiet spirit, says Susinno at one especially lyrical moment, was more turbulent than the sea at Messina with its dramatically rising and falling tides.

  Susinno informs us that the painter was always armed and slept with his dagger constantly by his side. And we can also thank Susinno for the disturbing story of why Caravaggio was obliged to leave Messina. Allegedly, he spent his off hours watching schoolboys play near the arsenal, observing and getting ideas from how they moved and positioned their bodies. But when their teacher, a certain Don Carlo Pepe, suspiciously questioned the painter’s motives for hanging around the boys, Caravaggio became enraged, hit the teacher on the head—and fled the city. In sum, Susinno tells us, he marked everywhere he went with the imprint of his deranged mind.