Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (36 page)

The interpretation of the case is clear enough. Prudenza and Fillide were vying for Ranuccio Tomassoni’s affections. Amongst the elaborate rituals of insult and injury, the crucial terms in the court documents are
sfregio
and the related verb
sfregiare
. Literally, a
sfregio
was a facial scar, but in the honour code of the time it also carried the figurative meaning of a serious affront to a person’s reputation. When Fillide said, repeatedly, that she wanted to cut Prudenza in the face, she was expressing a desire to dishonour and shame her. She uttered her threats publicly because she wanted her intentions to be known in the public arena of the street – the theatre in which reputation was made and harmed. Prudenza repeated those threats in court for the same reason. To accuse someone of the intention to inflict a
sfregio
was to alert the law to a potentially serious offence.

In the event, the many threats of wounds to Prudenza’s face seem not to have actually been carried out, perhaps because Fillide’s main aim was to frighten her rival. If she had actually cut her in the mouth, or sliced off her nose – a not unheard-of tactic in the more extreme revenge assaults – Prudenza would have become damaged goods. That would not have pleased Ranuccio. The impression that emerges from the testimony is that, for all her apparent wildness, Fillide knew what she was doing and remained in control throughout. Probably because nobody was seriously hurt, the case seems to have come to nothing.

Caravaggio’s name does not appear in the trial transcripts involving Fillide, Tella, Prudenza and Ranuccio, so these documents shed little direct light on the painter’s future quarrels with the pimp. But they shed a good deal on the murky world in which both men moved. Ranuccio’s contacts and alliances may also be significant. His family’s patrons, the Farnese, were supporters of Spain against France, so the Tomassoni clan was closely connected with Rome’s pro-Spanish faction. This was true of Ranuccio’s friends too. Politics could have been one cause of bad blood between him and Caravaggio. But the artist’s relationship with Fillide may have been another: a mere painter was hardly a desirable client for Ranuccio’s most beautiful courtesan.

PAITING FILLIDE

Fillide had been miscast as the virtuous heroine of
Martha and Mary Magdalen
, which is perhaps why that picture seems less than completely convincing. On two other occasions Caravaggio painted her more as the historical record suggests she truly was – tough, passionate, with a capacity for violence. Even though she only appears in devotional pictures, her presence in them tips the balance of his art from sacred to profane.

In 1598 or 1599 Caravaggio painted a startlingly sado-erotic
Judith and Holofernes
, with Fillide in the leading role. Like that of David and Goliath, the biblical story of Judith was a parable of underdog virtue triumphing over tyrannical might: the Jewish heroine of the tale seduces the ruthless Assyrian general and then slays him, with his own sword, in his tent. It was a subject that had been treated by many celebrated artists. Michelangelo had depicted Judith and her maidservant elegantly bearing aloft the tyrant’s severed head, as his corpse writhed in darkness, in one of the four paintings at the corners of the Sistine Chapel ceiling. The great Florentine Renaissance sculptor Donatello had created a famous bronze
Judith
in which the heroine hacks implacably at the neck of her victim. But even Donatello’s stark and visceral image pales by comparison with Caravaggio’s clinically violent conception of the subject.

Once again, the painter brought a scene from the biblical past into the world of his own time, but never before had he done so with such brutal, shocking immediacy. Sanctified execution in an Assyrian tent has become murder in a Roman whorehouse. The bearded Holofernes, lying naked on the crumpled sheets of a prostitute’s bed, is a client who has made a terrible mistake. He wakes up to realize that he is about to die. Fillide pulls on his hair with her left hand, not only to
expose his neck but to stretch the flesh taut so that it will part more easily under the blade. In her right hand, she holds the oriental scimitar –
Caravaggio’s one concession to historical accuracy – with which she has just managed to sever her victim’s jugular. She frowns with grim concentration, as he screams his last, and as the blood begins to spray from the mortal wound in bright red jets. A theatrical swag of dark red drapery hovers directly above the act of murder.

Caravaggio has imagined the whole scene as a fantastically extreme version of the kind of violent incidents in which he and his companions were often embroiled. ‘I want to cut you! I want to cut you!’ Fillide would yell at her rival Prudenza. Here, the threat is fully carried out. The heroine’s grizzled maidservant, readying herself to bag up the bloody trophy of a severed head, reinforces the impression that the action is indeed taking place in a darkened brothel somewhere in Rome. She is the stock figure of the procuress, the whore’s wizened partner in corruption.
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Caravaggio adds a sexual frisson to the thrill of bloody violence: beneath the diaphanous fabric of her tight-fitting bodice, Fillide’s nipples are visibly erect. It is the sort of detail that Cardinal Paravicino may have had in mind when he made his remark about pictures that he ‘would not have wanted to see from a distance’.

Judith and Holofernes
divided Caravaggio’s contemporaries. Annibale Carracci’s succinct condemnation of the work encapsulated the reservations of all those who found Caravaggio’s realism rude and indecorous. ‘When pressed to speak his opinion on a
Judith
by Caravaggio, he replied “I don’t know what to say except that it is too natural.” ’
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Artemisia Gentileschi, by contrast, was fascinated by it. During the second decade of the seventeenth century, she made a name for herself by painting numerous versions of the same subject in a darkly tenebristic style directly modelled on Caravaggio’s own. She gave an idiosyncratic twist to the theme by using it to take public revenge on the man who had raped her, painting herself as the sword-wielding heroine and Agostino Tassi as her victim.

In 1599 Fillide Melandroni appears once more in Caravaggio’s art, as
St Catherine of Alexandria
. The masterpiece of his early career, it is another picture that simmers with violent sexuality. Less shocking than the
Judith and Holofernes
, but equally striking, it encapsulates
the intense and powerfully inverted eroticism with which the Counter-
Reformation Church infused the idea of martyrdom. The haloed saint is isolated in a bare, featureless, dark room illuminated by a single light source coming from the left. She kneels on a red damasked cushion and wears splendid robes of purple, to indicate her royal birth. The mood is intimate, suspenseful. She holds the viewer’s gaze.

The saint is alone with the attributes decreed by her legend. A martyr’s palm lies crosswise on the floor at her feet. Beside her is the spiked wheel on which the Roman emperor Maxentius had intended to break her body, painted from an ordinary Roman cartwheel of coarse-grained oak. (A section of it is broken, because God sent a thunderbolt to shatter it before it could be used on the saint.) The actual instrument of her death was a sword. Caravaggio, with the expertise of a swordsman, has furnished Fillide with a weapon appropriate to her sex – a light, thin, perfectly deadly rapier. He did not have such a sword himself, so he borrowed one. The hilt is so intricate that it must have been painted from a real example.

The picture’s subject is a yearning for death so strong that it resembles sexual desire. The saint leans towards the wheel and its vicious spikes of grey steel as if leaning towards a lover. A fold of extraneous drapery has wrapped itself around the longest and darkest of the wheel’s spikes. She caresses the pommel of the sword and runs a finger lovingly along its blood-groove. Death by the sword is her consummation. To be penetrated by its steel is to be married, forever, to Christ. Her face is flushed, her eyes excited.

The composition is austere, the forms monumental, the paint handled with a subtle brilliance. The soft-focus depiction of the muted drapery around the wheel-spike anticipates the work of Velàzquez, and in fact Caravaggio would rarely repeat such levels of virtuosity. But it is not hard to see why some of the artist’s contemporaries might have been troubled by such a picture. Was it really a picture of St Catherine, rapt in the joyful embrace of death? Or was it just a picture of a sexy modern girl, with some studio props, alone in a room? In truth, it was both. Caravaggio’s technique opened his art to ambiguity because it exposed the painter himself directly to reality. His responses inevitably coloured every image that he created, whatever its mythical construction might be. Caravaggio could turn Fillide into Mary Magdalen, into Judith, into St Catherine, but the transformation could never be absolute. After all, it was Fillide that he saw in the room, Fillide with her damaged hand, breathing softly and looking back at him, with her wide appraising eyes, as she tried to hold the pose.

By the end of the 1590s Caravaggio had invented a new style and a new approach to painting, and in the three pictures for which Fillide posed he arrived at something like a fixed, settled method. In some early works he had used a light ground, like other painters from Lombardy. But in these later paintings he used a dark ground and worked from dark to light, a technique that he may have seen for the first time in the art of Tintoretto. It suited him in a number of ways. A dark ground enabled him to focus only on the essentials of a scene, as he imagined it. Dark paint creates an illusion of deep shadow around the principal forms and therefore also does away with the need to paint background detail: Bellori, in his biography of the painter, noted that Caravaggio ‘left the ground visible in the half-tones’, meaning that in places he could model form simply by leaving the canvas in the unpainted state in which it had been prepared. (The technique is visible, for example, in the frame of the mirror in
Martha and Mary Magdalen
.) Caravaggio was fond of short-cuts and liked to work quickly, which suggests another reason behind his extreme tenebrism: quite apart from their expressive effect, pools of darkness, like visible ground, simply mean that there is less to paint.

Caravaggio’s habitual impatience is manifest too in his frequent practice of working wet-in-wet rather than waiting for each layer of oil paint to dry. He was unique among the painters of his time in making no preparatory drawings for his pictures, preferring to block out his compositions directly on the primed canvas. Having posed his models, he often marked the exact positions of heads and other contours by making light incisions in the base layer of paint, presumably so that he could reset the models’ positions after every break in the work. No other artist of his time used such incisions. Caravaggio’s exceptional working procedure argues strongly for the hypothesis that he learned little from his master, Peterzano, and was largely self-taught.
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Caravaggio did not draw because his method of composition was essentially theatrical – proto-cinematic, it might be said, because lighting was also involved. He composed by staging scenes, or fragments of scenes, that he knitted together, collage-like, on his canvas, using shadow to mask the joins. The scenes involved objects, models, props. Fillide knelt on a real purple cushion, leaned against a real wheel and held a real sword while Caravaggio painted her. Sometimes, not surprisingly, the absence of preparatory drawing led him to make a mistake in posing his models: halfway through
Judith and Holofernes
, he realized that a head half severed would look more detached from the neck and trunk of the body than the head of his very alive model. X-rays show that he painted over the first head of Holofernes, re-posed the man and painted him again to achieve the necessary degree of grisly separation.

Caravaggio’s method also involved setting lights, or at least controlling illumination in some way. Joachim von Sandrart gave a short description of his technique, saying that ‘as he wished to effect a more perfect roundness and natural relief, he regularly made use of gloomy vaults or other dark rooms which had one small source of light from above; so that the darkness, by means of strong shadows, might leave power to the light falling upon the model, and thus produce an effect of high relief.’
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There is evidence of it in
Martha and Mary Magdalen
. The brilliant square of light reflected in the surface of the convex mirror is Caravaggio’s ‘source of light from above’ made visible on the canvas. Bellori noted that Caravaggio began to work in this way at around the time that he painted the
St Catherine
and other pictures close to it in date, in 1598–9. His pictures from these final years of the sixteenth century ‘have a darker colour’, he observed, ‘as Michele [
sic
] had already begun to darken the darks’.

Bellori went on to give his own account of how Caravaggio achieved his famously extreme contrasts of light and dark:

the colouring he was introducing was not as sweet and delicate as before, but became boldly dark and black, which he used abundantly to give relief to the forms. He went so far in this style that he never showed any of his figures in open daylight, but instead found a way to place them in the darkness of a closed room, placing a lamp high so that the light would fall straight down, revealing the principal part of the body and leaving the rest in shadow so as to produce a powerful contrast of light and dark. The painters then in Rome were greatly taken by this novelty, and the young ones particularly gathered around him, praised him as the unique imitator of nature, and looked on his work as miracles.
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A BROTHERLESS MAN

Many of Caravaggio’s pictures of the later 1590s look like demonstration pieces. Each new work shows a new difficulty overcome. But with the
St Catherine
of 1599 Caravaggio had reached a higher level of mastery and assurance. He painted the picture for del Monte, who had a special devotion to the martyr, probably because she was the patron saint of scholars. Perhaps this was the work that persuaded the cardinal that his protegé was ready for bigger commissions.