Caravaggio

by Andrew Graham-Dixon

  The Seven Acts guaranteed further commissions and more work for Caravaggio. Sometime in the early months of 1607 he agreed to paint another altarpiece, on the subject of Christ’s flagellation, for a chapel within the courtyard of a Dominican monastery in Naples.25 The picture was finished by 11 May 1607, when a final payment of 250 ducats was made.26 It has remained in Naples ever since, although it is no longer in the chapel for which it was commissioned, but in the Museo di Capodimonte.

  With The Flagellation of Christ, Caravaggio resumed his old rivalry with Michelangelo. The most celebrated earlier version of the subject had been for the Roman church of San Pietro in Montorio, painted by Sebastiano del Piombo but to Michelangelo’s designs. Sebastiano’s High Renaissance Christ is sorrowful but withdrawn. He is an idealized victim enduring the blows of a group of animated, mildly grotesque tormentors, in the setting of a grand apsidal chapel supported by marble columns with finely carved Corinthian capitals.

  Caravaggio took the same basic composition but made it his own by giving yet more emphasis to the cruelty and suffering implicit in the subject. He moved the viewer much closer to the grim act of torture, enlarging the figures and narrowing the complex architecture of the earlier painting to the truncated shaft of a single pillar in a darkened space. To that shadowy pillar, a reduced cast of torturers strive to bind the spotlit figure of Christ. Naked save for a loincloth and a crown of thorns, he is a strikingly statuesque figure. Just like the Christ of Michelangelo and Sebastiano, he might almost be a sculpture come to life. But he is more beaten down, more nakedly vulnerable. His exhaustion is conveyed by the line of his neck, the way he has wearily allowed the weight of his head to sag on to his shoulder. Too tired to hold himself upright, he has stumbled forward from the base of the pillar.

  Responding to their victim’s state of collapse with angry determination, two of his tormentors are kicking and yanking him back into place. The torturer at the right, whose face is half hidden by shadow, is tightening the cords with which Christ’s arms are bound. The man on the left is pulling his hair to straighten his body for the first blows. He snarls bestially, brandishing a makeshift whip in his other hand.

  A third torturer kneels at Christ’s feet, binding a sheaf of twigs into a flay. He goes about his work with care, only looking up to see how soon the work of flagellation need begin. Just as he had done in The Crucifixion of St Peter for the Cerasi Chapel, Caravaggio focused on the grim mechanics of evil. The kneeling man’s shadowed profile is shown in silhouette against Christ’s left thigh and bright white loincloth. Placing such emphasis on the proximity of one man’s body to another is Caravaggio’s way of heightening the horror of the scene. Torture is a misbegotten form of physical intimacy.

  His new audience was impressed but also startled by Caravaggio’s intense and troubling realism. The shock of their initial reaction can still be sensed in an account of The Flagellation, written more than a hundred years later, by the Neapolitan art historian Bernardo de Dominici: ‘This work when it was shown to the public attracted much attention, in particular the figure of Christ which was taken from a common and not a noble model as is necessary for the representation of God made Man: everyone, from the amateurs to the professors, was shocked by his new manner: the use of deep and terrible shadows, the truth of the nakedness, the cold light without reflections.’27

  Apart from his irrelevant complaint about the supposedly ignoble Christ – actually one of the painter’s most gracefully sculptural figures – de Dominici’s remarks epitomize the Neapolitan response to Caravaggio’s art. Pictures such as the Seven Acts and The Flagellation were greeted with stunned admiration, bordering on bewilderment. They created a sensation and transformed Neapolitan painting virtually overnight. Caravaggio’s extreme chiaroscuro and his brutal sense of reality were the catalyst for the birth of a new school of tenebristic painting in Naples. And through this city at the crossroads between Italian and Spanish art, Caravaggio’s starkly powerful new style was transmitted to Spain itself. There it would have an even deeper transformative effect on native traditions. The work of the greatest Spanish religious painters of the seventeenth century, Ribera and Zurbarán, is unimaginable without the influence of Caravaggio. The gruesome particularity of Baroque Spain’s polychrome statuary, so bloodily realistic in its conjurings of saints martyred and Christ crucified, is also deeply Caravaggesque in spirit.28 The painter’s years of exile and displacement are reflected, obliquely, in the westward spread of his influence.

  Two further altarpieces survive from this period. The Crucifixion of St Andrew, which now hangs in the Cleveland Museum of Art, may have been even more directly responsible than the Seven Acts or The Flagellation for the dissemination of Caravaggio’s influence in Spain. Bellori records that the picture was acquired by the Spanish viceroy in Naples, Don Juan Alonso de Pimentel y Herrera, Conde de Benavente, and taken by him to Valladolid on his return home to Spain in 1610. Its presence is confirmed by an entry in an inventory of the contents of the palace of the counts of Benavente drawn up in 1653, where it is described as ‘a large painting of a nude St Andrew when he is being put on the cross with three executioners and a woman, with an ebony frame’ and attributed, in a marginal annotation, to ‘micael angel caraballo[sic]’.29

  The Crucifixion of St Andrew was almost certainly commissioned directly from Caravaggio by the Conde de Benavente himself. The viceroy had a special devotion to the saint, having played a significant role in the early seventeenth-century renovation of the crypt of St Andrew in the cathedral of Amalfi. In 1610, the year of his departure from Naples, he is reported to have made a special pilgrimage to Amalfi, ‘moved by devotion to visit the tomb of St Andrew’.30 It seems highly probable that he commissioned Caravaggio’s painting as an aid to his own prayers, and that it was destined from the start for the private chapel of his palace in Spain.

  The picture is a harsh and daringly abbreviated depiction of a withered old man dying the cruel death of a martyr. Its true subject is not actually ‘St Andrew when he is being put on the cross’, as the writer of that Spanish inventory understandably assumed, but the miracle that occurred when his would-be executioners attempted to take him off it. According to The Golden Legend, the saint met his death in Patras, in Greece, after incurring the wrath of the Roman proconsul Aegeas. To prolong his agony, Aegeas ordered that Andrew be tied rather than nailed to the cross. For two days he hung there in the scorching sun, continuing to preach his forbidden Christian message to a crowd of twenty thousand. On the third day, the people grew restless and threatened Aegeas with death unless he put an end to the sufferings of ‘an old man full of gentleness and piety’. But the saint prayed to God to be allowed to die on the cross, just as Christ had done. When Roman soldiers tried to unbind him, ‘they could not touch him, for instantly their arms fell back powerless … a dazzling light came down from Heaven and enveloped him … and when the light vanished, he breathed forth his soul.’31

  This is the moment that Caravaggio chose to depict. As the flash of divine light fades, the old man stops breathing and his eyes begin to roll up into his head. This is the parody of a deathbed scene, with the dying man forced to expire, against nature, in an upright position. His livid yellow skin is stretched tight across his ribcage. Wizened and pathetically shrunken, he exhales his last breath. The painter captures that moment when a man does indeed give up the ghost, when he suddenly becomes strange and unfamiliar, no longer like himself, as the life slackens out of him and death takes over his mouth, his eyes, his limbs, twisting them into unfamiliar forms.

  Might the painter have observed his model, this very man, at the moment of his death? Might he have used his contacts in the Pio Monte della Misericordia to gain access to the Hospital of the Incurables – not to ‘serve and succour’ the terminally ill, but to paint one of their number? It is an image that reeks of mortality. The dead man’s face and neck are sunburned, the rest of his emaciated body pale. He looks just like an actual human being at the
end of an actual hard life, a malnourished lazzaro who has swapped the hardships of the land for the brutality of the city.

  The odour of the geriatric ward hovers too about the figure of the old woman in the bottom-left-hand corner of the painting.32 Sun-scorched like the saint himself, with a face heavily lined and wrinkled and a goitre in the neck, she frowns with fellow feeling. Her strong and sad eyes are full of pity. Gazing up towards the dying martyr, she plays the part of a chorus of one, standing in for the twenty thousand who had listened as Andrew preached.

  The party of Roman soldiers sent to untether the saint from his cross has also been reduced to a solitary figure, a man teetering on a ladder. He struggles to free his arms from the invisible force that has paralysed them. As he does so, he arches away from the saint. The two bodies perform a kind of dance, its symmetry shaping a contrast between life and death. One is curved in tension, balanced against the possibility of a fall. The other is curved involuntarily, by the sideways sag of its own dead weight. Below, the lightly bearded figure of Aegeas looks up wonderingly at the miracle. His armour gleams darkly, evoking memories of the malign armoured soldier in Caravaggio’s Betrayal of Christ. Two other figures loiter, their faces obscured by darkness. Landscape and sky have been reduced to a cursory smear.

  CARAVAGGIO AND RUBENS

  The other picture by Caravaggio to surface during his first visit to Naples was a large altarpiece of The Madonna of the Rosary. It was first mentioned by Frans Pourbus the Younger, a painter at the court of Mantua who was in Naples in the autumn of 1607. He had seen it for sale along with another painting by Caravaggio, a Judith and Holofernes that has since disappeared. On 15 September he wrote to his master, Vincenzo I Gonzaga, the Duke of Mantua, to inform him that ‘I have seen here two most beautiful paintings from the hand of Michelangelo da Caravaggio. One is a Rosary and was made as an altarpiece; it is 18 palmi high and they are asking no less than 400 ducats for it. The other is a painting of medium size with half figures and is a Judith and Holofernes; they will not let it go for less than 300 ducats. I did not want to make an offer because I did not know the intentions of Your Highness; however, they have promised not to let the painting go until they have been informed of the wishes of Your Highness.’33

  In the same letter Pourbus implied that the picture had been painted by Caravaggio in Naples, but its tight, dry, highly finished style is utterly at odds with the brusquely abbreviated technique that characterizes the known works of the first Neapolitan period, such as the Seven Acts or The Crucifixion of St Andrew. Poised and somewhat theatrical, with its crowd of anxious paupers clustered in supplication at the feet of the Virgin and Child, The Madonna of the Rosary must have been painted considerably earlier in Caravaggio’s career. Figures and forms are clearly delineated, the play of light and shade in the drapery far more sharply defined than such passages in any of the painter’s later works. The red drapery bunched above the head of Mary is more precisely described even than the similar swag of red cloth in Caravaggio’s last Roman altarpiece, The Death of the Virgin.

  Caravaggio was an artist compelled to be true to himself, incapable of stretching to the ventriloquistic impersonation of his own earlier manners. As he grew older, his style moved inexorably towards simplification, abbreviation, occlusion. The Madonna of the Rosary is closest in spirit and appearance to The Madonna of Loreto and The Entombment. It breathes the same air of unclouded popular piety as those pictures of 1604.

  Given the prominence of St Dominic in the legend of the Rosary, this large and imposing work was perhaps commissioned as the altarpiece of a Dominican church somewhere in or near Rome. Its appearance in Naples can best be explained by another of the rejections that occurred so frequently during the painter’s years in Rome. The naked and conspicuously dirty feet of the kneeling paupers in the foreground were probably to blame. Caravaggio may have taken the large and valuable canvas with him when he fled from Rome after the killing of Ranuccio Tomassoni.

  Worship of the Rosary had begun in Italy in the early years of the twelfth century. According to tradition, the Virgin appeared in a vision to St Dominic one night in 1208, holding a string of beads in her hand. She showed him how to use the beads in prayer and instructed him to preach the technique to Christians everywhere. Each bead represented a different mystery in the life of the Virgin or of Christ. As the worshipper moved the beads along the string, one by one, he or she was to visualize one particular mystery at a time, to bring it forth in the mind’s eye and focus devotion upon it, while reciting the Ave Maria and the Pater Noster. Protestants disapproved of the Rosary, but during the second half of the sixteenth century the cult went from strength to strength. At a time when the Church was actively seeking to strengthen its hold on the mass of ordinary believers, the distribution of Rosary beads was recognized as a cheap and effective way of encouraging prayer and piety at every level of society.

  Caravaggio stressed the inclusive nature of the cult by giving great prominence to the huddled crowd of the poor, reaching out in unison for the strings of beads held out by Dominic in both hands. In most depictions of the subject, the saint is shown himself receiving the Rosary from the Madonna. But here she acts the part of a heavenly overseer, supervising its distribution to the people. Supporting a plump Christ child on her knee, she points down towards the bottom-left-hand corner of the picture, in the direction of a mother who, like herself, is accompanied by her young son. The Virgin seems gently concerned that they should not be forgotten in the clamouring press of people.

  On the other side from St Dominic stands St Peter Martyr, distinguished by the head-wound of his martyrdom. He was a Dominican friar, who had been killed by a stone thrown by a heretic. Accompanied by another darkly cowled and inscrutable member of the order, he gestures towards the Madonna and child and looks out at the viewer with a yearning, soulful expression on his face.

  One other figure also looks at us. With the bearing and demeanour of an aristocrat, dressed in black and wearing a fine lace ruff, he kneels at Dominic’s elbow and stares meaningfully out from the picture. He is presumably its donor, the man for whose chapel it had been commissioned in the first place. Who is he? There is perhaps a clue in the painting’s composition. He has been aligned with a massive fluted column. The column was a symbol of the Colonna dynasty, strongly associated with the Madonna of the Rosary ever since the Battle of Lepanto, at which Costanza’s father Marcantonio had played a pivotal role. In Rome in the early 1570s, Filippo Neri had attributed victory there to the prayers of the faithful to the Madonna of the Rosary. Various names have been proposed for the donor, including that of Don Marzio Colonna, who had sheltered Caravaggio after his flight to the Alban Hills. But since the commission of the painting remains entirely undocumented, his precise identity remains a mystery.

  For whatever reason, the picture had disappointed the man in the lace ruff. Whoever he was, he had turned it down, and so it appeared on the open market in Naples in the autumn of 1607. By that time it was in the hands of two minor painter-dealers, Abraham Vinck and Louis Finson, whose stock also contained the now lost Judith and Holofernes. It is not clear whether they had purchased these works or whether they were selling them on commission on the painter’s behalf. It was Finson and Vinck who told Frans Pourbus that The Madonna of the Rosary would cost the Duke of Mantua 400 ducats, which happens to be exactly in line with the fee Caravaggio had received for the Seven Acts. But the deal must have fallen through, because in the end the dealers themselves kept hold of the painting. Finson subsequently took it to Aix-en-Provence and then Antwerp, where he died in 1617.34 The Madonna of the Rosary would eventually become part of the royal collection of the Viennese Habsburgs, and is nowadays to be seen in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum. It is a key picture in the transmission of Caravaggio’s style to northern Europe. But one particular chapter in its history introduces the crucial role that would be played in that process by another great artist.

  In 1620 or shortly afterward
s the picture was bought from the heirs of Finson and Vinck and donated to the principal Dominican church in Antwerp by a group of painters and connoisseurs. It would remain there for more than a hundred and fifty years.35 The archives of the Dominican Fathers of Antwerp record that the most celebrated Flemish painter of the seventeenth century, Peter Paul Rubens, was a driving force behind the bequest: ‘The large painting … now in the chapel above the altar, is a work of Michelangelo da Caravaggio and was given by various art lovers, including among others, Rubens, Bruegel, Van Bael, Cooymans. Seeing that they could acquire this extraordinary great work of art for a good price, they bought it out of affection for the chapel and to have in Antwerp a rare art work …’36

  Rubens was a middle-aged man in the early 1620s, but he had been deeply impressed by Caravaggio’s work from the start of his career. Like many other artists from northern Europe, he had travelled to Rome in his youth, forty years before, to study the art of classical antiquity and the Renaissance. While he was there he had been struck, as if by the force of revelation, by Caravaggio’s Roman altarpieces. The violence and drama of the works of Rubens’s early maturity, such as The Massacre of the Innocents, would be deeply touched by Caravaggio’s influence. Through Rubens, that influence would be transmitted to Flanders and Holland, where an entire school known simply as ‘the Caravaggisti’ would come into being. The development of Rembrandt’s subtle, shadowy realism would be part of the same story, which can ultimately be traced all the way back to the time of Caravaggio’s first visit to Naples, and Rubens’s early encounter with his pictures in Rome. In 1607, within just a few months of Pourbus’s negotiations on behalf of the Gonzaga to buy The Madonna of the Rosary – the very picture that Rubens, over a decade later, would help donate to the Dominicans in Antwerp – Rubens himself was acting for the Duke of Mantua in regard to another painting by Caravaggio that was for sale on the open market in Rome.