Caravaggio
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The gospel of Matthew was at the centre of a controversy between Catholics and Protestants. In the fourth century, St Jerome had asserted that Matthew wrote in Hebrew. But at the start of the sixteenth century the humanist author Erasmus had questioned whether the received version had really been translated from a Hebrew original. This raised the possibility that the biblical book of Matthew was based on a later, corrupt version of the text – posing a grave threat to the authority of the Church itself. In 1537 a Protestant Hebraist named Sebastian Munster published his own translation of a Jewish manuscript that he claimed was the true text of Matthew’s gospel, and which differed from the received version in numerous places. Caravaggio was certainly aware of this: the words in the book on Matthew’s lap are written in Hebrew, and he has been careful to ensure that they exactly mirror the sense of the received version approved by the Catholic Church.40
Because Matthew has just started writing his gospel, the painter shows its opening lines: ‘The book of the generations of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.’ Matthew, aided by the angel, is about to finish the next phrase, ‘Abraham begat’, which marks the start of the gospel’s tracing of the lineage of Christ. As the bloodline leading to the salvation of mankind is announced, Matthew stares in wonder.
According to St Jerome, Matthew was the first of the apostles to write his gospel. By the time Caravaggio painted his picture, this had become part of Catholic tradition. He alludes to it by implication through his emphatic use of chiaroscuro. As the wizened, sunburned figure of Matthew receives the very first divinely inspired Christian text, he is bathed in light. Through him, the whole world will be illuminated. As so often during this phase of his career, Caravaggio defines his own art by contrast with that of Michelangelo. Once more, he has the Sistine Chapel in mind, specifically the vast, sculptural figures of the prophets who sit enthroned at the level of the pendentive arches. Michelangelo’s monumental figures, like Caravaggio’s Matthew, are shown in the spasms of divine revelation, reading or writing the prophecies vouchsafed to them by God. Also like Caravaggio’s Matthew, they are barefoot, and often accompanied by inspiring angelic figures.
But Caravaggio evokes the comparison with Michelangelo’s prophets only to offer his own, opposed conception of divine inspiration. His St Matthew perfectly reverses all of the properties of the Michelangelesque figure of the prophet. Michelangelo’s prophets are nobly idealized figures, decorously draped, but Caravaggio’s Matthew is an ordinary, imperfect human being in working clothes that leave his arms and legs bare. Michelangelo depicts troubled intellectuals, straining to grasp God’s veiled meanings, but Caravaggio’s sainted peasant is a simple man stunned by the directness of his revelation. Whereas Michelangelo’s prophets sit on carved thrones of marble, Caravaggio’s apostle sits on a simple wooden chair, the same savonarola chair already used for the Calling of Matthew and the Supper at Emmaus.
Perhaps the most touching aspect of the painting is the intimacy of the relationship between the stooped saint and the tender young angel, whose wings enfold the whole scene in a hushed embrace. The angel is God’s messenger but also the embodiment of Christian love – a love so generous it encompasses even those as ragged and gnarled as the cross-legged, doltish St Matthew. The contrast between the two figures is the contrast between extreme youth and encroaching old age. Frailty is being overcome, an old man is being made young by the teachings of a child, which are the teachings of Christ himself, and the writing of the first word of the first gospel marks the very instant when the Old Testament is being replaced by the New.
Despite or more likely because of its brusque singularity Caravaggio’s picture ‘pleased nobody’, according to Baglione. The St Matthew was rejected as soon as it was delivered. Bellori gave the fullest account of events: ‘Here something happened that greatly upset Caravaggio with respect to his reputation. After he had finished the central picture of St Matthew and installed it on the altar, the priests took it down, saying that the figure with its legs crossed and its feet rudely exposed to the public had neither decorum nor the appearance of a saint.’41 That was, of course, precisely Caravaggio’s point: Christ and his followers looked a lot more like beggars than cardinals. But the decision of Mathieu Cointrel’s executors – who included François Cointrel, his nephew and heir – was final. Saving Caravaggio’s blushes, Vincenzo Giustiniani took the painting of St Matthew for his own collection. According to Bellori, Giustiniani also prevailed on the congregation of San Luigi dei Francesi to allow the painter to try again.
The resulting picture, his second version of St Matthew and the Angel, was accepted without demur. It remains on the altar of the chapel. The character of the painting, and indeed the very fact that it was commissioned at all, suggests that those in charge of the commission had few doubts about the painter’s ability. As far as they were concerned, it was merely his taste, and the tenor of his piety, that was suspect: if he was given the right instruction, these could easily be amended.
The second St Matthew suggests that Bellori’s account of the reasons for the rejection of the first was correct. Matthew the shockingly illiterate peasant has suddenly been turned into Matthew the dignified, grey-haired sage. This scholar-saint kneels at his desk, quill pen at the ready. He is draped in red robes and has been equipped with an expression of dignified attentiveness. Rather than guiding his uncertain hand, the angel now counts off the verses as he dictates them. The pages of the book are no longer visible, but since the angel has got to the index finger of his left hand – number two, in the gestural rhetoric of the time, since Italians counted the number one with their thumbs – it seems that he has once more got to the start of the second verse, and Abraham’s begetting of Christ’s lineage. The angel’s airborne arrival from behind Matthew closely echoes the composition of Tintoretto’s Virgin Appearing to St Jerome, which Caravaggio may have seen in Venice. There is no suggestion of intimacy here. A message is not vouchsafed tenderly as an act of love, but handed down from on high as an emanation of divine authority.
Caravaggio’s second St Matthew and the Angel is a much diluted, dutifully toned-down version of his original idea. Matthew’s poverty and humility are not rudely proclaimed, but politely whispered. The most tellingly emphatic of the painter’s several adjustments relate to the apostle’s feet. They are shown in profile rather than thrust towards the viewer, still bare but unlikely to offend anybody.
For the first but not the last time, Caravaggio’s work had been censored. His sin when painting the first St Matthew had been to make holy poverty and humility unpalatably real. On this occasion his embarrassment was spared by Vincenzo Giustiniani, but Giustiniani’s purchase of the first St Matthew itself created a paradox. A work of art expressly designed to articulate ideals of popular piety, to appeal to the broadest possible audience, had been deemed unsuitable for mass consumption. Instead, the picture had found a home in the collection of a noted connoisseur. The implication was that there was something dangerous, even seditious, about Caravaggio’s emphatically humble vision of the origins of Christianity. In a prominent church, such an intoxicatingly powerful painting might serve as a rallying cry. It might have an influence. Its visual language might help shape the visual language of the Counter-Reformation Catholic Church. But confined to the collection of a rich man, it became something much less potent: an interesting work of art, an experiment in a new style, but altogether too strange and adventurous for anyone but a sophisticate and his friends to appreciate.
LONG LIVE V
Vincenzo Giustiniani was a torchbearer for Caravaggio’s intensely ascetic religious art. He had probably helped the painter to win the commission to paint the lateral canvases in the Cerasi Chapel, and if Bellori is to believed it was he who persuaded the executors of Mathieu Cointrel to allow Caravaggio a second attempt at the St Matthew altarpiece for the Contarelli Chapel. Now, probably around the start of 1603, Giustiniani commissioned one of Caravaggio’s most uncompromisingly pauperis
t depictions of Christ and his disciples, Doubting Thomas,42 and when it was finished he displayed it prominently in the huge Palazzo Giustiniani, opposite San Luigi dei Francesi, on Via Crescenzi. Its presence there, in addition to that of the first St Matthew, meant that the Giustiniani collection was fast becoming an advertisement for Caravaggio’s new approach to devotional art. Vincenzo Giustiniani must have hoped that with his support the artist would eventually win papal favour, obtain great public commissions and become one of those painters who transform the depiction of Christian belief. Without him, many of Caravaggio’s most remarkable pictures might never have been created.
Doubting Thomas is a raw picture about the palpable proving of faith. Joachim von Sandrart, impressed by the graphic realism of the work, described it as a picture of ‘Christ, in whose holy wounds, Thomas, in the presence of the other apostles, is putting his finger. By means of good painting and modelling he was able to show on the faces of all those present such an expression of astonishment and naturalness of skin and flesh that in comparison all other pictures seemed to be coloured paper.’43 Sandrart was responding not only to the flesh wound in Christ’s side but also to the wrinkled and wizened skin of Thomas and his companions. Thin and papery with age, perhaps it was this that elicited his thoughts about other pictures looking like coloured paper. Caravaggio, once the painter of withered autumn fruits, was becoming increasingly the painter of withered human beings, battered by age and poverty.
Like The Supper at Emmaus, Doubting Thomas was inspired by a legend of the risen Christ. The painter’s source was a passage from the gospel of John:
when the doors were shut where the disciples were assembled for fear of the Jews, came Jesus and stood in the midst, and saith unto them, Peace be with you. And when he had so said, he shewed unto them his hands and his side. Then were the disciples glad, when they saw the Lord … But Thomas, one of the twelve, called Didymus, was not with them when Jesus came. The other disciples therefore said unto him, We have seen the Lord. But he said unto them, Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe. And after eight days again his disciples were within, and Thomas with them: then came Jesus, the doors being shut, and stood in the midst, and said, Peace be unto you. Then saith he to Thomas, Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing. And Thomas answered and said unto him, My Lord and my God. Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed’ (John 20:20–29).
Caravaggio chose a half-length frieze-like composition and a close-up view, further excluding all extraneous detail with his usual blanket of shadow. The story is distilled to its essence. Four faces, arranged in the configuration of a diamond, bear mute witness to the miracle of the Resurrection. Christ gently accepts the indignity of being surgically investigated by his sceptical follower. Holding aside the folds of his burial sheet, he guides Thomas’s hand towards him and draws the disciple’s forefinger into his open wound. Two fellow-disciples crowd round, eyes fixed on the clinical probing of divine flesh. Christ too looks down, as though assisting at his own autopsy. The place where finger meets wound is a different kind of vanishing point, achieved without the calculations of perspective. All converges at the place where the miracle is proved to be true, and the metaphysical and the empirical meet.
Thomas and his fellow apostles are men in the same mould as the first St Matthew and the Angel, earnest, ordinary, with heavily lined brows and sunburned faces. Thomas’s sleeve needs restitching at the shoulder. An otherwordly radiance floods the scene, illumination the herald of revelation. Cured of his doubt, Thomas himself looks not at the wound in Christ’s side but instead to the light.
There is also, once more, the suggestion of a reminiscence of Michelangelo’s paintings for the Sistine Chapel. Thomas’s reaching gesture is another of Caravaggio’s inverted variations on the fingertip-touching act of generation at the centre of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam. In the act of touching Christ, Thomas is born again in unquestioning faith.
Giustiniani commissioned one other, very different picture from Caravaggio. It is the single, stunning exception to the prevailingly solemn body of work produced by the artist during these middle years of his career. Omnia vincit amor, or Love Conquers All, was painted in the summer of 1602. The most nakedly libidinous of the painter’s secular mythological works, it is a mischievously joyful celebration of Eros – a laughing proclamation of the power of sexual love.
A smooth-skinned, naked young Cupid, far removed from the wizened saints of Caravaggio’s devotional pictures, confronts the viewer with a puckish smile. The figure half sits and half stands, one leg raised and bent at an angle of almost ninety degrees to his body. Awkwardly perched on a table draped with a white sheet, he occupies an interior cluttered with the stuff of intellectual, artistic, military and political endeavour: men may fight and dream, create and aspire, but in the end love will always triumph over all. The picture’s symbolism is concisely explained in a 1638 inventory of the Giustiniani collection, where it is listed as ‘A painting of a smiling Cupid, in the act of disparaging the world’.44 The question of whether it may have had other and deeper meanings, both for Caravaggio and for his patron, Vincenzo Giustiniani, has been hotly contested.
The pubescent boy who modelled for the picture also modelled for the St John the Baptist, painted by Caravaggio for Ciriaco Mattei at around the same time. Like that other picture, Omnia vincit amor is a variation on Michelangelo’s ignudi in the Sistine Chapel, although the effect on this occasion could hardly be more different. The St John is a sanctified version of a Michelangelo nude, spiritually transformed by Christian revelation. This dazzling Cupid in an airless room is devoid of conscience or piety. He embodies a triumphant, amoral, vibrant sexuality.
The figure’s pose carries echoes not only of the ignudi, but also of famous sculptures, one by Michelangelo, the marble figure of Victory,45 and one by Donatello, the celebrated bronze David, the first freestanding image of the male nude since antiquity, a work charged with homoerotic overtones. Caravaggio’s sexy adolescent is the extrovert alter ego of Donatello’s veiled, ambiguous, naked young man. The most sensually explicit detail of Donatello’s bronze is a feather, a plume from the felled Goliath’s helmet, that tickles David’s inner thigh. The same motif is repeated in Caravaggio’s painting, but here the boy’s leg is brushed by the tip of one of his own Cupid’s wings.
Joachim von Sandrart, a guest of Vincenzo Giustiniani between 1629 and 1635, reported that the marchese prized the Omnia vincit amor above all the other works in his collection. He gave an admiring, if not altogether accurate, description of the picture itself, and an arresting account of the manner in which it was originally displayed:
Caravaggio painted for the Marchese Giustiniani a life-size Cupid as a boy of about 12 years old, seated on a globe, and raising his bow in his right hand. On his left are various instruments, a book for studies, a laurel wreath. The Cupid has the brown wings of an eagle. Everything is accurately and clearly designed with bright colours and a three-dimensionality that approximates reality. This painting was among 120 others in a gallery of the most celebrated artists. But, I recall, it was covered with a curtain of dark green silk, and was shown last, after all the others, to avoid eclipsing the other works.46
The objects strewn at Cupid’s feet and by his side form a dispersed but uniquely haunting still life: a hallucination of things. They allude to the arts, sciences and letters. A compass and triangle, representing architecture as well as geometry, are prominent in the left foreground. A violin and a lute, rendered in extreme foreshortening, are propped on a musical part-book. A manuscript, emblem of literary ambition, lies open and abandoned on the floor. A laurel wreath has been dropped on to an empty cuirass and other scattered pieces of armour, of the same dark steel as that worn by the sinister s
oldier in The Betrayal of Christ. These signs of military glory undone are complemented by the crown and sceptre obscurely nestling in the dishevelled sheets near Cupid’s raised calf. Poking out from behind his right thigh is the rim of a celestial globe, blue with gold stars. Astronomy too has been laid low by Cupid, who holds up two arrows – not his bow, as Sandrart had asserted – to symbolize his triumph over all the works and schemes of industrious but easily tempted humanity.
The objects in the painting may have been selected to reflect Vincenzo Giustiniani’s own interests and family history. He was an author and a well-known musical amateur with a keen interest in astrology. The Giustiniani also had an illustrious military and political history. According to one ingenious (but incorrect) interpretation, the picture is not even intended to show love’s triumph over all worldly endeavours. Instead it is a celebration of Vincenzo Giustiniani’s many accomplishments, a Neoplatonic allegory of the passion propelling him and his family to so many different forms of excellence.47 But if art and culture really were being celebrated, why would their remnants litter the floor like bric-a-brac?