Caravaggio

by Andrew Graham-Dixon

  The novices of the Order of St John listened to sermons and received instruction in the oratory for which Caravaggio’s painting was destined. The place was both a school for the martyrs of the future and a burial ground for the martyrs of the past – the bones of the knights who had died at the Great Siege were interred beneath its stone-flagged floor. Within the oratory, novices were trained in the hard ways of the Knights of Malta and made to understand that they too might have to face death in a distant land at the hands of unbelievers. Caravaggio’s altarpiece was designed to make sure that they could be under no illusions about what that might mean. A martyr’s death brought the reward of eternal glory with the saints in heaven, but there would be nothing glorious about the death itself. It could be a death much like this one, a sordid act of butchery in a dark and lonely place. The picture is like a catechism, an asking of questions. Are you sure you have it in you to be a Knight of the Order of St John? Are you ready to die? To die like this?

  Next to the executioner, underscoring Caravaggio’s transposition of John’s legend to a cruel present, stands the figure of a Turkish jailor with heavy black keys dangling at his belt. He directs operations with an air of weary impatience, pointing unnecessarily at the richly chased and gilded plate onto which the severed head must be placed. Beside him stands an old woman with her head in her hands, distraught at the spectacle of the martyrdom. She is another version of the goitrous peasant woman gazing piteously at the crucified body of the saint in The Crucifixion of St Andrew. She stands for Christian pity and prayer. The main group of five figures is completed by that of the serving girl who has been sent to collect the head.62 Her pose has an eloquent woodenness about it. She is trying her best to carry out a task that appals her, affecting a mechanical workaday demeanour that the expression on her face belies. She stares fixedly down at the plate in her hands, pursing her lips like somebody desperately stifling the impulse to puke.

  What she cannot bear to look at is the spurting of the saint’s blood from the deep gash in his nearly severed neck. It is so thick that it resembles a skein of red wool laid on the ground. Beneath the main pool of coagulating gore, there lie some thinner threads of blood. Anyone looking closely at the picture sees that they have been made to spell out the letters of Caravaggio’s own name: ‘F. Michelangelo’. Inscribed in the blood of St John the Baptist himself, this is the only example of the artist’s signature. He had never signed a painting before, and would never do so again.

  This boldly idiosyncratic gesture has been subjected to a variety of anachronistic modern interpretations. It has been read, for example, as the veiled retrospective confession of Caravaggio, the murderer; and as a proto-Freudian token of his fetishistic obsession with violence and death. But the true meaning of the signature in blood is clear and unambiguous. The key to it lies in a tradition of Christian symbolism to which Caravaggio had already alluded earlier in his career. Years before, when painting The Martyrdom of St Matthew for the Contarelli Chapel in Rome, he had evoked the ancient link between martyrdom and baptism by having Matthew’s blood flow into a baptismal pool. The blood signature alluded to the same association, although its meaning was subtly different. In The Martyrdom of Matthew, it was Matthew and Matthew alone who had been reborn into immortality through his own martyrdom. In The Beheading of St John, it is not only the martyr who gains eternal life. Caravaggio himself has been symbolically reborn, through his acceptance into the ranks of those dedicated to the martyred John the Baptist.

  The Beheading of St John was Caravaggio’s gift to the Knights of Malta, a due paid in lieu of his passaggio into the Order of St John. Its completion, therefore, marked his entry into the brotherhood of knights. Hence that prominent ‘F’ before his name. It stands for ‘Fra’, or ‘Brother’, the official prefix of any Knight of St John.63 The artist’s signature, written in John the Baptist’s blood, was a public proclamation. It was Caravaggio’s way of asserting that his own mortal sin, the murderous letting of a man’s blood, had been washed away by the blood of his new patron saint. Now he could return to Rome, not as a criminal but as a proud Christian soldier.

  COMPETING WITH MICHELANGELO

  Caravaggio must have added his signature to the work some time shortly after 14 July 1608; because it was on that date, exactly a year and two days after his arrival on Malta, that he was invested with the habit of a Knight of Magistral Obedience and given the title ‘Fra Michelangelo Merisi’. The address given by the Grand Master at the ceremony of the investiture can only have increased the artist’s pleasure in his newfound status. In the Bull of his reception, Wignacourt went so far as to compare Caravaggio with Apelles of Kos, the celebrated painter of ancient Greece:

  Whereas it behooves the leaders and rulers of commonweals to prove their benevolence by advancing men, not only on account of their noble birth but also on account of their art and science whatever it may be, so that human talent, hopeful of obtaining reward and honour, might apply itself to praiseworthy studies:

  And whereas the Honorable Michael Angelo, born in the town Carraca, in the vernacular called Caravaggio, in Lombardy, having been called to this city, burning with zeal for the order, has communicated to us his fervent wish to be adorned with our habit and insignia.

  Therefore, as we wish to gratify the desire of this excellent painter, so that our island of Malta, and our order, may at last glory in this adopted disciple and citizen with no less pride than the island of Kos (also within our jurisdiction) extols her Apelles; and that, should we compare him to more recent artists of our age, we may not afterwards be envious of the artistic excellence of any other outstanding man of equally important name and brush … and as we wish to comply with the pious wish of the aforesaid Michael Angelo, we receive and admit him, by the grace of God almighty and by a papal authorization especially granted to us for the purpose, to the rank of Brethren and Knights known as Brethren and Knights of Obedience …64

  This pretty sequence of tributes pays the greatest compliment of all to Wignacourt himself, because if Caravaggio is a new Apelles, the Grand Master is by implication a second Alexander the Great. The author of the encomium, with its flowery phrases and polished rhetoric, was almost certainly Wignacourt’s erudite secretary, Francesco dell’Antella, who had also played a part in lobbying for Caravaggio’s knighthood some months earlier.65 Dell’Antella was a learned Florentine, who for a Knight of Malta prided himself on his sophistication and classical learning. He also took an unusually strong interest in art. He was himself a gifted amateur draughtsman, who produced an impressively detailed drawing of Valletta as one of the illustrations for his friend Giacomo Bosio’s history of the Order of St John. Dell’Antella would eventually become an official member of the Accademia del Disegno in Florence, the first Italian art academy, founded by Giorgio Vasari in the mid sixteenth century.66 Like Caravaggio, dell’Antella was a proud and stormy man with a tendency to violence. He had even killed Wignacourt’s own nephew in a swordfight, but had been magnanimously forgiven by the Grand Master on the grounds that he had been unjustly provoked. This similarity of temperament and history may have given the two men some affinity.

  Perhaps as a gesture of gratitude to dell’Antella, perhaps to commission, Caravaggio painted a wry and learned cabinet picture for him, Sleeping Cupid. The mischievous and malign child-god lies sleeping, one wing folded beneath him, the other reduced to the barely perceptible rim of a feathery arc. In his left hand he limply holds a bow, of Indo-Persian design, and a feathered dart of love. A dim light illuminates the scene, suggestive of the first glimmers of dawn. The picture is a darker, drowsier, dreamlike version of the Omnia vincit amor painted in 1602 for Vincenzo Giustiniani. This time the Cupid is not an adolescent boy but a child, with the plump, fleshy body and heavy, lolling head of a toddler.

  The painting is close in spirit to a poem about a statue of sleeping Cupid in Giambattista Marino’s La Galeria, an anthology of verse inspired by works of art both real and imaginary. Marino wa
s a close contemporary of Caravaggio, and had been a friend of his in Rome, so it is possible that the painter had the poet’s verses in mind when he painted his picture.

  Marino begins by warning the prospective visitor to his poetical museum against waking the image of the sleeping child:

  Guàrdati Peregrino

  non gli andar si vicino,

  nol desar, prega, ch’egli

  dorma in eterno pur, né mai si svegli.

  Se tu’l sonno tenace

  rompi al fanciul sagace,

  desto il vedrai più forte

  trattar quell’armi, ond’è

  e peggior che Morte.

  Look out, Pilgrim

  do not get so close,

  do not rouse him, pray that he

  sleeps forever and never wakes up.

  If you break the clever boy’s sleep,

  right away you will see him yet more strongly

  take up those weapons that make him

  worse than death.67

  Marino’s sleeping child is lost in cruel dreams of deceptions, massacres and sufferings. Dawn is breaking and he will soon awake to visit more miseries of love on his countless victims. The poem ends with a question, and a joking reminder that the subject of all these fears and fantasies is after all merely a work of art:

  Qual tu ti sia, che ‘l miri,

  temi non vivi e spiri?

  Stendi securo il passo:

  toccal pur, scherza teco, egli è di sasso.

  Whoever you are, who gaze upon him,

  do you fear lest he live and breathe?

  Lengthen your stride with confidence, do not tiptoe,

  Touch him even – I was teasing you – he is made of stone.

  Caravaggio’s painting also plays teasingly on the boundary between art and reality. The sleeping boy is an image, but of a disconcertingly lifelike kind. His teeth can be seen glinting behind his half-closed lips. The abandon with which his head is thrown back and the look of absorption on his face powerfully conjure the illusion of a real child caught up in a vivid dream. But there are other ways of looking at this picture too. Like Marino’s poem, Caravaggio’s painting looks back knowingly to the world of antiquity. Not only does it evoke the myth of Cupid; it also calls to mind the many ancient Greek legends about images of art so deceptively convincing that they seemed real – the painted grapes of Xeuxis which, as Pliny the Elder relates, fooled the birds into pecking at them, or the statue of a woman infused with such love by the sculptor Pygmalion that she actually came to life and stepped down off her pedestal. In painting the Sleeping Cupid, Caravaggio was making his own contribution to the imaginary art gallery of the classical past – and living up to the classical compliment that had so recently been paid to him at his investiture as a Knight of Malta. He had been dubbed the new Apelles, and now he was wittily acting the part.

  There was yet another layer of allusion for the learned Francesco dell’Antella to enjoy as he contemplated his new possession, this time to a more recent work of art. The subject of Cupid asleep was famously associated with Caravaggio’s namesake, Michelangelo Buonarroti. When Michelangelo was young, he had created a sculpture of a Sleeping Cupid so perfectly classical in spirit that he was able to pass it off as a genuine antique work of art. Giorgio Vasari tells the story:

  [He] set himself to make from another piece of marble a Cupid that was sleeping, of the size of life. This, when finished, was shown … to Lorenzo di Pier Francesco [Medici] as a beautiful thing, and he, having pronounced the same judgement, said to Michelangelo: ‘If you were to bury it under ground and then send it to Rome treated in such a manner as to make it look old, I am certain that it would pass for an antique, and you would thus obtain much more for it than by selling it here.’ It is said that Michelangelo handled it in such a manner as to make it appear an antique; nor is there any reason to marvel at that, seeing as he had genius enough to do it, and even more.68

  Michelangelo Buonarroti had created a sculpture of Cupid to rival the masterpieces of antiquity. Now Michelangelo Merisi was vying with him by emulating that very act of classical emulation. Implicit in the gesture was the Renaissance conceit of the paragone, a contest between different art forms. Michelangelo, the sculptor, had given tangible form to his Sleeping Cupid. Caravaggio, the painter, could not do that. But he could create a greater illusion of flesh and blood, and he could use his mastery of chiaroscuro to evoke the light of approaching dawn.

  The Sleeping Cupid is essentially a jeu d’esprit. But it is also a vitally important painting for the understanding of Caravaggio’s work as a whole, demonstrating his high degree of erudition and establishing beyond any doubt an explicit spirit of competition with Michelangelo, which had seemed at least implicit in so many of his Roman paintings, from The Calling of St Matthew onwards. Francesco dell’Antella made the comparison overtly when he went out of his way to show the picture to a great-nephew of Michelangelo named Francesco Buonarroti, who was also a Knight of Malta; and he then actually sent the work to Florence in the hope that the most celebrated member of the modern Buonarroti family, Fra Francesco’s brother, the poet and dramatist Michelangelo the Younger, would give his opinion of it. Michelangelo the Younger clearly did see this rivalrous homage to his great-uncle’s marble Cupid, because on 24 April 1610, dell’Antella wrote to him to say: ‘I value now more than before my Cupid, after hearing the praise of your Lordship for which I kiss your hand.’69

  APELLES IN PRISON

  The perennially spiky Caravaggio was celebrated on Malta. In his own estimation he had always been a valent’huomo. Now he was truly being treated like one. Alof de Wignacourt was delighted with the painter’s work for the order. According to Bellori, he was so impressed by the enormous new altarpiece for the Oratory of St John that ‘as a reward, beside the honour of the Cross, the Grand Master put a gold chain around Caravaggio’s neck, and made him a gift of two slaves, along with other signs of esteem and appreciation for his work’.70 Finally, Caravaggio had got his own gold chain.

  It may only have been at this moment of apparent happiness and prosperity that the full implications of being a Knight of Malta finally dawned on him. Not only was he bound to the island by the Grand Master’s whim, but obliged to live in strict observance of the statutes of the order. Sexual indiscretions were liable to be tolerated as long as they were committed out of the public eye, but any other disorderly conduct would be ruthlessly dealt with under the knights’ code of law. That meant no shouting or trading of insults, no fighting, no duelling with swords. For a man like Caravaggio, that was never going to be easy, especially in a town like Valletta. The city teemed with proud young noblemen from the different national Langues, intensely conscious of the most minute differences in rank and status. As Alof de Wignacourt himself remarked in a letter to the pope, ‘It is impossible, in a place where so many are devoted to the profession of arms, and where so much importance is given to points of honour, that there should not be numerous fights and brawls.’71

  Costanza Colonna and her son, Fabrizio Sforza Colonna, must have known that they were taking a calculated risk when they sent Caravaggio to Malta. Their hope must have been that the ruthless military discipline of the Order of St John would persuade him to keep his temper under control. Everything went to plan for a while, as Caravaggio painted for the central figures of the Maltese establishment. But the gamble did not pay off. The painter’s pride in his knighthood came before his greatest fall from grace. Caravaggio’s character had always been a volatile compound, an uneasy blend of Lenten piety and the raucous spirit of Carnival. This was never more true than on Malta.

  It is impossible to know what triggered the outburst that undid him. Perhaps it was his shocked realization that Wignacourt indeed wanted ‘not to lose him’ – to chain him to the island, perhaps not forever, but for several more years. Whatever the cause, just weeks after admission to the Order of St John, Caravaggio lashed out against its authority. In the space of a few hours he went from h
ero to villain.

  The early biographers are vague on the subject of what went wrong for Caravaggio on Malta. Mancini does not even mention the incident. According to Baglione, who was better informed, the cause of the trouble was an argument with a Knight of Justice: ‘In Malta Michelangelo had a dispute with a Knight of Justice and somehow insulted him.’72 Knights of Justice were higher ranking than mere Knights of Magistral Obedience. So Baglione may have meant to imply an argument over status, which was just the sort of ‘point of honour’ liable to cause the frequent fights between brothers of the order mentioned by Wignacourt in his letter to the pope.

  Bellori’s account is similar to Baglione’s, except that in his version of the story Caravaggio’s mercurial nature is the driving force behind the calamity. Like the hero of a Greek tragedy, he is a man ruinously undone by a fatal flaw of character: ‘He lived in Malta in dignity and abundance. But suddenly, because of his tormented nature, he lost his prosperity and the support of the Grand Master. On account of an ill-considered quarrel with a noble knight, he was jailed and reduced to a state of misery and fear.’73

  Caravaggio certainly committed an offence on Malta, one serious enough to merit imprisonment. But for centuries the exact nature of that offence remained a mystery. Generations of historians combed the archives in Malta, where the great books of statutes, crimes and punishments are still preserved in the library of the Order of St John, but to little effect. One of the volumes stored there revealed much about the aftermath of Caravaggio’s crime, but nothing about the crime itself. Tantalizingly, a number of adjacent pages in that same book had been systematically and deliberately painted out with a thick layer of opaque pigment.