Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (29 page)

PAINTINGS FOR PRAYER AND DEVOTION

Federico Borromeo’s ownership of the
Basket of Fruit
suggests that with del Monte’s support Caravaggio’s circle of patrons and collectors soon widened. As well as painting secular subjects, such as
The Musicians
and
The Lute Player
for del Monte himself, the artist created a number of private devotional works – images of the saints, and the Holy Family, intended as aids to prayer and meditation. These too were subtle and original works that did much to enhance his steadily growing reputation for independence of thought and style.

Two of these religious pictures,
The Penitent Magdalen
and
The Rest on the Flight to Egypt
, have been together in the Pamphili Collection in Rome ever since they were first recorded there in an inventory of 1652. Their earlier history is not known for certain but it is likely that their first owner was Donna Olimpia Aldobrandini, whose heir married Prince Camillo Pamphili in 1647, taking all the family pictures with her. Olimpia Aldobrandini was the niece of Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini, with whom Cardinal del Monte played hazard and frequented the company of courtesans, so she would have been well placed to buy works from Caravaggio in the later 1590s;
32
these two pictures appear to have been part of the unsold stock that the painter brought with him when he moved to the Palazzo Madama. Mancini, the most reliable source of information about the early years, says that both were painted at around the same time as
The Gypsy Fortune-Teller
, when Caravaggio was living in the house of Monsignor Fatin Petrigiani.
33
That would place them in 1595–6, a date consistent with their lightness of palette and slightly soft style.

Bellori thought
The Penitent Magdalen
was a shockingly unorthodox work of art and described it as one of the most extreme examples of Caravaggio’s obsession with reproducing raw and unmediated reality:

Since Caravaggio aspired only to the glory of colour, so that complexion, skin, blood and natural surfaces might appear real, he directed his eye and work solely to that end, leaving aside all the other aspects of art. Therefore, in order to find figure types and to compose them, when he came upon someone in town who pleased him he made no attempt to improve on the creations of Nature. He painted a girl drying her hair, seated on a little chair with her hands in her lap. He portrayed her in a room, adding a small ointment jar, jewels and gems on the floor, pretending that she is the Magdalen. She holds her head a little to one side, and her cheek, neck and breast are rendered in pure, simple, and true colours, enhanced by the simplicity of the whole figure, with her arms covered by a blouse and her yellow gown drawn up to her knees over a white underskirt of flowered damask. We have described this figure in detail in order to show his naturalistic style and the way in which he imitates truthful colouring by using only a few hues.

Neither for the first nor the last time in his life of Caravaggio, Bellori’s criticism was mitigated by grudging admiration. Compelled by his own academic dogma to dismiss the work, he none the less responded instinctively to its vivid style and unusual composition.

Mary Magdalen was one of the most popular saints of the Counter-Reformation Catholic Church, which placed a heavy emphasis on the moral responsibilities of each and every believer. She was held up as a shining example of penance and conversion, a beacon for all those languishing in darkness and sin. According to the most prominent part of her legend, she was a prostitute who repented, and ‘the woman whom Jesus loved’. The biblical Mary Magdalen was the woman from whose mouth ‘seven devils’ were exorcised in the gospel of St Luke. But tradition also identified her with Mary, the sister of Martha and Lazarus of Bethany, and with the unnamed repentant sinner blessed by Christ for washing his feet with her tears, drying them with her hair and anointing them with oil (Luke 7:37–50). In the Eastern Church these figures were regarded as separate individuals, but in the West all three were merged into Mary Magdalen. Her fable was further embroidered during the Middle Ages, when she was said to have travelled from the holy land to the South of France, where she ‘went into the desert and dwelt there thirty years without knowing of any man or woman’.

In the mid fifteenth century the Florentine sculptor Donatello had carved a harrowingly ascetic sculpture of Mary Magdalen in the wilderness, portraying her as a gap-toothed hermit with withered
flesh, wasting away in a hair shirt. But by Caravaggio’s time, Donatello’s
raw immediacy of imagining had fallen out of fashion. The image of Mary Magdalen, epitome of the repentant prostitute, had become fossilized by convention into two basic types: either she appeared as a beautiful nude in a landscape, decorously draped by tresses of her own luxuriant hair, praying before a crucifix and skull; or she appeared as a demure aristocrat reading a book indoors.

Caravaggio rejected both of those stereotypes to create his own, highly distinctive image of Mary Magdalen. The hands of the figure are boneless and the anatomy of her chest and neck unconvincing, but the painter’s conception of the subject is impressively original and characteristically dramatic. Caravaggio placed the girl who modelled for the painting on a chair so low that her knees must have been only inches off the ground. As a result, she is seen from above, almost as in a compressed version of a bird’s-eye view, so that at first sight it is not quite clear whether she is sitting or lying outflung on the ground. It may have been this extremely unusual perspective, so alien to the pictorial conventions of the time, that led Bellori to think of the work as a perverse exercise in purely optical painting. But it has a poetic point to it. By seating Mary Magdalen so low, Caravaggio emphasizes her humility – the etymology of which, derived from the Latin
humus
, or ‘ground’, itself expresses the idea of abasement.

Caravaggio’s Magdalen is no emblem, but a person in turmoil. She sits in darkness, but above her an abstract wedge of light intrudes, as if to dramatize the light of Christ entering her soul. The painter depicts her in the immediate aftermath of her conversion – the moment just after Christ says, ‘Thy faith has saved thee; go in peace.’ A single tear trickles down the side of her nose. She has torn off her gold and her jewels and scattered them on the ground. The glass jar beside her, three quarters full, contains the same unguent with which she anointed Christ’s feet. It is echoed by the shape of a vase in the damask of her dress, a visual pun that may have its own significance. She is herself like a vessel that has been filled with the spirit of the Lord. Her closed eyes suggest the idea that she is looking within, perhaps even experiencing the transports of mystic vision. She looks as though she is cradling an imaginary child. Perhaps she is thinking about her namesake, the Virgin Mary, and reflecting on the mystery of the mother whose divine child is foredoomed to die.

When Caravaggio reimagined the Magdalen in this way, when he thought about the heart of her story and asked himself how to bring that story to life, he was doing just what Carlo Borromeo had urged the preachers of post-Tridentine Milan to do. The true precedent for his painting lay in images formed from words, rather than paint or stone. There is nothing like his
Penitent Magdalen
in the visual art of late sixteenth-century Italy, but turn to the sermons of the time and close parallels can be found. The following, for example, is a description of Mary Magdalen in the passionate transports of her conversion given in a sermon by Francesco Panigarola, a preacher closely associated with Borromeo: ‘now she retraces her steps, her legs stagger, now she starts to take off all her vain ornaments, now to utter cruel invectives against indecent womankind, now to disparage the beauty of the eyes, now to groan, exclaiming, “Oh roof, why don’t you fall down and crush me?” Casting down her necklaces and jewels, shaking her tresses, violently wringing her hands, she trembled . . .’
34
Caravaggio’s picture is like a still image pulled from the flow of such thoughts. It would always be his practice as a religious painter to rethink sacred story as living drama. Perhaps, when he did so, he often began by remembering the images conjured up in the sermons of his childhood.

The Rest on the Flight to Egypt
, always closely associated with
The Penitent Magdalen
, must have been painted at around the same time. Caravaggio employed the same young model, a redhead, in both cases. In the second picture she has metamorphosed from distraught cour
tesan to exhausted Madonna. She sits cross-legged on the ground, cra
dling the infant Christ in her lap. The baby sleeps peacefully but the mother’s rest is more fitful; Mary’s head lolls, her cheek resting on the crown of the infant Christ’s head. Her brow is furrowed. There is some hesitancy in Caravaggio’s painting here. He has trouble articulating the junctures of chin and neck, neck and shoulder, and her limp hands are only a little more convincing than those of the
Penitent Magdalen
. But there is great tenderness, none the less, in the artist’s idea of mother and child. The heavy-headed Mary is a refugee huddled with her baby, snatching a moment of rest while she can. Bellori, that keen if reluctant admirer of Caravaggio’s humanity, noted the poignancy of ‘the Madonna who, with her head inclined, sleeps with her baby at her breast’.

On the other side of the painting sits a wizened, greybeard St Joseph.
Wrapped in folds of heavy brown cloth, he has the weather-worn face of a working man. He rubs one of his bare feet with the other in a way that suggests he is feeling the cold. His head is placed almost disconcertingly close to that of the ass, which stands patiently behind him. The objects beside him, a bundle wrapped in green striped cloth and a flagon of wine sealed with a twist of paper, speak of the family’s hurried displacement. Caravaggio’s Holy Family is very much in hiding. They nestle close together, within a bower sheltered by undergrowth. Like illegal immigrants seeking to avoid detection, they have made themselves small and unobtrusive.

The painter’s biblical source was the Book of Matthew, 2:12–15, which recounts the events immediately preceding Herod’s massacre of the innocents: ‘the angel of the Lord appeareth to Joseph in a dream, saying, Arise, and take the young child and his mother, and flee into Egypt, and be thou there until I bring thee word: for Herod will seek the young child to destroy him.’ Between Mary cradling the Christ child and the figure of Joseph, Caravaggio has included the angel of the Lord – a smooth-skinned adolescent boy, scantily draped, seen from behind, face in half-profile. The only upright form in the painting, the figure resembles a pillar of divine light against the dark clouds that hover over the landscape in the background. The angel plays a violin while Joseph obligingly holds up a musical part-book.

The music being played has been identified. It is the four-voiced
Quam pulchra es et quam decora
, composed by Noel Bauldewyn
(
c
. 1480–1520) to a medieval text drawn in patchwork fashion from the
verses of the Song of Songs.
35
The angelic music solemnizes the spiritual union of Caravaggio’s sleepy mother and child, so they are to be understood as the true husband and wife in the scene. Joseph earnestly contemplates the angel, as if straining to understand the mystical significance of the heavenly vision. But, like the slow and faithful ass with which he has been paired, he does not fully grasp the elusive meaning of the notes that fill the air.

His incomprehension might well have been echoed by many of Caravaggio’s contemporaries. Because the painter rendered the notes in the musical part-book without the actual words from the Song of Songs, a vital part of the iconography of his painting was encrypted from the outset.
The Rest on the Flight to Egypt
has an air of secrecy about it. In many respects it is a touchingly direct dramatization of a biblical story. But it is also occluded, a painting of different levels and layers designed to speak fully only to those who have been initiated into its mysteries.

The standing angel is one of the young Caravaggio’s most haunting inventions. There was nothing in the Bible or any of the Christian apocrypha to suggest the playing of heavenly music during the Holy Family’s flight to Egypt. A music-making guardian angel did appear in medieval miracle plays telling the story. The painter may have seen dramas of this kind, which were traditionally staged at Christmas, and perhaps he intended to evoke popular sacred theatre. But Caravaggio’s precise visual source for the angel was far removed from the world of medieval piety. He lifted the figure directly from
The Judgement of Hercules
, a mythological picture of 1596 painted for one of the ceilings of the Palazzo Farnese by Annibale Carracci. That painting, now in the Museo di Capodimonte, Naples, shows the mythical character Hercules choosing between two female figures personifying Vice and Virtue. It was the scantily clad figure of Vice that Caravaggio daringly chose to transform into his own half-naked angel. Caravaggio’s career would be marked by bitter rivalry with a number of other painters, including Annibale Carracci. So it seems likely that he was deliberately courting comparisons between his own work and Carracci’s
Judgement of Hercules
, which was painted only a few months earlier.

Appropriation is Caravaggio’s pretext for a virtuoso display of his own powers. The thief turns out to be a magician. Annibale’s figure is a heavy, sculpturally draped figment of the late Renaissance, a being abstracted from reality into the realm of art. Caravaggio’s angelic boy is a type of ideal beauty, but he has been brought down to earth. His feet touch the dark soil, his slender legs shift to transfer his weight to his left side, his curly hair is tousled by the wind. Even his wings, evidently modelled on those of a pigeon, announce Caravaggio’s distinctive attachment to actuality. An unnecessary curl of surplus string coils from one of the pegs of the angel’s violin, a final grace note of captivating realism. All this serves to emphasize the gulf between Carracci’s disembodied spirit of sensuality and Caravaggio’s fully realized angel. But the most daring trope of inversion is the transformation of the figure’s essential meaning. An embodiment of temptation has been recast as an angel. Vice has been sanctified. The profane is invested with sacred meaning, just as it is in the Songs of Songs. Like the half-concealed text at its heart,
The Rest on the Flight to Egypt
is charged with erotic feeling. The alluring and mysterious angel, sensuality and divinity intertwined, splits the picture like a bolt of lightning.