Caravaggio

by Andrew Graham-Dixon

  Caravaggio’s situation was awkward and fraught with danger. The galleys of Malta were in the waters of Messina throughout the last months of 1608. Not only that, but some time before 4 November Fra Antonio Martelli had taken up residence as the order’s prior of the city. He is unlikely to have looked on Caravaggio’s transgressions with a fond and forgiving paternal eye, but his ability to move openly against the painter was compromised because in the winter of that year the order was in litigation with the Senate of Messina, a state of affairs that continued for the duration of Caravaggio’s stay in the city.

  According to Susinno, Caravaggio’s fame had preceded him. He must have won the favour of the Senate, because his services were immediately in demand: ‘The new reputation of Caravaggio appealed to the sympathetic people of Messina, who always favoured strangers, and the impressive excellence of such a man was such that they wanted him to stay, and they gave him commissions.’96 Emboldened by Fra Martelli’s relative impotence, Caravaggio even had the cheek to present himself to his eager new clients as a fully fledged Knight of Malta. When the first of his Messinese altarpieces was consigned for delivery, the relevant document referred to the work as being ‘by the hand of fr. Michelangeli Caravagio [sic] Knight of the Order of Jerusalem’.97 Caravaggio was well aware that violation of the order’s thirteenth statute meant inevitable expulsion, so he cannot simply have been acting in ignorance of his own disgrace.98

  There are suggestions that the painter still hoped to win a pardon from Wignacourt. According to Bellori, ‘hoping to placate the Grand Master, Caravaggio sent to him as a present the half-figure of Herodias with the head of St John the Baptist in a basin’99 – a work that can tentatively be identified with a painting of a similar subject now in the National Gallery, London. But by continuing to pose as a Knight of Malta, he must have damaged his cause further. The stony-faced Fra Antonio Martelli is unlikely to have been impressed and reported back, no doubt, to the Grand Master. Alof de Wignacourt’s desire to have Caravaggio forcibly extradited from Sicily can only have been strengthened by his insulting masquerade.

  As Susinno suggested, the painter was soon hard at work for his new Messinese patrons. On 6 December a wealthy merchant named Giovan Battista de’ Lazzari entered into an agreement to build and decorate the central chapel of the church of the Padri Crociferi, the ‘cross-bearing fathers’, a confraternity of hospitallers devoted to caring for the sick.100 Determined to obtain the services of Caravaggio, the de’ Lazzari family offered him a huge sum of money to paint the principal altarpiece for their new chapel, more than three times the fee he might have expected for an equivalent commission when he was at the peak of his fame in Rome. The proposed title was The Madonna, St John the Baptist and Other Saints, which suggests a rather static image of the type that would come to be known as a Sacra Conversazione, or ‘sacred conversation’. Caravaggio must have disliked the subject, because in a play on his patrons’ family name he made the counter-suggestion that they commission him to paint The Resurrection of Lazarus instead. The de’ Lazzari accepted the proposal, and some time around the start of 1609 Caravaggio started work.

  In Rome at the height of the Renaissance it had not been unknown for a famous artist to alter the terms of a commission. Michelangelo had famously plucked up the courage to tell Pope Julius II that his initial plan for the Sistine Chapel ceiling was ‘a poor thing’, replacing the pope’s proposal of twelve apostles in a field of classical decoration with his own vastly more ambitious scheme of illustrations to the Book of Genesis. But in the provincial artistic milieu of Messina, Caravaggio’s assertion of independence was still being talked about a hundred years later. Susinno was even more struck by it than he was by the huge fee that the painter was paid:

  When some wealthy members of the house of Lazzaro wished to build a new chapel for the church of the Padri Crociferi, they commissioned Caravaggio to paint a large canvas and agreed to pay the sum of 1,000 scudi. Caravaggio conceived the Resurrection of Lazarus, alluding to their family. Those noblemen were greatly satisfied, and the artist was given free rein to fulfil his creative fantasy. It is commendable to give liberty to great artists to operate at their own will, instead of tying both their hands when they are ordered to execute a certain work in this or that manner or form.101

  Why, apart from this play on his patrons’ name, did Caravaggio want to paint the story of Lazarus raised from the dead? It was a subject rarely depicted since the very early Renaissance. Following the conventions of Byzantine art, Giotto and Duccio had painted Lazarus, plague-spotted, rising from his tomb still wrapped in his grave clothes. In Caravaggio’s later work, there is a powerful thrust towards both the subject matter and the style of much earlier Christian art. The only artist before him to have deliberately regressed in a comparable way had been – again – Michelangelo. With the creation of the Rondanini Pietà, late in life, Michelangelo had plunged his art back to the angular and ascetic forms of Gothic carving. Caravaggio’s The Resurrection of Lazarus makes a similarly unorthodox statement of primitivist intent.

  Light and dark, which Caravaggio had previously manipulated in the service of a beguilingly deceptive optical realism, now serve an altogether different purpose. Their function is simply to amplify meaning and feeling – to reduce, to pare away, to lose or annihilate everything irrelevant to the essentials of the story he wants to tell. Nine tenths of the painting is bitumen black, a great pit of darkness in which the action unfolds. It is the darkness of death. To the left, the deeply shadowed figure of Christ enters the sepulchre of Lazarus and with a gesture of his right hand bids the dead man to awake: ‘Lazarus, come forth’ (John 11:43). Around his shadowed form a gaggle of bystanders can be seen craning their necks for a view of the impending miracle.

  Below Christ’s beckoning hand, two swarthy and sunburned labourers lift the dead man’s tombstone, while another raises the corpse from the grave. As the last of the three workmen stumbles forward, cradling the exhumed body, panic, disgust and wonder are mingled together on his face. Lazarus is an emaciated and green-tinged corpse, just plucked from the tomb and seemingly reluctant to wake from the sleep of death. Light streams into the sepulchre from behind Christ, flowing along the line of his outstretched right arm towards the right hand of Lazarus, which reaches as if involuntarily towards the source of illumination. His left hand reaches down, towards the bony litter of the sepulchre, a human skull and thighbone gleaming softly in the low light. He is caught between life and death, suspended at the very moment of his animation.

  The parable of Lazarus was traditionally regarded as a miracle performed by Christ in prefiguration of his own crucifixion. In raising Lazarus from the tomb, Christ saved him from sin and death, just as by dying on the Cross, he would save mankind from Original Sin and open the way to salvation. Caravaggio was certainly aware of the theological parallel, since he has arranged Lazarus’s body in the same configuration as that of Christ on the Cross. Lazarus’s two sisters, Martha and Mary, gather around him like the mourners of Christ at the moment of his deposition. The detail of Martha’s face, pressed so close to that of her reviving brother, was taken directly by Caravaggio from an ancient Christian prototype of the Mater Dolorosa, the Virgin Mary mourning the death of her son. Cheek pressed to cheek, eyes to mouth, mouth to eyes, the motif of two faces interlocked like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle had long been a standard trope of Byzantine painting. It was used, for example, by the twelfth-century master who painted the fresco of the Lamentation in the church of St Pantaleimon in modern-day Macedonia – and from Byzantium the device entered Italian painting in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Caravaggio probably took the motif from an Italian source, and it is not impossible that he saw it in a Byzantine icon in Sicily.102

  Just as he had done in The Burial of St Lucy, where the two central mourners derive from early Renaissance images of the Crucifixion, Caravaggio introduced a deliberate archaism from a much earlier tradition of art into The Resurrection of Lazarus.
In both cases, he did so to evoke a parallel between the subject in hand and the Crucifixion of Christ. Perhaps he meant the gestures as acts of humility, a renunciation of his own illusionistic virtuosity, a penitential clipping of his own Icarus wings. He had always been an austere painter, a painter for, and of, holy poverty, but never more so than now. In emulation of Cardinal Borromeo, who had counselled a return to the austere values of the ancient Church, Caravaggio formulated his own modern version of a purged and primitive style. There is almost no colour in these works, almost no sense of space, just twisted groupings of figures arranged frieze-like in the convulsions of sorrow, melancholy or agonized bewilderment.

  Lazarus was traditionally believed to have died of the plague. Hence the Italian word for a plague house, lazzaretto (the slang word for the Neapolitan poor, lazzari, shares the same etymology). Once again, as in The Burial of St Lucy, Caravaggio had painted a scene like many he must have witnessed during the darkest years of his childhood in Milan – a group of people gathered around a grave, lit by what seems like guttering torchlight. He had set himself the challenge of redeeming those memories of death and desperation, of transfiguring them into representations of the miraculous. In this, he cannot be said to have entirely succeeded.

  For all his efforts, what is expressed in this last and darkest flowering of Caravaggio’s art is anything but a simple and straightforward sense of piety. The shadowed figure of Christ in The Resurrection of Lazarus is another figment of the painter’s memory, a second version of the statuesque Christ beckoning Matthew from shadow into light in the painter’s very first large religious painting, The Calling of St Matthew in the Contarelli Chapel. But so shadowy is the Saviour’s form that he might be missed altogether by the inattentive viewer. That kind of uncertainty, whether fully intended or not, has subversively worked its way to the very heart of the picture. Lazarus is suspended between death and life, extinction and salvation. As one hand reaches towards the light, the other extends down towards the tomb. His eyes are sightless, his body gripped still by rigor mortis. Will he truly be saved? All is still in the balance.

  Whereas light flooded into Caravaggio’s earlier religious paintings, here the illumination struggles to penetrate the gloom. The whole painting conveys a sense of just how hard it is truly to see – and perhaps believe in – salvation. Both men holding up Lazarus’s tombstone look back with bewildered expressions at Christ, squinting and blinking in confusion. Above them, Caravaggio has included his own self-portrait. He gazes out of the picture, staring directly at the invisible source of light pulsing into the sepulchre, a look of yearning desperation on his face.

  ADORATION, DESOLATION

  Caravaggio’s Sicilian biographer told colourful tales about how he painted The Resurrection of Lazarus. According to Susinno, Caravaggio asked for a room in the hospital run by the confraternity of the Padri Crociferi, hired some workmen, and arranged a grisly modelling class:

  in order to give the central figure of Lazarus a naturalistic flavour he asked to have a corpse dug up that was already in a state of decomposition, and had it placed in the arms of the workmen who, however, were unable to stand the foul odour and wanted to give up their work. Caravaggio, with his usual fury, raised his dagger and jumped on them, and as a result those unlucky men were forced to continue their job and nearly die, like those miserable creatures who were condemned by the impious Maxentius to die tied to corpses. Likewise Caravaggio’s picturesque room could in some fashion be called the slaughterhouse of the same tyrant.103

  This is surely a parable invented to illustrate the painter’s reputedly excessive attachment to naturalism. Lazarus cannot have been modelled from a corpse in a state of decomposition, because his body is shown in the involuntary stasis of rigor mortis; that the painter could find the corpse of a real man who just happened to have died in a cruciform pose is less than plausible. The figure is an invention, although it seems likely enough that the three workmen were painted from local models, since their faces are unfamiliar from the rest of Caravaggio’s work, and they do have the ungainly actuality of real individuals. Susinno tells an equally tall tale about a lost first version of the picture, which the painter supposedly slashed to ribbons with his dagger when a member of the de’ Lazzari family had the temerity to criticize one or two elements. It is a story designed to perfect the caricature of the painter as a wild man of art, deranged by his own passions.

  The biographer is more illuminating when he turns to the third and last of Caravaggio’s surviving Sicilian altarpieces, The Adoration of the Shepherds. Long neglected, because so far off the beaten track, it is one of the most startlingly direct, wrenchingly emotional religious paintings of the seventeenth century. A sombre and profoundly personal work, it is the last great painting of Caravaggio’s traumatic life. Susinno, who responded to it with heartfelt sincerity, believed it to be in fact the greatest of all his works:

  In this canvas he represented the Nativity with life-size figures, and this in my opinion is the best of all his paintings, because here this great naturalist abandoned his sketchy, allusive style and demonstrated his naturalism once more without the use of bold shadows … This one great work of art would have been enough for Caravaggio’s glory for centuries to come, because here he removed himself completely from dryness and from exceedingly dark tones. Instead, on the ground is a basket with carpentry tools alluding to St Joseph’s trade. Above, on the right, the Virgin is seen stretched out on the ground, looking at the Christ child wrapped in cloth and caressing him. She is leaning on a haystack, behind which those animals are grazing; on the left side, at the foot of the Virgin, St Joseph is seated in attractive drapery, deep in thought. Nearby the three shepherds adore the newborn child; the first one has a staff in his hand and is dressed in a white garment, the second with his two hands joined in prayer shows a bare shoulder that looks like living flesh, and finally the third one looks on admiringly, his bold head painted marvellously. The rest of the canvas consists of a black background with rough wood that constitutes the shed. Indeed, the background was higher, and it was necessary to cut off a large section in order to fit the canvas into the chapel.104

  Caravaggio’s Adoration of the Shepherds is the most tragic of nativities. Mary has just given birth to her tiny, swaddled child. She slumps, exhausted from her labours, not against a haystack as Susinno mistakenly said, but against the side of a manger. Behind her, in the half dark, the biblical ox and ass stand patient and impassive. Mary is the Madonna del Parto – the ‘Madonna of childbirth’ – and also the Madonna of humility. She reclines on the bare earth of the cattleshed, strewn with strands of straw that catch the light like threads of gold. Those pieces of light are her only riches, but her eyes are closed to them. She is a refugee mother, utterly alone in the dark with her defenceless child.

  Joseph is singled out by his halo, but he is not with her – he is with the shepherds, part of her audience. None of the men are truly with her, and there is no sense that any of them can help her. The bald shepherd closest to Mary and her child reaches out to touch them. But his hand is kept back from actually making contact, as if by an invisible force. The men are suspended in an eternal agony of empathy. Their faces radiate compassion and helplessness. What can be done? Does the world really have to be like this?

  Once again, Caravaggio in Sicily reached back to the oldest popular traditions of Christian art. The motif of the tiny baby, crawling on his mother’s body, pressing his face to hers and reaching to touch her with his little hand, is drawn from Byzantine art.105 The whole scene has been conceived as another of the painter’s assemblages of sculpturally realized figures, but this time what is evoked is not the sacred mountain with its chapels, but the tradition of the Christmas crib, begun by St Francis at the monastery of Greccio in the chill winter of 1223.

  It is no coincidence that The Adoration of the Shepherds was painted for one of Messina’s Franciscan churches. Such was the depth of the friars’ attachment to Caravaggio’s
painting that they later fought tooth and nail to keep it. ‘At various times princes have been attracted by this Nativity and sought to take it away,’ wrote Susinno, ‘but they were unable to do so because the Capuchin Fathers made an appeal to the Senate, which in those days was more important, and its authority made them realize that those Fathers were its only custodians. As a result the picture remained in Messina, and I can affirm in truth that this unique work is the most masterly painting by Caravaggio.’106

  All of Caravaggio’s great Sicilian pictures reach back – back to the oldest and most direct forms of Christian art, and back to his own oldest and most painful memories. Whether he was conscious of it or not, The Adoration of the Shepherds is an uncanny allegory of his own emergence into the dark world of Milan under plague back in the 1570s – born to a mother soon to be bereaved, born to be abandoned by all save her. That is why the men in the picture look on but cannot touch, like dreams or ghosts. They see the mother and child’s abandonment, but can do nothing to assuage it. They are hardly in the same place, but in another shadowland. Iconographically, the gnarled and saddened men are Joseph and the shepherds. Emotionally, they are Caravaggio’s father, his uncles, his grandfather – all the men in the family that he might have had, but lost. Caravaggio’s own father’s tools had been those of a simple stonemason. Here they are replaced by the equally humble tools of the carpenter, placed with such desolation to the other side of Mary.