Caravaggio

by Andrew Graham-Dixon

  Deodato Gentile concluded his letter of 31 July by advising Borghese to write to Don Pedro Fernández de Castro, Conde de Lemos, who had recently taken over the post of Spanish viceroy in Naples. Don Pedro was the most powerful man in the city. Borghese followed Gentile’s advice, informing the viceroy of the prior’s false claims and appealing to him for help. But the wheels of Spanish diplomacy moved painfully slowly. It was mid August before Don Pedro swung, rather confusedly, into action. He told the impudent Prior of Capua that it was no good pretending that Caravaggio had died a Knight of Malta, and that he would have to surrender all claims to the pictures. But the Spanish viceroy had evidently failed to realize exactly what had happened. Somehow or other he had got it into his head that the paintings were still being argued over in Porto Ercole, some two hundred miles north. So he fired off a peremptory letter to the head of the Spanish garrisons in Tuscany, together with an inventory listing the works of art that he particularly wanted to secure:

  Honoured Sir, I have been informed that the painter Michael Angelo di Caravaggio has died at Port’ Ercole and that you have in your possession all his property, especially the items indicated in the inventory which accompanies this letter, the property having been taken over as a spolium under the pretext that the deceased was a member of the Order of St John, and that it belonged to the Prior of Capua who has declared that he has no right to this spolium inasmuch as the deceased was not a Knight of Malta; and thus I charge you that as soon as you receive this letter you send me the aforesaid property by the first felucca available, and especially the painting of St John the Baptist, and if by chance it has been disposed of or removed from the property for whatever reason, you shall endeavour by all means to see that it is found and recovered in order to send it well packed with the other property and deliver it here to the proper authority, and you shall carry this out unconditionally, informing me of the receipt of this letter. From my desk, Naples, August 19, 1610.160

  It would be another five months before anything more was heard about the paintings. By then two of them had disappeared altogether, perhaps into the hands of Caravaggio’s creditors, perhaps to Malta. The only work of art that anyone could locate for sure was a St John, which turned out to be the picture of the saint as an olive-skinned Sicilian boy painted at around the time Caravaggio had left Messina for Palermo. By the winter of 1610 it had found its way into the house of the Spanish viceroy, who seems to have become singularly reluctant to give it up.

  On 12 December the beleaguered Bishop of Caserta, Deodato Gentile, was finally able to report further developments to Scipione Borghese. He apologized for still not having despatched the St John, which his lordship ‘must have given up for lost’, and explained the reasons. The viceroy had wanted to have a copy made of the painting for his own collection. In addition, there had been obscure problems with Caravaggio’s inheritors and creditors – this part of the document is barely legible – and since he had left many debts there were people who had needed to be satisfied.161 Gentile promised to press the matter and obtain the painting. Only in August of the following year did the papal nuncio finally manage to prise it from the grip of the Spanish viceroy and send it, at long last, to Rome. He apologized that it had been slightly damaged in all the toing and froing. The picture has remained in the Borghese collection ever since.

  DOING JESUS LIKE CARAVAGGIO

  The messy story of what happened to Caravaggio’s last paintings is also a microcosm of his afterlife, and a parable illustrating his singularity as a painter. He had always been an outsider, a troublemaker, a difficult and dangerous man. Yet his art was so compelling, so original, so unforgettable, that people were simply transfixed by it. They fought to look at it, gathering in their hundreds every time a new altarpiece was unveiled, and they fought to acquire it, even though everything else about Caravaggio – his terseness, his weird dress sense, his violence, his sexual reputation, his unerring gift for getting into trouble – seemed so disconcerting and strange.

  Caravaggio was not only the most disturbed but also the most unconventional of the truly great painters of the Italian tradition. His whole career ran counter to type, defiantly contradicting the patterns of training, patronage and even the actual practice of painting that were expected of a successful artist. It is clear that during his obscure early years, something went awry during his supposed apprenticeship to the Milanese painter Peterzano. Essentially, Caravaggio taught himself to paint. He may have picked up technical tips and clues in places like Giuseppe Cesari’s studio, but his basic method was empirical. He looked at the way light falls, and at the way people behave. The fact that he was obliged to invent himself may partly explain his deep originality. The advantage of not having been taught was that he had nothing to unlearn.

  Once he had begun to find his own way, Caravaggio painted with such force, such a stunning sense of drama, such a deep sense of humanity, that prestigious commissions flooded towards him. The simple truth is that he was a far greater painter than any of his contemporaries. But, despite winning the support of Cardinal del Monte, and despite his network of protectors within the Colonna family, he never found a secure place in the hierarchies of power and patronage. He painted as if the rich and the powerful were his enemies, as if he really did believe that the meek deserved to inherit the earth. Ultimately, he acted in the same way too. Only once in his life did he come close to achieving a truly settled position, a respected place among men of real power and influence, and that was on Malta. But almost as soon as he had been knighted, he managed to have himself thrown into jail. With hindsight it looks like a complete act of self-sabotage, as if he could not bear the thought of truly belonging and of walking the corridors of power.

  Caravaggio was also unique among the great Italian painters in how he went about painting. He had no studio in anything like the conventional sense. He had the odd boy to help him, Cecco in particular, but essentially he painted all by himself. He did not draw. He never established a workshop with specialist assistants to help with the painting of drapery or landscape, as other artists did. He gathered around himself no real circle of pupils, and there were no acolytes to spread the word, no one to disseminate his methods and his beliefs. There were no portfolios of his drawings to pass around. There was nothing except his pictures themselves, and there were not very many of those because he had died so young. Under the circumstances, the vast impact of his work is all the more remarkable.

  For more than a century and a half after his death, the classicizing critics of Europe’s academic art tradition made a concerted and resolute attempt to blacken his name. According to their beliefs, much influenced by the strains of Neoplatonist philosophy, it was art’s duty to present an idealized version of reality, and not – as Caravaggio was held to have done – merely to represent the real world in all its unregenerate ugliness. Bellori was the arch-exponent of the anti-Caravaggist movement in academic thought, but there were many others, notably the Spanish painter and author Vicente Carducho, who demonized Caravaggio as an anti-Christ of art, the antithesis to his saintly predecessor and namesake, the ‘divine’ Michelangelo. So influential was the rhetoric of Caravaggio’s posthumous enemies that the great French seventeenth-century painter Poussin was persuaded that he had been ‘sent into the world to destroy painting’.

  Despite the sustained drive to denigrate and marginalize his work, Caravaggio’s paintings were too profound and affecting to be suppressed. Gradually but inexorably, his dramatic sense of composition, his strikingly stark handling of light and dark and his sheer rawness of feeling worked themselves into the DNA of Western art. During the years immediately after his death, hardly a single important painter escaped his influence. Rubens, Velàzquez and Pietro da Cortona all echoed his compositions or copied his devices and traits. Within a generation, entire schools of so-called Caravaggisti established themselves in both Italy and the Netherlands. Partly perhaps because of the location of the French Academy in Rome, at the top of the
Spanish Steps, and within easy walking distance of so many of his most important altarpieces, he would have an especially powerful impact on French art. His influence can be detected in the work of such widely differing French painters as Valentin de Boulogne and Georges de La Tour. There was a particularly strong resurgence of interest in his art during the Neoclassical and Romantic periods. In England, Joseph Wright of Derby’s Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump of 1768 transformed the scientific demonstration of the effects of a vacuum on a living creature into a hushed modern version of a miracle as painted by Caravaggio. In France, the self-appointed painter to the Revolution, Jacques-Louis David, painted the dead Marat slumped in his bath as if he were one of Caravaggio’s spotlit martyrs, and in 1819 Theodore Géricault conceived arguably the first great masterpiece of French Romanticism, The Raft of the Medusa, as a modern, secularized version of an altarpiece by Caravaggio.

  Towards the end of the nineteenth century Caravaggio’s work did fall somewhat out of fashion. His paintings attracted relatively little attention from those pioneering the still embryonic discipline of art history, whose attentions were biased by the market. (The purpose of much early art historical research was to establish the provenance and therefore the value of pictures coming to auction, but, since nearly all of Caravaggio’s major pictures were immovable altarpieces, very few of his works ever came up for sale.) Neither did his pictures seem especially interesting to painters of the early Modern period, such as Cézanne or, later, the Cubists and Futurists, because it was their stated ambition to flatten, distort and destroy the conventions of post-Renaissance illusionist painting. Caravaggio was too much of an ‘optical’ painter for their taste. They preferred the so-called Italian ‘primitives’, painters such as Giotto and Duccio, whose disregard for conventional perspective seemed closer to a Modernist aesthetic. They might have been interested in Caravaggio’s late Sicilian pictures, which responded to powerful strains of primitivism in Counter-Reformation thought, but those paintings had fallen into neglect and were all but unknown by the early twentieth century. It is symbolic of this one period of genuine neglect that the young Picasso, for all his magpie eclecticism and positively Oedipal obsession with the art of the past, never showed the slightest interest in reworking or pastiching the art of Caravaggio. It was only when Picasso grew older that his attitude changed. In 1937, while working on Guernica, his agonized frieze of suffering inspired by the horrors of the Spanish Civil War, he told Salvador Dalí that he wanted the horse at the centre of the painting to have the same presence as the horse in Caravaggio’s Conversion of St Paul: ‘I want it to be so realistic – just like in Caravaggio – that you can smell the sweat.’162

  Caravaggio’s reputation was decisively rehabilitated for the twentieth century by the gifted and eloquent Italian art historian Roberto Longhi, who put on an extremely influential retrospective of the painter’s work in 1951. Since then Caravaggio has become perhaps the most widely popular of all the Old Masters. In many respects he is the perfect painter for an age pruriently obsessed with the lurid private lives of famous people. His fame has never been greater, and his private life was nothing if not lurid. His many sins and misdemeanours, his irregularities and eccentricities, so long used to blacken his name, have now made him a posthumous celebrity. But the deeper pull is still that of his art.

  Since Longhi staged his ground-breaking exhibition, Caravaggio’s influence has continued to spread. But his work seems to have been less of an inspiration to those ploughing the increasingly conceptualist fields of fine art than to those working with photography and film. One of the few painters to have had a profound impact on disciplines other than painting itself, he may fairly be considered as a pioneer of modern cinematography. Pier Paolo Pasolini, who made some of the most powerful Italian films of the 1960s, was profoundly influenced by Caravaggio’s sense of light, by his narrative directness, and by his casting of poor and ordinary working people in leading roles. Martin Scorsese, one of the most gifted American directors of the last forty years, has been disarmingly explicit about the depth of his own admiration for Caravaggio. He was introduced to the painter’s work in the late 1960s by screenwriter Paul Schrader when they were working on Taxi Driver, his film about a vigilante killer taking on New York’s underworld of drug dealers and whores. He sees Caravaggio very much with the eyes of someone looking for things he can use, borrow, adapt. In Scorsese’s words, the long tradition of Caravaggio as a true artist’s artist is both reincarnated and refreshed. It is worth quoting him at length:

  I was instantly taken by the power of the pictures, the power of the compositions, the action in the frames, the way he designed the composition and the subject matter … there was no doubt it could be taken into cinema because of the use of light and shadow, the chiaroscuro effect …

  Initially I related to the paintings because of the moment that he chose to illuminate in the story. The Conversion of Paul, Judith Beheading Holofernes: he was choosing a moment that was not the absolute moment of the beginning of the action, it’s during the action, in a way. You sort of come upon the scene midway and you’re immersed in it. It was very different from the composition of the paintings that preceded it, the Renaissance paintings. It was like modern staging in film. It was as if we had just come in the middle of scene and it was all happening. It was so powerful and direct. It was startling, really. He would have been a great film-maker, there’s no doubt about it. I thought, I can use this too …

  So then he was there. He sort of pervaded the entirety of the bar sequences in another film I made around then, Mean Streets. There’s no doubt about that. He was there in the way I wanted the camera movement, the choice of how to stage a scene. It’s basically people sitting in bars, people at tables, people getting up, that sort of thing. The Calling of Matthew, but in New York! Making films with street people was what it was really about, like he made paintings with them. They weren’t like the usual models from the Renaissance. They were people who were really living life. That’s why it played into my mind in Mean Streets …

  Then that extended into a much later film, The Temptation of Christ. Why couldn’t we have people who lived on the street play apostles? They had been fishermen, Jesus was a carpenter. Caravaggio takes the Virgin Mary and has a prostitute play the Virgin Mary. She’s a woman and the Virgin Mary’s a woman. It’s shocking and provocative. It doesn’t judge the person. It doesn’t make judgement on the prostitute when making her the Virgin and this is something very powerful and compassionate …

  So in doing The Last Temptation of Christ the idea was that Jesus was going to be Jesus Christ on Eighth Avenue and 49th Street in New York, where we shot Taxi Driver those years ago. It hasn’t changed much since then, it’s a little better now, but really you might as well be in a den of iniquity most of the time. It was quite a place, especially at three and four in the morning. This is where Jesus would go. He wouldn’t be hanging out on Park Avenue in New York. He’d be in the street with the crack addicts and the prostitutes. The idea was to do Jesus like Caravaggio.163

  1. Portrait of Caravaggio by Ottavio Leoni. A Roman barber named Luca described the painter just as he appears here: ‘a stocky young man, with a thin black beard, thick eyebrows and black eyes … dressed all in black’.

  2/3. The sacro monte at Varallo, in modern Piedmont. In a series of chapels linked by mountain paths, polychrome figures play out stories from the Bible in vivid and often bloody mises-en-scène.

  4. The Lamentation by Guido Mazzoni. Caravaggio was influenced by this intense form of realism. He knew Mazzoni’s work well and painted a picture for the Neapolitan church that housed this very sculpture.

  5. Mary Magdalen by Donatello. Donatello’s disconcertingly lifelike sculptures may also have shaped Caravaggio’s imagination.

  6. Carlo Borromeo (detail) by Carlo Dolci. Dour and ascetic, Borromeo was the dominant force in Milan during Caravaggio’s formative years. He would remain legendary in the city for centuries.
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  7. The Adoration of the Shepherds (detail) by Simone Peterzano. The young Caravaggio signed a contract of apprenticeship with Peterzano, but just what he learned from this feeble disciple of Titian is not clear.

  8. The Farnese Gallery by Annibale Carracci (detail). For his Farnese patrons, Carracci daringly revived pagan and erotic mythology in Counter-Reformation Rome.

  9. Perseus and Andromeda by Giuseppe Cesari. The young Caravaggio spent some unhappy months as an assistant to Cesari, who used him to paint fruit and flowers.

  10. Boy Peeling a Fruit. This may be one of Caravaggio’s earliest surviving pictures. If so, it shows how little progress he had made as a painter by his early twenties.

  11. Boy with a Basket of Fruit: ‘a blushing, smooth-skinned adolescent, with dark curly hair and an expression of amorous intensity on his face’ who may represent the Groom in the biblical Song of Songs.

  12. Boy Bitten by a Lizard. In the language of the Italian street the bitten finger represented the wounded phallus.

  13. Boy Bitten by a Crayfish by Sofonisba Anguissola.

  14. Self-Portrait as Bacchus. ‘The picture has a sorceror’s apprentice feel to it, with hints of illicit goings on …’

  15. Bacchus and Ariadne by Titian.

  16. The Cardsharps. A young aristocrat is cheated by two feral and predatory conmen.

  17. The Gypsy Fortune-Teller. ‘A sweet siren, she enchants with smooth incantations.’

  18. Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte by Ottavio Leoni. Friend to writers, musicians, artists and scientists, del Monte was Caravaggio’s first patron.