Caravaggio

by Andrew Graham-Dixon

  The title frequently used in modern times, Sick Bacchus, is a legacy of the Italian art historian Roberto Longhi. Longhi believed that Caravaggio painted it as an allegorical self-portrait just after his discharge from the hospital of the Consolazione. Whether the work alludes to the artist’s illness is open to question, but it is certainly a self-portrait. Baglione groups it with a number of other, long-since vanished ‘portraits of himself in the mirror’. The distorted right shoulder of the figure, so close to the picture plane as to seem almost touchable, may reflect the painter’s use of a faintly convex mirror. The effect is at once intimate and disconcerting. The promise of a close relationship is held out by the figure’s proximity, but denied by the cool evasiveness in his eyes. His right leg, so lost in semi-darkness as to have become little more than a blur, is half raised, which suggests that he could be about to get up. Sensual gratification is the half-promised gift that he brings. But he might disappear at any moment, leaving behind just darkness and the taste of ashes, not of wine.

  Why would Caravaggio have painted himself like this? What might he have meant by it? The notion that he intended the work as a record of his own illness is ingenious, but there is a better and simpler explanation for the artist’s liverish complexion. The picture is set at night, the time for Bacchic revelry. The light that flares so brightly on the figure’s shoulder, giving his face its greenish cast, is simply the light of the moon.

  The significance of this hypnotizing self-portrait is best sought in its symbolism, although that is anything but straightforward. In one sense Bacchus is an apt alter ego for an artist, because according to his legend he is subject to fits of divine inspiration. Caravaggio was not the first painter to associate himself with the god of wine. In Borromean Milan, the city of his upbringing, a group of painters, including the well-known artist and theorist Gian Paolo Lomazzo, had formed a mock-academy dedicated to the cult of Bacchus. The young Caravaggio’s appropriation of the same Bacchic symbolism may have been his way of announcing his strong sense of his own capabilities, in which case there may have been an element of personal manifesto involved in the play-acting. It is tempting to imagine that he painted this truculent picture to show Giuseppe Cesari that he could be much more than a hack studio assistant.

  While Bacchus symbolizes inpiration, he also stands for disorder, anarchy, an unruly surrender to the senses. He is passion, opposed to the reason embodied by Apollo. He is the enemy of civilization, capable of laying waste to an entire society: in Euripides’ tragedy The Bacchae he destroys Thebes by luring its people into the mountains to join in his revels. The city’s outraged king, Pentheus, is torn limb from limb by the god’s intoxicated female followers, the Bacchantes. Pentheus’ mother, Agave, is at their forefront, bearing her son’s head aloft in triumph. In her ecstasy she sees him as a lion, fit to be slaughtered.

  The madness and the maenadism associated with the myth had been painted most memorably – and most disconcertingly – by Titian in his celebrated Bacchus and Ariadne, now in London’s National Gallery. As Bacchus leaps down from his chariot to join the mortal woman with whom he has suddenly fallen in love, his rowdy mob continues with its orgy. The god’s followers include the fat Silenus, drunk beyond coherence, and a young satyr with glazed eyes who drags behind him, as if it were a toy, the severed head of a sacrificed calf. It had been Titian’s achievement to distil the violence and weirdness of the Bacchic cults to a single image. He had conjured up a Renaissance equivalent to the frenzy described in Catullus’ famous 64th poem – which was, almost certainly, one of his principal sources:

  Bacchus was rushing up and down with his dancing band of satyrs … looking for you, Ariadne. Some of them were waving thyrsi with covered points, some were tossing about the limbs of a mangled steer, some were girding themselves with writhing serpents; some were bearing in solemn procession dark mysteries enclosed in caskets, mysteries which the profane desire in vain to hear. Others were beating tambourines with uplifted hands, or were raising sharp ringings from cymbals of rounded bronze …

  All this is relegated to the background of Caravaggio’s self-portrait, which, in its dryness, restraint and small scale, is a world away from Titian’s seductively orgiastic mythology. But it is there by implication. The violence that impends, the rending of the flesh, the drunkenness, the cannibalism – these things lurk in the teasing expression on the painter’s face. Might he have actually painted the picture behind his master’s back? Could it have been an act of truancy from the demeaning drudgery of the pure still life painting to which he had been assigned in the Cesari workshop? It has a sorceror’s apprentice feel to it, with its hints of illicit goings on, after dark and away from prying eyes. By the light of the moon, the young painter dares to dress up as a god of misrule.

  Boy with a Basket of Fruit is a fresher, brighter painting. But there is maybe more to this work too than at first meets the eye. The viewer is confronted by a blushing, smooth-skinned adolescent, with dark curly hair and an expression of amorous intensity on his face. On the admittedly slender evidence of a later self-portrait by Mario Minniti, it is possible that this was one of the pictures for which Caravaggio persuaded his new Sicilian friend to model. The boy carries a woven basket filled to overflowing with fruit – a cornucopia by comparison with the mere pair of peaches and the solitary bunch of grapes perched before the figure of Caravaggio-as-Bacchus. The basket contains four bunches of grapes, one red, two black and one green, as well as three apples, a peach and a pair of medlars. A pomegranate, split open to reveal its purple seeds, and four figs, two green and two black – the latter so ripe that they too have split to disclose the yellow and purple flesh within – also appear.

  The picture has been interpreted in a number of sharply differing ways. It is plainly a kind of demonstration piece, painted to exhibit the young Caravaggio’s skill in depicting not only fruits and foliage, but also the human face and form. Some writers have regarded it as a straightforward genre painting, a portrait of a handsome young fruit-seller plying his trade. Others claim to detect echoes of classical literature26 – in particular, the fables of Pliny the Elder, whose Natural History is the principal source of information about the painters of antiquity. Pliny’s encyclopedic book contains several stories and parables intended to demonstrate the heights of virtuosity reached by the artists of ancient Greece, as they competed to create an art of perfectly deceptive illusionism:

  The contemporaries and rivals of Zeuxis were Timanthes, Androcydes, Eupompus, Parrhasius. This last, it is recorded, entered into a competition with Zeuxis. Zeuxis produced a picture of grapes so dexterously represented that birds began to fly down to eat from the painted vine. Whereupon Parrhasius designed so lifelike a picture of a curtain that Zeuxis, proud of the verdict of the birds, requested that the curtain should now be drawn back and the picture displayed. When he realised his mistake, with a modesty that did him honour, he yielded up the palm, saying that whereas he had managed to deceive only birds, Parrhasius had deceived an artist.27

  Pliny adds that, as a riposte to Parrhasius, Zeuxis also painted a picture of a child holding grapes. Once more the birds tried to eat the fruit, but this time Zeuxis felt he had failed. He disconsolately pointed out that if his picture had been perfectly lifelike, the birds would have been too frightened by the painted boy to peck at the painted grapes in his hands.

  It was not uncommon for Italian artists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to create their own versions of lost paintings from the classical past. So perhaps Caravaggio’s choice of subject was intended to evoke that same picture of a child holding grapes by Zeuxis – and, indeed, to surpass it. No birds would ever dare to pick at the fruit in this basket. The blushing boy, whose tunic has slipped off his shoulder, is tremblingly alive. There is a slight awkwardness in the handling of his anatomy – an uncertainty in the juncture of his collarbone and right shoulder, which seems as a result unnaturally enlarged – but he is a compelling presence none the less. While t
he basket of fruit advertises Caravaggio’s ability to capture different tones, textures and colours, the figure of the boy demonstrates a yet rarer gift: the ability to suggest human emotion. Those ardent, intently gazing eyes are filled with longing, even love. This striking intensity of feeling is inconsistent with the notion that the picture is simply a genre painting, a snapshot of daily life. Neither can it be readily explained by reference to the classical past.

  How should we think about this remarkable face? Those who subscribe to the romantic myth of Caravaggio as a social and sexual outsider, boldly expressing the love that dares not speak its name, are obliged to twist the fruit-bearer’s expression of amorous yearning into the come-hither eyelash-flutterings of a rent boy. Howard Hibbard’s biography of Caravaggio, published in 1983, contains a brief but exemplary statement of this line of argument: ‘There is a soliciting aspect to this picture, and since some of Caravaggio’s other paintings of the 1590s are apparently homosexual in implication, we may read at least unconscious elements of this kind into the Boy with a Basket, whose fruits have various potentially symbolic meanings.’

  Although Hibbard’s interpretation is, I believe, thoroughly misguided, it contains an element of truth. There is a link between the figure’s mood of sensual abandon and the luscious fruits that he bears, many of which – especially the figs, apples and pomegranate – had ancient sexual connotations. But the explanation for that lies not in the artist’s supposedly devil-may-care determination to flaunt his homosexuality. It lies in the words of an ancient Persian love poem, absorbed long ago into the Judaeo-Christian tradition and known as the Song of Songs or the Song of Solomon, the most flagrantly erotic text in all of the Old Testament.28 It takes the form of a poetic dialogue between two lovers, the Bride and the Groom, who express their feelings for one another in imagery of a rich and fecund natural world.

  The Groom compares his beloved to a garden: ‘A garden inclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed. Thy plants are an orchard of pomegranates, with pleasant fruits …’ (4:12–13). For her part, the Bride describes the Groom as ‘white and ruddy, the chiefest among ten thousand. His head is as the most fine gold, his locks are bushy, and black as a raven … His mouth is most sweet: yea, he is altogether lovely. This is my beloved, and this is my friend, O daughters of Jerusalem’ (5:10–16). Finally, the Groom describes the fruition of their desires: ‘How fair and how pleasant art thou, O love, for delights! This thy stature is like to a palm tree, and thy breasts to clusters of grapes. I said, I will go up to the palm tree, I will take hold of the boughs thereof; now also thy breasts shall be as clusters of the vine, and the smell of thy nose like apples; and the roof of thy mouth like the best wine for my beloved, that goeth down sweetly, causing the lips of those that are asleep to speak’ (7:6–9).

  The iconography of Caravaggio’s painting is extremely close to that of the Song of Songs. The boy’s basket is filled with the fruits described in the poem, while the boy himself has all the attributes of the Groom, with his ruddy cheeks, his hair ‘as black as a raven’. So tender and languorous is his gaze that he might readily be imagined actually reciting the verses of the Song of Songs to his beloved. His lips are parted, as if to speak or sing.

  The Song of Songs was a controversial religious text among Christians and Jews alike precisely because of its profound eroticism. In the first century AD one of the rabbis to argue most passionately for its inclusion in Jewish scripture, as the ‘Holy of Holies’, also condemned the secular practice of singing it in banqueting halls, which suggests that sacred interpretation of the text had long been shadowed by suspicion of its sensuality.29 By the time Caravaggio painted his Boy with a Basket, in the late sixteenth century, Christian Church fathers had spent considerably more than a millennium teasing out what they had come to see as the redemptive symbolism of the poem’s tale of love. The Groom’s passion for the Bride was held to express Jesus Christ’s boundless love for his holy mother, Mary. The metaphor of the Bride as an ‘inclosed garden’ was easily transformed into a symbol of Mary’s virginity.

  But, to judge by the remarks of St Teresa of Avila, who wrote her own commentary on the Song of Songs in 1573, such forms of allegorical interpretation were not always easily understood by congregations in the world of the Catholic Counter-Reformation. As she noted, bawdy laughter at the sexual connotations of the poem’s language might easily interrupt even the most solemn, sacerdotal reflections on the Song of Songs: ‘Indeed, I recall hearing a priest … preach a very admirable sermon, most of which was an explanation of those loving delights with which the bride communed with God. And there was so much laughter, and what he said was so poorly taken, that I was shocked.’30

  Caravaggio’s painting, like that priest’s sermon, has also provoked ribald comments and has inevitably been susceptible to erotic interpretation. That ambiguity has perhaps always been part of its meaning. To borrow a phrase applied to Caravaggio’s work as a whole by his contemporary Cardinal Ottavio Paravicino, it is a picture that seems poised ‘between the sacred and the profane’ – in this case, concealing a devout message within an apparently profane, secular subject. To those who would be blind to its spiritual dimensions, the painting was designed to remain a merely enchanting parade of sensual delights – a picture of a boy with a puzzlingly languorous expression on his face, carrying a basket of fruit. But to those who knew how to see through the sensual surface, the boy reveals himself as the Groom in the Song of Songs and therefore as the type of the young Jesus Christ, an image at once of love and vulnerability.

  He is bare from the shoulder, not only because he is rapt in symbolic love for his divine mother, but also in anticipation of his crucifixion, the sacrificial gift of love he bears to all humanity. The shadows that flicker on the wall behind him, set against the light that illuminates his face, are shadows of death from which his own image, and with it the promise of eternal life, radiantly emerges. The same Christian message, that eternal life can be salvaged from the jaws of death, lurks in his basket of fruit. Withered, worm-eaten leaves of the vine contrast with ripened bunches of grapes. From death, once more, shall come life. The fading foliage is decay, transience, the passing of all things here on earth. The grapes are wine, the wine of the Eucharist that is the sacrificial blood of Christ. The picture offers not only a gift but a stark contrast of alternatives. What will you have? Death or life? Darkness or light?

  BOY BITTEN BY A LIZARD

  Caravaggio’s Self-Portrait as Bacchus and Boy with a Basket of Fruit are subtle and ambitious paintings, not the work of a painter likely to be satisfied with long hours and low pay working as another artist’s fruit and flower specialist. They corroborate Bellori’s assertion that Caravaggio ‘worked reluctantly’ at whatever hack work was assigned to him and ‘felt deeper regret at not being able to paint figures’.

  With the Bacchus, Caravaggio asks to be taken seriously, to be recognized as a painter not only of inspiration and intelligence but of something more than that. The picture announces Caravaggio’s spirit of unruly unpredictability, and shows for the first time the face of a man quite capable of overthrowing the tired artistic conventions of his time. With the Boy with a Basket, he demands to be regarded as better than a mere still life painter, and expresses the hope that one day – one day soon – he might be allowed to try his hand at devotional pictures.

  Even this early in his career, at a time when so much of his life and personality are obscure, certain things are clear. Caravaggio wants to paint the human figure and he wants to treat what, for his contemporaries, are the deepest and most serious subjects – the great Christian themes of salvation and damnation. His art is both sensually and intellectually seductive. It is carefully calculated to appeal to the more discerning and well-educated type of Roman patron – someone likely to be high up in the hierarchy of the Roman Church, keenly attuned to the subtle devotional symbolism of a picture such as the Boy with a Basket, or to respond to a secular, mythologi
cal painting like the Self-Portrait as Bacchus.

  So it is no coincidence that the young Caravaggio should have gravitated towards the company of churchmen. The more he could infiltrate the higher circles of the Roman clergy, the more likely he would be to win meaningful patronage. At first he had stayed with the unsatisfactory Pandolfo Pucci, ‘Monsignor Salad’. Around the beginning of 1595, after eight months in the Cesari workshop and a spell in hospital, he lodged once more with a man of the cloth. According to Mancini, the struggling Caravaggio found support from a certain ‘Monsignor Fatin Petrigiani, who gave him the comfort of a room in which to live’.31

  There were no fond farewells to Giuseppe Cesari. Whether Caravaggio left Cesari’s employ before or after the murky events that led to his hospitalization, they parted on bad terms. Whatever the personal reasons for the bad blood between them, professional jealousy also probably played a part. There are hints, in Mancini’s manuscript notes, that Cesari deliberately attempted to hold his talented young apprentice back for fear of being outshone. The perennially abrasive Caravaggio was a born innovator who had little time for the art of most of his contemporaries (he would later say as much in one of his several appearances before the Roman magistrates), so likely regarded the fey late Mannerism of Cesari’s mature style with naked contempt. Cesari’s prestige among the most influential Roman collectors and patrons can only have made Caravaggio’s own position all the more galling to him. Being studio assistant was bad enough, but being studio assistant to an overrated mediocrity must have been more than his pride could stand.