The Criminal Genius of Caravaggio
By HILARY SPURLING
Published: September 30, 2011
In one of the last pictures he ever painted, a grim and startling “Resurrection” altarpiece, Caravaggio showed a scrawny, bedraggled Jesus Christ slipping out of the tomb and making off alone by night, “like a criminal escaping from his guards,” in the words of an 18th-century Frenchman. Shock was the conventional response to this painting (eventually destroyed by earthquake, along with the church where it hung). The artist himself was on the run at the time, wanted for murder and so jittery that he slept in his clothes with a dagger always at hand. “Whatever he set out to paint,” Andrew Graham-Dixon writes in his gripping biography, “he always ended up painting himself.”
CARAVAGGIO
A Life Sacred and Profane
By Andrew Graham-Dixon
Illustrated. 514 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $39.95.
Just over a decade earlier Caravaggio had painted Medusa, the Gorgon with snakes for hair who turned all who saw her to stone. He gave her staring eyes and a contorted mouth, apparently painted from his own reflection in a circular mirror. A sackful of water snakes from the Tiber modeled for the glistening, coiled and writhing plaits of her hair. It is an electrifying image of the artist in the concentrated act of catching and freezing a moment in time: “The painter takes on her role and in doing so claims for himself her dark powers of enchantment. . . . Her magic is his magic, a petrifying art.”
This reckless mix of myth with unadulterated realism stunned and appalled Caravaggio’s contemporaries. Caught at the turn of the 17th century between an increasingly degenerate Mannerism and the sumptuosity of nascent Baroque, he was a practicing modernist more than 300 years ahead of his time. Under constant attack in his day, disparaged, downgraded and all but forgotten after his death, his work had to wait until the second half of the last century to come into its own.
Caravaggio’s prime subject was the squalor, violence and energy of Roman street life. The biblical scenes he painted for wealthy churchmen were peopled by prostitutes, pimps, criminals, beggars, office workers, soldiers and ordinary laborers in drab, ragged clothes with dirty bare feet and grimy fingernails. His commissions all too often courted rejection when the priests who took delivery recognized a local prostitute in the refined and delicate features of his virginal young saints and Madonnas. The gruesome beheadings, throat-slittings and torture he depicted with such unparalleled immediacy reflect the rough justice to be seen every day in public executions and brawls.
His world was perilous and bloody. Born a week before the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, when Turkish invaders were driven out of Christendom with fearsome slaughter on both sides, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was just 6 years old when bubonic plague killed virtually every man in his family, including his father. He grew up contentious, aggressive and touchy. As a young man he roamed the streets in search of trouble with a band of “painters and swordsmen who lived by the motto nec spe, nec metu, ‘without hope, without fear,’ ” according to an early biographer, who might have been describing the opportunistic gangs bent on looting and rioting in the capitals of Europe today.
But all his life Caravaggio had friends in high places, starting with the influential Colonna family, which had close links with his mother’s family in Milan. Patrons and protectors responded, sometimes in spite of themselves, to the artist’s phenomenal imagination, the beauty and brilliance of his painting, his raw emotional exposure and the acute sensitivity that went with it.
Next to nothing is known of his private life, although much has been predicated on the early works featuring plump, pretty, provocative boys got up as angels or lutenists, as Bacchus, Cupid or Caravaggio’s favorite saint, John the Baptist. Some very young, all more or less naked, often seated on rumpled beds or draped loosely in bedsheets, they offer fruit, wine, music and all too plainly sex. The luscious baskets of fruit in these pictures are marked by bruises, wormholes and withered dry leaves. There is the same morbid frailty in the parted lips and sad knowing eyes of his epicene children, whose peachy skin and pudgy faces suggest dissolution or, in Graham-Dixon’s phrase, “the hormonal side effects of castration.”
Caravaggio’s only known studio assistant was the 12-year-old Cecco, who probably shared his bed. The same boy can be seen progressing with time on canvas from a seductive, laughing, open-faced child to the somber young David who dangles at arm’s length the dark, battered, bleeding, severed head of Goliath. This grisly head is unmistakably a self-portrait, painted on one of the flights that took Caravaggio — pursued by enemies, tormented by grief and horror — from Rome, where he had been sentenced to death for murder in 1606, to Naples, Malta, Sicily and back to Naples, heading once more for Rome.
“Fear hunted him from place to place,” an early biographer wrote. The majestic, stark and highly charged works of his last years were produced, often in haste, at way stations on these desperate journeys, which ended in 1610 with Caravaggio’s sudden, solitary, almost certainly accidental death at Porto Ercole, just short of Rome. Guilt and pain are compounded in these paintings by compassion, humanity and, in “David With the Head of Goliath,” profound and disturbing self-knowledge.
Several recent and increasingly authoritative accounts of Caravaggio’s life and work have helped precipitate the current revival, including two excellent reconstructions by the novelists Peter Robb and Francine Prose. Given the near-total lack of documentary evidence and the elusive nature of the subject himself, it is hardly surprising that fictional techniques have penetrated in some ways further and more surely than the sterner disciplines of art history. Graham-Dixon, the author of “Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel,” ably combines the two in “Caravaggio.”
He makes the most of Italian criminal records, intensively trawled by contemporary scholars to clear up confusion (especially concerning the final four years), and to provide graphic glimpses of the young Caravaggio squabbling, fighting, trading threats and insults, smashing plates in restaurants and slashing opponents with knife or sword. The only other available source is the art, to which Graham-Dixon brings the kind of imaginative and emotional intelligence that gives life and point to painstaking research.
“The Adoration of the Shepherds,” a last great altarpiece painted in Sicily, looks back to the first Christmas crib, devised by St. Francis; to the popular religious art the painter knew as a child; and to his own and his mother’s sense of abandonment in the plague-ridden 1570s. The painting shows no angels, trumpets, human tributes or celestial light, only, as Graham-Dixon says, a destitute refugee mother who owns nothing but the clothes on her back, clutching her newborn child and staring into a bleak future as she lies exhausted in the dark, propped against a feeding trough on the beaten earth floor of the stable. Three baffled workmen and her elderly husband “look on but cannot touch, like dreams or ghosts. . . . Iconographically, the gnarled and saddened men are Joseph and the shepherds. Emotionally, they are Caravaggio’s father, his uncles, his grandfather — all the men in the family that he might have had, but lost.” This book resees its subject with rare clarity and power as a painter for the 21st century.
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