Accusations of arrogance echo through the early biographies of Caravaggio. ‘Michelangelo Merisi was a satirical and proud man,’ writes Baglione; ‘at times he would speak badly of the painters of the past, and also of the present, no matter how distinguished they were, because he thought that he alone had surpassed all the other artists in his profession.’32 Bellori explicitly says that pride drove Caravaggio to leave Cesari and strike out on his own. At this point Bellori introduces another character into the narrative, a well-known painter of amusing bizzareries named Prospero Orsi, who suddenly appears as the rebellious Caravaggio’s sidekick, egging him on to rebellion and independence: ‘When he met Prospero, a painter of grotesques, he took the opportunity to leave Giuseppe in order to compete with him for the glory of painting. Then he began to paint according to his own inclinations; not only ignoring but even despising the superb statuary of antiquity and the famous paintings of Raphael, he considered nature to be the only subject fit for his brush.’
Bellori treats Caravaggio’s rejection of Cesari as if it had been the publication of a manifesto. In his eyes, Caravaggio had not just turned away from one man’s influence; he had repudiated the entire classical and Renaissance canon and abandoned those principles of selection and idealization on which all truly great and lasting works of art must be founded. He describes it as an act of foolhardy hubris. ‘As a result, when he was shown the most famous statues of Phidias and Glykon, in order that he might use them as models, his only answer was to point towards a crowd of people, saying that nature had given him an abundance of masters.’
The idea that anyone would have taken the time to call the young Caravaggio’s attention to the sculptures of classical antiquity is probably fanciful. The neatness of his rejoinder strengthens the suspicion that this is parable, rather than fact (Bellori in effect admits as much when he concedes that ‘A similar story is told about the painter Eupompus’). Yet the fiction is revealing because it contains, in a nutshell, the academic artist’s innate distrust of Caravaggio’s startling naturalism. The painter is cast as gifted but fatally proud, a man bent on dragging art down into the gutter – leading it towards the mere unthinking replication of reality. The same attitude, softened by time but equally misguided, lies behind more recent attempts to expose the presumed trickery behind Caravaggio’s art – the suggestion that the painter must have used some kind of lens to achieve his effects, or the hypothesis that it was all (literally) done with mirrors. The one grain of truth in Bellori’s account may lie in what it has to say about the sheer strength of early audience response, favourable or otherwise, to the seductively lifelike qualities of Caravaggio’s paintings.
Having left the Cesari studio, Caravaggio certainly needed to sell his paintings. His stay with Monsignor Petrigiani may not have lasted long. Baglione says that, soon after leaving Cesari, Caravaggio ‘tried to live by himself’ and that he painted some self-portraits at this time, lacking the funds to hire a model. ‘He also painted a boy bitten by a lizard emerging from flowers and fruits; you could almost hear the boy scream, and it was all done meticulously.’33
There are two extant versions of this subject, one in the Roberto Longhi Foundation in Florence, the other in the National Gallery, London. Technical analysis, as well as its slightly more crude and direct style, suggests that the Longhi picture was created first, probably in late 1594 or at the start of 1595.34 The handling of the drapery is more assured in the London picture, which also points to a slightly later date. Yet the very existence of this second, slightly more sophisticated variation indicates that Caravaggio had scored enough of a success with his original version to create a market for replicas.
Once again, Caravaggio paints a single figure in an interior lit by raking light. But this time he animates the figure, having him actively recoil in pain and, as Baglione says, utter an almost audible scream. The painter emphasizes the effects caused by his use of a single light source, pushing the contrast between light and dark to an unprecedented degree.
The subject is a moment of compressed drama. A young man has been unpleasantly surprised during what should have been a quiet moment of unalloyed pleasure. Reaching out towards the selection of fruit laid out on the table before him – two bright red cherries, some figs and some grapes are visible – he finds that he himself is being bitten, by a creature that has been lurking unseen. The animal, a lizard, buries its fangs into the fleshy part of his middle finger. The boy’s face, startled and flushed with the sudden consciousness of pain, is strongly illuminated. His bare shoulder and tensed right hand, from which the lizard still dangles, are thrown into sharp relief.
There is a slightly clumsily painted pink rose behind the boy’s ear, while the artist has also included a vase on the table in front of him, which is three quarters full of water and contains another rose and some stalks of flowering jasmine. Light slows and thickens to a texture like that of milk in the depths of the water. Reflections play in the convex surface of the vase, and two drops of condensation trickle down its fatly curved side. This is a piece of painting that evokes Giorgio Vasari’s description of a work by the young Leonardo da Vinci, the most famous painter to have worked in Caravaggio’s home town of Milan – a picture of the Virgin ‘in which, besides the marvellous vividness, he had imitated the dewdrops so that the picture seemed more real than life’.
The exquisite still life is a naked demonstration of skill – a reminder that when Caravaggio painted it he was working for the open market and therefore, in a sense, crying out his wares. He included the detail to impress his mastery of certain virtuoso techniques in oil painting on his prospective Roman audience – ways of painting the reflection and refraction of light, of capturing the precise wetness and viscosity of a drop of sweat, a drop of water or a drop of blood, which could make the practice of art seem almost like a form of magic. Despite Vasari’s encomium to Leonardo, such skills were primarily associated with artists from Flanders. Jan van Eyck had been the first Renaissance master to master them, followed by Rogier van der Weyden, Hans Memlinc and others. Caravaggio’s inclusion of such effects in his own work advertised his roots in Lombardy, in northern Italy, where Flemish art was better known than in the rest of the peninsula. His handling of the vase and its reflections indicate that he was familiar with the work of later Flemish masters such as Jan Bruegel.
But the still life detail is only a detail, a grace note in a picture designed primarily as a vehicle for the depiction of a human being gripped by sudden, strong emotion. Contrary to Bellori’s assertion that Caravaggio turned away from all artistic tradition to pursue an art rooted solely in study from life, the figure of the boy is extremely sculptural. He was painted from a model, but he also evokes that very tradition of classical statuary which, according to Bellori, Caravaggio despised. The most obvious precedent for the boy who screams in pain was the celebrated classical statue of Laocoön and his sons, wrapped in the coils of snakes, which had been excavated in Rome less than a hundred years earlier. Even the lizard may have been inspired by a classical sculpture, namely the so-called Apollo Sauroctonus, or Lizard Apollo, which is now in the Louvre but was probably in Rome in Caravaggio’s time. The reptile climbing up a tree trunk in that sculpture is shown from the same, sharply profiled angle – seen as if from above – as Caravaggio’s lizard.
The German art historian, painter and engraver Joachim von Sandrart, who travelled widely in Italy between 1628 and 1635, gave Boy Bitten by a Lizard a prominent place in the short account that he wrote of Caravaggio’s early years. To judge by its tone, he must have spoken to artists or collectors who still remembered the picture’s thrilling impact from some forty years before: ‘In the beginning, he painted many faces and half-length figures in a sharp, dry manner. One of these is that of a child with a basket of flowers and fruit, from which a lizard emerges, biting the hand of the child who begins to cry bitterly, so that it is marvellous to look at and it caused his reputation to increase notably throughout Rome.’
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Sandrart mistakenly refers to the picture’s vase of flowers as a basket. Perhaps he confused its still life, in his memory, with that in the earlier Boy with a Basket. But his report vividly demonstrates the extent to which the exploits of the young Caravaggio were still remembered, still talked about, in Rome even as late as the 1630s. His informants, whoever they were, also gave him to understand its startling combination of emotional intensity and artistic naturalism as a gauntlet thrown down at the feet of Giuseppe d’Arpino and his followers: ‘Because Arpino generally painted large works in fresco, which does not in itself have the same strength of colour or the intrinsic truth of oil colours, and because Caravaggio was very excellent in the latter, he offered Giuseppe and many others a challenge which resulted in endless quarrels. This brought them to swords’ points …’ Sandrart also tells the story that Caravaggio painted a picture in the Roman church of San Lorenzo in Damaso, next to an altarpiece by Giuseppe d’Arpino, in which ‘he represented a nude giant who sticks out his tongue at Giuseppe’s work as if he wished to ridicule it.’35 The tale of the nude giant with the mischievous tongue is certainly apocryphal, nor is there any other evidence to suggest that Caravaggio and Giuseppe Cesari, the Cavaliere d’Arpino, ever came to blows (if they had, Cesari might never have lived to a ripe old age). But there is perhaps a glimmer of fire behind all the smoke. In Sandrart’s telling of the story, Caravaggio becomes far more than a disgruntled studio assistant with the nerve to walk out on his boss. He becomes a rival, someone who turns away from his former master’s style and subject matter because he has his own ideas.
The most original aspect of Boy Bitten by a Lizard is the fact that it depicts an ordinary person – someone distinguished by no particular signs of rank or status – in the grip of a strong emotion. One of the few known precedents for this lay in late sixteenth-century Bolognese art. Giorgio Vasari tells of a female painter called Sofonisba Anguissola, originally from Cremona, who created a drawing for Tommaso de’ Cavalieri – once a close friend of the great Michelangelo – in which she depicted ‘a little girl laughing at a boy who is weeping because one of the cray-fish out of a basket full of them, which she has placed in front of him, is biting his finger; and there is nothing more graceful to be seen than that drawing, or more true to nature’.36
Vasari’s story about another work of art may shed light on the meaning of Caravaggio’s. The introduction of a faintly malevolent laughing girl complicates the story of a boy bitten by surprise. Perhaps Anguissola may have intended some playful allusion to the hazards of adult love that lie in store for every child. This, in turn, may begin to suggest the symbolic intentions that lay behind Caravaggio’s own choice of the theme. Is the presence of erotic temptation implied in his Boy Bitten by a Lizard? There is reason to think so.
There is an air of abandonment about the boy, imparted both by his languid state of undress and by the rose in his hair. Roses are traditional emblems of romantic love, but the other blossoms present in the picture add a less innocent note to its symbolism. Jasmine was a traditional symbol of desire (Caravaggio would include the same flower in his later portrait of a well-known Roman courtesan). The boy’s clothing, such as it is, a wispy piece of white drapery, might be no more than a twisted bedsheet. He who reaches for cherries and apples has grasped at sexual temptation. Now he is receiving his just reward. A sexual subtext lurks, as the lizard had done, in that pile of luscious fruit. The animal is zoologically inaccurate – real lizards have no teeth – but charged with metaphorical potency. A toothless reptile has been transformed into the very image of the vagina dentata.
It would have required no great ingenuity on the part of Caravaggio’s contemporaries to unlock his meaning. In the sign language of the Italian street – symbolism in its most vivid, popular form – the bitten finger represented the wounded phallus. The English diarist John Evelyn witnessed a quarrel between two boatmen in seventeenth-century Genoa, at the end of which one of them ‘put his finger in his mouth and almost bit it off by the joynt, shewing it to his antagonist as an assurance to him of some bloodie revenge’.37 The threat on that occasion, as Evelyn euphemistically hints, was castration. A different fate can be understood to lie in store for Caravaggio’s decadent young man: in Rome, city of courtesans, the reward for promiscuity was venereal disease. ‘The French disease’, they called it in Italy (although the French themselves preferred to think of it as ‘the Pox of Naples’).
Boy Bitten by a Lizard is a vanitas painting, a reflection on the pitfalls that await those who give themselves up to the pleasures of the flesh. It is a work of art that functions in a way exactly analagous to the action which it depicts. An apparently innocuous image, full of sweet fruit and lingering sensual detail, hides the sourest of morals. The message of the picture might seem unnecessarily severe, but it should be remembered that Caravaggio’s target audience was the higher Roman clergy. They needed the alibi of moral reflection to enjoy – let alone purchase – a picture such as this.
GYPSIES AND ROGUES AND A CARDINAL SNARED
For all his ingenuity, Caravaggio did not enjoy immediate success with Boy Bitten by a Lizard. According to Mancini, the painter was forced to sell the work for next to nothing. In Baglione’s yet bleaker telling of the story, Caravaggio failed to find a buyer for any of the pictures that he painted after leaving the Cesari workshop: ‘He was unable to to sell these works, and in a short time he found himself without money and poorly dressed.’
Desperate for money, the artist went to the picture-dealers of Rome. According to Baglione, ‘some charitable gentlemen expert in the profession came to his aid, and finally Maestro Valentino, a dealer in paintings at San Luigi dei Francesi, managed to sell a few.’38 This ‘Maestro Valentino’ was actually Costantino Spata, who did indeed have a shop in the piazza bordering San Luigi dei Francesi, the so-called ‘church of the French’. He befriended Caravaggio and Prospero Orsi. He sold their pictures on commission and was seen drinking with them on several occasions.39
Costantino Spata played a vital role in Caravaggio’s career. It was through him that the painter came to the attention of one of his most important supporters, his principal patron during his early years in Rome. Baglione tells the story in a few words: ‘This was the means by which he met Cardinal del Monte, an art lover, who invited him to his home.’40 Cardinal del Monte would nurture Caravaggio through the next few crucial years of his life. Not only would he house, clothe and protect him, but he would introduce him to a circle of the most powerful and influential collectors in Rome, and negotiate the difficult waters of higher Church patronage on his behalf.
Del Monte, the ‘art lover’, whose palace was just around the corner from the Piazza di San Luigi, was one of Spata’s clients. Did the dealer and the painter think up a deliberate strategy to get the cardinal’s attention? Did Spata even advise Caravaggio on what to paint, helping to bait the hook that would land the big fish? Certainly, the work that Caravaggio created for his new dealer to try to sell was markedly different from anything he had painted before.
The two pictures with which Caravaggio and Spata successfully tempted del Monte, The Gypsy Fortune-Teller and The Cardsharps, still exist. The first is to be found in the Capitoline Museum in Rome (a later and even finer version of the same composition, painted for a friend of del Monte, is in the Louvre). The second is in the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. Between them, they mark a radical new departure for Caravaggio, and indeed they are among the most innovative pictures created anywhere in Europe in the late sixteenth century.
Each painting shows a scene of trickery and deceit, enacted by half-length figures. ‘Genre picture’ was the less than satisfactory term eventually settled upon by art historians to describe such works. But the genre picture in this vein did not exist until Caravaggio invented it. Although there had been shadowy precedents for such work, in prints and drawings and in marginal details of paintings about other things, The Gypsy Fortune-Teller and The Cardsharps introd
uced a new concept to art: the low-life drama. Hung together in a single room in del Monte’s Roman palace, their influence was soon felt far and wide. The taste for such pictures grew rapidly and spread across all of Europe. Caravaggio’s tricksters spawned a whole world of painted rogues, created by a multitude of artists including Bartolomeo Manfredi in Italy, Rembrandt in Holland and Georges de La Tour in France.
The differing dimensions of the two canvases suggest that they were not painted as a pair, although both are offspring of the same idea. In The Gypsy Fortune-Teller, a sharply dressed young man with a sword at his hip has fallen under the spell of a smiling young Romany traveller. She fixes him with an intense and slightly nervy stare. He returns her hypnotic gaze with a dreamy, half-lost expression of his own. Shadows play on the dun-coloured wall behind the two figures. The precise nature of the action was explained by Mancini: ‘I do not think I have seen a more graceful and expressive figure than the Gipsy who foretells good fortune to a young man … he shows the Gipsy’s slyness with a false smile as she takes off the ring of the young man, who shows his naivete and the effects of his amorous response to the beauty of the little Gipsy who foretells his fortune and steals his ring.’41 Under the pretence of reading the young man’s palm, the streetwise confidence trickster is actually robbing him.
The Cardsharps plays a variation on the same theme, a gentleman fooled out of his money. The scene is a gambling den, in which we encounter the second of Caravaggio’s fresh-faced, rich young men, playing a game of cards. He is dressed in sumptuous black silk over a lace-trimmed shirt – sleek finery that has drawn the attention of not one but two urban predators. The yellow-and-black stripes of their costumes suggest the image of a pair of wasps buzzing around a honeytrap. Some honey has already been extracted, to judge by the detail of a backgammon board, pushed to the edge of the gaming table. Having failed at one game, the young gentleman is trying to win back his losses at another. His optimism is undimmed, to judge by the half-smile that plays on his lips. But he cannot possibly win. The young cheat sitting opposite him has a choice of extra cards tucked into his belt behind his back. The other peeks over the young gentleman’s shoulder and signals in code to his partner in crime, letting him know exactly what will be required to ensure a winning hand.
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