Caravaggio

by Andrew Graham-Dixon

  Cardinal Giustiniani’s involvement in the commission is confirmed by the contract for the new work. He is described in the role of banker, making the first payment to Caravaggio on Cerasi’s behalf. The document is dated 24 September 1600:

  Michael Angelo [sic] Merisi da Caravaggio … outstanding painter of the city, contracts with Tiberio Cerasi to paint two pictures on cypress wood, each with a length of ten Roman palmi and a width of eight, representing the Conversion of St Paul and the Martyrdom of St Peter, for delivery within eight months, with all figures, persons, and ornaments which seem fit to the painter, to the satisfaction of his Lordship. The painter shall also be obliged to submit specimens and designs of the figures and other objects with which according to his invention and genius he intends to beautify the said mystery and martyrdom. This promise the said painter has made for an honorarium and price of 400 scudi in cash … [having received] 50 scudi in the form of a money order directed to the Most Illustrious Vincenzo Giustiniani … For all this the parties have pledged themselves … They have renounced to the right of appeal, in perfect consent and have taken their oaths respectively: the Prelate according to the custom of his rank, by touching his breast; Messer Michel Angelo [sic], by touching the Bible …23

  Tiberio Cerasi had only acquired the burial chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo in July, barely more than two months earlier, and clearly wanted to avoid the kinds of delay that had plagued the decoration of the Contarelli Chapel. He may also have suspected that he did not have long to live. Two years earlier he had signed his last testament, in which he declared the Hospital of Santa Maria Consolazione to be the erede universale and residuary legatee of his will.24 His father, Stefano Cerasi, had worked there as a physician, and Tiberio had always kept close ties with the institution.25 In his will, Cerasi wrote that his love for the hospital was greater than his poor bequest could convey. He was a man with his mind on the next world, determined to be in credit when the final reckoning came. He would die while work was still in progress on the paintings for his chapel, but the results would surely have pleased him. Caravaggio’s dark and solemn style was well suited to his penitential mood.

  Saints Peter and Paul were deeply revered in Rome. Their heads were reputedly preserved in St John Lateran, their bodies buried before the high altar of St Peter’s. It was believed that they had both been martyred in the city on the same day, baptizing the Roman Church with their blood. Because they were regarded as ‘the founders of the Apostolic See’,26 the stories of their lives were often presented together, but it was unusual to see depictions of the particular episodes prescribed by Cerasi placed side by side. The conversion of Paul was not usually paired with Peter’s martyrdom, but with Peter receiving the keys from Christ.

  There was one notable precedent for the chosen arrangement. In the 1540s, in the Pauline Chapel, next to the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo had painted his last pair of monumental frescoes, a Conversion of St Paul and a Martyrdom of St Peter for Pope Paul III. They are forbiddingly gloomy pictures, part of Michelangelo’s long retreat from ideal beauty. By commissioning Caravaggio to repeat the same juxtaposition of themes in his own burial chapel, Cerasi was implicitly setting him in competition with the ghost of the most celebrated Renaissance artist of all.

  To this challenge, the patron added another. In addition to Caravaggio’s lateral panels of Paul and Peter, he commissioned a painted altarpiece for his chapel. The artist chosen was the Bolognese painter Annibale Carracci, who had recently completed the breathtaking cycle of mythological paintings for the ceiling of the Palazzo Farnese. The subject for his new work was to be The Assumption of the Virgin. Carracci and Caravaggio were the two most talented painters in Rome. Cerasi had secured the services of both, beginning what he must have hoped would be a thrilling battle for pre-eminence.

  Carracci was the senior of the two, some fifteen years older than Caravaggio. Before starting work, he looked at his rival’s new pictures in the nearby church of the French and probably assumed that Caravaggio would repeat the pattern of his Calling and Martyrdom of St Matthew: making the past seem present, painting from carefully posed models, using intense contrasts of light and shade. During the course of his considerably longer career, Carracci himself had flirted with similar methods and devices. But now his sense of competition pushed him to the opposite extreme.

  Painting The Assumption of the Virgin, Carracci reverted to the pure, sweet style of the High Renaissance. He brightened and softened his colours and ruthlessly eliminated any hint of real life. Swathed in drapery the colour of a summer’s sky, arms outspread, an expression of beatific serenity on her perfectly round face, Carracci’s Virgin Mary rises from the tomb like an ecstatic doll. Her feet rest on a cushion of winged cherubim’s heads, while a decorous cast of bearded apostles has been arranged, below her, in various standard poses of politely expressed wonderment. The painting is airless and spaceless, all its figures pushed up to the picture plane as if to a sheet of glass. There is no suggestion of the sacred erupting into the world of the everyday. It is a dream of pure transcendence.

  Carracci’s picture is a point-by-point refutation of all Caravaggio’s innovations in the Contarelli Chapel. Harking back to the serenity of Raphael’s middle style, it is an insistently retrograde work of art – a doctrinaire assertion of the importance of disegno, in the sense both of drawing and of idealized composition. But it also anticipates the swooning, aerially propelled visions of the incipient Baroque – the style that in Italy at least would for a time triumph over Caravaggio’s harsh brand of pious naturalism. The Assumption of the Virgin is a reminder of the powerful tides of taste against which Caravaggio was swimming.

  Annibale Carracci delivered his work on time, to the approval of Tiberio Cerasi, and it was duly installed on the altar of the chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo. Caravaggio struggled with his own commission. Working on panels of cypress wood, as the contract had stipulated, was very different from his usual practice of working on canvas. Oil paint does not penetrate panel in the same way that it works its way into the weft of a canvas. The resulting surface is more reflective, with more emphatically succulent colours and shadows that do not recede as fully into darkness. According to Baglione, Caravaggio persevered with the two panel pictures, but they ‘were painted in a different style’ and ‘did not please the patron’. Cerasi rejected them and the artist had no choice but to start again, this time in his preferred medium of oil on canvas. His abortive first efforts were sold on, Baglione added, to Cardinal Sannesio.

  Only one of these unsatisfactory compositions survives. The attribution to Caravaggio has sometimes been questioned, but is now generally accepted. The dimensions of the panel are very close to those of the two oil paintings that the painter eventually completed for the Cerasi Chapel. Allowing for the painter’s use of an unfamiliar support, the style is convincing. The model for the angel reappears in at least one of Caravaggio’s later works.

  It is not hard to see why Tiberio Cerasi rejected this first Conversion of St Paul. The composition is a clutter and a jumble. As the bearded Paul squirms on the ground, shielding his eyes from the dazzling celestial vision, his horse rears up and foams at the mouth. The saint’s aged retainer, clutching a shield decorated with a crescent moon and wearing an absurdly elaborate plumed helmet, resembles a baffled spear-carrier in a comic opera. Hearing a noise like a thunderclap, but seeing nothing, he brandishes his weapon at thin air. The young, bearded Christ descends from the heavens, reaching down to the stricken Paul with a gesture of grave compassion. He and the angel accompanying him lean awkwardly across a snapped branch of a laurel, like a pair of parachutists stuck in a tree. This cumbersome arrangement probably reflects some actual studio contrivance. A ladder and a length of rope may have been used to help the models assume their poses for this part of the mise-en-scène.

  Once again, the artist’s memories of the popular religious art of Lombardy are much in evidence. The picture bears a strong resemblance to some of t
he more overcrowded scenes enacted by the busy mannequin figures in the chapels of the sacro monte tradition. The painting is more upright than the Contarelli Chapel canvases, yet Caravaggio has tried to squeeze almost as much dramatic action into the narrower compass allowed for by the cramped dimensions of the Cerasi Chapel. As a result, the forms and figures seem bizarrely compressed, with heaven and earth forced into a weird and unconvincing proximity.

  During his early struggles with the Cerasi Chapel commission, Caravaggio was handicapped by an apparent inability to get away from the famous prototype of Michelangelo’s restless and turbulent Conversion of St Paul in the Pauline Chapel. The rearing horse and reeling saint, the figure of Christ descending from the heavens, arm outstretched – he borrowed and adapted all these elements from Michelangelo’s far larger and more densely populated painting, as if he were setting out to create a condensed version of the earlier work. It was only when Cerasi rejected the painting out of hand that Caravaggio reconsidered and found a diametrically different solution. For his second Conversion of St Paul, he went back to basics. He returned to oil on canvas and went back to the biblical source of the story, to find a new way of getting to its heart and bringing it to life.

  The tale of Paul’s conversion is told in the Acts of the Apostles. The Roman citizen Saul of Tarsus, the future St Paul, was travelling to Damascus with letters of authority to persecute the Christians. A harsh and ruthless man, ‘breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord’, he was abruptly stopped in his tracks by a miracle:

  And as he journeyed; he came near Damascus: and suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven: And he fell to the earth, and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? And he said, Who art thou, Lord? And the Lord said, I am Jesus whom thou persecutest … And he trembling and astonished said, Lord, what wilt thou have me to do? And the Lord said unto him, Arise, and go into the city, and it shall be told thee what thou must do. And the men which journeyed with him stood speechless, hearing a voice, but seeing no man. And Saul arose from the earth; and when his eyes were opened, he saw no man: but they led him by the hand, and brought him into Damascus. And he was three days without sight, and neither did eat nor drink’ (Acts 9:1–9).

  Caravaggio’s own revelation, on rereading these words, may have been as sudden. The story is essentially a parable played out between the twin poles of his own art – a tale of light and darkness. Lost in the shadows of evil and ignorance, a vicious man is suddenly bathed by the light of God and his soul is washed clean. In the moment of his ecstatic vision the divine light enters him, invades and permeates his whole being. Filled with this inner illumination, the light of truth and faith, he becomes blind to the mundane world about him. There are striking parallels with the story of Matthew called by Christ as Caravaggio had imagined it in the Contarelli Chapel. But this time the metaphor of illumination, which the painter had brought to the bare text of Matthew’s gospel, is there in the biblical account itself: ‘there shined about him a light from heaven’. In that phrase, he found his key to understanding the nature of Paul’s conversion. Turning his back on the tumult and drama conventionally associated with Paul’s conversion, Caravaggio created a picture of unprecedented calm. Gone are the creakingly theatrical figures of Christ and the angel, replaced by a spectral radiance that is the light of God. There is no noise, no clamour, no comedy of misapprehension here – just simple ignorance contrasted with miraculous divine illumination, an irresistible tide of light that floods the saint and changes him forever.

  Paul’s retainer stands quietly to one side, lost in his thoughts and half lost in the shadows. A hard-faced balding man with a furrowed brow, he tends with calm solicitude to the horse from which his master has fallen. Below, almost beneath the animal’s hooves, the figure of Paul lies on his back with his eyes closed like a man dreaming of his lover. His arms are open wide, embracing the light that envelops him, filling him with truth and wisdom and humanity. He is considerably younger than the wizened, bearded Paul of the rejected version. This Paul is very much the tough Roman soldier described in the Acts of the Apostles – a hard-bodied athlete with a granite jaw who has suddenly been melted by the love of God. His sword lies by his side, resting in folds of red drapery as if to symbolize the rivers of Christian blood that he had meant to shed when he set out for Damascus.

  In the moment of Paul’s ecstasy, the world is brought to a standstill. A physical journey has turned into a spiritual odyssey. Caravaggio’s decision to purge the story of visible narrative was brave and unorthodox, but expressive. Bellori, missing the point with perfect eloquence, described the picture as ‘the Conversion of St Paul, in which the history is completely without action’. On the contrary: the action has been completely internalized, so that we see or sense it unfolding within Paul’s soul. He is being moulded by the light that models his figure with its soft and gentle rays. In the chiaroscuro that plays along the length of his outstretched left arm, in the shafts woven through the tips of his fingers, in the gleams reflected in the dull sheen of his fingernails, light itself becomes palpable – something he feels, accepts, draws into the depths of his body.

  This is a painting to be understood intuitively, instinctively. It is not an intellectual picture, nor one that shows any interest in beauty as conventionally understood. It is designed to speak not to the rich or theologically learned but to the poor – to roughshod peasants and sunburned labourers, ordinary people who had made the long pilgrimage south to Rome and found themselves, at last, inside the city walls. The composition is dominated by the solid, heavy form of the patiently standing horse, lifting a heavy hoof so as not to tread on the prone body of its master. The animal is no thoroughbred, but a stocky piebald beast of burden. Caravaggio paints the weight and density of its powerful flank. He paints the animal’s patience and loyalty. He even conjures up a feeling of the heat that emanates from its slow, heavy body – in rural parts, in the little town where he had been brought up, poor people kept their livestock in their homes in the winter months to keep themselves warm. This is an essential part of the picture’s plainspeaking intimacy. It is like a hearth, inviting cold bodies to gather round and warm themselves in the act of devotion.

  The horse evoked other folk memories too. Like the benign ox and ass in traditional depictions and plays of the Nativity, the animal standing quietly in the dark recalls the manger in which Christ was born. Seen through half-closed eyes, the animal’s groom might almost be St Joseph. The association adds another level of meaning to the scene. In the moment of his conversion Paul is helpless yet blessed, bathed by the light of God, just as Christ was in his infancy.

  Behind all this is the old idea of the Imitatio Christi, which was central to the ethics of the old pauperist orders such as the Franciscans. To understand Christ’s message is to become like him, to follow in his footsteps – to undergo a profound, internal metamorphosis. At the instant of his inner rebirth as a Christian, Paul mystically experiences the whole life of Christ, its beginning and its end. He becomes, in his own mind, both Christ the blessed child and Christ the doomed adult, sacrificed to save mankind. In the movements of his body are reflected the motions of his soul. He reaches his arms out like a baby. As he does so, his gesture mimes the Crucifixion.

  The theological justification for pairing St Paul’s conversion with St Peter’s martyrdom was the belief that each event represented a mystical death. At his conversion, Paul dies to the world to be reborn in Christ; at his martyrdom, Peter literally dies, to meet his rewards in heaven. Such symmetry is implicit in the relationship between Caravaggio’s two paintings. The prone body of Paul, cruciform in a gesture of spiritual empathy, is echoed by the actually crucified body of Peter.

  According to legend, Peter insisted that he be crucified upside down because he felt unworthy to die the same death as Christ. In The Crucifixion of St Peter, Caravaggio shows him already nailed to the cross, defiantly half rearing up as
his executioners toil to raise him into place. He exhales against the pain, stomach muscles tensing, and looks away out of the picture. His eyes are fixed on the actual chapel’s altar, as if to stress that death by martyrdom is another form of participation in the rite of the Mass. Even as his own blood is shed, he trusts that he will be saved by the flesh and blood of Christ. The rock in the foreground is the symbol of his hard, enduring faith, cornerstone of the Church itself: ‘thou art Peter, and upon this rock I shall build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it’ (Matthew 16:18–19).

  The action takes place in some dim corner of a nocturnal world lit only by the flash of God’s grace. The light falls on Peter and the straining figures of his three executioners, but the martyr alone is alive to its message of salvation. The others grunt and sweat under the burden of his weight, grimly immersing themselves in the practical business of hoisting up a human body nailed to a cross. They look as though they are trying not to think about what they are actually doing – or pretending to themselves that it might be some more innocent and straightforward task, such as erecting a fence-post, or heaving the joist of a house into place.

  The executioners are insensitive to the point of insentience, blind to the mystical significance of the death they so callously arrange. Their figures are pushed up so close to the front edge of the picture that they seem almost to spill out into the real world. Like The Conversion of St Paul, The Crucifixion of St Peter is a painting aimed squarely at poor and ordinary people. It is a challenge as well as a call to conscience: viewers are brought into its space and invited to take the place of Peter’s executioners, at least in the mind’s eye – to make good their failings, to show compassion and mercy, to open up to the light of God.