Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (38 page)

The hand of Christ is not the only such allusion in the painting. The grouping of figures around the table has been calculated to resemble a profane version of the Last Supper. The young man counting his change, oblivious to the call of Christ, clutches a bag of money in his shadowed left hand. He is like Judas with his fifty pieces of silver. It is from the company of worldly Judases, to that of Christ the Saviour, that Matthew has been called.

The painting is poetical and metaphorical, although the piety of which it speaks is harsh, direct and forbidding. It also has a haunting quality, the character of a personal renunciation: in
The Calling of St Matthew
, Caravaggio revisited the world of his own early genre paintings, but only to consign that world to darkness. The picture was the artist’s first public demonstration of his formidable naturalism, but it is less like a depiction of real life than a dream of escaping reality altogether, of being called away from a life of vice, suddenly and inexplicably, and summoned into the presence of God. Did Caravaggio himself dream of being chosen like this – of being rescued from his own unruly, imperfect nature?

The painter fought long and hard with the second of his pictures for the Contarelli Chapel,
The Martyrdom of St Matthew
. His struggle became common knowledge among the gossiping artists of Rome. Bellori, writing seventy years afterwards, knew enough to declare that Caravaggio ‘did it over twice’,
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a claim confirmed when the picture was examined during conservation in 1966. X-ray photographs reveal the painter’s aborted first composition, in which the bearded martyr stood before the altar, hands outstretched to protect himself from the assault of three armed men. As one of the assassins prepared to attack, another strode in from the side, sword at the ready. A third stepped in with his back to the viewer, as if entering the scene from directly in front of the picture. Shocked spectators looked on. In this initial attempt, the figures were considerably smaller than in the completed version. The architecture, square columns and pilasters with heavy cornicing, was correspondingly more prominent. The painter was perhaps struggling to depict the scene as it had been described in Contarelli’s instructions: ‘a long wide space in the form of a temple . . . where St Matthew dressed in vestments to celebrate the mass is killed by the hands of soldiers’.

Unhappy with his first effort, Caravaggio painted it out and rethought his approach. Now he was determined to give his composition a focal point, to make an image that would be at once more monumental and more dynamic. He made two fundamental changes to the composition that had displeased him: he greatly increased the scale of the individual figures, and he reduced the number of executioners from three to one. The story of murder and martyrdom was in this way compressed to a single brutal act. In the finished work a snarling youth wields a sword over the prone figure of Matthew, who lies at the base of a simple stone altar. The saint, whose chasuble is splashed with blood, has already been wounded. The assassin grasps him by the wrist, subduing Matthew at the same time as turning his body towards him, the better to administer the
coup de gr
âce
. In the first version of the painting the killers had been represented as athletic youths stripped to the waist. In the final version the single assassin is nude save for a loincloth. A high, raking light falls on the scene, catching his pale skin and accentuating his musculature. It also catches Matthew’s white vestments and his helpless upturned face.

Caravaggio’s final composition resembles a centrifuge, with peripheral forms and figures seeming to fly off in all directions, driven away by the violence at the centre. On the right-hand side a statuesque altar-boy screams, open-mouthed. To the left several onlookers recoil, including two men in shadow. One raises his hands in a gesture of instinctive shock and revulsion, while the other simply stares, transfixed. Behind them two
bravi
, one armed with a sword and wearing a plumed hat, look back as they prepare to flee the scene. Two more distant figures, isolated against the darkness, have already taken flight. One is shown in half-profile while the other is shown in full-face, picked out by a sudden shaft of light. He turns back to stare at the killing, his eyes full of sadness, regret, guilt. His features are unmistakably those of Caravaggio himself.

The painter’s treatment of the foreground was long regarded as a puzzle. To the right-hand side, two nearly nude figures huddle together on a fold of striped blanket. Opposite them, another reclining nude supports his weight on both hands while dangling his right leg into a dark area of void space. The near-nudity of Matthew’s assassin might be explained by the fact that he is pagan, but why should these other figures be half naked in church at the celebration of Mass? It has been argued that they are no more than an expedient compositional device, and that their function is essentially to swell the small crowd of witnesses.
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A more plausible explanation, advanced by Giovanni Urbani in his report on the cleaning of both Contarelli Chapel pictures in 1966, is that the nudes should be regarded as recent converts to Christianity who are about to be baptized.
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The evidence suggests that his hypothesis is correct.

The principal source for the story of Matthew’s martyrdom was the popular compendium of saints’ lives known as
The Golden Legend
. There it is told that Matthew travelled to Ethiopia, where he converted many people to Christianity. His followers built him a church, where he baptized the king and queen and their daughter, Ephigenia, who entered a religious order. Matthew’s martyrdom was the work of the king’s successor, Hirtacus, who came to the throne determined to marry Ephigenia. When Matthew counselled her to remain a bride of Christ, Hirtacus ordered that the troublesome priest be killed. The story emphasizes that Matthew’s martyrdom was the direct consequence of his missionary zeal: in earlier Italian pictorial narratives of the saint’s life, the image of his killing was often immediately preceded by a depiction of him baptizing new converts.
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Conversion and baptism were themes highly appropriate to the national church of the French, whose own king had himself been so recently converted to Catholicism. The setting of Caravaggio’s painting
is a baptismal chapel, with steps leading down from the altar to a lustral pool, around the edges of which the naked converts have gathered. The significance of the painting’s architecture was long unrecognized, for the simple reason that hardly any such baptismal chapels have survived. But they were once a common sight in Italian churches, especially in the north. In Rome, where baptism by aspersion was the general practice, stepped pools were not necessary. But in Milan, where they practised the Ambrosian rite of baptism by full bodily immersion, such chapels contained a deep pool at the base of the altar. The liturgically precise Archbishop of Milan, Carlo Borromeo, writing in his
Instructiones fabricae et supellectilis ecclesiasticae
, described an arrangement that closely corresponds to the setting of
The Martyrdom of St Matthew
: ‘a baptistery should be in the
centre
of the chapel. It should be eleven cubits wide and deep enough so that the descent to it from the floor of the chapel consists of at least three steps. By the descent and moderate depth it should resemble a sepulchre.’
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It seems that Caravaggio painted the kind of baptismal chapel that he remembered from his childhood in Milan.

Borromeo’s instruction that the baptistry should resemble a sepulchre reflects the Christian belief that baptism and death are closely connected: to be baptized is to enter a new life in Christ, and to die is also to embark on the journey to a new existence – eternal life among the blessed. Baptism and death by martyrdom were even more intimately linked in Christian theology, in part because of the belief that the wound in Christ’s side had flowed with water as well as blood during the Crucifixion. The early Church father, Tertullian, commented that this was ‘to make us, in like manner, called by water, chosen by blood. These two baptisms He sent out from the wound of his pierced side in order that they who believed in his blood might be bathed with the water; they who had been bathed in the water might likewise drink the blood.’
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These ideas are woven together in
The Martyrdom of St Matthew
. The artist has imagined Matthew, missionary to the heathen, being murdered in the very act of conducting Mass during the sacrament of baptism. As he dies his blood flows into the baptismal pool. In this detail, murder is sanctified to a holy rite. The saint’s death is a baptism of blood, a rebirth into immortality. Above, invisible both to the assassin and to the saint’s shocked congregation, an angel perched on a heavy outcrop of cloud descends to thrust the palm of martyrdom into Matthew’s open right hand.

Caravaggio’s hard-won solution to the challenge of the picture combined theological subtlety with dramatic immediacy and narrative plausibility. The murderer, all but naked like the circle of converts awaiting baptism, has sprung up from their midst. He turns out to have been a pagan in disguise, lurking among the ranks of the faithful.

The principal visual inspiration for
The Martyrdom of St Matthew
is often said to have been Titian’s famous
St Peter Martyr
, which had been painted for an altar in the Venetian church of
SS
Giovanni e Paolo.
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That work must have been in Caravaggio’s mind as he devised his own image of martyrdom, since his fallen saint and executioner are undeniably close to the same figures in Titian’s composition. Yet the effect of his crowded tableau of figures is closer still to the three-dimensional sculptural
m
ises-en-scène
of popular religious art in his native Lombardy.
The Martyrdom of St Matthew
resembles nothing so much as the chapel sculptures of the sacred mountain at Varallo, near Milan – in particular, perhaps, the many figures assembled in a frozen re-enactment of
The Massacre of the Innocents
. Caravaggio’s picture is like a partial, spotlit memory of that crowd scene.

Caravaggio’s self-portrait as one of the fleeing onlookers in the
Martyrdom
is partly a kind of signature, in line with well-established Renaissance convention. A hundred years earlier Luca Signorelli had included himself as a solemn witness at the end of the world, in his fresco cycle of scenes from the Book of Revelation in Orvieto Cathedral. Caravaggio too is a witness. Including himself in the scene may have been his way of proclaiming that he really did see it all unfold, just like this, in his mind’s eye. But there is perhaps more to it: he is not only an observer, but also a participant, a furtive accessory to the dreadful act. Like the converts in the foreground of the painting, he has stripped naked to be baptized; unlike them, he has gathered his blanket around him and taken to his heels. The self-portrait, in this instance, reads like a
mea culpa
. If Caravaggio had actually been there, he suggests, he would have had no more courage than anyone else. He would have fled like the others, leaving the martyr to his fate. According to the logic of his own narrative, he remains unbaptized and therefore outside the circle of the blessed. He is a man running away, out of the church and into the street.

A BACK-STABBING, AND OTHER MISADVENTURES

On 4 July 1600 the painter received a final payment of 50 scudi for
The Calling
and
The Martyrdom of St Matthew
. The two pictures were complete by that date, but may not have been set into the walls of the chapel until the autumn. Only in December did the carpenter employed to do the work submit his bill:

for lining the two pictures which are on either side of the chapel of Cardinal Contarelli, which are both 14½ palms broad and 15 palms long; for fixing the laths in the wall so that the boards may be nailed, for putting three [laths] for each picture . . . and for dividing the fir-wood boards, by 50, all my own material – it amounts to 20 scudi 20 baiocchi. For making the frames of the said pictures of my own white-poplar timber – it amounts to 20 scudi and 20 baiocchi.
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The pictures for the Contarelli Chapel were compellingly original public works of art. At a stroke they brought Caravaggio’s new style of painting to a much broader public. His matchless sense of drama and his use of extreme contrasts of light and dark would prove intoxicatingly influential. The painting of such seventeenth-century masters as Rembrandt in Holland, Georges de La Tour in France, Ribera in Spain, even the work of much later Romantic artists such as Géricault and Delacroix, all are inconceivable without the pictorial revolution first unleashed by Caravaggio in his two pictures of scenes from the life of St Matthew. It is no exaggeration to say that they decisively changed the tradition of European art. But in their own time, they were controversial.

Caravaggio’s rival, imitator and future biographer Giovanni Baglione went to see the pictures as soon as they were installed. His account of the visit conveys the impact of Caravaggio’s work on those who first saw it. But it also hints at the jealousies aroused by the sudden rise to fame of a previously little-known painter from Lombardy. Baglione went to see the pictures with Federico Zuccaro, the president of Rome’s art academy, the Accademia di San Luca. Sixty years old,
Zuccaro was an
éminence grise
who aspired to the mantle of Michelangelo while painting late Mannerist monstrosities.
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He claimed
to be unimpressed by Caravaggio’s work, as Baglione reported with evident pleasure:

This commission with the paintings done after life . . . made Caravaggio famous, and the paintings were excessively praised by evil people. When Federico Zuccaro came to see this picture, while I was there, he exclaimed: ‘What is all the fuss about?’ and after having studied the entire work carefully, added: ‘I do not see anything here other than the idea of Giorgione in the picture of the saint when Christ calls him to the Apostolate’; and, sneering, astonished by such commotion, he turned his back and left.
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