Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (28 page)

Caravaggio’s painting moodily evokes the milieu of del Monte’s household – a laboratory of musical experiment and innovation, where performers rehearsed under the tutelage of the cardinal and his friends, and where the expressive, classically inspired
stile rappresantativo
was taken to new extremes. The space into which Caravaggio’s four boys have been crammed evokes the cluttered intimacy of the
camerino
itself. Dressed in their makeshift
all’antica
costumes, they are preparing to take part in a piece of musical theatre of just the kind favoured and supported by del Monte. A single voice will be accompanied by only two instruments, in emulation of that imagined golden age when the songs of Orpheus were heard. The theme of the piece is the intoxicating effect of music on those who are in love. The song studied by the boy with his back to the viewer is no longer decipherable, but it probably expressed some variant of the sentiments voiced by Shakespeare’s Count Orsino in
Twelfth Night
: ‘If music be the food of love, play on.’

By painting a rehearsal rather than a performance, Caravaggio went behind the scenes of the traditional concert picture. He showed the long hours of preparation and the artifice that made possible the final, polished performance. In doing so, he paid subtle tribute to the active role del Monte himself played in the musical culture of his time. Once hung in the room that the cardinal had consecrated to music, the picture conjures up a scene in which his own, animating presence is forever awaited. It is the picture of a process that depends on the energies of the patron himself. Only when the cardinal arrives can the final preparations be completed, and the concert begin.

THE LUTE PLAYER
AND THE
BASKET OF FRUIT

The second of Caravaggio’s musical paintings,
The Lute Player
, was commissioned by del Monte’s friend Vincenzo Giustiniani and probably painted around 1596. An effeminate young man plucks at the strings of a lute while gazing out at the viewer with an expression of such soulfulness that his eyes seem to be brimming with tears. Two musical part-books and a violin lie on the table before him beside some scattered fruit and a glass carafe full of flowers. The scene is lit by a bright, diagonal shaft of light that casts strong shadows.

The wistful singer has sometimes been taken for a girl. Bellori, for example, described the figure as ‘a woman in a blouse playing a lute with the sheet music in front of her’.
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But the 1638 inventory of Giustiniani’s collection unambiguously listed the work as ‘a half-length figure of a youth who plays the lute, with diverse flowers and fruits and music books . . . from the hand of Michelangelo da Caravaggio’.
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There would seem little reason to doubt its accuracy. The singer’s face is androgynous but the shirt, open almost to the waist, reveals no sign of a cleavage.

It is possible that Caravaggio’s
Lute Player
is an idealized portrait of del Monte’s promising but potentially troublesome castrato, Pedro Montoya. Montoya joined the Sistine Chapel Choir in 1592 and left in 1600, so he was almost certainly in del Monte’s household when the picture was painted. The soft, hairless skin and slightly swollen face of Caravaggio’s lutenist are consistent with the hormonal side-effects of castration. There may be a glancing allusion to the pitch of the boy’s voice in the part-books that lie on the table before him. The five-staved sheets of an open part-book reveal a number of madrigals. Beneath lies another part-book, prominently marked ‘Bassus’. It is closed, perhaps the painter’s way of indicating that this particular singer never would be capable of hitting the low notes.

Castrati were much in favour in Rome in the years around 1600. Their rise coincided with that of the professional female singer, and both reflected the new taste for piercingly emotional music arranged for the single voice. In his
Discourse on Music
, Vincenzo Giustiniani noted that ‘the famous Vittoria Archilei’ had established ‘the true method of singing of women’, adding that it applied equally well to sopranos singing in falsetto and the castrati of the Sistine Chapel choir.
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The castrato voice was valued for its sweetness and sensuality, as well as for its clarity of enunciation.
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Castrati were encouraged to learn musical instruments so that they might accompany themselves. Such tuition is likely to have been part of the regime in del Monte’s household. The cardinal himself played the Spanish guitar, and it is possible that Caravaggio learned the same instrument while living there. A deposition lodged against him by his landlady in 1605 includes the complaint that he came to her house late at night with a group of friends, playing the selfsame instrument and singing lewd songs, and a later inventory of his possessions lists one.

The singer in the
Lute Player
is anything but raucous. He opens his mouth ‘not more than is necessary to converse with friends’, as a contemporary singing manual advised those performing chamber music of this kind.
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The picture is in such good condition that the sheet music open on the table is still legible: four madrigals by the Flemish composer Jacques Arcadelt (
c
. 1505–68): ‘
Chi potra dir
’, ‘
Se la dura durezza
’, ‘
Voi sapete
’ and ‘
Vostra fui
’.
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Their texts are a compendium of the conventions of the courtly love tradition, shot through with plaintive simile and metaphor – beauty that blinds like the sun, ardent fires of passion, cold unyielding marble of a proud woman’s heart. ‘
Chi potra dir
’ is representative:

Who can express what sweetness I taste

In gazing on that proud light of my lady

That shames the celestial sphere?

Not I, who am unable to find within myself

The proper words,

So that, looking on her beautiful face and mien,

So as not to see less well

I would deign to lose together both life and light.
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The amorous mood of the song is conveyed by the singer’s passionate, voluptuous expression. The beam of light that rakes the room, illuminating the boy’s face with its flash of radiance, may be Caravaggio’s own metaphor for ‘that proud light of my lady’. The melancholy poetry of a song has been translated into the texture of painting.

The prominent still life may have been intended to enhance the bitter
sweet mood. Faded flowers traditionally symbolized the transience of life and love. Baglione singled them out for particular praise, focusing on ‘the carafe of flowers filled with water, in which we see clearly the reflection of a window and other objects in the room, while on the petals of the flowers there are dewdrops imitated most exquisitely’. The flowers have indeed been depicted with meticulous care, each one sharply individuated. But they pose a puzzle because neither they, nor the fruit, can possibly have been painted by Caravaggio himself. The handling is very different in this part of the painting, much harder in the outlines, with a pernicketiness in the finish that is quite alien to his style. The vase of flowers strikes an especially discordant note. The enamelled blooms are piled high in a merely decorative profusion. They have none of the weight, none of the mute and insistent singularity, of things seen and painted by Caravaggio. It is conceivable that the fruit and flowers were added by the Netherlandish painter Jan Bruegel (1568–1625), who was in Rome in the mid 1590s. The second son of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Jan Bruegel was a favourite of Carlo Borromeo’s cousin Cardinal Federico Borromeo, a friend of del Monte who lived close to the Palazzo Madama from 1597 to 1601. With Borromeo’s encouragement, Bruegel would later become a specialist
painter of flowers in vases. Given that he was certainly in Caravaggio’s
circle and in Rome at the right time, he is a plausible candidate for authorship of
The Lute Player
’s mysterious bouquet.

Jan Bruegel’s patron, Federico Borromeo, was one of the first collectors of still life painting. It was for him that Caravaggio painted his only pure example of the genre, the
Basket of Fruit
, now in the Ambrosiana Library in Milan. Created some time in the later 1590s, it is among the very first autonomous still life pictures, a muffled explosion of morbidity and metaphysical aspiration, and another testament to Caravaggio’s extreme originality.

The
Basket of Fruit
was elaborated from the earlier
Boy with a Basket of Fruit
. What it shows, essentially, is the basket without the boy. The weight of the painter’s attention on his apparently straightforward theme is palpable. The basket on this occasion contains a considerably reduced ration of produce. There are figs, an apple, a quince, a peach, a pear and four bunches of bloom-clouded grapes. These are the fruits of late summer, ripe to succulence, but also on the turn. There is a dark wormhole in the red-streaked cheek of the apple. Two of the grapes at the apex of the uppermost bunch have shrivelled to raisins. There are black spots as well as bright pearls of dew on some of the foliage. A parched vine leaf has turned thinner than paper, while the peach leaves have curled and dried to dark, perforated twists. The basket of woven straw has been placed on the most minimally suggested of ledges. It overhangs the edge a little, a fact that the painter indicates with the smallest crescent of black shadow. The transience of nature is linked to precariousness. Entropy and the fear of falling are connected in Caravaggio’s mind.

The background of the painting is a golden void, reminiscent of a cream-coloured wall in the sun. An early inventory of Federico Borromeo’s collection shows that it was kept unframed. This may have been deliberate: it may have been hung high on a wall the same colour as the ground, to emphasize its
t
rompe-l’œil
effect and make it yet more of a tantalus.
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In any case, the blank background had been a characteristic peculiarity of Caravaggio’s work from the very start of his career. It is the hallmark of an artist utterly uninterested in extraneous detail. For Caravaggio, making images is a way of focusing the mind. To paint something is to isolate it for the purposes of contemplation.

The total isolation of forms in the
Basket of Fruit
might have lent the image a quality of objectivity, akin to that of the contemporary specimen studies in the albums compiled for Cassiano dal Pozzo collectively known as ‘The Paper Museum’. But in Caravaggio’s hands it has the opposite effect. The objects of his concern have been removed from the world of the merely mundane. The possibility of transfiguration seems to linger in the stillness that surrounds them. The picture implicitly contrasts death with hope. From withered grapes comes wine, just as from the dead body of Christ flowed the blood of salvation. The fruits and leaves are haloed by the golden light, which seems to emanate from several sources. The light gives modelling to some and reduces others to sharp and ragged silhouettes. There is a measure and a rhythm to the arrangement of objects and shapes, which creates the sense that there must be more going on than meets the eye. Leaves droop and curl with an exquisite sense of placement, fastidiously arranged in such a way as to hang clear in the golden air.

Caravaggio exhausted the genre of still life – for himself, at least – in the act of painting his only example of it. Roberto Longhi,
searching
for words to express the uniqueness of the painting, called it ‘a
humble
biological drama’. It is precisely the picture’s dramatic quality that makes it so unusual, and so powerful. The
vanitas
connotations of bruised fruit and the eucharistic implications of grapes come together in the painted basket. But the accumulation of symbols is not enough for Caravaggio, who prefers to express his meaning dynamically. His idea of still life painting is not an assemblage of objects but a theatre of forms. The huddled windfall fruit have a
corporeal
solidity. The grapes overspill. The foliage is uncannily anthropomorphized. The most daring detail is the single tendril of vine that reaches into the picture from an unexplained point of origin outside its right-hand edge. The blackened silhouettes of leaves
hanging
from that single, knubbled stalk might almost be hands stretching. They are figures of death or desperation reaching towards the light and life. The work i
s, in t
he end, only a still life painting, but it is filled with the same energies, the same sense of agony and paroxysm, as Caravaggio’s greatest religious pictures.

The origins of the
Basket of Fruit
remain obscure. It might have been commissioned directly by Federico Borromeo when he lived in Rome, between April 1597 and May 1601. Or it might have been a gift from Cardinal del Monte. In a letter to Borromeo of 1596, del Monte thanks him for certain presents received and expresses his intention to reciprocate with a gift of ‘paintings and clocks’. He says he is sorry for the delay, caused by the fact that ‘I am dealing with persons with whom I have to arm myself with patience’ – which sounds like a reference to the temperamental Caravaggio.

Opinion is also divided on the question of what Borromeo thought of the painting. He singled it out in an intriguing passage in his
Musaeum
, part of a tract entitled ‘
De Pictura Sacra’
, ‘Of Sacred Painting’, written in 1618: ‘Of not little value is a basket containing flowers in lively tints. It was made by Michelangelo da Caravaggio who acquired a great name in Rome. I would have liked to place another similar basket nearby, but no other having attained the incomparable beauty and excellence of this, it remained alone.’
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Borromeo’s reference to flowers instead of fruit has called into question the sincerity of his admiration for the painting. If he had truly loved it, surely he would never have made such an elementary mistake. But it was not uncommon for a churchman to refer to the mystic grapes of Christian belief as
flores vineae
, the ‘flowers of the vine’ – a phrase inspired by the Song of Songs. Rather than indicating Borromeo’s indifference to the picture, the passage may actually reveal his awareness of its deeper connotations.
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