Caravaggio

by Andrew Graham-Dixon

  19. The Palazzo Madama in Rome, where Caravaggio lived for several years under del Monte’s protection.

  20. Medusa. ‘Whomsoever she looks at, she freezes. From the flux of life she takes a moment and makes it last for all time. That is what Caravaggio does too. Her magic is his magic, a petrifying art.’

  21. The Musicians. By painting a rehearsal instead of an actual performance, Caravaggio went behind the scenes of the traditional concert picture.

  22. Le Concert Champêtre by Titian. Music in the pastoral mode.

  23. Concert by Callisto Piazza. Music as erotic stimulus.

  24. The Lute Player. This may be Pedro Montoya, a castrato favoured by del Monte. His swollen cheeks are consistent with the hormonal effects of castration.

  25. Basket of Fruit. Caravaggio’s only surviving pure still life painting.

  26. The Penitent Magdalen. In a paroxysm of repentance, she has torn off her gold and her jewels and scattered them on the ground. By seating the Magdalen so low, Caravaggio emphasized her humility.

  27. St Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy. ‘The picture offers a consoling dream of transfiguration, a condition of oneness with Christ.’ It seems to be a self-portrait.

  28. The Rest on the Flight to Egypt. A scantily draped adolescent angel stands between Mary and Joseph. Caravaggio borrowed the figure from a composition by Annibale Carracci (below).

  29. The Judgement of Hercules by Annibale Carracci.

  30. Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto. Decorations for the ceiling of del Monte’s alchemical laboratory, in his house near the Porta Pinciana.

  31. Bacchus. The model for Caravaggio’s second depiction of the god of wine was probably his Sicilian friend and fellow painter, Mario Minniti.

  32. Martha and Mary Magdalen. Fillide Melandroni, not so penitent courtesan, modelled for the Magdalen. Her friend Anna Bianchini possibly sat for the figure of Mary’s sister Martha.

  33. St Catherine. Fillide also posed for this depiction of the Christian martyr Catherine. ‘She leans towards the wheel and its vicious spikes of grey steel as if leaning towards a lover.’

  34. Portrait of Fillide Melandroni. She kept this portrait with her until her death. It later passed into the German national collections and was destroyed by fire during the Second World War.

  35. Judith and Holofernes. Fillide once more, frowning with concentration as she plays the part of the Old Testament biblical heroine beheading a tyrant.

  36. The Entombment. This stark, strong composition was much admired by the people of Rome, whom Giovanni Baglione described as ‘chattering like geese’ at its unveiling.

  37. Pietà by Michelangelo. Caravaggio adapted the limp right arm of Michelangelo’s dead Christ for his own version of the same figure in The Entombment (above).

  38. The Calling of St Matthew. ‘And as Jesus passed forth from thence, he saw a man, named Matthew, sitting at the receipt of custom: and he saith unto him, Follow me. And he arose, and followed him’ (Matthew 9).

  39. The Creation of Adam by Michelangelo (detail). Caravaggio modelled the hand of his beckoning Christ (above) on the hand of Michelangelo’s Adam.

  40. The Martyrdom of St Matthew. Caravaggio included his self-portrait among those fleeing from the scene of the crime. He looks back as if to regret his failure to help the stricken Matthew.

  41. The Conversion of St Paul (first version). One of Caravaggio’s few failures, it was immediately rejected by the patron, Tiberio Cerasi. The reeling servant looks like a spear-carrier in a bad comic opera.

  42. The Crucifixion of St Peter. Peter insisted that he be crucified upside down, because he felt unworthy of the same death as Christ. His unfeeling executioners impassively hoist him aloft.

  43. The Cerasi Chapel (front view). (above the altar) Annibale Carracci’s Assumption of the Virgin. (left) The Crucifixion of St Peter. (right) The Conversion of St Paul, with horse’s rump aimed at Carracci’s Virgin Mary.

  44. The Conversion of St Paul (second version). Rejecting the tumult and drama of his first, unsuccessful treatment of the subject (Plate 41), Caravaggio internalized the action so that we sense it unfolding within Paul’s soul.

  45. The Supper at Emmaus. As the risen Christ reveals himself to the two disciples, they react with gestures of awe and astonishment.

  46. St John the Baptist. Caravaggio’s workshop assistant, Cecco, modelled for this depiction of the saint in the wilderness as a smiling and ecstatic young boy.

  47. Ignudo by Michelangelo. The male nudes on the Sistine Chapel ceiling evoke the golden age of classical myth. Caravaggio appropriated motifs from Michelangelo’s work throughout his life.

  48. The Betrayal of Christ. ‘The pale, delicate, emotionally sensitive face of Christ is set hard against the brutish, sunburned face of Judas.’

  49. Street Scene by Francesco Villamena. A notorious battle between Rome’s pro-French and pro-Spanish factions. Caravaggio took the billowing cloak for his own nocturnal street scene, The Betrayal of Christ.

  50. St Matthew and the Angel (first version). Caravaggio’s first, rejected version of the altarpiece. Objections were raised to its lack of decorum. During the Second World War, it met the same fate as the lost Portrait of Fillide Melandroni (Plate 34).

  51. St Matthew and the Angel (second version). More refined but less forceful, the saint has metamorphosed from illiterate bumpkin to dignified sage. The picture still hangs over the altar in the Contarelli Chapel today.

  52. The Death of the Virgin, in which a prostitute modelled for the Virgin. The picture was rejected by the fathers of Santa Maria della Scala, the last straw that may have triggered Caravaggio to commit murder.

  53. The Death of the Virgin by Carlo Saraceni, the picture that replaced Caravaggio’s rejected altarpiece (above).

  54. Doubting Thomas. ‘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’ (John 20).

  55. The Sacrifice of Isaac. Abraham holds his squealing son down as if the boy were a lamb brought to slaughter. These are the last glimpses of landscape in Caravaggio’s work.

  56. Omnia vincit amor. ‘Love conquers all.’ Cupid was modelled by Cecco. An English visitor to Rome was told that ‘’Twas the body & face / of [Caravaggio’s] owne boy or servant / that laid with him.’

  57. Divine Love by Giovanni Baglione. The avenging angel triumphs over the devil, who has been caught in flagrante with his young catamite. The sodomitic Satan on the left is a libellous caricature of Caravaggio.

  58. Study for The Resurrection by Giovanni Baglione. This study preserves the composition of Baglione’s lost altarpiece for the Gesù, which Caravaggio mocked openly: ‘It’s a bungle … the worst he has done.’

  59. St Jerome Writing. A penitentially solemn picture. It may have been a gift to Scipione Borghese, papal nephew, for helping Caravaggio obtain a pardon for violent assault in the summer of 1605.

  60. St Francis in Meditation. The saint is lost in contemplation of his own mortality, and of Christ’s crucifixion at Golgotha, ‘the place of the skull’.

  61. St John the Baptist. A world away from the earlier St John modelled by Cecco. This glowering adolescent ‘might almost be a portrait of Caravaggio’s own dark state of mind’ during his later years in Rome.

  62. The Madonna of the Rosary. This altarpiece was greatly admired by Peter Paul Rubens, one of a group of connoisseurs who bought the picture for a prominent church in Antwerp in 1651.

  63. The Madonna of Loreto. Two humble pilgrims to Loreto, with patched clothes and dirt-ingrained feet, are granted a miraculous vision of the Madonna and child.

  64. The Madonna of the Palafrenieri. The Virgin Mary and the infant Christ crush the serpent Satan as St Anne looks on. The picture was turned out of St Peter’s, probably because of the Madonna’s full cleavage.

  65. The contract for the ill-fated Madonna of the Palafrenieri. His blood signature aside (Plate 80), this is the
sole surviving example of Caravaggio’s handwriting.

  66. View of Zagarolo in the Alban Hills outside Rome. Palazzo Colonna in Zagarolo was Caravaggio’s first hide-out after the murder of Ranuccio Tomassoni.

  67. The Supper at Emmaus. A strikingly different interpretation of a subject Caravaggio had treated so subtly five years earlier (Plate 45). After the murder his style became increasingly bleak, dark and morbid.

  68. David with the Head of Goliath. Cecco as David, Caravaggio as the severed head of Goliath. Often misdated to the end of the painter’s life, but actually painted in 1606 as a homicide’s plea for clemency.

  69. Sleeping Cupid. Painted in Malta for a Florentine humanist, this picture was inspired by a celebrated sculpture of the same subject by Michelangelo.

  70. The Seven Acts of Mercy. ‘This one dark street, scene of desperation and pain and death, is the painter’s microcosm for the brutality of existence itself.’

  71. Roman Charity (detail) by Pierino del Vaga.

  72. The Flagellation. Torture as a misbegotten act of intimacy.

  73. The Crucifixion of St Andrew. The painting does not show Andrew being bound to the cross, as some have thought, but the moment of his death. His former tormentors strive but fail to release him.

  74. St Jerome Writing. Painted for one of the most senior Knights of Malta, a virtuoso demonstration of Caravaggio’s gifts to the artist’s new circle of patrons in the Order of St John.

  75. Portrait of Fra Antonio Martelli. ‘This depiction of an obdurate and forceful man, in lean old age, rheumy eyes gazing off into the distance, anticipates the mature portraiture of Rembrandt by some half a century.’

  76. Portrait of Alof de Wignacourt, with His Pageboy. Instead of a monastic habit, the Grand Master wears a suit of sixteenth-century armour, evoking the heroic defence of Malta at the great Siege of 1565.

  77. The Resurrection of Lazarus. ‘Lazarus, come forth’ (John 11). As Christ bids him to rise from the grave, Lazarus seems reluctant to wake from death.

  78. The Adoration of the Shepherds. The most tragic of nativities: Mary is a refugee mother utterly alone in the dark with her defenceless child.

  79. The Beheading of St John. In the blood gushing from the saint’s neck, Caravaggio signed his name. It is his only signature on a painting.

  80. St John the Baptist. Caravaggio’s last known depiction of the saint, who was modelled on this occasion by a swarthy and sun-tanned Sicilian adolescent.

  81. The Adoration of the Shepherds. Painted for a Franciscan confraternity in Palermo, the last of Caravaggio’s Sicilian altarpieces was allegedly stolen by order of a Mafia boss in 1969. It has not been recovered.

  82. The Burial of St Lucy. ‘The picture’s iconography is ingeniously suggestive of hope … but its mood is overwhelmingly bleak. Almost half the painting is dark bare stone.’

  83. The Denial of St Peter. One of just two paintings that can be dated to after the painter’s face was slashed in late 1609. The seriousness of his injuries is shockingly apparent in the work’s ragged, fumbling style.

  84. The Martyrdom of St Ursula. Caravaggio’s very last work contains his last self-portrait. Behind Ursula’s bowed head, the painter’s face appears. He seems to groan, as he stares sightlessly into space.

  Caravaggio’s influence reached forward to the Enlightenment, continued into the Romantic period and has infiltrated the DNA of modern cinema.

  85. Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump by Joseph Wright of Derby.

  86. The Raft of the Medusa by Theodore Géricault.

  87. Still from Mean Streets, directed by Martin Scorsese.

  Epilogue

  Caravaggio’s contemporaries would doubtless have been amazed by the extent of his posthumous fame. Few of those who knew him could ever have imagined that he and his work would survive so far into the future, that he would be remembered so long after they had all been forgotten.

  But it was true. Hardly any of the artists with whom Caravaggio had been close made any mark at all on posterity. His Sicilian friend Mario Minniti lived into his sixties, turning out quantities of mediocre altarpieces and making himself a small fortune, but no great reputation, in Messina. His old assistant Cecco Boneri established something of a career for himself as Cecco del Michelangelo, but soon slipped into near-total obscurity. The hot-headed architect Onorio Longhi, who had been his second in the duel, returned to Rome a year or so after Caravaggio’s death, only to die himself five years later of syphilis.

  Caravaggio’s old enemy Giovanni Baglione lived long and prospered, winning numerous grand commissions from popes as well as princes and aristocrats. When he died he was nearly eighty, a Knight of Christ and a wealthy man. But he too would soon be forgotten – or at least remembered mostly for being Caravaggio’s adversary and biographer. Orazio Gentileschi, who had once laughed along with Caravaggio at ‘Johnny Baggage’, was the only one of his close acquaintances to amount to much as an artist. A painter of considerable power and invention, he ended his career as a court painter to Charles I, dying in London in his mid seventies in 1639 just a few years before the start of the English Civil War. Orazio’s daughter, Artemisia, who had been raped by Agostino Tassi, also became a gifted and successful painter in her own right.

  And what of those with whom Caravaggio drank and dined, quarrelled and fought? What of those whom he loved and hated? What of the waiter with the cut face, the sharp-eyed barber-surgeon, the disgruntled notary? What of all the pimps and soldiers and the boys and girls who lived by selling their bodies? Some survived in his paintings, whether as villains or martyrs, torturers or apostles. Most disappeared without trace. But one fragment has survived: the last will and testament of Fillide Melandroni.

  Fillide had been Caravaggio’s first model. She was the disconcertingly sexy St Catherine, as well as the girl holding the flower up to her breast and gazing out with a smouldering, coquettish stare in the portrait he had painted of her in 1598. She was Fillide the courtesan, who perhaps won the heart and certainly lightened the purse of the Florentine aristocrat Giulio Strozzi.

  In the summer of 1618, Fillide was thirty-seven or thirty-eight years old, close to the same age as Caravaggio when he died. She was still living in Rome, but by now she had her own house. She had clearly gone up in the world. But she was mortally ill, perhaps with the same form of venereal disease that had cut short the life of Caravaggio’s friend Onorio Longhi. On 3 July she died.

  Soon after, an inventory was made of her now considerable possessions. Her main reception room was decorated with gilded leather panels. At its centre stood a table covered with a Turkish carpet, and around the table there were eight leather-covered chairs. In the bedroom she had a large gilded four-poster bed with a green taffeta canopy and a chest containing some lengths of luxury fabric. She had books, vases, plants, an inkwell of silvered copper, a pearl necklace, twenty gold buttons and two gold pendants with pearls.

  On 19 November her estate was settled and division was made of her goods. The will that she had made four years earlier was read out. It seems that she was happy for all her property to be sold and the proceeds parcelled out, in specified fractions, to her chosen legatees. But she wanted one particular object to go to one particular individual: ‘Item: she states and declares that she has in her house a painting or portrait by the hand of Michelangelo da Caravaggio that belongs to Giulio Strozzi. She wishes it to be restored and consigned to Sr Giulio.’

  Fillide’s portrait by Caravaggio, the picture that would be consumed four centuries later by the flames of the Second World War, was the most precious thing that she had. She wanted it to go to Strozzi, her protector, who had allowed her to keep it for so long. Perhaps she liked the thought of being with him, in surrogate, after she died. Perhaps she still loved him.

  From the inventory of her possessions and the terms of her will we may think that Fillide was not quite the same woman she had been when Caravaggio knew her. Once, she had shamelessly touted for business as a pro
stitute in the very shadow of the monastery of the Convertites, the religious foundation for the reform of prostitutes, and had assaulted her rival, Prudenza, in her house directly next door to it, screaming as she did so: ‘You dirty whore! I want to cut you! I want to cut you!’ Now, as well as the portrait by Caravaggio, her house contained three small devotional paintings: of the Nativity, of the Virgin Mary and of the Penitent Magdalen, the prostitute who mended her ways. Her will specified that she wanted to be buried in her parish church. At the end, as death approached, she left several legacies to religious institutions dedicated to the Virgin, so that Masses would be said for her soul after she had died, and a fifth of her entire legacy to the Convertites. The bequest was stipulated in the penultimate clause in her will, set down by the notary in black and white.

  But who knows what Fillide really felt, or what she really believed. Like the dark-haired painter she had once known, she moved in that uncertain realm, ‘between the sacred and the profane’.