Caravaggio

by Andrew Graham-Dixon

  The most skilfully carved and painted of the figures have a shocking actuality about them. This is not art that seeks to idealize or generalize life; it is art that aspires to the condition of a simulacrum of life itself. Collectively, the chapels of the sacro monte exemplified an ancient, pious fairground form of realism – a type of art that has in general been overlooked or avoided by most art historians precisely because of its naked and self-conscious ‘vulgarity’. Yet the art of the sacro monte also had strong roots in traditions of high artistic realism going back to the start of the Renaissance. This was a tradition that had produced the sculpturally immediate, emotionally vivid and highly theatrical fourteenth-century paintings of Giotto – which themselves had strong links with certain forms of sacred drama, miracle plays and the like, promoted by the Franciscans and other orders of mendicant friars; as well as the startlingly lifelike fifteenth-century sculptures of Donatello, creations such as the Mary Magdalen or the Habakkuk, which struck his contemporaries as so eerily imbued with human presence that he was even suspected of necromancy.

  This tradition of the work of art as, essentially, a speaking likeness intended to bring the Bible to life was displaced during the later Renaissance – or, at least, it was so transformed by the values and imperatives of the High Renaissance, of Michelangelo and Raphael and the Mannerists who came after them, that its original, uncanny effects were greatly diminished. Yet it continued to thrive away from the perceived centres of art such as Rome or Florence. In Emilia-Romagna and throughout Lombardy, unsettlingly realistic groups of figures were created by a school of sculptors working in the malleable and highly expressive medium of terracotta. Their art is still insufficiently appreciated, but a sculptor such as Guido Mazzoni from Modena, whose breathtakingly emotive works can still be seen in churches across northern Italy – and indeed as far south as Naples – deserves to be ranked alongside any of his better-known contemporaries. The traditions of the highly realized terracotta sculpture, and of the sacro monte, played a crucial role in shaping the imagination of pious Italians in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

  Both traditions were also deeply influential on Caravaggio. Caravaggio’s mature paintings, such as The Crucifixion of St Peter and The Conversion of St Paul, are blatantly rooted in the traditions of popular pious realism that produced the sculptures of the sacred mountain and the freestanding groups created by Mazzoni and other such masters. So clear and direct is the connection, so manifest the visual resemblance, that it might even be said that his principal strategy as a religious artist was to translate the effects of these two particular branches of theatrical sculpture into the painting of his time. The way in which he paints the wrinkled faces and bodies of his protagonists has its exact parallel in the wizened physiognomies conjured from clay by the masters of terracotta sculpture in Lombardy and Emilia-Romagna – so much so that some of the older faces in his painting might almost have been copied direct from sources in terracotta sculpture.

  Caravaggio’s fondness for going into gruesome, visceral detail – his depiction, for example, of the gouts of blood that spurt from the decapitated tyrant’s head in Judith and Holofernes – also vividly testifies to the affinity between his art and the rowdy, bloody, popular spectacle of much sacro monte imagery. But even more telling is his constant habit of framing and composing scenes as though confined within a single, small, contained, theatrical space. There is very little landscape in Caravaggio, very little feel of the open air. The scenes he depicts are mostly to be imagined taking place indoors. He habitually collapses the immensity of the world to the confines of a room in which he can control the action and rigorously limit the cast of actors – a space analogous to the densely packed, theatrical spaces devised by the creators of the popular, pious, sculptural mises-en-scène.

  To say this is to deny neither Caravaggio’s virtuosity nor his powers of invention. The way in which he adapted the conventions of popular sculpture to painting, the way in which he made them thoroughly pictorial – above all through his use of light and shade – was so original that it gave painters nothing less than a whole new grammar and vocabulary. The very idea of looking back, past the etiolated late Mannerism of his day, past the art of the High Renaissance, to vivid and robust traditions of popular religious sculpture – that too was a profoundly original move. It ran directly counter to the prevailing aesthetic orthodoxy of late Renaissance thought, as expressed by Giorgio Vasari in his Lives of the Artists – namely, the belief that art should continually evolve and progress, and that it was the duty of every artist to increase that forward momentum, whether he did so incrementally or through some great leap of innovation.

  There was admittedly room for a degree of retrospection within Vasari’s fundamentally teleological view of history. As he tells the tale of a great rebirth, or Rinascita, in Italian art, Vasari allows that the earliest masters, such as Giotto or the Pisano family, had been obliged to look back to the art of classical antiquity to rekindle the painting and sculpture of their own day. In articulating that belief, he was adapting a commonplace of the poet Petrarch’s thought – the idea that the classical past was a ‘golden age’ that could be recovered and eventually surpassed thanks to the efforts of humanist scholarship – and applying it to the discipline of art history. Because Vasari was the very first art historian, his notion of art as essentially progressive has proved peculiarly persistent. But the idea that an Italian artist born in the sixteenth century might have thought it worthwhile to look back past the art of Michelangelo and Raphael, not to the classical world but to the art of the earlier Renaissance, and even to the popular arts of the Middle Ages – that would have shocked and bewildered Vasari. He would have regarded such a preference, for the old and the popular over the new and sophisticated, absurd and perverse. Yet Caravaggio exhibited and proclaimed just such a preference. It might even be said that he was the first self-conscious primitivist in the entire history of post-classical Western art. The force, imagination and ingenuity with which he asserted his position made his art seem all the more iconoclastic and persuasive – compelling the admiration of subsequent painters as diverse as Rembrandt and Rubens, Ribera and Zurbarán.

  How was it that Caravaggio came to formulate his aggressively retrograde strategy? The most plausible solution would seem to lie in the painter’s roots in Borromean Milan. Caravaggio’s reinvention of devotional religious painting along the lines of a direct, theatrical, visceral, popular art would take place not in Milan but in Rome, and it would happen more than a decade after Borromeo’s death. But it would represent, none the less, a strikingly faithful translation, into the field of art, of the imperatives of Carlo Borromeo’s piety. In matters of piety Borromeo was a dramatist, a populist and – for all his innovations in church architecture and furnishing – a primitivist. The religious art that Caravaggio was destined to create could hardly have been more closely aligned to the beliefs and sensibilities of the charismatic Archbishop of Milan.

  There are certainly elements of Caravaggio’s religious painting of which Borromeo would not have approved. The full-breasted figure of the Virgin Mary in Caravaggio’s The Madonna of the Palafrenieri would doubtless have offended his sense of decorum. He would have been disturbed altogether by the painter’s intense sensuality, by his feel for the flesh and blood of the human body and by his sensitivity to the suggestions implicit in the least exchange of glances. Yet even here, Borromeo may have exerted a subtle influence on the painter. Caravaggio paints with a strong and unmistakable sense of the perils and the powers of looking. His pictures both embody and evoke an acute and piercing gaze. Caravaggio sees what he sees with such intensity – even if it is only an image in his mind’s eye, an image conjured from the imagination – that he makes seeing itself seem a compulsive and potentially fraught act. It is as if he feels at every moment that to see is also to possess and, potentially, to be possessed. This is why Caravaggio’s paintings have a destructive effect on pictures by other a
rtists hung anywhere near them in art galleries. They exert such a sensually charged, magnetic attraction that they seem almost as though backlit, or somehow illuminated from within, while the pictures around them – even those of great artists, whether Rembrandt or Poussin or Velàzquez – appear by comparison to recede, to retreat from the gaze.

  Pablo Picasso was another artist whose pictures project such deep intensity of looking that they have an obliterating effect on other works of art. In his case, the phenomenon seems to have been linked to a powerfully distinctive way of seeing learned from the culture in which he grew up – the male-dominated and intensely Catholic society of late nineteenth-century Andalusia, where they even had a phrase for this kind of looking, the mirada fuerte (which literally means ‘strong gazing’). It has been succinctly characterized by the historian David Gilmore: ‘When the Andalusian fixes a thing with a stare, he grasps it. His eyes are fingers holding and probing … the sexual element is present also … The light of the eyes is highly erotic … In a culture where the sexes are segregated to the point of mutual invisibility, the eye becomes the erogenous zone par excellence …’33 The explanation for Caravaggio’s own intensity of looking may also lie in the distinctive milieu of his youth, the milieu of Borromean Milan – a place where, just as in Picasso’s Andalusia, rigorous attempts were made to keep men and women apart.

  If the dangers inherent in the sense of touch disturbed Borromeo, he was yet more disturbed by the opportunities for corruption furnished by the sense of sight. In the words of the Methodus Confessionis – the sixteenth-century confessor’s manual that Borromeo himself recommended to his Milanese clergy – sight was described as the most dangerous of all the senses precisely because it was superior to the rest and had the ability to ‘incite man to many sins’.34 In a sermon delivered in the Lombard town of Lecco on 2 July 1583, Borromeo went even further. Reflecting on the murky biblical tale of the rape of Dinah (Genesis 34), he argued that the origins of all such sexual crimes lay within the sense of sight. Dinah was at fault for the rape, he decreed, because she had allowed herself to be seen and had underestimated what can happen when men are given sight of the flesh that they sinfully covet. The eyes, he pronounced, ‘are like two gates to the castle of our body. So when they are in the Devil’s control, he is also the master of our heart, and can introduce into our soul whatever he wants … consequently, since the eyes can introduce great mischief into the soul, they are to be guarded with the utmost diligence. For “death has come up through our windows” [Jeremiah 9:21]: therefore we have to keep them shut.’35

  It was remarkable advice to give to any congregation. To avoid sin, close your eyes. Take Borromeo’s views one step further and the logical thing to do would be to inflict blindness systematically on the whole Christian community to keep it pure of lust and other evil thoughts. He was also of course perfectly capable of taking exactly the opposite line, especially when it came to images of the kind to be encountered on the sacred mountain at Varallo. There, Carlo Borromeo would counsel the faithful to open their eyes as wide as possible – as he did, in the days before his death – and drink in the spectacle of Christ’s suffering. For all his contradictions, one thing is certain. At the centre of the paranoid and extremist edifice of Borromeo’s religious thought there was a profound, superstitious belief that the sense of sight was the most direct route to the soul.

  The evidence of his art suggests that Caravaggio was profoundly shaped by the insistent, manic ocularity of Borromean piety. He would surely have been a very different artist had he not been exposed to the very particular nexus of Milanese attitudes that linked seeing with guilt-ridden sensuality on the one hand, and salvation on the other. His pictures certainly speak of an intense sensitivity to every aspect of visual experience. So too do his notorious arguments and quarrels. Nearly all of the disagreements that would mark and mar Caravaggio’s life would turn on a glance taken amiss, a perceived slight or insult implying a potential loss of face. When he looked at people, nothing missed his attention and sometimes his sensitivity may have fooled him into seeing things that really were not there. When people looked back at Caravaggio, they did so at their peril.

  PLAGUE

  In the summer of 1576, when Caravaggio was almost five years old, the city of Milan was struck by an outbreak of bubonic plague. A census taken at the end of that year in the Milanese parish of Santa Maria della Passerella records the presence there of Fermo Merisi and his wife Lucia. Also listed were Fermo’s daughter by his first marriage, Margherita, as well as Giovan Battista Merisi, Caravaggio’s brother, four years old at the time. Mysteriously, there is no mention of Caravaggio himself, or of his two-year-old sister, Caterina, or of his still younger sibling, Giovan Pietro.36

  It is possible that by November or December they had already been evacuated from the city to the relative safety of the countryside, although it is not clear why they alone should have been sent away, leaving the equally vulnerable Giovan Battista at risk. Perhaps the censor missed their presence in the household; perhaps they were not there on the day that he came; perhaps Fermo and Lucia hurriedly managed to conceal at least some of their children when the censor visited, making it easier to evacuate them, unnoticed, at a later date. The movement of people and goods was strictly controlled in time of plague, and almost as soon as the contagion had become apparent, in August, Carlo Borromeo had issued edicts prohibiting anyone from leaving the city. At the end of October, as the disease appeared to abate, this quarantine was briefly lifted – although even then only a select group of wealthier families was allowed to leave. Is it possible that Caravaggio’s parents took advantage of their contacts with the Colonna family to secure safe passage for their children, away from Milan, at that time? All that the historical record shows, for sure, is that the whole family had moved to their home in Caravaggio by the autumn of 1577 at the latest.37 Whatever the subsequent course of events, there is no reason to believe that the artist was not living with his parents in Milan when the outbreak struck in August of 1576. So he is likely to have witnessed much of the horror of the epidemic, especially during its early months, at first hand.

  The symptoms of bubonic plague (yersinia pestis) are grim and unmistakable. On infection, plague bacteria swiftly multiply in the sufferer’s lymphatic system, affecting tonsils, adenoids, spleen and thymus. Within a day or two, the victim suffers fevers, chills and headaches. Vomiting and diarrhoea follow. But the most decisive sign of plague, the true mark of death, is the appearance of the so-called ‘buboes’ – swellings caused by internal bleeding that appear in the neck, groin and armpits, at the point of the lymph nodes, oozing both blood and pus. Damage then quickly spreads throughout the victim’s underlying tissue, until the whole body is covered in dark, purplish blotches. The majority of sufferers die within about four days of contracting the disease.

  To the young Caravaggio and his contemporaries, the plague was a visitation, a mysterious curse, like a torture from the bowels of hell inflicted on the living. What could be more appalling than this death by spontaneous internal putrefaction, this sudden consuming of the body from within? Bubonic plague was carried by rats and transmitted to human beings by fleas that jumped from those rats, but no one in Caravaggio’s world was aware of that fact. The concept of infection was understood and so was the importance of quarantine, so that houses known to be plague-ridden were locked from the outside, their inhabitants forbidden to leave until the contagion had passed (when all those trapped within were usually found dead). But, although the precise cause of the disease was unknown, human intuition had groped towards an understanding that the illness might in some way be linked to hygiene. Public proclamations issued at regular intervals by Milan’s health office in the late 1570s give no fewer than seven accounts of the true cause of the plague, and although they differ widely it is striking how many of them involve rumours about unclean bedding or clothes – which no doubt did, indeed, harbour the fleas that carried the disease. The plague was sa
id to have begun in Venice, originating with Jews trading in used household goods; to have been brought from Mantua by a Jew who had come from that city to Milan selling – again – used household goods; to have been caused by a citizen of Mantua, a man carrying the disease who had spent the night in a Milanese inn and thereby infected the bedding on which he had slept; to have been transmitted by a dirty shirt, worn by a traveller and unwisely confiscated by an innkeeper in part settlement of his bill; and so on.38

  As well as carrying inklings of the truth about the actual mechanisms of infectious transmission, these stories vividly demonstrate the extent to which plague was liable to stir up a hornets’ nest of prejudice. There was a long, ignoble history of such accusations. During the fourteenth century, when all of Europe suffered unprecedented mortality rates from outbreaks of the Black Death, as plague became known, the rumour was put about that Jews were deliberately spreading the disease. The idea of a pestis manufacta, a plague-inducing substance secretly manufactured by the enemies of Christianity, took hold of the popular imagination. In the lower Rhineland and parts of Provence, many Jews suspected of such terrorist acts had been interrogated and tortured, and when confessions had been extorted from them entire Jewish communities had been systematically liquidated.39 There was no such response to the Milanese plague of the 1570s, but there was a recurrence of rumours about the role of untori – unguent-spreaders – in creating the epidemic. According to a Jesuit eyewitness, Paolo Bisciola, ‘it is said that there were certain men who went about touching the walls, gates, and streets with artificial unguents, which opinion many affirmed through the discovery one morning that almost all of the gates and cadenazzi of the Corsa di Porta Nuova, had been smeared, and the walls in various places had been soiled by unguents.’40 The presumed culprits, this time, were not the Jews but the Spanish. For a while, the people of Milan convinced themselves that their hated rulers were to blame for the evil that afflicted them. The Spanish governor of Milan felt compelled to pass legislation that forbade anyone from repeating the accusation – which only made the Milanese population even more jittery.