Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (23 page)

The German art historian, painter and engraver Joachim von Sandrart, who travelled widely in Italy between 1628 and 1635, gave
Boy Bitten by a Lizard
a prominent place in the short account that he wrote of Caravaggio’s early years. To judge by its tone, he must have spoken to artists or collectors who still remembered the picture’s thrilling impact from some forty years before: ‘In the beginning, he painted many faces and half-length figures in a sharp, dry manner. One of these is that of a child with a basket of flowers and fruit, from which a lizard emerges, biting the hand of the child who begins to cry bitterly, so that it is marvellous to look at and it caused his reputation to increase notably throughout Rome.’

Sandrart mistakenly refers to the picture’s vase of flowers as a basket. Perhaps he confused its still life, in his memory, with that in the earlier
Boy with a Basket
. But his report vividly demonstrates the extent to which the exploits of the young Caravaggio were still remembered, still talked about, in Rome even as late as the 1630s. His informants, whoever they were, also gave him to understand its startling combination of emotional intensity and artistic naturalism as a gauntlet thrown down at the feet of Giuseppe d’Arpino and his followers: ‘Because Arpino generally painted large works in fresco, which does not in itself have the same strength of colour or the intrinsic truth of oil colours, and because Caravaggio was very excellent in the latter, he offered Giuseppe and many others a challenge which resulted in endless quarrels. This brought them to swords’ points . . .’ Sandrart also tells the story that Caravaggio painted a picture in the Roman church of San Lorenzo in Damaso, next to an altarpiece by Giuseppe d’Arpino, in which ‘he represented a nude giant who sticks out his tongue at Giuseppe’s work as if he wished to ridicule it.’
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The tale of the nude giant with the mischievous tongue is certainly apocryphal, nor is there any other evidence to suggest that Caravaggio and Giuseppe Cesari, the Cavaliere d’Arpino, ever came to blows (if they had, Cesari might never have lived to a ripe old age). But there is perhaps a glimmer of fire behind all the smoke. In Sandrart’s telling of the story, Caravaggio becomes far more than a disgruntled studio assistant with the nerve to walk out on his boss. He becomes a rival, someone who turns away from his former master’s style and subject matter because he has his own ideas.

The most original aspect of
Boy Bitten by a Lizard
is the fact that it depicts an ordinary person – someone distinguished by no particular signs of rank or status – in the throes of a strong emotion. One of the few known precedents for this lay in late sixteenth-century Bolognese art. Giorgio Vasari tells of a female painter called Sofonisba Anguissola, originally from Cremona, who created a drawing for Tommaso de’ Cavalieri – once a close friend of the great Michelangelo – in which she depicted ‘a little girl laughing at a boy who is weeping because one of the cray-fish out of a basket full of them, which she has placed in front of him, is biting his finger; and there is nothing more graceful to be seen than that drawing, or more true to nature’.
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Vasari’s story about another work of art may shed light on the meaning of Caravaggio’s. The introduction of a faintly malevolent laughing girl complicates the story of a boy bitten by surprise. Perhaps Anguissola may have intended some playful allusion to the hazards of adult love that lie in store for every child. This, in turn, may begin to suggest the symbolic intentions that lay behind Caravaggio’s own choice of the theme. Is the presence of erotic temptation implied in his
Boy Bitten by a Lizard
? There is reason to think so.

There is an air of abandonment about the boy, imparted both by his languid state of undress and by the rose in his hair. Roses are traditional emblems of romantic love, but the other blossoms present in the picture add a less innocent note to its symbolism. Jasmine was a traditional symbol of desire (Caravaggio would include the same flower in his later portrait of a well-known Roman courtesan). The boy’s clothing, such as it is, a wispy piece of white drapery, might be no more than a twisted bedsheet. He who reaches for cherries and apples has grasped at sexual temptation. Now he is receiving his just reward. A sexual subtext lurks, as the lizard had done, in that pile of luscious fruit. The animal is zoologically inaccurate – real lizards have no teeth – but charged with metaphorical potency. A toothless reptile has been transformed into the very image of the
vagina dentata
.

It would have required no great ingenuity on the part of Caravaggio’s contemporaries to unlock his meaning. In the sign language of the Italian street – symbolism in its most vivid, popular form – the bitten finger represented the wounded phallus. The English diarist John Evelyn witnessed a quarrel between two boatmen in seventeenth-century Genoa, at the end of which one of them ‘put his finger in his mouth and almost bit it off by the joynt, shewing it to his antagonist as an assurance to him of some bloodie revenge’.
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The threat on that occasion, as Evelyn euphemistically hints, was castration. A different fate can be understood to lie in store for Caravaggio’s decadent young man: in Rome, city of courtesans, the reward for promiscuity was venereal disease. ‘The French disease’, they called it in Italy (although the French themselves preferred to think of it as ‘the Pox of Naples’).

Boy Bitten by a Lizard
is a
vanitas
painting, a reflection on the pitfalls that await those who give themselves up to the pleasures of the flesh. It is a work of art that functions in a way exactly analagous to the action which it depicts. An apparently innocuous image, full of sweet fruit and lingering sensual detail, hides the sourest of morals. The message of the picture might seem unnecessarily severe, but it should be remembered that Caravaggio’s target audience was the higher Roman clergy. They needed the alibi of moral reflection to enjoy – let alone purchase – a picture such as this.

GYPSIES AND ROGUES AND A CARDINAL SNARED

For all his ingenuity, Caravaggio did not enjoy immediate success with
Boy Bitten by a Lizard
. According to Mancini, the painter was forced to sell the work for next to nothing. In Baglione’s yet bleaker telling of the story, Caravaggio failed to find a buyer for any of the pictures that he painted after leaving the Cesari workshop: ‘He was unable to to sell these works, and in a short time he found himself without money and poorly dressed.’

Desperate for money, the artist went to the picture-dealers of Rome. According to Baglione, ‘some charitable gentlemen expert in the profession came to his aid, and finally Maestro Valentino, a dealer in paintings at San Luigi dei Francesi, managed to sell a few.’
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This ‘Maestro Valentino’ was actually Costantino Spata, who did indeed have a shop in the piazza bordering San Luigi dei Francesi, the so-called ‘church of the French’. He befriended Caravaggio and Prospero Orsi. He sold their pictures on commission and was seen drinking with them on several occasions.
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Costantino Spata played a vital role in Caravaggio’s career. It was through him that the painter came to the attention of one of his most important supporters, his principal patron during his early years in Rome. Baglione tells the story in a few words: ‘This was the means by which he met Cardinal del Monte, an art lover, who invited him to his home.’
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Cardinal del Monte would nurture Caravaggio through the next few crucial years of his life. Not only would he house, clothe and protect him, but he would introduce him to a circle of the most powerful and influential collectors in Rome, and negotiate the difficult waters of higher Church patronage on his behalf.

Del Monte, the ‘art lover’, whose palace was just around the corner from the Piazza di San Luigi, was one of Spata’s clients. Did the dealer and the painter think up a deliberate strategy to get the cardinal’s attention? Did Spata even advise Caravaggio on
what
to paint, helping to bait the hook that would land the big fish? Certainly, the work that Caravaggio created for his new dealer to try to sell was markedly different from anything he had painted before.

The two pictures with which Caravaggio and Spata successfully tempted del Monte,
The Gypsy Fortune-Teller
and
The Cardsharps
, still exist. The first is to be found in the Capitoline Museum in Rome (a later and even finer version of the same composition, painted for a friend of del Monte, is in the Louvre). The second is in the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. Between them, they mark a radical new departure for Caravaggio, and indeed they are among the most innovative pictures created anywhere in Europe in the late sixteenth century.

Each painting shows a scene of trickery and deceit, enacted by half-length figures. ‘Genre picture’ was the less than satisfactory term eventually settled upon by art historians to describe such works. But the genre picture in this vein did not exist until Caravaggio invented it. Although there had been shadowy precedents for such work, in prints and drawings and in marginal details of paintings about other things,
The Gypsy Fortune-Teller
and
The Cardsharps
introduced a new concept to art: the low-life drama. Hung together in a single room in del Monte’s Roman palace, their influence was soon felt far and wide. The taste for such pictures grew rapidly and spread across all of Europe. Caravaggio’s tricksters spawned a whole world of painted rogues, created by a multitude of artists including Bartolomeo Manfredi in Italy, Rembrandt in Holland and Georges de La Tour in France.

The differing dimensions of the two canvases suggest that they were not painted as a pair, although both are offspring of the same idea. In
The Gypsy Fortune-Teller
, a sharply dressed young man with a sword at his hip has fallen under the spell of a smiling young Romany
traveller. She fixes him with an intense and slightly nervy stare. He returns her hypnotic gaze with a dreamy, half-lost expression of his own. Shadows play on the dun-coloured wall behind the two figures. The precise nature of the action was explained by Mancini: ‘I do not think I have seen a more graceful and expressive figure than the Gipsy who foretells good fortune to a young man . . . he shows the Gipsy’s slyness with a false smile as she takes off the ring of the young man, who shows his naivete and the effects of his amorous response to the beauty of the little Gipsy who foretells his fortune and steals his ring.’
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Under the pretence of reading the young man’s palm, the streetwise confidence trickster is actually robbing him.

The Cardsharps
plays a variation on the same theme, a gentleman fooled out of his money. The scene is a gambling den, in which we encounter the second of Caravaggio’s fresh-faced, rich young men, playing a game of cards. He is dressed in sumptuous black silk over a lace-trimmed shirt – sleek finery that has drawn the attention of not one but two urban predators. The yellow-and-black stripes of their
costumes suggest the image of a pair of wasps buzzing around a honey
trap. Some honey has already been extracted, to judge by the detail of a backgammon board, pushed to the edge of the gaming table. Having failed at one game, the young gentleman is trying to win back his losses at another. His optimism is undimmed, to judge by the half-smile that plays on his lips. But he cannot possibly win. The young cheat sitting opposite him has a choice of extra cards tucked into his belt behind his back. The other peeks over the young gentleman’s shoulder and signals in code to his partner in crime, letting him know exactly what will be required to ensure a winning hand.

The older of the two conmen, with his holed, threadbare glove and black cloak – perfect for melting into the unlit gloom of Rome’s streets by night – is the spying accomplice described in numerous books and pamphlets of the time. There was a thriving literature devoted to the tricks of the street and, in particular, the devices of the card cheat. A popular Italian treatise on gambling, entitled
The Book on Games of Chance
(
Liber de ludo aleae
), was written by the mathematicican, astronomer and failed card-player Gerolamo Cardano (1501–76). Countless other texts listed the various techniques used by cheats at the gaming table. One of the most widely read, a work first published in England in 1552 under the title
A Manifest Detection of the Most Vile and Detestable Uses of Dice-play, and Other Practices Like the Same
, contains a more or less exact description of the ruse played out in Caravaggio’s
Cardsharps
: ‘Of this fraternity there be that called
helpers, which commonly haunt taverns or ale-houses, and cometh in as men not acquainted with none in the company, but spying them at any game will bid them God-speed and God-be-at-their-game, and will so place himself that he will show his fellow by signs and tokens, without speech commonly, but sometime with far-fetched words, what cards he hath in his hand, and how he may play against him. And those between them both getteth money out of the other’s purse.’
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There is a narrative and symbolic affinity between the two pictures painted for Cardinal del Monte and the work that immediately preceded them,
Boy Bitten by a Lizard
. All three tell of a man undone by his own vices, of youth suddenly clouded by the prospect of disease, loss or debt – a pattern that the artist had perhaps experienced during his own youth in Milan. But what made
The Gypsy Fortune-Teller
and
The Cardsharps
so startlingly original was their unprecedentedly close focus on the world of the street and the gambling den.

The subject matter of these paintings was highly topical. Counter-Reformation Rome was a city in which all manner of thieves, rogues and scoundrels thronged. Their presence was a symptom of social crisis. Recurrent plague not only destroyed lives, but ravaged economies in the cities and states where it struck. The number of displaced and unemployed people had grown alarmingly during Caravaggio’s lifetime. Sixteenth-century Italy had also been racked by an almost
constant state of war, resulting in a large, permanently uprooted popu
lation of mercenaries. When they had money such men gambled, drank and whored. If the recruiting officer did not call, they were liable to turn to crime. In Rome, ever a magnet for the poor in need of alms, they often masqueraded as pilgrims.