Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (37 page)

It was at this otherwise propitious time, for reasons unknown, that Caravaggio finally severed all links with his family. In 1594 his sister Caterina had married a ‘maestro Bartolommeo Vinizzoni’ – ‘maestro’ indicating that he was an artisan of some kind. Caravaggio had not attended the wedding. He had also been avoiding his brother, Giovan Battista, the priest, who was in Rome studying moral theology with the Jesuits from the autumn of 1596 to the winter of 1599. Before Giovan Battista went back to Lombardy, to be ordained as a subdeacon in the province of Bergamo, he decided to call on Caravaggio. Giulio Mancini tells the strange story of what happened when the two brothers met:

Caravaggio had an only brother, a priest, a man of letters and of high morals who, when he heard of his brother’s fame, wanted to see him and, filled with brotherly love, arrived in Rome. He knew that his brother was staying with Cardinal del Monte, and being aware of his brother’s eccentricities, he thought it best to speak first to the Cardinal, and to explain everything to him, which he did. He was well received by the Cardinal, who told him to return in three days. He did so. In the meantime, the Cardinal called Michelangelo and asked him if he had any relatives; he answered that he did not. Unwilling to believe that the priest would tell him a lie about a matter that could not be checked, and that would do him no good, he asked among Caravaggio’s compatriots whether he had any brothers, and who they were, and so discovered it was Caravaggio who had lied. After three days the priest returned and was received by the Cardinal, who sent for Michelangelo. At the sight of his brother he declared that he did not know him and that he was not his brother. So, in the presence of the Cardinal, the poor priest said tenderly: ‘Brother, I have come from far away to see you, and thus I have fulfilled my desire; as you know, in my situation, thank God, I do not need you for myself or for my children, but rather for your own children if God will do you good as I will pray to His Divine Majesty during my services, as will be done by your sister in her chaste and virginal prayers.’ But Michelangelo was not moved by his brother’s ardent and stimulating words of love, and so the good priest left without even a goodbye.
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Mancini neither comments on the story nor explains it in any way. But the structure of his telling, which is like a fable, may contain clues about what he believed was going on. Three times Caravaggio is asked to recognize his brother, the priest, and three times he refuses him. Like St Peter denying Christ three times ‘before the cock crows twice’ (Mark 14:66–8), Caravaggio denies his brother, himself Christ’s servant on earth. The implication is that religion, somehow, lay at the heart of the matter. Was Caravaggio ashamed to look his pious brother in the eye? Mancini may have thought so.

Ottavio Leoni drew a portrait of Caravaggio at around this time. He has the dark, dishevelled hair and bushy eyebrows described by Luca, the barber-surgeon. But it is his expression that seems most striking. His mouth is set and sullen. There is determination and truculence in his eyes, but there is sadness there too – a look of profound loneliness, and abandonment.

PART FOUR

Rome, 1599–1606

THE ST MATTHEW CHAPEL

For the priests at San Luigi dei Francesi, the Contarelli Chapel had been nothing but trouble. For years the chapel – the fifth one along on the left, in the national church of the French – had been little better than a building site. Not only did it make the church look bad, the priests complained, it was giving Rome’s French community a bad name.

The saga had begun in 1565, when a French cardinal named Mathieu Cointrel (or Matteo Contarelli, as his name was Italianized) had paid a considerable sum to acquire the chapel, where he intended to be buried. Contarelli had already given generously during the construction of San Luigi dei Francesi, footing the bill for its fine marble façade, designed by Giacomo della Porta. But despite his best efforts his own chapel was still all but bare of decoration when he died in 1585.

The cardinal himself had contracted Girolamo Muziano, a competent but unexceptional painter, to paint frescoes on its two lateral walls and decorate its vault. Muziano had prevaricated for years, only to renege on the commission with almost nothing painted. In 1587 the executor of Contarelli’s will, Virgilio Crescenzi, had commissioned a marble altarpiece from a Flemish sculptor, Jacques Cobaert. Crescenzi had also persuaded Giuseppe Cesari to fresco the walls and ceiling. Cesari had completed the frescoes on the vault by 1593, when Caravaggio was part of his studio, but he never got round to the rest because he was deluged by other assignments, including several from the pope himself. Meanwhile the sculptor, Cobaert, was said to be working away, although there was nothing to show for it. Thrilled by the importance of the commission, but paralysed by self-doubt, he toiled for years on what he hoped would be his
magnum opus
. His contract was renewed in 1596, yet as the end of the sixteenth century approached there was still no sign that he would ever actually deliver the work. Those close to him remarked that Cobaert was becoming ever more paranoid and secretive.

In 1597 the patience of the long-suffering priests had finally snapped. With the Jubilee year of 1600 fast approaching, they had sent a petition to the pope:

Most Blessed Father, the French community of the Church of San Luigi in Rome . . . humbly represents that the chapel . . . founded in this church by the late Cardinal . . . and provided by him with one hundred gold scudi per annum for two chaplains, has been closed for more than twenty-five years and is at present still closed. And if Your Holiness does not bring His authority to bear in the matter, there is a danger that the chapel will never be completed, because Signor Abbate Giacomo Crescenzi, the executor of the will of the above-named Cardinal since the retirement of his father Virgilio Crescenzi . . . has not finished it and excuses himself on the grounds of difficulties with the sculptor, the painter and other things. Thus the soul of the deceased has been cheated of its masses and the church of San Luigi similarly cheated of the endowment which was destined for the chapel. All of this is a discredit to the divine service and a shame for the community, and it leads
people
to believe that the neglect is the fault of the community when they see the chapel continually boarded-up and closed while various other churches in Rome are constructed from their foundations up . . . the heirs and sons of the Crescenzi, accumulating [revenues] year after year and day after day, have bought many and various offices in the Cancelleria, real estate and other things without doing anything which relates to the will of the testator and without even having anniversary services said for the soul of the deceased . . .
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As a result of this tirade, Clement VIII ordered the Crescenzi to surrender Contarelli’s legacy and entrusted responsibility for the chapel to the governing body of the Fabbrica di San Pietro – the works office of St Peter’s. Giuseppe Cesari was approached again and asked to finish what he had begun, but he pleaded overwork. Del Monte, whose palace was directly opposite the church, followed these developments carefully. Del Monte was friendly with the Crescenzi family. He busied himself behind the scenes, pulled the right strings and somehow won the commission for Caravaggio, an artist as yet untried in the public arena of large-scale religious painting. ‘With the support of his Cardinal he got the commission for the Contarelli chapel in San Luigi dei Francesi,’ Baglione noted, with a touch of bitterness. On 23 July 1599 Caravaggio signed a contract with the two rectors of the church in which he undertook to complete the side panels for the chapel by the end of the year for a fee of 400 scudi.

It was a daunting challenge for a young and relatively inexperienced artist. So far Caravaggio had never painted a picture with more than four figures in it. None of his previous canvases had been more than four or five feet across. Suddenly, he would have to produce two monumental paintings, each more than ten feet in width and almost the same in height. He had, it is true, painted a number of devotional pictures, but he was known principally as a painter of genre scenes with a talent for still life. Now he was being invited to create complex religious narrative paintings. It was a chance to compete with the greatest artists of the past. But if it went wrong, Caravaggio’s failure would also be very public.

The subjects of the two lateral pictures for the Contarelli Chapel had been prescribed by Cardinal Cointrel himself. He had wanted his burial chapel to be dedicated to St Matthew, his name saint, and so the two pictures on either side of the altar were to tell stories from the apostle’s life. The painting on the left was to show Matthew, the tax collector, being summoned by Christ. That on the right was to show the saint’s glorious martyrdom at the hands of a pagan assassin. Cointrel had also had very particular ideas about how these scenes might be depicted,
which are reflected in the unusually circumstantial wording of an attachment to
one of the contracts for the painting of the chapel:

For the St Matthew Chapel . . . At the right side of the altar, that is, on the side of the gospel, there is to be a painting 17 palmi high and 14 palmi long in which is painted the same St Matthew in a store or large room used for tax collection with various items pertaining to such an office, with a counter such as tax collectors use, with books, and
monies
that have been received, or as shall seem best. From this counter St Matthew, dressed as a practitioner of his trade would be, should rise in order to follow Our Lord who passes along the street with his disciples and calls him to the apostolate; and the attitude of St Matthew should show the painter’s skill, as should also the rest. On the left side, that is, of the epistle, there should be another painting of the same height and length as above in which is painted a long wide space in the form of a temple, with an altar raised up on the top of three, four, or five steps: where St Matthew dressed in vestments to celebrate the mass is killed by the hands of soldiers and it might be more artistic to show the moment of being killed, where he is wounded and already fallen, or falling but not yet dead, while in the temple there are many men, women, young and old people, and children, mostly in different attitudes of prayer, and dressed according to their station and nobility, and benches, carpets, and other furnishings, most of them terrified by the event, others appalled, and still others filled with compassion.
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The level of detail in these instructions shows how carefully painters had to tread in Rome at the end of the sixteenth century. In the event Caravaggio took artistic licence, but he remained faithful to the spirit of the patron’s recommendations. None of the documentary sources specifies the medium in which the works were to be carried out, although such was the pre-eminence of fresco in the traditions of Rome’s Christian art that its use was probably assumed. But frescoes must be painted
in situ
, the pigment applied directly to a fast-drying layer of wet plaster. The technique would have required Caravaggio to depart from his studio practice – the painting of live models posed in carefully controlled light conditions. Reluctant to abandon the procedures that had already won him admirers, Caravaggio purchased two large canvases and set to work in his usual way.

True to his method of transposing the biblical past to the present day, Caravaggio imagined
The Calling of St Matthew
taking place in a dingy room somewhere in modern Rome. Christ and St Peter have just entered the dim and plainly furnished office of Matthew, the tax-gatherer. Here they encounter five men, grouped around a table set close to a bare wall relieved only by a single window. The window’s shutter is open, but little light penetrates through its four dull panes, which are made not of glass but of oilskin held in place by crossed strings. There are coins on the table as well as a moneybag, an open account book and an inkwell from which the stem of a quill protrudes. A transaction is taking place.

At the far end of the table, a young man sitting in a savonarola chair is absorbed in calculation. He is the taxpayer, who has settled his dues and is now receiving a small amount of change. His shoulders are hunched as he counts the meagre handful of coins before him and prepares to draw the money in. Directly behind him, a bespectacled old man wearing a fur-trimmed coat peers down at the table, as if to check that all the sums have been done correctly. Next to them sits Matthew himself, accompanied by his page, a round-faced boy who leans with friendly familiarity on his master’s shoulder. Caravaggio’s Sicilian friend, the painter Mario Minniti, posed for this figure. Opposite sits another young man in fine page’s livery, his striped black and white sleeves flashing and shimmering in the half-dark of the room. He is presumably the taxpayer’s minder. Tradition has it that this figure was also modelled by a painter, Lionello Spada. But the identification may be apocryphal, a flight of fancy inspired perhaps by the sword –
spada
, in Italian – that he wears at his side.

The biblical account of Matthew’s election to the apostolate is terse in the extreme: ‘And as Jesus passed forth from thence, he saw a man, named Matthew, sitting at the receipt of custom: and he saith unto him, Follow me. And he arose, and followed him’ (Matthew 9:9). Caravaggio has painted the moment at the heart of this truncated narrative, when Christ has just spoken his simple two-word command. Matthew, at once astonished and compelled, points to his own chest as he gazes up into the eyes of the Saviour. There is incredulity in his expression and a question frozen on his lips: ‘Who, me?’ He continues, absent-mindedly, to count out one last coin of the taxpayer’s change, but he knows in which direction his destiny is taking him. He braces his legs, preparing to stand up and step into his new existence. The command is irresistible, its outcome inevitable. Christ fixes the tax-collector with a hypnotizingly intense stare. Even as he reaches out towards Matthew, he has already begun to leave the room. His bare feet, half hidden in deep shadow, are turned away from the company of men back towards the outside world. In a moment he will have left, taking his new apostle with him. All has been done that needed to be done.

Matthew and his companions, grouped around the coin-strewn table, might almost be gaming in the tavern of the
Cardsharps
, painted for Cardinal del Monte five years earlier. The disconsolate man paying his taxes and raking back a pile of change looks like a gambler who has just won an annoyingly small pot. Indeed that was exactly what the seventeenth-century writer Joachim von Sandrart took him for, years after the picture was painted. ‘Christ is represented in a dark room,’ he wrote, ‘which he has entered with two of His followers and finds the tax collector Matthew in the company of a gang of rogues with whom he is playing cards and dice, and sitting about drinking. Matthew, as if afraid, conceals the cards in one hand and places the other on his breast; in his face he reveals that alarm and shame which is the result of his feeling that he is unworthy to be called to the Apostolate by Christ. One of the other men takes his money from the table by sweeping it with one hand into the other, and attempts to sneak away; all of which seems true to life and nature itself.’
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Sandrart plainly failed to give the painting his full attention, but none the less his misinterpretation evokes a mood that Caravaggio intended to create. The tax-gatherer’s office, with its basement gloom and its cast of mercenary characters, is a convincingly seedy den of iniquity. Christ brings light into this darkness, just as he brings illumination and divine purpose to Matthew’s dreary, money-grubbing existence. The picture’s main light source is high and to the right, to suggest daylight flooding in from above, perhaps through an open door and down a flight of stairs. It flashes on to the face of Matthew, along a diagonal parallel with the line traced by Christ’s golden halo and his outstretched, spotlit, beckoning hand. It is the light of ordinary mundane reality, yet it is also the light of God.

The Calling of St Matthew
is built on contrasts, and not only the contrast of light and shade. Whereas Matthew and his companions are dressed in foppish modern finery, Christ and the solemn, reproving figure of St Peter go barefoot and wear simple, timeless robes. They belong to a different time and place, and a different moral and spiritual universe. They might be an apparition or a dream, projected from the distant sacred past into a profane Roman present.

With
The Calling of St Matthew
Caravaggio was staking his claim
to a place in the great Italian tradition of monumental religious painting.
He had the confidence to weave an overt reference to that tradition into the very fabric of his picture. The hand that Christ holds out to Matthew is a direct paraphrase of one of the most celebrated images of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, a detail appropriated from
The Creation of Adam
in which the animating finger of God reaches towards the languid hand of the first man. Yet it is the hand of Adam, not God, that Caravaggio has chosen to give to his own solemnly beckoning figure of Christ. This apparent homage to Michelangelo is
actually a statement of Caravaggio’s independence of thought, and the
detail adds a subtly appropriate layer of meaning to the picture. Caravaggio’s Christ becomes a second Adam, made in God’s image but purged of sin, calling Matthew to his redemption: ‘For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive’ (1 Corinthians 15:22).