Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (69 page)

Caravaggio painted the moment just after St Lucy received communion and died. Having breathed out her soul, she lies on a bare expanse of ground. Her body is small, crumpled, pathetic. Her right arm is outstretched, the foreshortened hand reaching out like the hand of a beggar asking for charity. The other arm rests on her belly. Lucy’s skin is pallid with death, her mouth slack. Her head lolls helplessly back. There is a deep gash in her neck, but no sign of burns. Her frail body is framed by the hulking figures of two gravediggers, stooping to plunge their spades into the earth. The contrast between the slight saint and the giants who have come to bury her is extreme and disconcerting. This was Caravaggio’s way of continuing to suggest the brutality of Lucy’s martyrdom – the death of a young woman at the hands of thuggish men – even in the moment of her burial.

The bull-necked, crop-haired gravedigger to the right, whose tightly draped buttocks have been given such rude prominence, is loutishly absorbed in his task. Were he to stand up, he would tower over all the other figures in the painting. He is a man-mountain, at least ten feet tall. His workmate is similarly gigantic but more aware of his surroundings. Veins bulge in the left forearm and right wrist, but, as he bends to dig, he loses concentration on the job in hand. He seems transfixed by the figure of the bishop, to the right of the scene, whose blessing hand is picked out by a ray of illumination. The toiling worker has suddenly become aware of the momentous, sacred nature of the ritual in which he is taking part. According to her legend, in her last moments Lucy had expressed the hope that her martyrdom might convert some of her tormentors to Christianity. In the figure of the second gravedigger, that hope is about to be realized. He has looked up, and seen the light.
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The picture has been much abraded by time, but its power and originality are undimmed. The strong illusion of reality is all the more impressive given the painter’s bold distortions of scale and perspective. Clustered behind the body of the saint, a small group of mourners has gathered. Their faces and bodies are seen in fragments, occluded by shadow and the body of the first gravedigger, forming a collage of griefstruck response. To the right of the priest’s blessing hand, a man’s face has been abbreviated to little more than a furrowed brow and a pair of staring, anxious eyes; this may be a daringly cropped self-portrait. To the left, three more saddened faces appear. A bald man prepares to wipe tears from his eyes. Beside him, the much repainted figure of a woman stares impassively into space, while, between them, their bearded companion seems frozen by melancholy. At the feet of these three figures, Caravaggio has included a kneeling reprise of the old woman with her face in her hands from his recent altarpiece of
The Beheading of St John
.

The mourners are completed by a young man draped in a snaking length of red cloth, and a veiled elderly woman. His hands are clasped in front of him, at waist height, while hers are held up to her cheek. Both stare down with intense grief at the dead body on the ground in front of them. These last two mourners have been taken directly from the conventions of earlier Renaissance painting, in which Mary and the Apostle John were depicted in exactly the same postures of grief. Caravaggio’s use of this deliberate archaism evokes the Crucifixion and emphasizes the martyr’s emulation of Christ. The wound in her neck and her outstretched left arm reinforce this chain of associations.

The picture has a hallucinogenic quality, the feeling again of a work painted from memory rather than from models. Just as the old woman with her head in her hands has been borrowed from Caravaggio’s earlier
Beheading of St John
, the sinister figure in armour standing next to the blessing bishop is another version of Aegeas in
The Crucifixion of St Andrew
, painted in Naples in 1607. More than ever, Caravaggio’s painting evokes the old, folk traditions of Italian polychrome sculpture. Lucy and those who mourn, bury and bless her could almost be mannequins of wax, dressed in real clothing and given real hair. The tall, bare room in which the burial takes place evokes the simple chapels of the old
sacro monte
, where stories of the life of Christ are told through assemblages of straining and struggling figures very much like these.

The artist may have drawn on older memories too. When plague had struck Milan in 1576 he would have seen many hasty burials and ragged funeral processions. The picture’s iconography is ingeniously suggestive of hope and redemption, but its mood is overwhelmingly bleak. No angel descends to hymn the martyr’s soul to heaven. Almost half the painting is dark bare stone, wall and arch both isolating and seeming to press down on the figures crowded around the dead body. The snapshot immediacy of the image, with its extremely innovative effects of cropping and occlusion, is suggestive of alienation and abandonment. Not until the middle of the nineteenth century, when Manet and Degas began to crop and cut their images in the name of capturing ‘modern life’, would there be anything to rival Caravaggio’s weird dislocations in
The Burial of St Lucy
. The bishop and soldier, pushed to one side by the scything asymmetry of the composition, remain deeply ambiguous. Officially they stand for good and evil, light and dark, the compassionate Christian as opposed to the ruthless pagan response to a martyr’s death. But they have been so brusquely sidelined by the artist that it is tempting to wonder whether he was opening the way to another view of what they might embody. Church and state stand by, united in their ineffectiveness, as yet another innocent goes to the grave.

Perhaps with the priorities of the Senate of Syracuse in mind, Caravaggio also included a strong visual reference to the saint’s original place of burial in his picture. The church of Santa Lucia was built directly on top of the city’s ancient Christian catacombs, where according to legend her body had first been put into the ground. The high, arched interior in which he set
The Burial of St Lucy
was directly based on those actual catacombs, which he had visited for himself; in this way, he perpetuated the act of interment linking Lucy to the city, creating an illusion that made it look as though her body was forever about to be entombed beneath the church itself. However dark its mood, Caravaggio’s painting was a brilliant stroke of propaganda for the city.

He started work on the altarpiece soon after arriving in Syracuse, probably at around the beginning of November. He must have worked extremely fast. The altarpiece was monumental in scale, the largest work of his Sicilian period and one of the largest pictures he had ever undertaken. Yet it was finished by the start of the following month, comfortably in time for St Lucy’s feast day on 13 December. ‘The big canvas came out so well that it became famous,’ wrote Susinno; ‘the idea behind it was so good that there are many copies in Messina and in other cities of the Regno.’
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The sources indicate that Caravaggio was in a state of nervous anxiety during much of this period. During his first weeks in Sicily, the galleys of the Order of St John were a constant and highly visible presence around the harbours of the island, including that of Syracuse.
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Susinno records that ‘Caravaggio was very distracted, restless, indifferent to his own existence: many a time he would go to bed fully dressed, with his dagger (from which he was never separated) at his side . . . Even when dressed ordinarily he was always armed, so that he looked more like a swordsman than a painter.’
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Baglione tells us that it was around this time that he acquired ‘a black dog that was trained to play various tricks, which he enjoyed immensely’.
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The animal was probably not just for amusement and company. Caravaggio gave it the ill-omened name of Corvo – ‘Crow’ – a raucous creature with an aggressive personality to match.

THE TYRANT’S EAR

Caravaggio may have painted
The Burial of St Lucy
in Mario Minniti’s substantial workshop. It was quite unlike any of his own modest studios. In pursuit of success and respectability, Minniti had reinvented himself as a gentleman-painter, employing an army of assistants to transfer his compositions from paper to canvas and adding only the finishing touches himself. So busily productive was Minniti’s workshop that quality inevitably suffered. ‘Many weak paintings by him can be seen around,’ wrote Susinno. ‘If he had contented himself with just a few public works he would have been as celebrated as Caravaggio himself.’
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Caravaggio made at least one other acquaintance in Syracuse, with whom he went on a foray to see some of the sights of the town: Vincenzo Mirabella, antiquarian, mathematician and archaeologist. Caravaggio may have sought his help in researching the Christian catacombs of Syracuse, to give
The Burial of St Lucy
an authentically antique setting: the catacombs were one of Mirabella’s specialities, and he would include a lengthy account of them in his book, the
Dichiarazioni della pianta delle antiche Siracuse
, published in 1613.

Elsewhere in the same book, Mirabella would tell of how he took Caravaggio to see another of the oldest sites of Syracuse, a huge grotto said to have been used as a prison by the ancient tyrant Dionysus. According to local folklore, Dionysus had ordered a deep and narrow slit to be cut into the roof of this ‘speaking cave’, so named because of its extraordinary acoustic qualities, which amplified noise in such a way as to make the least sound perfectly audible. At the cave’s single entrance, the tyrant built a great gate, so that he could confine his prisoners within. On the hilltop above the cave, perched directly over the slit cut into its apex, he placed the house of his jailor. While his captives languished hundreds of feet below, Dionysus could eavesdrop on their every word. He could hear their admissions of guilt, learn their plans, discover the names of their friends and allies.

After explaining all this to Caravaggio, Mirabella was struck by the acuteness of the painter’s response. ‘I remember,’ he wrote, ‘when I took Michelangelo da Caravaggio, that singular painter of our times, to see that prison. And he, considering its strength, and showing his unique genius as an imitator of natural things, said: “Don’t you see how the tyrant, in order to create a vessel that would make all things audible, looked no further for a model than that which nature had made herself to produce the self-same effect. So he made this prison in the likeness of an ear.” Which observation, not having been noticed before, but then being known and studied afterwards, has doubly amazed the most curious minds.’
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To this day, the great cave – now part of the Archaeological Park of Syracuse – continues to be known as ‘The Ear of Dionysus’.

Judging by the portrait that serves as frontispiece to Mirabella’s book, its author was a dapper and fashion-conscious gentleman with a self-consciously quizzical stare. He waxed his extravagantly long handlebar moustache and favoured the Spanish style of dress, wearing a high-necked lace ruff over a dark, finely embroidered shirt. But Mirabella was also highly respected by some of the best minds in early seventeenth-century Italy. A year after the publication of his book, he would be enrolled in Rome’s foremost scientific society, the Accademia de’ Lincei – named for that sharp-eyed animal, the lynx – after his friend Federico Cesi wrote a letter supporting his application to the great astronomer Galileo Galilei. In Cesi’s words to Galileo, Mirabella was ‘a knight from Syracuse, noble by birth and very rich, learned in Greek and Latin, man of letters and most erudite in Mathematics and primarily in the theory of Music, in which he is greatly esteemed and admired by his proposer. He has already published a worthy volume on the Antiquity of his birthplace with diligent description of the same . . .’
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Mirabella subsequently became a friend and correspondent of Galileo himself. They exchanged letters about ‘spots on the sun’ and the astronomer lent ‘the knight from Syracuse’ telescope lenses on more than one occasion.

Mirabella was impressed by the empirical tenor of Caravaggio’s thought, and by his evident interest both in acoustics and in the mechanism of the human ear. Their exchange gives a rare glimpse of Caravaggio not as a violent criminal, nor as a probable lover of young men
and whores, but as an intellectual and sophisticate. This was the same man who, in Rome, had moved in a circle of speculative thinkers and
connoisseurs such as Giulio Mancini and Cardinal del Monte – himself another correspondent of Galileo’s – and who had befriended poets such as Giambattista Marino.

But Caravaggio’s remarks about ‘The Ear of Dionysius’ seem also to have reflected his increasingly apprehensive state of mind. The tyrant’s prison grotto was a potent image of his own contracting world – a ‘speaking cave’ where every movement was monitored by spies, every remark overheard by eavesdroppers. Behind the logic of his observation lurked a paranoid fear of surveillance and recapture.

LAZARUS RISING

Typically, the most strenuous efforts to recapture an errant Knight of
Malta were made in the period leading up to his trial, and in theory the
ceremony of the
privatio habitus
diminished the urgency of Wignacourt’s campaign to get the painter back to Valletta.
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But even if Caravaggio was aware of that, he did not feel safe in Syracuse. Despite the success of
The Burial of St Lucy
, Susinno records that ‘the unquiet nature of Michelangelo, which loved to wander the earth, soon after led him to leave the home of his friend Minniti’. He departed more or less immediately after the work was finished, not even waiting to see it unveiled. By 6 December, a full week before the Feast of St Lucy, he was in the nearby city of Messina. There, he showed no sign of lowering his guard. He continued to wear his dagger and sword in public and to sleep fully clothed. Susinno wrote that ‘his spirit was more disturbed than the sea of Messina with its raging currents that sometimes rise and sometimes fall.’