The Renaissance scholar and connoisseur Bernard Berenson, who published a short and rather tetchy book about Caravaggio in 1951, was offended by the aggressive directness of the picture:
But for the noble Titianesque head of the victim, the rest is a study in the raising of a heavy weight without the aid of machinery. Of the chief performers, the one who acts as crane and the other as booster, we see the back of one and the buttocks of the other. We do not see their faces. No need. They are mere mechanisms. Hard to conceive a more dehumanized treatment of the subject. No doubt the arrangement of the four figures as crossed diagonals taking up the entire canvas was a happy thought …27
The executioners were certainly intended to shock. The presence of these coarsely posed, unmistakably low-brow figures underscored Caravaggio’s total rejection of High Renaissance and Mannerist elegance. This is all the more apparent in the Cerasi Chapel, where Annibale Carracci’s large and centrally placed altarpiece perfectly embodies the traditions to which Caravaggio’s work is so brutally opposed. Carracci had sought to pre-empt his rival by creating a work designed to reassert the values of idealized beauty, splendid colour and lofty transcendence. In doing so, he may have hoped to sow seeds of self-doubt in Caravaggio’s mind. But the younger painter was only spurred on to a more blatant statement of his own, very different priorities. In place of Carracci’s emotionless splendour of effect he offered up his own spare, low-toned, militantly ‘poor’ art. Carracci had used rich colours, colours that literally embodied wealth and magnificence, like the celestial blue of the Madonna’s cloak, painted in the costly medium of ultramarine. In stark contrast, Caravaggio kept rigorously to a palette of humble, ordinary, cheap colours: the earth colours, ochre and umber, carbon black, lead white, verdigris. The use of costly ultramarine was actually specified by Cerasi, who doubtless wanted posterity to know that no expense had been spared. But Caravaggio used the colour in such a way as to reject its rich associations. The dying Peter’s robe, lying in a heap in the bottom corner of the Martyrdom, has been painted in murkily shadowed ultramarine. As Bellori noted, Caravaggio avoided more brilliant vermilions and blues, and even when he did use them generally ‘toned them down’.28
The lives of Christ and his followers were neither rich nor splendid. Their deaths were brutal. Caravaggio insists on these home truths in every detail of the Cerasi Chapel paintings, whether it be the glint of the crouching executioner’s spade or the black dirt so deeply ingrained in the upturned heel and ball of his left foot. Like Carlo Borromeo preaching in rags, the art of Caravaggio expressed an aggressively harsh piety. With The Conversion of St Paul and The Crucifixion of St Peter, he took his uncompromisingly severe style of painting to an ascetic extreme. As a parting gesture to his rival, as if to stress the depth of his disdain for Carracci’s brand of vapid magnificence, Caravaggio contrived a cunning insult: the rump of St Paul’s proletarian carthorse is pointedly turned towards Carracci’s Assumption of the Virgin.
IN THE HOUSE OF THE MATTEI
Caravaggio finished his two lateral paintings for the Cerasi Chapel towards the end of 1601. Earlier in the year he had left the household of Cardinal del Monte to accept the hospitality of another powerful figure in the Roman Curia, Cardinal Girolamo Mattei.
The Mattei were powerful. They lived in a honeycomb complex of houses and palaces built over the ruins of the ancient Roman Teatro di Balbo, in the heavily populated district of Sant’Angelo, between the Tiber and the Campidoglio. The adjoining residences of the various branches of the family formed an entire block, known as the Isola dei Mattei. At its centre, looking out across the Piazza Mattei, was the massive Palazzo Mattei, home to Cardinal Girolamo.
Caravaggio moved there some time before 14 June 1601, when he gave his address on agreeing a contract for an altarpiece of The Death of the Virgin, for the church of Santa Maria della Scala in the district of Trastevere in Rome: he is described as ‘Michelangelo Merisi from Caravaggio, painter of the city, living in the palace of the illustrious and reverend lord cardinal Mattei’. The terms of the contract allowed him twelve months to paint the new altarpiece. He would complete the work eventually, but not until long after that deadline had passed.
Caravaggio probably remained in the household of the Mattei family until at least the beginning of 1603. His precise movements are hard to track following his departure from the household of Cardinal del Monte, who was himself friendly with the Mattei and may have been instrumental in the artist’s move. Caravaggio’s change of address should not be seen as marking a break between him and del Monte. The painter continued to rely on his old protector for support. On the evening of 11 October 1601 Caravaggio was stopped for carrying arms without a licence in the district of the Campo Marzio. The policeman who made the arrest reported that the painter ‘insisted that he was on the household roll of the Cardinal del Monte, and because he did not have a licence and I did not know if it was true, I took him to prison at the Tor di Nona.’29 Nothing came of it and the painter was soon released, probably with del Monte’s help. For his part the Medici cardinal seems to have remained on good terms with his protégé, continuing to make allowances for his erratic behaviour.
Cardinal Girolamo Mattei was one of three brothers. Although he was not the eldest, his elevated position in the Roman curia meant that it was he who lived in the principal family palace. He was a member of the strictest order of Franciscan friars, the Observants. Cardinal Mattei was noted for his dislike of conspicuous display and may have influenced Caravaggio’s turn towards a harsh and simplified language of Christian painting in 1601. The pictures for the Cerasi Chapel, so stark and ascetic, were finished when Caravaggio was living in the Palazzo Mattei.
Girolamo’s two brothers, Ciriaco and Asdrubale, shared a house close to the Palazzo Mattei. Ciriaco was a year older than the cardinal, while Asdrubale was ten years younger. Both men had added to their considerable inherited wealth by marrying advantageously. They were known as enthusiastic collectors of ancient Roman sculpture and as connoisseurs of contemporary art. The family account books show that it was they, rather than their brother the cardinal, who commissioned paintings from Caravaggio. For Asdrubale he created a painting of St Sebastian that has long since been lost. For Ciriaco he painted no fewer than three gallery paintings on sacred themes, all of which survive.
The archives of the Mattei family show that Caravaggio was paid by Ciriaco at the start of January 1602 for ‘A painting of Our Lord Breaking Bread’. This is The Supper at Emmaus, now in the National Gallery in London. The painting tells the biblical story of the risen Christ, days after the crucifixion, sharing a meal with two of his astonished followers. According to the gospel of Luke, at first they did not recognize him: ‘And then it came to pass, as he sat at meat with them, he took bread, and blessed it, and brake, and gave to them. And their eyes were opened, and they knew him; and he vanished out of their sight’ (Luke 24:30–31). Caravaggio paints the moment just before the vanishing. Dressed in robes of red and white, colours that symbolize his triumphant resurrection, Jesus reveals his identity with a gesture of gentle benediction. In the act of blessing the square and solid loaves of bread, he both confirms that he has indeed risen from the dead and affirms his own bodily presence in the Eucharist. The claws of a scrawny boiled chicken, pathetic image of mortality, are contrasted with the life-giving hands of Christ. A simple meal has become a sacrament.
The Bible says that the village of Emmaus ‘was from Jerusalem about threescore furlongs’, but Caravaggio imagined a place much closer to home. His Supper at Emmaus is served up in a rough Roman tavern, the kind of place where the painter would meet his friends and start arguments with his enemies. As the Saviour announces himself, a hardbitten innkeeper looks on with an expression of uncomprehending suspicion, as if he might be wondering whether this pale, plump-faced young man and his ragged companions will be able to pay their bill.
Meanwhile the two disciples are frozen in the throes of astonished, dawning recog
nition. One has his back to us. As he prepares to lever himself upright, his hands are braced on the arms of the same savonarola chair that Caravaggio had used in The Calling of St Matthew. At the point of his bony elbow, there is a small rent in his rough green tunic, through which his white undershirt shows. The other disciple, who wears a pilgrim’s shell on his mantle, spreads his arms as wide as he can, measuring the extent of his amazement like an angler demonstrating the size of a fish that got away. His gesture also mirrors the Crucifixion, as if to shape the question springing to his mind. How is it possible that a man whom he so recently saw nailed to the cross, a bleeding corpse, should live and breathe and speak once more?
The hands of Christ and the wondering apostle seem to reach out of the painting, through the membrane that separates illusion from reality. The effect is worked through skilful foreshortenings of perspective. The apostle’s outspread arms plot the whole depth of the picture. His right hand, half lost in the darkness, seems blurred by movement. His other hand, so close to the picture plane as to seem almost touchable, is sharply in focus. From the tip of Christ’s thumb, back along the dappled sleeve of his red shirt to his shoulder, his arm is a piece of art that measures distance, in graded lights and darks, with such illusory precision that it is almost impossible to look at the painting and believe it truly flat.
Yet Caravaggio’s intense realism is also, on this occasion, shot through with a strong sense of the uncanny. It is as if the painter has asked himself a series of direct, straightforward questions about the story that he was given to depict. What happens to the world when a miracle takes place? How might it be possible to tell, should the risen Christ suddenly come among us? What do things actually look like at such moments? The Supper at Emmaus contains Caravaggio’s answers to those questions.
The idea that divine visitations are inevitably accompanied by thunderclaps and clouds of angels is dismissed as naive and childish. Caravaggio, himself so keen-eyed and attentive to every last nuance of visual experience, imagines the process to be subtler than that. God is light, so he announces his presence among men in the elusive forms of a shadowplay. The innkeeper cannot see it, but by standing where he does he casts a shadow on the wall that gives Christ a dark but unmistakable halo. Below, a basket of fruit is balanced precariously on the leading edge of the table. It is the same basket that Caravaggio had painted for Federico Borromeo, and its contents are nearly the same too – a worm-eaten apple, a pomegranate and fig, withered grapes and trailing vine leaves, embodying decay but also symbolizing the hope of Christian redemption. The fruit and the teetering basket cast a second meaningful shadow, this one shaped like the tail of a fish, the ancient mnemonic sign for Christ used by his earliest followers. Caravaggio’s painting suggests that those who would prefer to be saved, rather than damned, might do well to pay attention to such details. Even those in the presence of a miracle might easily miss it.
Bellori unwisely chose to single out The Supper at Emmaus as an example of the painter’s thoughtless literalism and lack of decorum: ‘in addition to the vulgar conception of the two Apostles and of the Lord who is shown young and without a beard, the innkeeper wears a cap, and on the table is a dish of grapes, figs and pomegranates out of season. Just as certain herbs produce both beneficial medicine and most pernicious poison, in the same way, though he produced some good, Caravaggio has been most harmful and wrought havoc with every ornament and good tradition of painting …’ The biographer concluded this little homily with the reflection that many other painters had been bewitched by the ‘error and darkness’ of Caravaggio’s painting, ‘until Annibale Carracci came to enlighten their minds and restore beauty to the imagination of nature’.30
Bellori’s misreading of The Supper at Emmaus does at least have the virtue of highlighting some of the picture’s most effective devices. The writer found his eye drawn to Caravaggio’s wicker basket of fruit, so beautifully painted, only to complain that the fruits within were ‘unseasonal’. He clearly felt they should have been the fruits of Easter, the time of Christ’s crucifixion. Guilty of the very literalism for which he blamed Caravaggio, Bellori was oblivious to the symbolic meanings concealed within the basket of fruit, and completely blind to the significant shape of its shadow.
He was also perturbed by the disrespectful figure of the innkeeper, who wears his cap in the presence of Christ. But this is no mere oversight, or vulgar lapse, on the part of the painter; it is a detail essential to his telling of the story. The innkeeper fails to doff his cap because he does not realize whom he serves. He remains in darkness, even though a miracle is taking place before his eyes. In Caravaggio’s interpretation, the story of the meal at Emmaus becomes a parable about those who see and those who do not.
Bellori disliked the evident poverty of the two disciples and can almost be heard tut-tutting over that prominent torn sleeve. More telling is his other complaint, about Caravaggio’s depiction of Christ as ‘young and without a beard’. The painter’s decision to depart from the traditional image of a solemn, bearded Christ – such as he had recently painted in The Calling of St Matthew – was certainly unusual. But once again, it is essential to his understanding of the story as a tale of hard-won recognition.
The principal source for the story of the Supper at Emmaus is the gospel of Luke, Chapter 24, but there is also a fleeting reference to it in Chapter 16 of the gospel of Mark: ‘After that he appeared in another form unto two of them, as they walked, and went into the country.’ Caravaggio seized on the three words, ‘in another form’. They are the only explanation given in the Bible for the apostles’ failure to recognize Christ. Risen from the dead, he took on a different physical appearance. It seems that Caravaggio’s inspiration for the picture’s main idea – the idea of an unobvious miracle, a miracle that men must struggle to see – had its origins in a careful reading of the Bible.31
Back in the 1540s Michelangelo had placed a similarly controversial, young and beardless Christ at the centre of his Last Judgement, on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel. The image was meant to evoke the early traditions of Christian Rome, where Christ had often been depicted in the guise of the sun god, Apollo. There are strong echoes of Michelangelo’s Apollonian Christ, judging all mankind at the end of the world, in Caravaggio’s own figure of Christ in The Supper at Emmaus. In the fresco of The Last Judgement, Christ’s left arm is turned against the seething mass of the damned, while with his right he beckons the blessed up into heaven. Caravaggio appropriated those same gestures, adapting them with surprisingly little modification for his own figure’s act of blessing the bread. It is another formal echo charged with spiritual meaning. Christ’s appearance to his two disciples at Emmaus prefigures his final appearance to the whole human race on the day of judgement.
Two more payments were made to Caravaggio by Ciriaco Mattei in 1602, one in July, the other in December. These were for a painting which has been plausibly identified with the St John the Baptist now in the Capitoline Museum in Rome. Once again, Caravaggio treated his appointed subject in an unusual and idiosyncratic way. The saint, who is shown during his legendary retreat into the desert, appears without several of his usual attributes. He carries neither a cross nor a banderole. The lamb of God who usually accompanies him has metamorphosed into a sheep with horns. He embraces the animal, which nuzzles his cheek. It was conventional to depict St John as a haggard ascetic in animal furs, but Caravaggio presents him as a cheerfully smiling, ruddy-cheeked adolescent. Most unusual of all, he is stark naked. The boy reclines on a scrap of fur, but his discarded clothes lie around him in a heap.
The picture is so unconventional that even its very subject has been called into question. As early as 1620 the author of a guidebook to the Mattei collection gave the work a mythological title, referring to it as a Pastor Friso, which identified the naked young man as a pagan shepherd.32 A number of subsequent scholars have taken that attribution seriously. Others have argued that Caravaggio intended to depict the biblical Isaac,
son of Abraham, stripped for sacrifice and rejoicing after his sudden stay of execution.33 None of these hypotheses has much merit. Ciriaco Mattei presented the picture to his son, Giovanni Battista Mattei, whose name saint it certainly depicts and for whom it was almost certainly intended from the outset. An inventory of his possessions drawn up in 1616 refers to ‘A painting of San Gio: Battista with his Lamb by the hand of Caravaggio’,34 and it is safe to assume that the picture’s owner knew its true subject. When Giovanni Battista made his will, seven years later, he gave instructions that the painting ‘of St John the Baptist by Caravaggio’35 be left to none other than Cardinal Francesco del Monte. This implies that the Mattei family felt an abiding sense of obligation to del Monte for releasing Caravaggio into their service.
Although its subject is easily established, the work is still intriguingly unusual. Why did Caravaggio paint John the Baptist in this strange, splay-legged pose? Why is the figure smiling so enigmatically? Why, above all, is he nude? Part of the answer to those questions lies in the art of the immediate past.
During the early years of the seventeenth century, when Caravaggio was forging his style and making his reputation, he gave a great deal of thought to the works of Michelangelo. He had been born just seven years after the death of ‘the divine Michelangelo’, as Vasari had called him. Like every ambitious painter of his generation, he would have regarded Michelangelo’s works as a summit of excellence. And as if to force such comparisons upon him, Michelangelo also happened to be his own namesake. Caravaggio had already been invited to compete with the older artist by the choice of subjects for the Cerasi Chapel. In that case, he had asserted his independence from his predecessor by reconceiving his two canonically Michelangelesque themes in a radically un-Michelangelesque manner. But in other works of the period, he complicated the game of rivalry and homage. The Supper at Emmaus, with its Michelangelesque Christ, is just one of several instances. The Capitoline St John the Baptist is another.
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