In 1599 Fillide Melandroni appears once more in Caravaggio’s art, as St Catherine of Alexandria. The masterpiece of his early career, it is another picture that simmers with violent sexuality. Less shocking than the Judith and Holofernes, but equally striking, it encapsulates the intense and powerfully inverted eroticism with which the Counter-Reformation Church infused the idea of martyrdom. The haloed saint is isolated in a bare, featureless, dark room illuminated by a single light source coming from the left. She kneels on a red damasked cushion and wears splendid robes of purple, to indicate her royal birth. The mood is intimate, suspenseful. She holds the viewer’s gaze.
The saint is alone with the attributes decreed by her legend. A martyr’s palm lies crosswise on the floor at her feet. Beside her is the spiked wheel on which the Roman emperor Maxentius had intended to break her body, painted from an ordinary Roman cartwheel of coarse-grained oak. (A section of it is broken, because God sent a thunderbolt to shatter it before it could be used on the saint.) The actual instrument of her death was a sword. Caravaggio, with the expertise of a swordsman, has furnished Fillide with a weapon appropriate to her sex – a light, thin, perfectly deadly rapier. He did not have such a sword himself, so he borrowed one. The hilt is so intricate that it must have been painted from a real example.
The picture’s subject is a yearning for death so strong that it resembles sexual desire. The saint leans towards the wheel and its vicious spikes of grey steel as if leaning towards a lover. A fold of extraneous drapery has wrapped itself around the longest and darkest of the wheel’s spikes. She caresses the pommel of the sword and runs a finger lovingly along its blood-groove. Death by the sword is her consummation. To be penetrated by its steel is to be married, forever, to Christ. Her face is flushed, her eyes excited.
The composition is austere, the forms monumental, the paint handled with a subtle brilliance. The soft-focus depiction of the muted drapery around the wheel-spike anticipates the work of Velàzquez, and in fact Caravaggio would rarely repeat such levels of virtuosity. But it is not hard to see why some of the artist’s contemporaries might have been troubled by such a picture. Was it really a picture of St Catherine, rapt in the joyful embrace of death? Or was it just a picture of a sexy modern girl, with some studio props, alone in a room? In truth, it was both. Caravaggio’s technique opened his art to ambiguity because it exposed the painter himself directly to reality. His responses inevitably coloured every image that he created, whatever its mythical construction might be. Caravaggio could turn Fillide into Mary Magdalen, into Judith, into St Catherine, but the transformation could never be absolute. After all, it was Fillide that he saw in the room, Fillide with her damaged hand, breathing softly and looking back at him, with her wide appraising eyes, as she tried to hold the pose.
By the end of the 1590s Caravaggio had invented a new style and a new approach to painting, and in the three pictures for which Fillide posed he arrived at something like a fixed, settled method. In some early works he had used a light ground, like other painters from Lombardy. But in these later paintings he used a dark ground and worked from dark to light, a technique that he may have seen for the first time in the art of Tintoretto. It suited him in a number of ways. A dark ground enabled him to focus only on the essentials of a scene, as he imagined it. Dark paint creates an illusion of deep shadow around the principal forms and therefore also does away with the need to paint background detail: Bellori, in his biography of the painter, noted that Caravaggio ‘left the ground visible in the half-tones’, meaning that in places he could model form simply by leaving the canvas in the unpainted state in which it had been prepared. (The technique is visible, for example, in the frame of the mirror in Martha and Mary Magdalen.) Caravaggio was fond of short-cuts and liked to work quickly, which suggests another reason behind his extreme tenebrism: quite apart from their expressive effect, pools of darkness, like visible ground, simply mean that there is less to paint.
Caravaggio’s habitual impatience is manifest too in his frequent practice of working wet-in-wet rather than waiting for each layer of oil paint to dry. He was unique among the painters of his time in making no preparatory drawings for his pictures, preferring to block out his compositions directly on the primed canvas. Having posed his models, he often marked the exact positions of heads and other contours by making light incisions in the base layer of paint, presumably so that he could reset the models’ positions after every break in the work. No other artist of his time used such incisions. Caravaggio’s exceptional working procedure argues strongly for the hypothesis that he learned little from his master, Peterzano, and was largely self-taught.78
Caravaggio did not draw because his method of composition was essentially theatrical – proto-cinematic, it might be said, because lighting was also involved. He composed by staging scenes, or fragments of scenes, that he knitted together, collage-like, on his canvas, using shadow to mask the joins. The scenes involved objects, models, props. Fillide knelt on a real purple cushion, leaned against a real wheel and held a real sword while Caravaggio painted her. Sometimes, not surprisingly, the absence of preparatory drawing led him to make a mistake in posing his models: halfway through Judith and Holofernes, he realized that a head half severed would look more detached from the neck and trunk of the body than the head of his very alive model. X-rays show that he painted over the first head of Holofernes, reposed the man and painted him again to achieve the necessary degree of grisly separation.
Caravaggio’s method also involved setting lights, or at least controlling illumination in some way. Joachim von Sandrart gave a short description of his technique, saying that ‘as he wished to effect a more perfect roundness and natural relief, he regularly made use of gloomy vaults or other dark rooms which had one small source of light from above; so that the darkness, by means of strong shadows, might leave power to the light falling upon the model, and thus produce an effect of high relief.’79 There is evidence of it in Martha and Mary Magdalen. The brilliant square of light reflected in the surface of the convex mirror is Caravaggio’s ‘source of light from above’ made visible on the canvas. Bellori noted that Caravaggio began to work in this way at around the time that he painted the St Catherine and other pictures close to it in date, in 1598–9. His pictures from these final years of the sixteenth century ‘have a darker colour’, he observed, ‘as Michele [sic] had already begun to darken the darks’.
Bellori went on to give his own account of how Caravaggio achieved his famously extreme contrasts of light and dark:
the colouring he was introducing was not as sweet and delicate as before, but became boldly dark and black, which he used abundantly to give relief to the forms. He went so far in this style that he never showed any of his figures in open daylight, but instead found a way to place them in the darkness of a closed room, placing a lamp high so that the light would fall straight down, revealing the principal part of the body and leaving the rest in shadow so as to produce a powerful contrast of light and dark. The painters then in Rome were greatly taken by this novelty, and the young ones particularly gathered around him, praised him as the unique imitator of nature, and looked on his work as miracles.80
A BROTHERLESS MAN
Many of Caravaggio’s pictures of the later 1590s look like demonstration pieces. Each new work shows a new difficulty overcome. But with the St Catherine of 1599 Caravaggio had reached a higher level of mastery and assurance. He painted the picture for del Monte, who had a special devotion to the martyr, probably because she was the patron saint of scholars. Perhaps this was the work that persuaded the cardinal that his protegé was ready for bigger commissions.
It was at this otherwise propitious time, for reasons unknown, that Caravaggio finally severed all links with his family. In 1594 his sister Caterina had married a ‘maestro Bartolommeo Vinizzoni’ – ‘maestro’ indicating that he was an artisan of some kind. Caravaggio had not attended the wedding. He had also been avoiding his brother, Giovan Battista, the priest
, who was in Rome studying moral theology with the Jesuits from the autumn of 1596 to the winter of 1599. Before Giovan Battista went back to Lombardy, to be ordained as a subdeacon in the province of Bergamo, he decided to call on Caravaggio. Giulio Mancini tells the strange story of what happened when the two brothers met:
Caravaggio had an only brother, a priest, a man of letters and of high morals who, when he heard of his brother’s fame, wanted to see him and, filled with brotherly love, arrived in Rome. He knew that his brother was staying with Cardinal del Monte, and being aware of his brother’s eccentricities, he thought it best to speak first to the Cardinal, and to explain everything to him, which he did. He was well received by the Cardinal, who told him to return in three days. He did so. In the meantime, the Cardinal called Michelangelo and asked him if he had any relatives; he answered that he did not. Unwilling to believe that the priest would tell him a lie about a matter that could not be checked, and that would do him no good, he asked among Caravaggio’s compatriots whether he had any brothers, and who they were, and so discovered it was Caravaggio who had lied. After three days the priest returned and was received by the Cardinal, who sent for Michelangelo. At the sight of his brother he declared that he did not know him and that he was not his brother. So, in the presence of the Cardinal, the poor priest said tenderly: ‘Brother, I have come from far away to see you, and thus I have fulfilled my desire; as you know, in my situation, thank God, I do not need you for myself or for my children, but rather for your own children if God will do you good as I will pray to His Divine Majesty during my services, as will be done by your sister in her chaste and virginal prayers.’ But Michelangelo was not moved by his brother’s ardent and stimulating words of love, and so the good priest left without even a goodbye.81
Mancini neither comments on the story nor explains it in any way. But the structure of his telling, which is like a fable, may contain clues about what he believed was going on. Three times Caravaggio is asked to recognize his brother, the priest, and three times he refuses him. Like St Peter denying Christ three times ‘before the cock crows twice’ (Mark 14:66–8), Caravaggio denies his brother, himself Christ’s servant on earth. The implication is that religion, somehow, lay at the heart of the matter. Was Caravaggio ashamed to look his pious brother in the eye? Mancini may have thought so.
Ottavio Leoni drew a portrait of Caravaggio at around this time. He has the dark, dishevelled hair and bushy eyebrows described by Luca, the barber-surgeon. But it is his expression that seems most striking. His mouth is set and sullen. There is determination and truculence in his eyes, but there is sadness there too – a look of profound loneliness, and abandonment.
PART FOUR
Rome, 1599–1606
THE ST MATTHEW CHAPEL
For the priests at San Luigi dei Francesi, the Contarelli Chapel had been nothing but trouble. For years the chapel – the fifth one along on the left, in the national church of the French – had been little better than a building site. Not only did it make the church look bad, the priests complained, it was giving Rome’s French community a bad name.
The saga had begun in 1565, when a French cardinal named Mathieu Cointrel (or Matteo Contarelli, as his name was Italianized) had paid a considerable sum to acquire the chapel, where he intended to be buried. Contarelli had already given generously during the construction of San Luigi dei Francesi, footing the bill for its fine marble façade, designed by Giacomo della Porta. But despite his best efforts his own chapel was still all but bare of decoration when he died in 1585.
The cardinal himself had contracted Girolamo Muziano, a competent but unexceptional painter, to paint frescoes on its two lateral walls and decorate its vault. Muziano had prevaricated for years, only to renege on the commission with almost nothing painted. In 1587 the executor of Contarelli’s will, Virgilio Crescenzi, had commissioned a marble altarpiece from a Flemish sculptor, Jacques Cobaert. Crescenzi had also persuaded Giuseppe Cesari to fresco the walls and ceiling. Cesari had completed the frescoes on the vault by 1593, when Caravaggio was part of his studio, but he never got round to the rest because he was deluged by other assignments, including several from the pope himself. Meanwhile the sculptor, Cobaert, was said to be working away, although there was nothing to show for it. Thrilled by the importance of the commission, but paralysed by self-doubt, he toiled for years on what he hoped would be his magnum opus. His contract was renewed in 1596, yet as the end of the sixteenth century approached there was still no sign that he would ever actually deliver the work. Those close to him remarked that Cobaert was becoming ever more paranoid and secretive.
In 1597 the patience of the long-suffering priests had finally snapped. With the Jubilee year of 1600 fast approaching, they had sent a petition to the pope:
Most Blessed Father, the French community of the Church of San Luigi in Rome … humbly represents that the chapel … founded in this church by the late Cardinal … and provided by him with one hundred gold scudi per annum for two chaplains, has been closed for more than twenty-five years and is at present still closed. And if Your Holiness does not bring His authority to bear in the matter, there is a danger that the chapel will never be completed, because Signor Abbate Giacomo Crescenzi, the executor of the will of the above-named Cardinal since the retirement of his father Virgilio Crescenzi … has not finished it and excuses himself on the grounds of difficulties with the sculptor, the painter and other things. Thus the soul of the deceased has been cheated of its masses and the church of San Luigi similarly cheated of the endowment which was destined for the chapel. All of this is a discredit to the divine service and a shame for the community, and it leads people to believe that the neglect is the fault of the community when they see the chapel continually boarded-up and closed while various other churches in Rome are constructed from their foundations up … the heirs and sons of the Crescenzi, accumulating [revenues] year after year and day after day, have bought many and various offices in the Cancelleria, real estate and other things without doing anything which relates to the will of the testator and without even having anniversary services said for the soul of the deceased …1
As a result of this tirade, Clement VIII ordered the Crescenzi to surrender Contarelli’s legacy and entrusted responsibility for the chapel to the governing body of the Fabbrica di San Pietro – the works office of St Peter’s. Giuseppe Cesari was approached again and asked to finish what he had begun, but he pleaded overwork. Del Monte, whose palace was directly opposite the church, followed these developments carefully. Del Monte was friendly with the Crescenzi family. He busied himself behind the scenes, pulled the right strings and somehow won the commission for Caravaggio, an artist as yet untried in the public arena of large-scale religious painting. ‘With the support of his Cardinal he got the commission for the Contarelli chapel in San Luigi dei Francesi,’ Baglione noted, with a touch of bitterness. On 23 July 1599 Caravaggio signed a contract with the two rectors of the church in which he undertook to complete the side panels for the chapel by the end of the year for a fee of 400 scudi.
It was a daunting challenge for a young and relatively inexperienced artist. So far Caravaggio had never painted a picture with more than four figures in it. None of his previous canvases had been more than four or five feet across. Suddenly, he would have to produce two monumental paintings, each more than ten feet in width and almost the same in height. He had, it is true, painted a number of devotional pictures, but he was known principally as a painter of genre scenes with a talent for still life. Now he was being invited to create complex religious narrative paintings. It was a chance to compete with the greatest artists of the past. But if it went wrong, Caravaggio’s failure would also be very public.
The subjects of the two lateral pictures for the Contarelli Chapel had been prescribed by Cardinal Cointrel himself. He had wanted his burial chapel to be dedicated to St Matthew, his name saint, and so the two pictures on either side of the altar were to tell stories from the apostle’s life. The
painting on the left was to show Matthew, the tax collector, being summoned by Christ. That on the right was to show the saint’s glorious martyrdom at the hands of a pagan assassin. Cointrel had also had very particular ideas about how these scenes might be depicted, which are reflected in the unusually circumstantial wording of an attachment to one of the contracts for the painting of the chapel:
For the St Matthew Chapel … At the right side of the altar, that is, on the side of the gospel, there is to be a painting 17 palmi high and 14 palmi long in which is painted the same St Matthew in a store or large room used for tax collection with various items pertaining to such an office, with a counter such as tax collectors use, with books, and monies that have been received, or as shall seem best. From this counter St Matthew, dressed as a practitioner of his trade would be, should rise in order to follow Our Lord who passes along the street with his disciples and calls him to the apostolate; and the attitude of St Matthew should show the painter’s skill, as should also the rest. On the left side, that is, of the epistle, there should be another painting of the same height and length as above in which is painted a long wide space in the form of a temple, with an altar raised up on the top of three, four, or five steps: where St Matthew dressed in vestments to celebrate the mass is killed by the hands of soldiers and it might be more artistic to show the moment of being killed, where he is wounded and already fallen, or falling but not yet dead, while in the temple there are many men, women, young and old people, and children, mostly in different attitudes of prayer, and dressed according to their station and nobility, and benches, carpets, and other furnishings, most of them terrified by the event, others appalled, and still others filled with compassion.2
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