The Story of Black

by John Harvey

  Not all his scenes are executions or Christian miracles, but again, when he paints pagan gods and young saints as beautiful boys, the background will be dark towards black. If he paints Bacchus (against the dark background), the young, fat, sensual god will have thick, jet-black curls and be crowned with grapes as black as his eyes, while he twists into a love-knot the black ribbon that holds his robe (illus. 39). With his other flushed hand he raises to us a Venetian goblet containing wine so deep-red it is nearly black – and is black in the nearby decanter. The piled wicker basket in front of him includes lustrous black plums, black figs and black grapes, while blemishes darken on the brighter fruit (as they do in Caravaggio’s early still-life Basket of Fruit).

  In life, as in art, Caravaggio was a dark figure, and those who knew him found blackness in his person. The Roman barber-surgeon Luca described him in 1597:

  a stocky young man, about twenty or twenty-five years old, with a thin black beard, thick eyebrows and black eyes, who goes dressed all in black, in a rather disorderly fashion, wearing black hose that is a little bit threadbare, and who has a thick head of hair, long over his forehead.

  The head of hair and eyebrows were also black, as we see in the drawing of him, aged 25, by his friend Ottavio Leoni. As to his clothes, black was fashionable at the time, but young fashionables could wear other colours, while Caravaggio wore only black. He wore the same black clothes to rags, so if he seems now dandy, now tramp, he also is an early example of the artistic person known for their dramatic black outfit (as later artists have been, from Baudelaire to Johnny Cash). Clearly he liked black: the chest in which he kept his ‘ragged’ clothes was covered with black leather, and he kept a knife in an ebony chest. He also acquired – perhaps for protection as well as company – ‘a black dog that was trained to play various tricks, which he enjoyed immensely’. He called the dog Corvo (‘Crow’).

  39 Caravaggio, Bacchus, c. 1597–8, oil on canvas.

  The black he wore had several values. Though as a young man he was housed in the palazzo of an art-loving cardinal, he also lived a violent street life, going about by day and especially by night with young sword-toting rowdies, in a world where black cloaks were ubiquitous. As the affidavits show, they were worn not only by Caravaggio but by both the victims and the witnesses of his street violence. Black cloaks were worn also by the papal constables – the sbirri – who several times arrested him. They wore them for the same reason that black was worn by thieves (who also blackened their faces): because it made them invisible in the night.

  Clearly Caravaggio was drawn, as we would say, to the dark side. As a favoured protégé of Cardinal del Monte, living well among demure boy-musicians and doe-eyed castrati (whom he painted with tender sensuality in The Musicians and The Lute Player), he might have seemed well provided for. Did he need to strut the streets with a sword, trading virile insults (‘cornuto fottuto’ – fucked cuckold – was a favourite shout) and getting into knife fights between the tavern and the brothel? Matters may have been darker. It is not just that his bisexual passions included boys and prostitutes (it appears): he may have played the pimp for the Fillides, Annas and Lenas who posed for his Virgins, Judiths and St Catherines.

  It may be that without his immersion in street life, he could not have painted his biblical figures with that weathered, soiled, scarred actuality which gives his art its hard punch of the real. But his attraction to violence seems also addictive. He was arrested for breaking a dish into a waiter’s face, for ‘deterpatio portae’ or house-scorning (which was normally done with rocks and excrement), and for attacking an enemy from behind at night and giving him a head wound with (in different acounts) a dagger, a pistol or a hatchet. Repeatedly the fights left him injured (so his sword had to be carried for him, as he limped through the streets, by the boy-model Cecco who was said to share his bed). The brawling also injured his name with the cardinals and abbots who paid for his altarpieces. He sounds as though he had a condition like Tourette’s, but in a physical form, so he could not stop himself from lashing out disastrously, both with words and with the nearest jagged object. It must be said that in the transcripts of police interrogations, he is uncowed and unforthcoming: he is sardonic and contemptuous. Clearly he was a formidable person whether he had a knife or a brush in his hand. His behaviour may suggest to us pathology, though to him it may have felt like original sin. For he paints miracles and crucifixions with manifest conviction – like the disciples at Emmaus realizing with wonder that the beardless young man eating with them is Jesus. In his immortality Jesus is younger than he had been when he died. On the wall behind him a large shadow resembles a cloak, except where, above his head, it is like an opaque black halo.

  One must be wary of equating the dark pigments a painter uses with the ‘black’ – the bad – elements in his subject or in his life. But Caravaggio does demonstrate how the life-values, death-values and art-values of black may hang together inextricably. In The Flagellation of Christ it is hard to read the dense black shadows that occupy three-quarters of the picture space as other than the darkness of evil being done (illus. 40). We see Caravaggio’s hallmark realism in the awkwardness with which the exhausted Christ sags towards us, and again in the savage effort with which the right-hand torturer lifts his knee and heaves, straining to tighten Christ’s bonds. The left-hand torturer, who holds a flail in one hand and Christ’s hair in the other, looks in part demonic, though he also has the energetic snout of a hooligan. The torturer in the foreground wears a dark sleeveless jacket and, as in other Caravaggios, this foreground black leads the darks in the picture, scaling back through the black hair of the left-hand torturer and the dark, shadowed column to the darkness behind them, which seems opaque, spaceless, solid – as if it spoke and said, here is the final pit of callous sadistic cruelty. But also it has the black of fear, of pain in expectation, for the flagellation is still to begin: Christ’s body is as yet unscarred.

  It is a very similar darkness, however, which, in a different picture, surrounds St Jerome, painted as a bony, white-haired old man writing busily with a skull beside him, and which again surrounds the young St John the Baptist, turning nearly naked to us, seen as a distinctly attractive young man. Both John and Jerome wear – or fail to wear – loose shapeless robes of that splendid red which is Caravaggio’s one touch of sumptuous colour: it may be the red of martyrs’ blood, but is also triumphal, the colour of ultimate spiritual victory. Blackness reads here as the intensity, the solemnity, of Christian spirituality; at once sacred, profoundly penitential, and possibly mystical. The darkness has the same value in more anecdotal paintings, like The Madonna of Loreto (illus. 41).

  The legend illustrated here is almost ludicrous: it was believed that the holy house where Mary lived in Nazareth flew miraculously to Italy in the year 1294, landing in the woodlands east of Rome. The cult was derided by Protestants, and few of the thousand pilgrims who made the journey each year (in the final stages on their knees) can have met the Virgin in person, but that is the miracle that has occurred for this elderly couple. The scene has a quietness, as if they have come not to an altar, but to the street entrance of a good but plain house, where the Virgin herself has come to meet them, not in a visionary incandescence of light, but as an actual if noble nursing mother answering a night-time knock on her door (though her naked child looks not newborn but two or three years old). The picture has the reality of daily life, but is surreal too – for why should these visitors be down on their knees? But how should the Virgin answer a street door? If a prostitute modelled for her, the trade does not show in her fine-featured face. She acknowledges the couple, whose hands, raised as if in prayer but slightly parted, express reverence and wonder. We see the man’s bare, muddied feet – they are the nearest thing to us – and the elegant, long-toed feet of the Virgin, bare feet being, in Caravaggio’s work, the signature of a sacred subject.

  40 Caravaggio, The Flagellation of Christ, 1607, oil on canvas.

  41 Ca
ravaggio, The Madonna of Loreto, 1604, oil on canvas.

  There were many blacks in Caravaggio’s world, and we cannot give a single value to the dark-to-black pigments that swamp his picture-space. In person he seems the embodiment of opposite extremes, or of the violent vacillation between extremes. He is like a character by Dostoevsky, at once the greatest of sinners, but also a tormented saint. He was not, in that period, unique in his extremity. Andrew Graham-Dixon emphasizes the importance, as an influence on the young Caravaggio, of figures like Carlo Borromeo, the cardinal-archbishop of Milan in the 1570s and ’80s. He was a Pope’s nephew, and his rapid rise in the Church was widely attributed to favouritism. When young he spent lavishly on horses and hounds, but his style even then was severe, with all of his 150 servants dressed head-to-toe in black velvet. This may sound like the black of high princely fashion, though with hindsight we see that it presages Borromeo’s latent spirituality, which later showed with charismatic effect when he led processions dressed in black sackcloth, with a rope round his neck, carrying the heavy black cross which bore the Holy Nail. According to a Jesuit priest who witnessed these processions, he was sometimes accompanied by a thousand flagellants, and his bare feet bled on the hard stones of Milan.

  The colour black is ambiguous, and values can reverse as one studies a Caravaggio. He had an intellectual life – he corresponded with Galileo – but we do not know whether, in asking prostitutes to model for the Virgin and the saints, he was turning with truculence to the women he knew, or whether he was thinking of Mary Magdalene and of the insistence of Jesus that her faith could equal anyone’s. Time after time his paintings were rejected by commissioning priests because of the low-life character he gave to biblical figures. In a later painting of the dinner at Emmaus there is an elderly disciple who looks not merely poor and meek, but like an old lag who has done time for house-breaking. Caravaggio will savagely paint savagery; and also will echo the distinctly anti-wealth charitableness in several remarks of Jesus Christ.

  He spent his last young years on the run, having killed an enemy in an arranged confrontation between two bands – swordfight at the OK Piazza, as it were. From Italy he fled to Malta, an island which had its own black theme. The native Maltese were ‘little less tawnie than the Moores’; the wives of the citizens wore ‘long blacke stoles, wherewith they cover their faces’ while those governing the island, the Knights of St John, wore at all times a long black robe with a white, eight-pointed ‘Maltese’ Cross. The knights were flogged if they dressed irregularly. They had been founded as a crusading order – originally they had cared for the sick in Jerusalem – and it is clear that their austere militarism appealed to Caravaggio. The admiration shows in his portrait of the order’s grand master, Alof de Wignacourt, grizzled and spartan in black-varnished armour (illus. 42). His black helmet is carried by a page in black, on whose pale, responsive face the brightest light in the picture falls.

  The portrait, and Caravaggio’s conduct, so pleased the grand master that he obtained a papal dispensation to make Caravaggio himself a knight of the order. Clearly Caravaggio still had his Renaissance genius for wheedling gifts from patrons. Within a month he was arrested, following a brawl in which another knight was shot. He escaped from his cell with a rope-ladder, fled Malta, and in absentia was stripped of his knighthood. The Black Knights of Malta were on his trail, however, and it was the knight whom he had attacked on Malta, the Conte della Vezza, who led the final assault on him. He was waylaid in a Naples street and held down so that he could be deliberately wounded in the face. His injuries, which may have damaged his sight, contributed to his death nine months later at the age of 39.

  It is clear that he saw himself as a sinner, and late in life he said his sins were not venial but mortal. We do not know how guilty he may have felt for his presumptive sodomy – though we know it was not possible then to feel relaxed about an active bisexual life. The penalty for sodomy was beheading, and this judicial fact must have some bearing on the seven or more beheadings that he painted, in which the cut-off heads of Goliath, Holofernes, John the Baptist and Medusa are (in five or more cases) clear self-portraits. Cut off, or nearly cut off – for he likes also to show the blood dripping or gushing as the blade saws resistant sinew – the strong-featured head, with black curly hair, hovers on the boundary of death and life, one eye glazed, one glinting. The blade will be held – and the head held out to us – by a beautiful young woman or (most often) young man. Given the historic taboo, and the penalty, this style of self-portrait looks compulsively, even suicidally, confessional. In most cases the darkness behind the beheadings is as solidly black as any he painted – all we see may be the youth, the sword, the thickly dripping head – and it is possible that Caravaggio lived wildly and violently, and painted with both innovative genius and religious zeal, while believing that he himself was damned. The blackness in his painting, when not sacramental, may be the blackness of damnation.

  42 Caravaggio, Alof de Wignacourt with His Page, 1607, oil on canvas.

  SINCE SPAIN ALREADY had a strong black tradition, it was natural that Caravaggio’s inventions should have an impact on Spanish artists. Ribera (who was to spend most of his life in Italy) painted Prometheus tipping and flailing, luminously naked against dark rocks, while a coal-black eagle takes a peck. In the oeuvre of Zurburán more than one spotlit Hercules strides within a deep-black cave to cudgel swarthy malformations. The great Velázquez paints boys, Infantas, street-traders, with rich ochres and richer blacks. John Ruskin was to call Velázquez ‘the greatest master of the black chords . . . his black is more precious than other people’s crimson’.2

  In the Netherlands Caravaggio’s reputation was relayed by, especially, Rubens. One might have thought Rubens, with his love of transparent, luxurious colour, the last person to enthuse over Caravaggio, but his admiration was intense and practical too. In 1607 he urged his Italian patron, the duke of Mantua, to buy Caravaggio’s Death of the Virgin after it was rejected by the Carmelite fathers of Santa Maria della Scala. The duke’s Roman agent was struck by Rubens’s care for the transport arrangements: ‘Sr Peter Paul Rubens . . . in order to preserve it from injury, is having I know not what sort of case constructed’ of timber and tin. Thirteen years later, established as ‘the prince of painters’ in Flanders, Rubens led the campaign to buy Caravaggio’s Madonna of the Rosary for the Dominican church in Antwerp.3

  Though the acclaimed genius of colour, Rubens will also use deep chiaroscuro and dark-to-black backgrounds, as in his Last Communion of St Francis of Assisi. His black still differs from that of Caravaggio: it is a positive colour, not deep shadow, in energetic play with his reds and bronzes, his deep greens and blues, and with his light hues of pale rose, pale turquoise and pale gold, which find their way even into his flesh tones. Rubens’s black, one might say, is bright.

  Through Rubens especially, the influence of Caravaggio’s tenebrist style was transported to the Netherlands, encouraging a school of young dark painters who became known as the Caravaggisti, both in Flanders and in neighbouring Holland. Younger, more independent artists further refined the play of chiaroscuro. Vermeer in particular manages the effect of a single light source within a dim or dark room. It is very likely that he used a camera obscura (a darkened box or compartment in which a single aperture focuses the scene, just as in a camera) to help him capture real-life extremes of perspective and shadow. Thus an officer in a large black felt hat, sitting close to us with the light beyond him, becomes a giant, near-black silhouette; we look past him to the much smaller figure of the woman he is talking to, who gently handles a delicate glass. Vermeer comes even closer than Caravaggio had to the kind of ‘close-up’ image, with a steep perspective and strong light-and-dark, which was to be the new way of European imaging – consummated 200 years later with the invention of photography. As is often said, his pictures resemble (and of course have inspired) stills from films.

  In his Woman Tuning a Lute the chair and cloak look huge bec
ause they are close to the peephole of the camera obscura (illus. 43). The blacks and darks are strong in the picture, behind the curtains, in the further chair, in the lute itself and the shadowed gown of the girl. But what is most striking is the subtlety and sharpness of her look. It is the best painting I know of a quick eye movement – a glance – so we wonder whom she has heard arriving out in the street, or whether, after all, she is gazing keenly inwards, at the fine note she hears as the string rings in tune. In her mouth there is a hint of hope or pleasure, though she has a serious, pale face. The entering light is cold and grey, but warm-to-gold where she sits. The painting intrigues: it invites us to notice the rapid impulse inside her, but at the same time preserves her solitude and privacy, for we stay outside her. Vermeer does not, as a nineteenth-century artist would have, invite us in to tell her story. The dimnesses and darknesses in the room have a depth – as she too does – which we respect from a small but sympathetic distance.

  However, it was above all another Dutch artist who developed – indeed who, by Vermeer’s time, had already developed – the dark innovations of Caravaggio, so much so that his name became a byword for powerful blacks, both in his foregrounds and in his depths of shadow. In portraits by Rembrandt the sitters nearly always wear black, half merged into the shadows behind them, while their serious eyes may also be black – literally so, a black disc of paint. Like Caravaggio, Rembrandt restricts himself often to the palette of Apelles, working mainly in black, white, red and yellow – through many earth-colour richnesses of burnt umber, burnt sienna and burning gold, while his blacks often could be said to be warm.