Caravaggio

by Francine Prose

  Many of Caravaggio’s contemporaries had a more positive opinion of his achievement, and in September 1600, he signed a contract with the pope’s treasurer-general, Tiberio Cerasi, to paint The Mystery of the Conversion of Saint Paul and The Martyrdom of Saint Peter for the Cerasi family chapel in the church of Santa Maria del Popolo. The work was supposed to be finished in eight months, and the artist agreed to show Cerasi preliminary plans that would make clear how he meant to depict the mystery and the martyrdom.

  Once again, regardless of whatever Caravaggio may have learned from his labors on the Contarelli paintings, the execution was far more difficult than he could have anticipated. His first attempts were, like the first versions of Matthew’s martyrdom, failures. This time, Caravaggio finished the paintings only to have them rejected, either by Cerasi or by the Fathers of the Madonna della Consolazione, who assumed control of the chapel’s decoration after Cerasi’s death in May 1601. Caravaggio may have beem handicapped by his own most recent artistic and popular success, by the satisfaction of having discovered how to capture the swirling violence and turbulence of Saint Matthew’s murder. Or perhaps the famously competitive artist’s difficulties may have had something to do with the fact that Annibale Carracci’s dynamic, if relatively conventional, altarpiece The Assumption of the Virgin was already in place.

  By then, Caravaggio and Carracci were considered to be serious competitors, and their simultaneous work on the Cerasi Chapel was seen as the artistic equivalent of an athletic contest. Carracci was one of the only contemporary painters whose work the notoriously critical Caravaggio admired, as he mentioned in his testimony at the libel trial. And it was said that he liked Carracci’s painting of Saint Margaret in the Church of Santa Caterina dei Funerari so much that he “died over it.”

  But the likeliest explanation for Caravaggio’s difficulties is that his problem had less to do with Carracci than with the dramatic (or, more accurately, undramatic) nature of the narrative itself. On the way to Damascus, Saul, a soldier authorized to continue his vicious persecution of the Christians, was intercepted by a blinding light that knocked him to the ground. There he had a vision of Jesus, who told him to rise and proceed to the city and wait there for further instruction. The most significant action in the story is interior, and transpires within the heart and soul of an unconscious man lying stunned and motionless in the road. Doubtless that is why the detail of Paul having been thrown from his horse—an element notably absent from the New Testament account—was required and supplied by the demands of visual art.

  In earlier depictions, such as Raphael’s and Michelangelo’s, the event involves a crowd and a large amount of human, military, divine, and equine participation. Both versions feature Christ skimming down from heaven to reveal himself to Paul; in Michelangelo, this visitation is accompanied by a small army of angels.

  Caravaggio’s first attempt—which survives in Rome’s Odescalchi collection—is the recognizable offspring of these venerable forebears. Stretched out in a verdant landscape, the nearly naked Paul cringes and protects his eyes from the dazzling light, while his handsome, athletic horse rears up wildly behind him. A soldier—bearded and elderly, like Paul himself—points his spear at Jesus and at the angel who is flying in from the upper right hand corner. And you can’t blame the old soldier for cowering. It’s unclear if the heavenly visitors intend to save Paul or to harm him, and something about Christ’s outstretched arm recalls the thrust with which Matthew’s assassin grabs the apostle’s wrist.

  Except for the general impression of chaotic agitation, the composition has little in common with the final Contarelli paintings and bore few of the hallmarks that already distinguished a Caravaggio from the efforts of rival artists: the darkness, the lack of discernible background, the theatrical chiaroscuro, the contemporary setting. Perhaps that was why the priests of the Madonna della Consolazione were disappointed by a work unlikely to create the same stir as the showpieces that were currently such a source of pride for their French counterparts at San Luigi dei Francesi.

  The painting was rejected, a blow to the artist’s vanity and pocketbook that was presumably softened when the work was bought by Cardinal Giacomo Sannesio. During this phase of Caravaggio’s career, this sequence of events—a commission destined for a public venue failed to please its sponsors and was promptly snapped up by a wealthy private citizen—would be repeated several times, and each of these incidents would take an increasing toll on the artist.

  Though we hear about how unhappy he was later when The Death of the Virgin was refused by the Church of Santa Maria della Scala in 1602, there is no record of any friction between the short-tempered painter and any of the patrons whose rejection of his initial efforts must have caused him considerable anger and disappointment. Apparently, he was able to rein himself in when dealing with his employers and to vent his frustration in street brawls and in bad behavior in the taverns and brothels. Even as Caravaggio was working and reworking his ideas for the Cerasi Chapel, he was prosecuted (though charges were later dropped) for giving one Flavio Canonici—a former guard at the prison at the Castel Sant’Angelo—a sword wound on the hand, not life threatening but grave enough to leave a permanent scar. Caravaggio was adept at separating the studio from the street, where the slightest insult could lead to violence. Yet when the executors of a commission required him to start over, he appears to have behaved like a consummate professional who absorbs his losses, retrenches, and begins again.

  Contemplating the first and second versions of The Conversion of Saint Paul, we’re tempted to conclude that nothing short of a revelation could have directed the leap from one to the other. We feel that there must have been a moment of illumination not unlike Saint Paul’s: a flash of insight lighting up the mystery of the difference between stasis and stillness. Instinctively, Caravaggio understood that the key was to stop struggling against the interiority, the muteness and timelessness of the event, and to take on the challenge of picturing a moment when time and motion have ceased and everything has gone silent.

  In the second version, the distractions of the physical world have receded into blackness and night; the borders have closed in so tightly as to squeeze out the last breath of air. Jesus the soaring messenger has disappeared from the painting; from now on Caravaggio’s Christ will be as earthbound as the viewers contemplating his image.

  The figures, the two men and the horse, occupy the entire painting, and that fact alone—their size in relation to that of the whole—makes them seem monumental. Radically foreshortened, Saint Paul, younger than in the earlier version, sprawls on his cloak and sword. His arms no longer cover his face but instead are thrown open so that there is nothing between him and God, nothing between him and us. If Paul has grown younger, his horse has aged, become less skittish, thicker, more tired, more like the sorrowful donkey in The Rest on the Flight into Egypt. His raised hoof won’t crush his thrown rider, not even if he has to hold it like that for a lifetime. The old man has decided that tending the horse is more useful and practical, less pointlessly distressing than attempting to figure out what is happening to the soldier who has fallen for no reason and is writhing, blind, on the ground.

  The crowd is gone, the angels are gone, only these three creatures remain. They could hardly be physically closer, yet each is utterly alone. Paul has already left the quotidian world that the other two still inhabit. Like The Calling of Saint Matthew, the painting depicts a conversion, but Paul is more like Caravaggio himself, a man for whom a more extreme and drastic awakening was required. Nothing, really, is happening here. Everything has just happened or is about to happen. Yet despite, or because of, its stillness, the scene is far more dramatic than that of Matthew being extracted from his countinghouse. Because that calling took place at an instant in time, whereas here, on the road to Damascus, Caravaggio has given us a way to imagine that what we are being shown is a moment of eternity, a frozen glimpse of forever.

  If The Conversion of Saint Pau
l is at once more inward and brutal than the vocation of Saint Matthew, so the martyrdom of Peter is paradoxically less violent and more excruciating than the assassination of his brother apostle. And if Matthew’s murder is as tumultuous as a random outbreak of street violence, Peter’s death is as chilling and methodical as what it is: an execution. The nocturnal setting, the stillness, the simplicity of composition, the minimal cast of characters, the humble grandeur with which the figures occupy massive amounts of space, the daring decisions about which moment to portray and which figures to enlist as the main actors in the understated and nearly unbearable drama—all these elements remind us and, indeed, compel us to see that The Martyrdom of Saint Peter is not merely a companion piece, but the mystical counterpart of The Conversion of Saint Paul.

  Already strapped to the instrument of his death, the apostle is portrayed as his cross is being raised in preparation for his crucifixion, upside down. Again, Caravaggio’s vision departs from earlier conceptions, which mostly portray the saint with his torment well under way, his body fully inverted—images in which the cruelty of his punishment has the unintended effect of distancing us from his plight. Unless we ourselves stand on our heads, we cannot see the saint’s expression. And so the dying, upside-down martyr has, in effect, already ceased being human. Caravaggio’s solution allows us to look directly into the suffering face of the saint, even though his eyes evade ours as he drifts toward wherever he must go in order to endure the pain that awaits him.

  The key to the painting’s power lies in the horrifying naturalism of the way in which Peter holds his body and his head. We feel that the saint’s uncomfortable pose has been copied directly from life, that this is exactly how we would attempt to ease our misery, the precise angle at which we would lift our backs and strain our necks, had we been forced into that position, on that hard wooden plank. Perhaps Caravaggio achieved this effect by leaving his model in position long enough so that the stand-in for the saint assumed the pose that would minimize his discomfort.

  The overall impression is one of overpowering loneliness, even though the apostle is involved in a sort of group activity, a species of collective labor, with the three burly workmen expending all their energy on the physically demanding task of lifting Peter’s cross. Of the three, two have their backs turned to us; the third one’s face is in shadow. You feel that, if you could see them, they would be expressionless, utterly impassive and stolid. They take no pleasure in their work, nor do they bother with guilt or remorse. They’re simply doing a job they’ve been hired to do, a job that needs to be done—as efficiently as possible and with the least amount of wasted effort.

  As with each of Caravaggio’s paintings, especially from this period, you can see him learning how to do something both marvelous and new. Here what he’s discovering is the effect that can be achieved by focusing our attention on the mindless menial labor involved in martyrdom and its aftermath, a theme that will intensify the gravity and beauty of one of his late masterpieces, The Burial of Saint Lucy. And here, for the first time, he boldly insists on the true appearance, transcribed from life, of the callused hands and rugged backs of the laborers who carry out the killing of those whom the powerful want silenced.

  Most important, he is exploring the magnitude of the compassion that he is able to make us feel for the innocent, suffering victim of a horrible crime. Everything in his portrayal of Peter—the intersecting furrows in his brow, the sharp crease traversing his stomach, the way that one of the workers embraces his shins while raising the cross without any perceptible awareness that he is touching a living human being—all of it increases our sympathy until we feel that an actual execution is transpiring in front of our eyes and that we have to turn away because we can hardly stand to see it.

  By this time the double life that Caravaggio had been leading—as a member of Del Monte’s exquisitely refined milieu and as a street gangster drinking in the taverns and dueling in the back alleys of the Campo Marzio—must have begun to seem simple compared with the multiple sets of manners and mores he was now obliged to adopt as he moved among a wide range of social circles and conducted what amounted to a series of parallel, interrelated careers. Even as he was finishing his deeply felt religious masterpieces for the Contarelli and Cerasi Chapels, he was also working for hire, painting portraits of anyone who had enough celebrity to intrigue him or enough money to pay his fees.

  As if to make it perfectly clear that his depictions of Saint Paul’s and Saint Matthew’s conversions did not signify that he himself had suddenly felt called to walk the straight and narrow path of the righteous, Caravaggio painted two of his most provocative and disquietingly homoerotic works, full-length nudes of the same dark-haired, smooth-skinned prepubescent boy. Sprawled with his buttocks pressed against a fur pelt, Saint John the Baptist grins saucily at us as he flings his arms around the neck of a shaggy old ram. Except for the single jarring note—that only one of them is human—the pair precisely models the discrepancies (young vs. mature, smooth vs. hirsute) that, in Caravaggio’s era, were culturally required attributes of the acceptable homosexual couple. The fact that the boy’s pose is modeled so closely on one of Michelangelo’s nudes in the Sistine Chapel adds the extra frisson of an art joke, a tribute or an insult to a masterwork of the past that amplifies the painting’s already considerable outrageousness.

  Victorious Cupid, a sly, impudent—and winged—boy stands with one leg folded back on a bench covered by a tangled bedsheet. His thighs are spread, his penis exposed. One of his hands is either behind, or on, his buttocks, calling attention to his perfect little rear. His look of delighted triumph seems partly inspired by the fact that the artifacts and symbols of knowledge, culture, and civilization—musical instruments, a pen and a book, military armor, scientific and mathematical implements, a crown and a globe—have effectively cast themselves at his pretty feet. It’s hard to talk about these paintings without sounding as if one is squinting at the past with the myopic eyes of the present, as if we wish to defile the innocence of an earlier era with the puritanical assumptions of a society that can no longer see a child’s beauty admired without diagnosing a case of pedophilia. But to paraphrase Dickens on the death of Little Nell, it would take a heart of stone not to feel that these works were intended to convey a sexual charge, that these boys’ expressions and poses were consciously meant to be teasing, enticing, and seductive.

  The Cupid was commissioned by Del Monte’s friend Vincenzo Giustiniani, who hung it in the same room as his most prized old masters. Sandrart would later say that Giustiniani kept the painting (which Giustiniani refused to sell, even when he was offered an exorbitant price) hidden under a dark green silk cloth. The story that was circulated was that he covered the painting to prevent it from making all the other 120 works in the room seem pale and inferior by contrast.

  In 1603, a certain Cardinal Ottavio Paravicino wrote a cautionary letter to a friend who had bought a painting of Caravaggio’s. In a famous remark, the cardinal warned his friend to be careful, because Caravaggio had a fondness for doing work that straddled the middle ground between “the sacred and the profane.” In fact it went beyond a fondness and was something more closely resembling a credo. Indeed, Caravaggio insisted on his freedom to defy categorization, his right to make art according to his convictions and out of whatever engaged his intellect and his soul, as well as his creative, religious, and erotic impulses. More to the point, he believed that the sacred could often be found in the profane, in the broad shoulders of the gravedigger and the executioner, and perhaps even in the smooth skin and alluring smile of the preadolescent boy.

  It took nerve to be known as the creator of both The Crucifixion of Saint Peter and Victorious Cupid, and inevitably that courage amplified Caravaggio’s reputation—and his notoriety. His work was discussed and widely admired by many of Rome’s most famous writers and literary figures, and it became a mark of status to have one’s likeness painted by Caravaggio. Poets and musicians wrote l
yrics and madrigals in praise of his style, which was said to possess a kind of magic that so bewitched the viewer that people became confused: Were they looking at the real world or one of Michelangelo Merisi’s paintings?

  Caravaggio became a close associate of the well-known poet Giambattista Marino, who also had parallel careers in art and crime. Marino had been accused both of sodomy and of impregnating an unmarried girl—yet more evidence of the fact that, at the time, these two activities would not have been considered mutually exclusive. Before leaving Naples for Rome, Marino had been jailed for forging papers on behalf of a friend who was eventually executed. Doubtless because of the fact that Marino was not a painter—and therefore not a potential rival—he and Caravaggio appear to have had a friendship that inspired them both without the anxiety of the competition that so often soured Caravaggio’s associations with his fellow artists.

  Caravaggio painted Marino’s portrait, and the poet responded by composing a sonnet extolling the painting’s virtues. Marino wrote laments for Narcissus, the Greek youth who was so harshly punished for his excessive self-regard, and Caravaggio painted his sensitive study of Narcissus gazing at his reflection in the water.

  Unlike Caravaggio’s Cupid and his Saint John the Baptist, his Narcissus has no interest in us, or in anything but his own image. Likewise, the painter’s attention seems focused less on the work’s potential effect on the viewer than on the formal—the geometric—aspects of its composition. As Narcissus kneels at the edge of the pool with his head turned to one side, his body describes a sort of arch, the two columns of his arms traversed by the horizontal of his shoulders. That shape is repeated in his reflection, so that the mirror image and the reality join in an oval, its two halves linked at the points at which Narcissus appears to be holding hands with himself and thus forming his own one-man, off-center circle.