Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (22 page)

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 illu
minates 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, mythological 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 unsatisfac
tory 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 Cara
vaggio 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.

Accusations of arrogance echo through the early biographies of Caravaggio. ‘Michelangelo Merisi was a satirical and proud man,’ writes Baglione; ‘at times he would speak badly of the painters of the past, and also of the present, no matter how distinguished they were, because he thought that he alone had surpassed all the other artists in his profession.’
32
Bellori explicitly says that pride drove Caravaggio to leave Cesari and strike out on his own. At this point Bellori introduces another character into the narrative, a well-known painter of amusing bizzareries named Prospero Orsi, who suddenly appears as the rebellious Caravaggio’s sidekick, egging him on to rebellion and independence: ‘When he met Prospero, a painter of grotesques, he took the opportunity to leave Giuseppe in order to compete with him for the glory of painting. Then he began to paint according to his own inclinations; not only ignoring but even despising the superb statuary of antiquity and the famous paintings of Raphael, he considered nature to be the only subject fit for his brush.’

Bellori treats Caravaggio’s rejection of Cesari as if it had been the publication of a manifesto. In his eyes, Caravaggio had not just turned away from one man’s influence; he had repudiated the entire classical and Renaissance canon and abandoned those principles of selection and idealization on which all truly great and lasting works of art must be founded. He describes it as an act of foolhardy hubris. ‘As a result, when he was shown the most famous statues of Phidias and Glykon, in order that he might use them as models, his only answer was to point towards a crowd of people, saying that nature had given him an abundance of masters.’

The idea that anyone would have taken the time to call the young Caravaggio’s attention to the sculptures of classical antiquity is probably fanciful. The neatness of his rejoinder strengthens the suspicion that this is parable, rather than fact (Bellori in effect admits as much when he concedes that ‘A similar story is told about the painter Eupompus’). Yet the fiction is revealing because it contains, in a nutshell, the academic artist’s innate distrust of Caravaggio’s startling naturalism. The painter is cast as gifted but fatally proud, a man bent on dragging art down into the gutter – leading it towards the mere unthinking replication of reality. The same attitude, softened by time but equally misguided, lies behind more recent attempts to expose the presumed trickery behind Caravaggio’s art – the suggestion that the painter must have used some kind of lens to achieve his effects, or the hypothesis that it was all (literally) done with mirrors. The one grain of truth in Bellori’s account may lie in what it has to say about the sheer strength of early audience response, favourable or otherwise, to the seductively lifelike qualities of Caravaggio’s paintings.

Having left the Cesari studio, Caravaggio certainly needed to sell his paintings. His stay with Monsignor Petrigiani may not have lasted long. Baglione says that, soon after leaving Cesari, Caravaggio ‘tried to live by himself’ and that he painted some self-portraits at this time, lacking the funds to hire a model. ‘He also painted a boy bitten by a lizard emerging from flowers and fruits; you could almost hear the boy scream, and it was all done meticulously.’
33

There are two extant versions of this subject, one in the Roberto Longhi Foundation in Florence, the other in the National Gallery, London. Technical analysis, as well as its slightly more crude and direct style, suggests that the Longhi picture was created first, probably in late 1594 or at the start of 1595.
34
The handling of the drapery is more assured in the London picture, which also points to a slightly later date. Yet the very existence of this second, slightly more sophisticated variation indicates that Caravaggio had scored enough of a success with his original version to create a market for replicas.

Once again, Caravaggio paints a single figure in an interior lit by raking light. But this time he animates the figure, having him actively recoil in pain and, as Baglione says, utter an almost audible scream. The painter emphasizes the effects caused by his use of a single light source, pushing the contrast between light and dark to an unprecedented degree.

The subject is a moment of compressed drama. A young man has been unpleasantly surprised during what should have been a quiet moment of unalloyed pleasure. Reaching out towards the selection of fruit laid out on the table before him – two bright red cherries, some figs and some grapes are visible – he finds that he himself is being bitten, by a creature that has been lurking unseen. The animal, a lizard, buries its fangs into the fleshy part of his middle finger. The boy’s face, startled and flushed with the sudden consciousness of pain, is strongly illuminated. His bare shoulder and tensed right hand, from which the lizard still dangles, are thrown into sharp relief.

There is a slightly clumsily painted pink rose behind the boy’s ear, while the artist has also included a vase on the table in front of him, which is three quarters full of water and contains another rose and some stalks of flowering jasmine. Light slows and thickens to a texture like that of milk in the depths of the water. Reflections play in the convex surface of the vase, and two drops of condensation trickle down its fatly curved side. This is a piece of painting that evokes Giorgio Vasari’s description of a work by the young Leonardo da
Vinci, the most famous painter to have worked in Caravaggio’s home town of Milan – a picture of the Virgin ‘in which, besides the marvellous
vividness, he had imitated the dewdrops so that the picture seemed more real than life’.

The exquisite still life is a naked demonstration of skill – a reminder that when Caravaggio painted it he was working for the open market and therefore, in a sense, crying out his wares. He included the detail to impress his mastery of certain virtuoso techniques in oil painting on his prospective Roman audience – ways of painting the reflection and refraction of light, of capturing the precise wetness and viscosity of a drop of sweat, a drop of water or a drop of blood, which could make the practice of art seem almost like a form of magic. Despite Vasari’s encomium to Leonardo, such skills were primarily associated with artists from Flanders. Jan van Eyck had been the first Renaissance master to master them, followed by Rogier van der Weyden, Hans Memlinc and others. Caravaggio’s inclusion of such effects in his own work advertised his roots in Lombardy, in northern Italy, where Flemish art was better known than in the rest of the peninsula. His handling of the vase and its reflections indicate that he was familiar with the work of later Flemish masters such as Jan Bruegel.

But the still life detail
is
only a detail, a grace note in a picture designed primarily as a vehicle for the depiction of a human being gripped by sudden, strong emotion. Contrary to Bellori’s assertion that Caravaggio turned away from all artistic tradition to pursue an art rooted solely in study from life, the figure of the boy is extremely sculptural. He was painted from a model, but he also evokes that very tradition of classical statuary which, according to Bellori, Caravaggio despised. The most obvious precedent for the boy who screams in pain was the celebrated classical statue of
Laocoön
and his sons, wrapped in the coils of snakes, which had been excavated in Rome less than a hundred years earlier. Even the lizard may have been inspired by a classical sculpture, namely the so-called
Apollo Sauroctonus
, or
Lizard Apollo
, which is now in the Louvre but was probably in Rome in Caravaggio’s time. The reptile climbing up a tree trunk in that sculpture is shown from the same, sharply profiled angle – seen as if from above – as Caravaggio’s lizard.