Caravaggio

by Francine Prose

  When autumn came, Caravaggio departed for Naples, which was then under Spanish rule, and which might as well have been a different country. Even today Naples can make you feel as if you have left Italy and been magically transported to North Africa or Asia. The streets of the old city are narrower and more mazelike than those in the capital, and they’re darker, shadowed by ancient dwellings that loom like skyscrapers, compared with the relatively low-rise buildings of Rome. The population was and is poorer and more likely to be unemployed, the prevailing atmosphere more volatile and anarchic.

  Happily for the exiled painter, part of what tied the two cities together were the tendrils of influence exerted by families like the Colonnas, who had played such a critical role in Michelangelo Merisi’s life, beginning when his father was employed in their palace in Milan. Caravaggio had thoughtfully brought the Neapolitan Colonnas his Mary Magdalene as a gift, and they were proud to introduce him to the local aristocracy and its privileged art collectors. The Neapolitan artists were also thrilled to have in their midst not only a great painter but also one with the glamor of Caravaggio’s stature, his reputation, and his notoriety. Perhaps uniquely susceptible for reasons of temperament and natural predisposition, the painters of Naples were drawn to Caravaggism with the zeal of new converts, and for decades afterward, Neapolitan painting would reflect the dramatic lighting and the theatrical scenarios that the master had brought down from Rome and left with them in trust.

  Presumably, their admiration for the brilliant newcomer was such that the local painters hardly resented it when, almost immediately, Caravaggio began receiving some of their city’s most sought-after commissions. He was hired to paint an altarpiece for the Pio Monte della Misericordia, a church recently constructed by the circle of aristocrats who had formed a confraternity dedicated to performing charitable deeds, to ministering to the poor and the incurably ill. Caravaggio was requested to depict the seven acts of mercy as enumerated in the Gospel of Saint Matthew: clothing the naked, visiting the sick and the imprisoned, feeding the hungry and giving drink to the thirsty, sheltering the wanderer. He was also directed to include, in the same painting, the Madonna della Misericordia.

  The Seven Acts of Mercy was a daunting assignment, but Caravaggio rose to the challenge, setting his nocturnal drama in a cramped piazza and crowding the lower half of his canvas with figures involved in scenarios corresponding to each of the seven good works. The most startling and most brightly lit of these illustrates the ancient Roman legend of Cimon and Pero, an exemplary tale of filial devotion concerning a woman who saved the life of her imprisoned and starving father by nourishing him with her breast milk. Here, in an astonishingly naturalistic touch, Pero has lifted the hem of her skirt as a sort of bib beneath the chin of her grizzled father, whose head protrudes between the prison bars as he suckles her bare breast. Half turning from him, Pero regards the spectacle around her: Samson drinking from the jawbone of an ass, Saint Martin dividing his cloak to clothe a naked beggar, an innkeeper directing pilgims to his establishment. Just behind Pero, a priest raises his torch to aid a man grasping the ankles of what appears to be a corpse. Above it all soars Mary, tenderly holding her radiant child, and from a tangle of angels, feathered wings, and swirling drapery, she surveys the world beneath her with perfect and absolute compassion.

  Lacking a central emotional core, a vibrantly intimate interaction of the sort that allowed Caravaggio to achieve his most powerful effects, the painting seems chaotic, almost circuslike, and unfocused. It’s hard to know what we should look at first, or what impression we should take away from this jittery, hyperactive carnival of competing activity—that is, until we realize that what we are seeing is Naples itself. Even now the darkness, the light and shadow, the frenetic buzz of the crowd makes the altarpiece seem less like a biblical or mythical narrative than like a cityscape, like reportage.

  In the heart of the city’s historic center, the Church of Pio Monte della Misericordia is directly around the corner from the Duomo, and on one of the busiest blocks of the ancient road that has become the terrifyingly and thrillingly congested Via dei Tribunali. The modestly proportioned church’s vaguely beehive-like shape makes you think, for just a moment, of a church by Francesco Borromini. But as you step into the circular, whitewashed interior, that one moment of peace and reflection is all you can hope to get before Caravaggio’s masterpiece draws you in and makes you feel as if the vertiginous and endlessly fascinating street life of the centro storico has somehow followed you inside. It’s a kind of magic, really, a miracle of transformation—to have set out to depict the seven faces of charity, and to have painted, in the process, an impressionistic portrait of an essentially unforgiving and recklessly passionate city.

  Once more we can watch Caravaggio testing the aesthetic boundaries and the squeamishness of his patrons, juxtaposing the audaciously highlighted naked breast of the ordinary Neapolitan woman who modeled for Pero with the bare feet of the corpse on its way to an unceremonious burial. But this time the artist was not disappointed. The painting pleased its intended audience, the Confraternity of the Misericordia and the faithful who came to worship in their church. It must have been a great comfort to Caravaggio, after his troubles with the altarpieces he had painted in Rome, which had been rejected.

  He was soon receiving other commissions from yet more Neapolitan patrons, most importantly for a portrayal of The Flagellation of Christ, destined for the chapel of the di Franco family in the Church of San Domenico Maggiore. In reimagining the scene of the flagellation, Caravaggio was returning—after the complications and the mass chaos of The Seven Acts of Mercy—to the sort of image at which he excelled: a simple drama in which the innocent victim, the object of our religious veneration as well as our human sympathy, is pitted against his torturers or assassins in such a way as to extract the maximum emotion from a wrenching and tragic scene.

  The flagellation was a perfect subject for Caravaggio, an occasion and an invitation for him to pull out all the stops. The scene is one that pious Christians have often been encouraged to meditate on as a means of releasing all their pity and grief for the scorned and tormented Jesus. In the Church of Santa Prassede in Rome is a section of the whipping post to which, it is claimed, Christ was bound during his scourging. One afternoon, I watched a monk kneeling in front of the relic, praying and weeping steadily for well over an hour.

  The Flagellation of Christ is one of Caravaggio’s most beautiful and saddest paintings. Naples’s shadows have changed him. His blacks have never been blacker. Much of the canvas is given over to dark and empty space. The drama is transpiring in a grim Neapolitan dungeon in which there is nothing, where nothing exists but the column to which Christ is tied. Light shines from the pillar, and from Christ’s as yet unblemished chest. The beauty and brightness of his flesh only serve to remind us of how soon it will show the bruises and excoriations, the physical and visible evidence of his pain and humiliation. Every muscle, every cell in his perfect young body has tensed in order to ward off the pain as he twists away from his attackers. Already a few smears of blood testify to the harshness with which the crown of thorns has been jammed onto his forehead. And Christ has already drawn inside himself. His eyes are closed, his head tilted, his chin half tucked under his shoulder in the way that a bird might nestle its head beneath its wing.

  In some ways, the painting resembles The Crucifixion of Saint Peter in the Cerasi Chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo. Both depict the moment of suffering before the real suffering has begun; both show the solitary victim outnumbered by, and at the mercy of, three executioners or tormentors. But the difference between them shows us how much darker and more desolate Caravaggio’s vision has grown.

  The laborers hoisting Peter’s cross take no pleasure in their work. Their faces are hidden from us, as if to allow them to perform their assigned task in private. They are simply doing a job on someone else’s orders. The same might be said of the man who kneels in the lower left corner of The
Flagellation, efficiently and unhurriedly tying the bundle of branches with which he will soon begin to beat Jesus. Likewise, the workman on the right seems to be engaged, with no particular malice, in tightening the ropes that bring Jesus’s wrists to the column. But that impression changes when you notice the detail of his foot, pressing for leverage into Christ’s calf—an act of gratuitous cruelty, or at best of the most egregious sort of unconciousness. For we can safely assume that the same force and leverage could have been achieved had he braced his foot against base of the column and not felt compelled to step on Christ merely because he could. And there can be no doubt about how much the jailer on the left is enjoying his task. His eyebrows are raised, his teeth bared in a grimace of sadistic satisfaction as he yanks Jesus’s hair, a brutal gesture accentuated by the sweet and melting angle at which Christ inclines his head.

  In many paintings of the flagellation, the beating of Christ seems to have an almost balletic aspect; in their enthusiasm, the torturers draw back and twist their bodies to intensify the force of their blows. So perhaps what makes this version so painful to behold is, again, the realism with which labor is portrayed; what’s transpiring here is not dancing, but rather a perversely rewarding form of hard labor.

  In his religious paintings, beginning with The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew and even Judith and Holofernes, Caravaggio had never shied away from telling the truth about what human beings will, given half the chance, do to one another. But not until The Flagellation of Christ did he reveal what he knew, or suspected, about how much they enjoy it.

  In the summer of 1607, Caravaggio left Naples for Malta. Like the motives behind so much of what he did during those final years, his reasons for leaving remain mysterious and confounding, especially since his work was so avidly desired and so well received in Naples. Perhaps, as Bellori believed, he was driven by the ambition to be knighted and to receive the Cross of Malta. Perhaps he imagined that, as a knight, he would find it easier to get the pardon that would enable him to return to Rome. Perhaps he went in the hopes of receiving a commission to decorate the new Co-Cathedral of Saint John in Valletta, though that seems improbable, since he was already getting so many lucrative assignments in Naples, which must have seemed so much more enjoyable, entertaining, and lively than Malta—that peculiar and isolated island dominated by the militaristic, officially austere, but in reality (at that time) increasingly dissolute and contentious Knights of the Order of Saint John. Or perhaps the isolation was exacty what appealed to him, perhaps in his growing and possibly justified paranoia, he believed that the papal authorities were still after him, and that they remained so determined to bring him to justice for the murder of Ranuccio Tomassoni that Naples suddenly seemed dangerously close to Rome.

  Or perhaps he had once again managed to get into some sort of ugly entanglement, to become embroiled in a feud that had not yet attracted the attention of the authorities, but that threatened to erupt into a new version of the disaster that had forced him out of Rome. Perhaps this time it seemed wiser to leave town rather than to simply let matters take their perilous and inevitable course. Given his character, this supposition hardly seems unlikely, and certainly, when he revisited Naples two years later, some old trouble was waiting for him or some new trouble came to find him, and he was attacked and nearly killed in a fight in a tavern.

  The least probable explanation is that offered by Sandrart, who claims that Caravaggio was still smarting from the insult he had received from the Cavaliere d’Arpino, who had refused to fight him because d’Arpino was a knight and Caravaggio wasn’t. At this particularly stressful and turbulent period in his life, claims Sandrart, Caravaggio was driven by the determination to bump his social status up to the level of his former employer’s. Sandrart seemed convinced that the quarrel with d’Arpino was such a watershed moment for Caravaggio that, as soon as he was knighted, the artist rushed back to Rome to have things out, this time on an equal footing with his former rival.

  In any event, Caravaggio was living in Malta by the end of July. The society in which he found himself could hardly have been more different from the sybaritic aristocracy and the anarchic street life of Naples or, for that matter, from the artistic and political intrigues of Rome. Malta was essentially a military outpost manned by a religious volunteer army, a thickly walled fortress in which the Knights of the Order of Saint John had taken on the sacred duty of protecting Christendom and Western Europe from the onslaughts of the Ottoman Turks and, after the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, the Barbary pirates.

  By the time Caravaggio arrived, many Maltese could still remember the Great Siege of 1565, when the Ottomans had filled the waters of the harbor with the headless bodies of dead knights tied to a flotilla of crucifixes that carried them, like rafts, toward shore. And the knights had retaliated by firing the heads of the dead Turks from cannons. Since then, captured Christians had been sold into slavery by the Turks, just as Turkish prisoners were made to work as galley slaves on European ships.

  Malta’s position at the center of a thriving slave market did little for its moral character, and it was common for the knights to have slaves as personal attendants. Nor was the tone of the place improved much by the influx of prostitutes who came to service the predominantly male society of merchants, traders, and theoretically celibate knights. In 1581, the knights revolted and imprisoned their grand master, Jean de la Cassiere, who had made the tactical mistake of attempting to expel the whores from the island.

  In the newly built baroque city of Valletta, Caravaggio’s circle most likely included Marc’Aurelio Giustiniani, a relative of the painter’s former patrons in Rome, and Fabrizio Sforza Colonna, whom the pope had sentenced to exile in Malta as a convenient solution to the embarrassing problems caused by the awkward conjunction of Colonna’s lineage, his popularity, his fame—and his criminal activity. Most important, Caravaggio enjoyed the support of the current grand master, Alof de Wignacourt, an aristocratic Frenchman who had become grand master in 1601, and whose architectural, civil, and cultural achievements included the building of the Tower of Malta, the construction of the aqueduct that furnished Valletta with its water supply, and the establishment of the National Library. Surely it must have been clear to everyone involved that Wignacourt’s favor would prove to be Caravaggio’s ticket to knighthood.

  Taxing their imaginations to understand how the undeserving, lowborn Caravaggio could have received an honor designated for the favorite sons of the aristocracy, Bellori, Baglione, and Mancini come together in a rare moment of concurrence. All three suggest that the artist’s knighthood was essentially granted him in return for the portrait or portraits (Bellori claims there were two) he painted of the grand master, which pleased Wignacourt so much that he admitted their creator into his order. Perhaps Bellori, like quite a few others who came after him, incorrectly assumed that Caravaggio’s portait of another Knight of Malta, Fra Antonio Martelli, was also a likeness of Wignacourt.

  Looking at these portraits—both depictions of old men—you may find yourself regretting how many Caravaggio portraits have been lost, for both of these paintings are among art history’s most psychologically complex, astute, and sensitive renderings of the ways our physical appearance discloses all manner of information about our character and experience, even as it vigilantly guards our deepest secrets.

  Like the portraits by Titian, Rembrandt, and Velasquez, the depiction of Alof de Wignacourt precisely calibrates the formula of just how much the face is compelled to reveal and how much it declines to tell us, so that we may think that we know something about its owner until we are forced to agree with Virginia Woolf that you can never say that a person is this or that, one thing or another.

  Meanwhile, we can’t help drawing our own conclusions about the sitter. Positioned in the center of the canvas, the grand master wears his heavy and elaborate armor as comfortably and magisterially as a metal suit can be worn. His stance conveys authority and control, he stands as if he owns the ground be
neath his feet. His bearded, close-cropped head is turned to one side, his gaze tracks into the distance—perceptive, shrewd, but neither inhuman nor intimidating. He is proud of himself and of what he’s accomplished in the course of his sixty-one years, but there is something about him that resembles all those old men, humbled by time, who appear so often in Caravaggio’s work. Though the portrait makes no attempt to him look younger than he is, it thoughtfully conceals some of the fleshiness, and equivocates slightly about the size and shape of his nose, as well as the wart growing on it—features that other portraits of the grand master confronted more directly.

  The painting could almost pass for a traditional military portrait, an unusually conventional effort from Caravaggio, which is understandable, since even the fiercely uncompromising painter doubtless understood that this time something more than pure art was at stake. But Caravaggio never disappoints, never settles for what is familiar or expected. The grand master is not alone. On the right of the canvas stands a page boy, a pretty blond youth of ten or so, carrying Wignacourt’s plumed helmet, which is made to appear doubly enormous by the fact that it seems to be twice the size of the boy’s head. Why is the little servant in the painting at all? And why is he staring out at us so fixedly that he is constantly on the edge of upstaging the grand master? What is he—and Caravaggio—trying to tell us? What is the boy’s relation to the older man? Should we let ourselves register the fact that the boy is of the age that, in those times, would have been considered most appealing and most suitable as a romantic object for a man of Wignacourt’s age?

  The answers, which we will never have, are finally not what matter. The boy provides that singularly distinguishing detail—the bare feet of the pilgrim, the swollen belly of the Madonna, the gnarled legs of the saint, the jailer yanking Christ’s hair—that so neatly combines reality and mystery in a single image that Caravaggio searched for and could not resist representing, and that identifies his presence and his vision as conclusively as a fingerprint.