Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (31 page)

Such modern stories of saintly ecstasy were well known to those who commissioned and paid for Caravaggio’s early devotional pictures. Neri had confided the tale of his blissful ordeal by divine fire to none other than Cardinal Federico Borromeo, owner of Caravaggio’s
Basket of Fruit
. Near the end of his life, Cardinal del Monte delivered a
laudatio
of St Teresa, on the occasion of her canonization.

Caravaggio’s strong and unusual emphasis on the love that burned within Francis’s heart expressly evoked the parallels between his legend and those of the modern saints. The sacred past is projected into the present. The holy light that shone on Francis might still shine on anyone with eyes to see.
St Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy
is more than an illustration of an episode in the life of a saint. The picture offers a consoling dream of transfiguration, a condition of oneness with Christ to which anyone might aspire. That is the significance of its most striking detail, the creased and eyes-closed face of the ecstatic saint. Caravaggio painted St Francis as a real, flesh-and-blood human being, a man with sharply defined features, someone who might be easily recognized, even on the dark streets of Rome by night. Not only that – he gave the saint his own face.
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It is an extraordinary statement of self-identification, but one that would be more than justified by Caravaggio’s subsequent religious works. No other painter of his time would do more to revive and proclaim the solemn, ascetic sense of humility at the heart of the Franciscan ideal.

BETWEEN SACRED AND PROFANE

The sacred and the profane are inextricably intertwined in Caravaggio’s early work. Pictures of apparently mundane subjects are depth-charged with spiritual yearning, while flashes of intoxicating eroticism dart from pictures of the saints or the Holy Family. The painter dreams of angelic beauty, but can only embody it as one beautiful boy after another. The sensual and sexual appeal of such youthful, smooth-skinned figures as the coquettish, music-playing angel in
The
Rest on the Flight
, or the angelic ministrant to St Francis, has been taken as evidence of the painter’s homosexuality. The truth is not straightforward. Caravaggio was capable of being aroused by the physical presence of other men. He could not have painted such figures in the way that he did if that were not so. But he was equally attracted to women, as certain other paintings from the late 1590s, such as the transfixing
St Catherine of Alexandria
, plainly demonstrate. Insofar as the art reveals the man, Caravaggio’s painting suggests an ambiguous sexual personality. On the evidence of his paintings he was neither heterosexual nor homosexual, terms that are in any case anachronistic when applied to his world. He was omnisexual.

The devouring way in which Caravaggio looked at the world made it all but impossible for him to paint idealized forms. There is a quality of seemingly involuntary vividness in many of the details of his paintings – a quality that, increasingly, he learned to control and to manipulate. This both intrigued and fascinated his contemporaries, and brought a dangerous unpredictability to his pictures. Something base and ordinary might suddenly seem touched by a miracle; a holy mystery could shade into figments snatched from an erotic daydream. Caravaggio’s early work is beguiling, in part, because it is so ambiguous and metamorphic. It expresses the truancies of the painter’s imagination and allows space for the unregulated responses of the viewer’s wandering eye. It speaks of piety but makes concessions to the impious mind, guiltily mingling the pleasures of the world with a genuine sense of devotion.

C
aravaggio’s more sophisticated patrons were attuned to such subt
l
e ambiguities. The best evidence for this is an intriguing correspondenc
e between a cleric from Vicenza named Paolo Gualdo and Cardinal Ottavio Paravicino. Paravicino, who had been present at Vittoria Archileo’s concert, was a friend of del Monte and one of three Roman cardinals certainly linked with Filippo Neri’s Oratory. Gualdo was a scholarly cleric with strong connections to the humanist culture of the Veneto in general and Vicenza in particular. He was a friend of the poet Tasso and wrote a biography of the architect Palladio. He was also a lover of painting, who had tried and failed to obtain a picture by Caravaggio.

In one of his letters to Paravicino, Gualdo harks back to that disappointment. Referring to himself in the third person, and writing in a spirit of knowingly ironical self-deprecation, he casts himself in the role of a simple impecunious man of the cloth, motivated by philanthropy as well as the love of art, whose overtures to Caravaggio have been unfairly rebuffed: ‘the good priest has a certain discernment when it comes to painting, but not very many jewels to fund his fancy, so this seemed a good occasion to help a
galant’huomo
of the art of painting, and in the process obtain some graceful little picture.’
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The allusion to Caravaggio as a
galant’huomo
suggests not only his pre-eminence as a painter but also a degree of social pretension. The term, which was used interchangeably with
valent’huomo
, signified a virtuoso or a man of especial expertise in his chosen field. But it also carried associations of worth and, by extension, honour. Gualdo’s letter was written in 1603, but, given that he refers to a small picture, and elsewhere mentions the name of Cardinal del Monte, it seems reasonable to believe that he had the painter’s work of the mid to late 1590s in mind.

A yet more interesting letter about Caravaggio was written by Paravicino to Gualdo in August 1603. It is a teasing text, composed in courtly riddles and insinuations, which takes the form of an imaginary encounter between the phantom of Caravaggio and a caricatured version of Paravicino’s friend, Gualdo himself, the cleric from Vicenza:

Michelangelo da Caravaggio, excellent Painter, says that he came as a shade or spirit to Vicenza, and met a
galant’huomo
who loves paintings and who asked him wondrous many questions. He describes, but does not paint with his brush, a priest with the air of a solemnly reformed cleric, a man who, if he did not speak, would appear to be a Theatine. [The Theatines were a Counter-Reformation order of clerics noted for their asceticism and moral severity.] But when he does open his mouth he touches on every topic, and does so in a spirit of gallantry. It seems to me that he has a tincture of all the sciences, says Caravaggio, but since I lack the necessary expertise myself I cannot touch the marrow of his actual knowledge. He describes himself as extremely keen to have something painted, one minute speaking of various churches, the next of having some beautiful work painted for his lordship the Bishop of Padua. But Caravaggio would have made for him some painting that would have been in that middle area, between the sacred, and the profane – a kind of picture that he would not have wanted to see from a distance . . .

The aim of the letter is to tease Gualdo and to puncture, with the lightest of touches, his holier-than-thou pretensions – which had themselves been expressed in a spirit of ironic self-parody. Caravaggio and his art are merely the tools employed to that ludic end. But, for all its cryptic circumlocutions, Paravicino’s letter reveals much about the risky pleasures enjoyed by keen-eyed connoisseurs of Caravaggio’s painting.

The whole passage turns on the play between appearance and reality. The figure of Gualdo seems at first to be a severe and utterly correct Counter-Reformation cleric, but he then discourses with gallantry on every subject under the sun, showing that he has a more restless mind than first appearances had suggested. He is not necessarily irreligious, although he thinks about more than religion alone. But even this second Gualdo,
galant’huomo
himself of art and all the sciences, may not be everything that he seems, since the fictional Caravaggio of the letter confesses that he himself lacks the wherewithal to judge the true extent of his knowledge.

A similar contrast between seeming and being is drawn in the second part of Paravicino’s tale, about the imaginary commissioning of a picture. Gualdo says that he is thinking of a painting to be given to a church, or to his superior, the Bishop of Padua. But Caravaggio sees through the smokescreen of Gualdo’s request and understands what would
really
please him. He decides not to paint an altarpiece, a
monumental and unimpeachably pious type of painting. That is because
a public work of art, designed to be seen and read from a distance, would not suit a man of Gualdo’s personality. Instead, Caravaggio will paint for him something very different – a work that might appear devout but will also appeal to a taste for profane pleasures. It will be a picture for private contemplation, ‘not one that he would have wanted to see from a distance’, because it would yield its secrets and pleasures only when viewed at close quarters. Such a picture, it is archly implied, would be the exact complement to Gualdo, because it would be just as slippery as the man himself. For the priest who is not entirely priestly, for the man who is not all he seems, Paravicino has found the perfect gift: a work by Caravaggio.

BACCHUS
AND
HEAD OF THE MEDUSA

None of the artist’s pictures are more teasingly poised between the sacred and the profane than the
Bacchus
that he painted sometime in 1597 or 1598 for his patron Cardinal del Monte. This later Bacchus is very different from the
Self-Portrait as Bacchus –
the malingering reveller, impersonated by the artist himself, painted during his apprentice days of discontent. The model, this time, seems to have been Caravaggio’s Sicilian friend Mario Minniti. He is a swarthy, ruddy-cheeked, well-fed god of wine, crowned with a wreath of grapes and vine leaves. An air of Dionysian mystery still clings to him, but he is very much the Greek god in his Roman incarnation. Wearing a toga, he lounges on a
triclinium
, as the ancient Romans did when feasting.

There is a decanter on the table in front of him, two thirds full of a wine so darkly crimson that it looks almost black. There are bubbles at its surface and its level is askew, a minute touch of realism that makes the moment captured in the painting seem ever more fleeting. The wine is still swinging in the heavy bowl of the decanter. The boy-god has just set it down, after pouring a glassful of the liquid into the fine-stemmed Venetian goblet that he holds, delicately, in his left hand. He offers the wine to the viewer of the painting. His expression is gently quizzical, his half-raised eyebrow both invitation and challenge: unriddle me if you can.

The
Bacchus
is a sophisticated, courtly work of art, calculated to catch the eye and then hold it. It is an enigma embodied as a rich store of captivating details. Viewed from a certain perspective, the picture seems ripe with sensuality, bordering on outright lubricity. The barely draped boy might be no more than an elaborately wrapped sexual gift. Does he himself not hint at that possibility, with the suggestive play of his right hand in the knot of black ribbon that binds his clothes?

That would be the profane approach to the picture. But there is space for a devout approach too. There is another way of undoing that knot. Bacchus is the god of wine and of autumnal fruitfulness, and in keeping with that Caravaggio has given him another of his overflowing baskets of fruit. The black grapes have never seemed so lustrous, the figs so ripe. But the foliage once more is withered, the apple worm-eaten, the quince and the plum bruised. The pomegranate has split and collapsed, disgorging its fleshy seeds. Once more, a sense of eucharistic implication hovers in the still air. Summer has become autumn and the sere leaves at the basket’s edge are the presage of death to come. But there is hope here too: the transcendent promise of eternal life is contained in the glass of wine held so carefully by the boy-god – and with such precise metaphorical intent – directly above the basket of decaying fruit.

According to the Neoplatonic thought of the Renaissance, classical myth was alive with shadowy anticipations of Christian truth. The legend of Dionysus, who died to be reborn, was regarded as a pagan prophecy of the coming of Christ. So it was that the figure of Dionysus/Bacchus became associated with the Saviour himself. Caravaggio’s Bacchus has sad, solemn eyes. Those aware of his Christian aspect might also have noted how the toga that drapes him so loosely also resembles a winding sheet. The wine that he offers is the wine of his blood, an allusion lightly pointed by the heart-shaped shadow, angled towards the figure’s heart, cast by the decanter. The apparent promise of physical delight has been transfigured, changed to a metaphysical gift.

The picture plays on the deceptive nature of appearances, yet also flaunts the very deceptions that brought it into being. As he had done in
The Musicians
, Caravaggio allows the viewer to peer behind the scene of his own artifice. The model’s face and hands are sunburned, to indicate that he is someone who has to go out into the world and earn a living under the harsh noonday sun. There are crescents of black dirt under the fingernails of his left hand. His Roman bed of repose has been created by the expedient of draping white sheets over a somewhat grubby cushion decorated with blue ticking, part of which shows through. This is not
really
Bacchus, but a young man playing his part.
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The
Bacchus
soon found its way into the collections of the Medici in Florence. It is likely that del Monte specifically commissioned it as a gift for the grand duke. But the present does not seem to have gone down well. The god with dirty fingernails and sunburned skin may have struck the Medici as a joke in poor taste, or perhaps they were scandalized by the picture’s close focus on the sensual body of a half-naked boy. Either way, the picture disappeared from view as soon as it entered the Medici collections. When it finally resurfaced, some four hundred years later, in a basement storeroom of the Uffizi Galleries, not only had it never been catalogued, it had never even been framed.