Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (32 page)

In 1598 del Monte gave another painting by Caravaggio to his Medici protector. Baglione writes that the artist created ‘a head of a terrifying Medusa with vipers for hair placed on a shield, which the Cardinal sent as a gift to Ferdinando, Grand Duke of Tuscany’.
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Unlike the Bacchus, the
Medusa
was enthusiastically received and prominently displayed in the Medici collections. It is one of Caravaggio’s most startling inventions. Painted on to a circular piece of canvas stretched over a convex shield of poplar wood, the picture conjures up the legendary monster at the instant when she breathes her last. In Greek myth, the serpent-haired Medusa turned all who gazed upon her to stone, until the hero Perseus, looking only at her reflection in his brightly polished shield, cut off her head. In Caravaggio’s painting, thick jets of blood spurt from the horrible creature’s neck, which has been neatly severed just below the jaw. Her eyes stare and her mouth opens in a soundless scream. The snakes of her hair coil convulsively, each writhing in its own separate corkscrew agony of death.

The dying monster with arrestingly masculine features is yet another of the artist’s self-portraits.
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‘
Item
: a convex mirror’, reads one of the entries in an inventory of Caravaggio’s possessions. The distortions of the painter’s face as it appears in the
Medusa
indicate that he used a convex mirror to paint it. As in a convex reflection, the cheeks and forehead have been slightly broadened and elongated. Caravaggio deepens the game further by making his own convex reflection, painted on to a convex shield, look as though it is actually
concave
. The shadow cast by the Medusa’s head creates the illusion of a curved circular surface scalloped away from the viewer, like a shallow bowl.

Caravaggio treated the commission as a pretext for the display of his own special skills and techniques – so much so that the picture might almost be regarded as his own emblem, or
impresa
. Just as the face is the painter’s own, studied from life, the snakes too were painted from actual, wriggling specimens. It is a mark of Caravaggio’s pragmatism that the snakes are not vipers, but watersnakes of a type commonly found in the Tiber. He must have asked a fisherman to net some for him.

Just as Perseus had slain the snake-haired Gorgon, Caravaggio set out to vanquish every other artist to have attempted the subject. The
Medusa
is a work of such flourish and bravado that it has the look of a painting submitted for a prize. Giorgio Vasari had argued that without the intense spirit of competition between Florentine artists there could have been no Italian Renaissance. His
Lives of the Artists
is full of accounts of such rivalry, and tales of actual contests that had taken place between artists in earlier times – for example, the story of Ghiberti and Brunelleschi competing for the commission to create a set of bronze doors for the Baptistry in Florence, or that of Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci working, side by side, on two enormous battle paintings for the council chamber of the city’s town hall. By commissioning the
Medusa
, Cardinal del Monte was consciously arranging another such competition. He was pitting Caravaggio against the celebrated Leonardo himself: not only was Leonardo’s
Medusa
one of his most famously idiosyncratic creations, it also happened to be in Florence, in the collection of the Medici. The work is lost now, surviving only in the form of a vivid account in Vasari’s life of Leonardo. The story begins with Leonardo’s father asking him to paint something on a shield of fig wood:

And afterwards, having given it a coat of gesso, and having prepared it in his own way, he began to think about what he could paint upon it, that might be able to terrify all who should come upon it, producing the same effect as once did the head of the Medusa. For this purpose, then, Leonardo carried to a room of his own into which no one entered save himself alone, lizards great and small, crickets, serpents, butterflies, grasshoppers, bats, and other strange kinds of suchlike animals, out of the number of which, variously put together, he formed a great ugly creature, most horrible and terrifying, which emitted a poisonous breath and turned the air to flame; and he made it come out of a dark and jagged rock, belching forth venom from its open throat, fire from its eyes, and smoke from its nostrils, in so strange a fashion that it appeared altogether a monstrous and horrible thing; and so long did he labour over making it, that the stench of the dead animals in that room was past bearing, but Leonardo did not notice it, so great was the love that he bore towards art.
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Caravaggio also studied live animals in the process of creating his own monster, but otherwise his
Medusa
could hardly have been more different to that described by Vasari. Leonardo’s painting sounds complicated and full of circumstantial detail, conjuring up rocks and crags, a theatrical entrance on the part of the monster, and even the air itself thick with fire and smoke, just the sort of picture that mirrored his restless mind. By contrast, the brilliance of Caravaggio’s
Medusa
reflects the painter’s remorseless pursuit of a realist conceit. Leonardo had painted a picture of the Medusa that seemed wittily appropriate as the decoration of a shield. Caravaggio did something bolder and conceptually far more pure. He created a painting that sought to transcend painting and become the very thing that it depicts. His
Medusa
is not a painting
of
a shield, or at least it pretends not to be. It pretends to
be
the shield itself, held in Perseus’s hand at the very instant when he has killed the Medusa. It is a painting meant to be admired at close quarters, passed round from hand to hand. To look at the picture thus would be to
become
the conquering hero himself – to gaze, through his eyes, at the reflection of the Medusa, as she in turn watches herself die, in her own reflection, in the shield’s mirror.

The best way to grasp the true nature of Caravaggio’s illusion – to complete the circle of gazes demanded by the painter’s conceit – would indeed be actually to hold it. Did Ferdinando de’ Medici do just that, and smile at the ingenuity of Caravaggio’s idea? Certainly, the sense that this was not a picture like other pictures, a picture simply to be hung on a wall, persisted among later generations of the Medici. An inventory of the family’s armoury from 1631 reveals that it was displayed as part of a suit of armour arranged to look like a standing knight at arms. It was brandished by the figure, in fact, just like a real shield.

Caravaggio’s
Medusa
was designed to transform its owner into Perseus himself. To give such a picture to a Medici was to pay him a comfortingly familiar compliment. The Perseus myth had been assimilated into the mythology of Medici power in the middle years of the sixteenth century, when the family had assumed absolute control over what had once been the Florentine republic. Benvenuto Cellini’s chillingly persuasive, larger-than-life bronze of
Perseus
, brandishing a scimitar and holding up the Medusa’s head, was a public symbol of Medici might – a vivid demonstration of exactly what would happen to anyone with the temerity to resist Medici rule. Caravaggio’s
Medusa
, reviving those old associations with the lightest of touches, is a clever piece of praise as well as a virtuoso work of art.

But its biggest compliment of all is paid implicitly to the painter himself. He it is who personifies the Medusa, the monster who might be defeated but whose magical powers, none the less, loom larger than anything else in her legend. With eyes wide open and mouth agape, the painter takes on her role and in doing so claims for himself her dark powers of enchantment. Whomsoever the Medusa looks at, she freezes, preserving them forever in a single, charged instant of being. From the flux of life she takes a moment and makes it last for all time. That is what Caravaggio does too. Her magic is his magic, a petrifying art.

IN THE LABORATORY
OF THE ALCHEMIST

Sometime around 1599 del Monte invited Caravaggio to his villa near
the Porta Pinciana and commissioned him to decorate the ceiling of the
Tesoretto, a narrow, rectangular room next to the distillery where the cardinal conducted his alchemical experiments. A hidden, private space, it is reminiscent of the
studiolo
of Francesco de’ Medici in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, a chamber like a jewellery box, which had been richly decorated in the Mannerist style by Giorgio Vasari and his assistants in the late 1560s. Francesco de’ Medici himself appears in one of those paintings, in the character of an alchemist. Although Caravaggio did not actually paint Cardinal del Monte surrounded by his phials and retorts, he did create a kind of portrait of the alchemically inclined mind.
Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto
is a wall painting but it was executed in the unusual and fugitive medium of oil on plaster, which strengthens the suspicion that Caravaggio had never learned to paint in fresco, despite his supposed apprenticeship to Peterzano. The picture, which is still
in situ
and in surprisingly good condition, was first described by Bellori:

In Rome in the Ludovisi Gardens near the Porta Pinciana, they attribute to Caravaggio the
Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto
in the casino of Cardinal del Monte, who was interested in chemical medicines and adorned the small room of his laboratory, associating those gods with the elements and with the globe of the world placed in their midst. It has been said that Caravaggio, reproached for not understanding either planes or perspective, placed the figures in such a position that they appear to be seen from sharply below, so as to vie with the most difficult foreshortenings . . .
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For the first and last time Caravaggio flirted with out-and-out Mannerism.
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The picture’s primary function might almost be, as Bellori insinuates, to demonstrate difficulties triumphantly overcome. The plunging perspective is of a type known as
di sotto in sù
, literally meaning ‘of above, from below’, executed here with light-hearted bravado. Jupiter, mounted on an eagle, reaches a hand into the translucent celestial sphere at the centre of the ceiling’s painted sky. The frowning figure of Neptune, mounted on a rearing seahorse, is yet another of Caravaggio’s self-portraits.
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The most dramatically foreshortened figure is that of Pluto, whose carefully painted penis is uncircumcised and surrounded by a dark bush of pubic hair. The Mannerist painter Giulio Romano had painted a similarly vivid
di sotto in sù
depiction of male genitalia – the undercarriage of a flying charioteer – in his mid sixteenth-century decorations of the Palazzo del Te in Mantua. Caravaggio’s bawdy fantasy of airborne larking about belongs squarely in the same tradition.

There is an allegorical alibi for the emphatic phallus. The overarching theme of the painting is the procreative role of the three elements. From their seminal confluence, everything in the known universe depends. The picture reflects a particular twist in sixteenth-century alchemical theory. During the middle years of the century, the card-playing astronomer Gerolamo Cardano had proposed a revision of the ancient Aristotelian belief in the four elements of Fire, Air, Water and Earth. Cardano argued that fire should not properly be regarded as an element, thereby reducing their number to three. Caravaggio followed this refinement, presumably advised by del Monte.

Michelangelo had made dramatic use of
di sotto in sù
perspective for his depictions of
God Separating Light and Darkness, God Creating the Sun and Moon
and
God Calling Forth Life from the Waters
on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The subject of Caravaggio’s painting for del Monte is, in essence, a profane version of the same story, told at the start of the Book of Genesis. Caravaggio’s use of the same device may have been his way of mischievously pointing up the parallel between the most famous cycle of religious frescoes in all of Rome and his own, rather more playful ceiling decoration.

Caravaggio was always highly responsive to circumstance and milieu. Throughout his life, his art would be deeply coloured by the different social, political and religious environments that he encountered. Entering the circle of Cardinal del Monte, living in his palace, absorbing his ideas, listening to his musicians, looking at his art collections – those experiences are all clearly reflected in Caravaggio’s paintings of the late 1590s. His work becomes more sophisticated, and more intellectually rarefied. Certain details, such as the exquisite wine glass held up by Bacchus, with its delicately blown stem and the whirlpool patterning of its shallow bowl, express his palpable delight in a previously unknown world of beauty and luxury.

The work of this period is also marked by a spirit of experiment. The artist is trying out new ideas and striving to impress, so much so that he occasionally paints against the grain of his own dark and intense personality. The mythical Mannerist comedy of
Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto
would not be repeated. But the fact that Caravaggio was prepared to undertake a commission so alien to his own sensibility demonstrates his determination to succeed.

Away from his painting room, and away from the company of Cardinal del Monte, Caravaggio was still the same turbulent young man who had committed nameless misdeeds in Milan. Those who knew him at this time thought of him as a person split asunder, a man who contrived to live two opposing lives. Karel van Mander, a Dutch painter in Rome, described him as a piece of living chiaroscuro:

There is . . . a certain Michelangelo of Caravaggio who is doing remarkable things in Rome . . . he . . . has risen from poverty through his industry and by tackling and accepting everything with farsightedness and courage, as some people do who refuse to be held down through timidity or through lack of courage but who advance themselves candidly and fearlessly and who boldly pursue gain – a procedure which, if it is taken in honesty, in a proper manner, and with discretion, deserves no censure. For Fortuna will offer herself by no means frequently of her own accord; at times we must try her, prod her, and urge her . . .