Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (55 page)

On 8 April, Caravaggio delivered the painting and gave a certificate to the deacon of the confraternity. It is the only known example of a statement by the artist written in his own handwriting: ‘I, Michelangelo da Caravaggio, am content and satisfied with the picture that I have painted for the Company of St Anne, in faith I have written and underwritten this 8th day of April 1606.’
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On 14 April the picture was put on display in the confraternity’s chapel. The record shows that 1 scudo was paid on that day to a carpenter named Pierfrancesco, for installing the painting on the altar of St Anne in St Peter’s. On 16 April, two days later, the picture was removed. Orders were given that it should be taken away and stored in Sant’Anna dei Palafrenieri, the church of the papal grooms. The confraternity records ‘payment to two porters to carry the painting of St Anne from St Peter’s to their church’. On a spring morning, Caravaggio’s monumental altarpiece was loaded into a mule-driver’s cart and drawn slowly along the cobbled streets of the city.

To a painter so sensitive about his honour, the humiliation of this sudden reverse must have been deeply wounding. Why was the painting rejected? At around the time when Caravaggio delivered his picture, a dispute had arisen over the Palafrenieri’s rights to the altar in St Peter’s, but even after its resolution in early May the Palafrenieri made it clear that they still did not want the painting. By the middle of June 1606 they had sold it to Scipione Borghese for 100 scudi. The arrangement suited both parties: the Palafrenieri disposed of the picture that displeased them, clearing a small but tidy profit on their original outlay, and Borghese acquired a new work by the painter he most admired at a knockdown price.

It is possible that the Palafrenieri had simply taken exception to Caravaggio’s portrayal of their beloved patron, St Anne, as a withered old lady thrown into deep shadow. The theology behind it allowed her to represent all the ancient generations before the coming of Christ, who had lived in darkness – but the Palafrenieri still might not have liked the overall effect. Their main objections, however, probably centred on the portrayal of the other two figures. The most plausible account of the picture’s rejection is given by Bellori, who baldly states that it was taken out of St Peter’s ‘because of the offensive portrayal of the Virgin with the nude Christ child’.
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The infant Christ’s nudity may have been thought improper but a wisp of drapery could easily have been added. It was surely Caravaggio’s embodiment of the Virgin as Lena in a low-cut dress that really caused the difficulty. Appealing once more to the mass of ordinary Catholics – and especially women, among whom the cult of Mary was strongest – Caravaggio had painted her as the kind of mother with whom real mothers might identify. He had stressed her tenderness, leaning down over the child with gentle solicitude, but in the process he had revealed quite a lot of her cleavage. It is not difficult to see why such a voluptuous Virgin Mary might have caused misgivings. Car
dinal Gabriele Paleotti, whose
Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images
was a widely consulted book of rules for the Counter-Reformation artist and patron, wrote that a picture of the Madonna with even the slightest hint of lasciviousness made him ‘sick to my stomach’.
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There is no reason to doubt Caravaggio’s pious intentions. He probably called attention to the Madonna’s full breasts to stress her maternal aspect and posed her as he did to impart the touching awkwardness of actual life. But, if so, he miscalulated. The woman in red, leaning forward with her skirts hitched up, was just too real to be allowed into St Peter’s. In the eyes of the Counter-Reformation Church, Mary was pure and perfect, the Queen of Heaven. Caravaggio’s Mary was just not like that. As Roberto Longhi memorably remarked, she might almost be ‘a peasant woman killing a viper in a barn’.
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The hellfire Dominican preacher Savonarola had once declared that artists should depict the Virgin as a pauper, not a queen, but that had been in Florence a hundred years before Caravaggio’s time, when collective repentance was in the air along with smoke from Savonarola’s bonfires of the vanities. In Rome under Pope Paul V such views were not widely held. The Borghese papacy was characterized by a return to pomp and magnificence, a decisive rejection of the austerity that had marked the age of Carlo Borromeo and, to a lesser degree, that of Clement VIII. Caravaggio, whose approach to religious painting had been shaped so powerfully by Borromean ideals of piety, found himself in a difficult position. In one sense his work was favoured by those in power. But in another and more important sense it was deemed entirely unacceptable.

Scipione Borghese, who ended up buying
The Madonna of the Palafrenieri
, clearly liked Caravaggio’s powerfully dramatic style. But he did so as a connoisseur. As a cardinal, he looked at it differently. Caravaggio may have had friends among the elite clerics of the Borghese papacy, but they were not prepared to put the weight of the Church behind his visions of holy poverty. The rejection of his altarpiece for St Peter’s, and its acquisition for the Borghese collection, fundamentally altered its nature as a work of art. It was secularized, and in the process was also neutered.

The same thing had happened to him once before, in 1602, when Vincenzo Giustiniani had stepped in to buy the first
St Matthew
. But on that occasion the picture had been for a burial chapel in the church of the French and Caravaggio had been invited to paint another version. This time the picture was for St Peter’s and he was given no second chance. It was a watershed in his career. Thereafter he became an increasingly isolated figure – an artist whose work would be tolerated, even admired, in private, or at the provincial margins of the Catholic world, but not at its centre.

Despite this enormous setback Caravaggio refused to change his approach. Shortly after delivering
The Madonna of the Palafrenieri
, he finally completed his long overdue altarpiece of
The Death of the Virgin
.
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This huge and deeply moving picture is stark evidence of the painter’s reluctance to compromise, and of his moral resilience.

Never before in the history of Christian painting had Mary, mother of God, been made to seem as poor and frail and vulnerable as this. Wearing a simple red dress, unlaced at the bodice to make her more comfortable in her last moments, she lies stretched out on the makeshift bier of a plank of wood. She looks shockingly dead. The apostles have gathered around her lifeless form, to pay their last respects. They are grave and serious men in the winter of their lives, each expressing pain and sorrow in his own different way. Those nearest the body are the most convulsed by grief. One man cries and rubs at his tears. Another covers his eyes and holds himself by the throat as if to choke off his own sorrow. Two others stare intently at her prone body, as if rapt in contemplation of the miracle that once grew within this mortal flesh.

Caravaggio suggests that the Virgin’s own last thoughts had been of that miracle, and that even now she might be dreaming of it. Her right hand rests gently on her own slightly swollen stomach, remembering the sacred baby that once grew in the blessed womb. Standing slightly to one side, St John the Evangelist, his head propped on one hand, is the picture of melancholy reflection. Mary Magdalen sits shuddering with grief on a chair pulled right up to Mary’s bed. She must have been the last person to hold the dead woman’s hand. As some crowd round the body, others must wait. At the back of the room, more men can be seen, talking quietly among themselves or simply thinking their own grave thoughts. Perhaps they have just come in. Once more, Caravaggio evokes the messiness of actual life. People have always mourned their dead like this, and always will.

The Death of the Virgin
is the most bleakly mundane of Caravaggio’s sacred dramas, the deathbed scene of a poor and ordinary woman. It drew another of Longhi’s pithy metaphors: ‘a scene from a night refuge’, he called it. The Virgin’s dwelling is certainly poor and humble, with its rough plastered wall and simple ceiling of coffered wood. Her feet, bare like those of the apostles, poke out straight and stiff from the folds of her dress. There is perhaps a hint that
rigor mortis
has begun to set in. The copper basin on the floor of the room adds a final note of pathos. The body of the Virgin, too, is an empty vessel, and there is little hint of transcendence.

There is a stratagem behind the painting’s apparent mood of hopeless bereavement: it invites the viewer into the darkness and doubt of death. It even dares to suggest – the deepest fear of all, in an age of faith – that perhaps this meagre life is all that there is. But peer into the gloom and all is not as it seems. Just as he had done in
The Supper at Emmaus
, with its mystical shadowplay, Caravaggio weaves a sense of the miraculous into hard and ordinary reality. The signs of salvation have to be looked for, even if at first sight they appear to be lacking. The Virgin’s face is much younger than those of the apostles, which indicates that she has been spared by God the ravages of age. The thinnest of haloes, shining in the dark air, encircles her head. Above her a great swag of drapery hangs from the ceiling of the room. Literally, it is the canopy of the Virgin’s bed, but spiritually it is a sign from above. Its colour relates to her body, while its form tells the story of her soul. It is being drawn upwards, whirled to heaven by unseen energies.

The church of Santa Maria della Scala, for which the painting was intended, belonged to the order of the so-called Discalced Carmelites, the shoeless Carmelites. This may have encouraged Caravaggio to believe that his uncompromisingly severe depiction of the Virgin and apostles as shoeless paupers might find favour there. But he was once again disappointed. No sooner was his painting delivered than he learned that it too had been rejected.

Giulio Mancini watched the whole situation unfold and even took the trouble to talk to the Fathers of the Carmelite order about why they had rejected the picture. In his biography of Caravaggio, he baldly states that ‘the fathers of that church had it removed because Caravaggio portrayed a courtesan as the Virgin.’ Had they simply got wind of the fact that the painter had modelled his Madonna on a prostitute, and found it scandalous? Caravaggio would certainly not have publicized his method, since the practice had been explicitly condemned in Cardinal Paleotti’s
Discourse on Sacred and Profane
Images
.
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Maybe one of the Carmelite fathers simply recognized the girl in the painting as a local streetwalker, or perhaps one of the painter’s enemies helpfully pointed it out to them. She is not Lena, who had modelled for
The Madonna of Loreto
and
The Madonna of the Palafrenieri
. Mancini seems to have known her identity, although he does not give her a name. In marginal notes to the manuscript of his life of Caravaggio, he elaborates tantalizingly on the bare bones of the story: ‘the fathers rejected it because he had painted, in the person of the Madonna, the portrait of a courtesan whom he loved – and had done so very exactly, without religious devotion.’
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It is impossible to establish the true nature of Caravaggio’s relationship with the girl – lover, pimp or simply employer.

But the model’s identity cannot have been the sole reason for the rejection of the painting. One painted face can easily be substituted for another, a detail that could have been altered in less than a day’s work. It seems it was Caravaggio’s fundamental approach to the subject – essentially, his blunt portrayal of the Virgin as an actual dead woman – that the fathers could not bear. In the autumn of 1606 Mancini talked to the Carmelite fathers and subsequently wrote a letter to his brother in Siena in which he alluded to the picture being ‘compromised
by its lasciviousness and lack of decorum’. Later in the same document he reiterated that it was ‘well made but without decorum or invention or cleanliness’.
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To say a picture had been created ‘without invention’ was shorthand for saying that it had been painted from reality rather than the imagination. The other two objections, about cleanliness and decorum, were versions of the same criticism. This was the heart of the fathers’ objections. The Madonna had been made to look dirty and indecorous. She had been made to look real.

The best evidence for this is the picture that eventually ended up on the altar of the church. Having sacked Caravaggio, the church fathers passed the commission on to an artist called Carlo Saraceni. Taking his cue from images of the Virgin as the Queen of Heaven, such as Annibale Carracci’s
Assumption of the Virgin
in the Cerasi Chapel, he depicted an ecstatic Mary being translated to heaven at the moment of her death. But even that was not a sufficiently happy ending for the Madonna. The Carmelites of Santa Maria della Scala wanted a choir of angels to waft her to heaven, so Saraceni had to cook up a second version of his own sweet confection, adding a topping of cherubs. His picture, finally completed in 1610, can still be seen in the church today. Caravaggio’s painting is in the Louvre.

Coming so soon after the rejection of his altarpiece for St Peter’s, this second disappointment must have cut Caravaggio to the quick. Looking back on it years later, Mancini wondered if the refusal of
The Death of the Virgin
might not have been the tilting point of the painter’s whole life. ‘Perhaps consequently Caravaggio suffered so much trouble,’ he wrote. It is just an aside, but it should not be taken lightly. Mancini was there at the time. He had seen what happened next. In the immediate aftermath of the two rejections, Caravaggio committed the darkest of his many crimes, the crime that would blight the rest of his life. He killed a man.

DEATH ON A TENNIS COURT