Caravaggio

by Andrew Graham-Dixon

  The devouring way in which Caravaggio looked at the world made it all but impossible for him to paint idealized forms. There is a quality of seemingly involuntary vividness in many of the details of his paintings – a quality that, increasingly, he learned to control and to manipulate. This both intrigued and fascinated his contemporaries, and brought a dangerous unpredictability to his pictures. Something base and ordinary might suddenly seem touched by a miracle; a holy mystery could shade into figments snatched from an erotic daydream. Caravaggio’s early work is beguiling, in part, because it is so ambiguous and metamorphic. It expresses the truancies of the painter’s imagination and allows space for the unregulated responses of the viewer’s wandering eye. It speaks of piety but makes concessions to the impious mind, guiltily mingling the pleasures of the world with a genuine sense of devotion.

  Caravaggio’s more sophisticated patrons were attuned to such subtle ambiguities. The best evidence for this is an intriguing correspondence between a cleric from Vicenza named Paolo Gualdo and Cardinal Ottavio Paravicino. Paravicino, who had been present at Vittoria Archileo’s concert, was a friend of del Monte and one of three Roman cardinals certainly linked with Filippo Neri’s Oratory. Gualdo was a scholarly cleric with strong connections to the humanist culture of the Veneto in general and Vicenza in particular. He was a friend of the poet Tasso and wrote a biography of the architect Palladio. He was also a lover of painting, who had tried and failed to obtain a picture by Caravaggio.

  In one of his letters to Paravicino, Gualdo harks back to that disappointment. Referring to himself in the third person, and writing in a spirit of knowingly ironical self-deprecation, he casts himself in the role of a simple impecunious man of the cloth, motivated by philanthropy as well as the love of art, whose overtures to Caravaggio have been unfairly rebuffed: ‘the good priest has a certain discernment when it comes to painting, but not very many jewels to fund his fancy, so this seemed a good occasion to help a galant’huomo of the art of painting, and in the process obtain some graceful little picture.’43

  The allusion to Caravaggio as a galant’huomo suggests not only his pre-eminence as a painter but also a degree of social pretension. The term, which was used interchangeably with valent’huomo, signified a virtuoso or a man of especial expertise in his chosen field. But it also carried associations of worth and, by extension, honour. Gualdo’s letter was written in 1603, but, given that he refers to a small picture, and elsewhere mentions the name of Cardinal del Monte, it seems reasonable to believe that he had the painter’s work of the mid to late 1590s in mind.

  A yet more interesting letter about Caravaggio was written by Paravicino to Gualdo in August 1603. It is a teasing text, composed in courtly riddles and insinuations, which takes the form of an imaginary encounter between the phantom of Caravaggio and a caricatured version of Paravicino’s friend, Gualdo himself, the cleric from Vicenza:

  Michelangelo da Caravaggio, excellent Painter, says that he came as a shade or spirit to Vicenza, and met a galant’huomo who loves paintings and who asked him wondrous many questions. He describes, but does not paint with his brush, a priest with the air of a solemnly reformed cleric, a man who, if he did not speak, would appear to be a Theatine. [The Theatines were a Counter-Reformation order of clerics noted for their asceticism and moral severity.] But when he does open his mouth he touches on every topic, and does so in a spirit of gallantry. It seems to me that he has a tincture of all the sciences, says Caravaggio, but since I lack the necessary expertise myself I cannot touch the marrow of his actual knowledge. He describes himself as extremely keen to have something painted, one minute speaking of various churches, the next of having some beautiful work painted for his lordship the Bishop of Padua. But Caravaggio would have made for him some painting that would have been in that middle area, between the sacred, and the profane – a kind of picture that he would not have wanted to see from a distance …

  The aim of the letter is to tease Gualdo and to puncture, with the lightest of touches, his holier-than-thou pretensions – which had themselves been expressed in a spirit of ironic self-parody. Caravaggio and his art are merely the tools employed to that ludic end. But, for all its cryptic circumlocutions, Paravicino’s letter reveals much about the risky pleasures enjoyed by keen-eyed connoisseurs of Caravaggio’s painting.

  The whole passage turns on the play between appearance and reality. The figure of Gualdo seems at first to be a severe and utterly correct Counter-Reformation cleric, but he then discourses with gallantry on every subject under the sun, showing that he has a more restless mind than first appearances had suggested. He is not necessarily irreligious, although he thinks about more than religion alone. But even this second Gualdo, galant’huomo himself of art and all the sciences, may not be everything that he seems, since the fictional Caravaggio of the letter confesses that he himself lacks the wherewithal to judge the true extent of his knowledge.

  A similar contrast between seeming and being is drawn in the second part of Paravicino’s tale, about the imaginary commissioning of a picture. Gualdo says that he is thinking of a painting to be given to a church, or to his superior, the Bishop of Padua. But Caravaggio sees through the smokescreen of Gualdo’s request and understands what would really please him. He decides not to paint an altarpiece, a monumental and unimpeachably pious type of painting. That is because a public work of art, designed to be seen and read from a distance, would not suit a man of Gualdo’s personality. Instead, Caravaggio will paint for him something very different – a work that might appear devout but will also appeal to a taste for profane pleasures. It will be a picture for private contemplation, ‘not one that he would have wanted to see from a distance’, because it would yield its secrets and pleasures only when viewed at close quarters. Such a picture, it is archly implied, would be the exact complement to Gualdo, because it would be just as slippery as the man himself. For the priest who is not entirely priestly, for the man who is not all he seems, Paravicino has found the perfect gift: a work by Caravaggio.

  BACCHUS AND HEAD OF THE MEDUSA

  None of the artist’s pictures are more teasingly poised between the sacred and the profane than the Bacchus that he painted sometime in 1597 or 1598 for his patron Cardinal del Monte. This later Bacchus is very different from the Self-Portrait as Bacchus – the malingering reveller, impersonated by the artist himself, painted during his apprentice days of discontent. The model, this time, seems to have been Caravaggio’s Sicilian friend Mario Minniti. He is a swarthy, ruddy-cheeked, well-fed god of wine, crowned with a wreath of grapes and vine leaves. An air of Dionysian mystery still clings to him, but he is very much the Greek god in his Roman incarnation. Wearing a toga, he lounges on a triclinium, as the ancient Romans did when feasting.

  There is a decanter on the table in front of him, two thirds full of a wine so darkly crimson that it looks almost black. There are bubbles at its surface and its level is askew, a minute touch of realism that makes the moment captured in the painting seem ever more fleeting. The wine is still swinging in the heavy bowl of the decanter. The boy-god has just set it down, after pouring a glassful of the liquid into the fine-stemmed Venetian goblet that he holds, delicately, in his left hand. He offers the wine to the viewer of the painting. His expression is gently quizzical, his half-raised eyebrow both invitation and challenge: unriddle me if you can.

  The Bacchus is a sophisticated, courtly work of art, calculated to catch the eye and then hold it. It is an enigma embodied as a rich store of captivating details. Viewed from a certain perspective, the picture seems ripe with sensuality, bordering on outright lubricity. The barely draped boy might be no more than an elaborately wrapped sexual gift. Does he himself not hint at that possibility, with the suggestive play of his right hand in the knot of black ribbon that binds his clothes?

  That would be the profane approach to the picture. But there is space for a devout approach too. There is another way of undoing that knot. Bacchus is the god of wine and of autum
nal fruitfulness, and in keeping with that Caravaggio has given him another of his overflowing baskets of fruit. The black grapes have never seemed so lustrous, the figs so ripe. But the foliage once more is withered, the apple worm-eaten, the quince and the plum bruised. The pomegranate has split and collapsed, disgorging its fleshy seeds. Once more, a sense of eucharistic implication hovers in the still air. Summer has become autumn and the sere leaves at the basket’s edge are the presage of death to come. But there is hope here too: the transcendent promise of eternal life is contained in the glass of wine held so carefully by the boy-god – and with such precise metaphorical intent – directly above the basket of decaying fruit.

  According to the Neoplatonic thought of the Renaissance, classical myth was alive with shadowy anticipations of Christian truth. The legend of Dionysus, who died to be reborn, was regarded as a pagan prophecy of the coming of Christ. So it was that the figure of Dionysus/Bacchus became associated with the Saviour himself. Caravaggio’s Bacchus has sad, solemn eyes. Those aware of his Christian aspect might also have noted how the toga that drapes him so loosely also resembles a winding sheet. The wine that he offers is the wine of his blood, an allusion lightly pointed by the heart-shaped shadow, angled towards the figure’s heart, cast by the decanter. The apparent promise of physical delight has been transfigured, changed to a metaphysical gift.

  The picture plays on the deceptive nature of appearances, yet also flaunts the very deceptions that brought it into being. As he had done in The Musicians, Caravaggio allows the viewer to peer behind the scene of his own artifice. The model’s face and hands are sunburned, to indicate that he is someone who has to go out into the world and earn a living under the harsh noonday sun. There are crescents of black dirt under the fingernails of his left hand. His Roman bed of repose has been created by the expedient of draping white sheets over a somewhat grubby cushion decorated with blue ticking, part of which shows through. This is not really Bacchus, but a young man playing his part.44

  The Bacchus soon found its way into the collections of the Medici in Florence. It is likely that del Monte specifically commissioned it as a gift for the grand duke. But the present does not seem to have gone down well. The god with dirty fingernails and sunburned skin may have struck the Medici as a joke in poor taste, or perhaps they were scandalized by the picture’s close focus on the sensual body of a half-naked boy. Either way, the picture disappeared from view as soon as it entered the Medici collections. When it finally resurfaced, some four hundred years later, in a basement storeroom of the Uffizi Galleries, not only had it never been catalogued, it had never even been framed.

  In 1598 del Monte gave another painting by Caravaggio to his Medici protector. Baglione writes that the artist created ‘a head of a terrifying Medusa with vipers for hair placed on a shield, which the Cardinal sent as a gift to Ferdinando, Grand Duke of Tuscany’.45 Unlike the Bacchus, the Medusa was enthusiastically received and prominently displayed in the Medici collections. It is one of Caravaggio’s most startling inventions. Painted on to a circular piece of canvas stretched over a convex shield of poplar wood, the picture conjures up the legendary monster at the instant when she breathes her last. In Greek myth, the serpent-haired Medusa turned all who gazed upon her to stone, until the hero Perseus, looking only at her reflection in his brightly polished shield, cut off her head. In Caravaggio’s painting, thick jets of blood spurt from the horrible creature’s neck, which has been neatly severed just below the jaw. Her eyes stare and her mouth opens in a soundless scream. The snakes of her hair coil convulsively, each writhing in its own separate corkscrew agony of death.

  The dying monster with arrestingly masculine features is yet another of the artist’s self-portraits.46 ‘Item: a convex mirror’, reads one of the entries in an inventory of Caravaggio’s possessions. The distortions of the painter’s face as it appears in the Medusa indicate that he used a convex mirror to paint it. As in a convex reflection, the cheeks and forehead have been slightly broadened and elongated. Caravaggio deepens the game further by making his own convex reflection, painted on to a convex shield, look as though it is actually concave. The shadow cast by the Medusa’s head creates the illusion of a curved circular surface scalloped away from the viewer, like a shallow bowl.

  Caravaggio treated the commission as a pretext for the display of his own special skills and techniques – so much so that the picture might almost be regarded as his own emblem, or impresa. Just as the face is the painter’s own, studied from life, the snakes too were painted from actual, wriggling specimens. It is a mark of Caravaggio’s pragmatism that the snakes are not vipers, but watersnakes of a type commonly found in the Tiber. He must have asked a fisherman to net some for him.

  Just as Perseus had slain the snake-haired Gorgon, Caravaggio set out to vanquish every other artist to have attempted the subject. The Medusa is a work of such flourish and bravado that it has the look of a painting submitted for a prize. Giorgio Vasari had argued that without the intense spirit of competition between Florentine artists there could have been no Italian Renaissance. His Lives of the Artists is full of accounts of such rivalry, and tales of actual contests that had taken place between artists in earlier times – for example, the story of Ghiberti and Brunelleschi competing for the commission to create a set of bronze doors for the Baptistry in Florence, or that of Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci working, side by side, on two enormous battle paintings for the council chamber of the city’s town hall. By commissioning the Medusa, Cardinal del Monte was consciously arranging another such competition. He was pitting Caravaggio against the celebrated Leonardo himself: not only was Leonardo’s Medusa one of his most famously idiosyncratic creations, it also happened to be in Florence, in the collection of the Medici. The work is lost now, surviving only in the form of a vivid account in Vasari’s life of Leonardo. The story begins with Leonardo’s father asking him to paint something on a shield of fig wood:

  And afterwards, having given it a coat of gesso, and having prepared it in his own way, he began to think about what he could paint upon it, that might be able to terrify all who should come upon it, producing the same effect as once did the head of the Medusa. For this purpose, then, Leonardo carried to a room of his own into which no one entered save himself alone, lizards great and small, crickets, serpents, butterflies, grasshoppers, bats, and other strange kinds of suchlike animals, out of the number of which, variously put together, he formed a great ugly creature, most horrible and terrifying, which emitted a poisonous breath and turned the air to flame; and he made it come out of a dark and jagged rock, belching forth venom from its open throat, fire from its eyes, and smoke from its nostrils, in so strange a fashion that it appeared altogether a monstrous and horrible thing; and so long did he labour over making it, that the stench of the dead animals in that room was past bearing, but Leonardo did not notice it, so great was the love that he bore towards art.47

  Caravaggio also studied live animals in the process of creating his own monster, but otherwise his Medusa could hardly have been more different to that described by Vasari. Leonardo’s painting sounds complicated and full of circumstantial detail, conjuring up rocks and crags, a theatrical entrance on the part of the monster, and even the air itself thick with fire and smoke, just the sort of picture that mirrored his restless mind. By contrast, the brilliance of Caravaggio’s Medusa reflects the painter’s remorseless pursuit of a realist conceit. Leonardo had painted a picture of the Medusa that seemed wittily appropriate as the decoration of a shield. Caravaggio did something bolder and conceptually far more pure. He created a painting that sought to transcend painting and become the very thing that it depicts. His Medusa is not a painting of a shield, or at least it pretends not to be. It pretends to be the shield itself, held in Perseus’s hand at the very instant when he has killed the Medusa. It is a painting meant to be admired at close quarters, passed round from hand to hand. To look at the picture thus would be to become the conquering hero himself – to g
aze, through his eyes, at the reflection of the Medusa, as she in turn watches herself die, in her own reflection, in the shield’s mirror.

  The best way to grasp the true nature of Caravaggio’s illusion – to complete the circle of gazes demanded by the painter’s conceit – would indeed be actually to hold it. Did Ferdinando de’ Medici do just that, and smile at the ingenuity of Caravaggio’s idea? Certainly, the sense that this was not a picture like other pictures, a picture simply to be hung on a wall, persisted among later generations of the Medici. An inventory of the family’s armoury from 1631 reveals that it was displayed as part of a suit of armour arranged to look like a standing knight at arms. It was brandished by the figure, in fact, just like a real shield.

  Caravaggio’s Medusa was designed to transform its owner into Perseus himself. To give such a picture to a Medici was to pay him a comfortingly familiar compliment. The Perseus myth had been assimilated into the mythology of Medici power in the middle years of the sixteenth century, when the family had assumed absolute control over what had once been the Florentine republic. Benvenuto Cellini’s chillingly persuasive, larger-than-life bronze of Perseus, brandishing a scimitar and holding up the Medusa’s head, was a public symbol of Medici might – a vivid demonstration of exactly what would happen to anyone with the temerity to resist Medici rule. Caravaggio’s Medusa, reviving those old associations with the lightest of touches, is a clever piece of praise as well as a virtuoso work of art.