Caravaggio: A Passionate Life (8 page)

XIV

The First Severed Heads, 1599

I
n Caravaggio’s Rome he could scarcely avoid seeing public executions. Almost daily, proclamations announced, “Today there will be hangings, quarterings, and clubbings.” There were nearly as many beheadings. He was well accustomed to watching condemned men and women being led in chains through the streets to the scaffold. Perhaps he knew that during the condemned’s last night on earth priests often howled like demons in rooms over their cells, rattling fetters in the hope of conjuring up thoughts of hell and arousing a wish to die in the penitent.

But only now did Caravaggio start to paint severed heads. Historians date the earliest of these disquieting pictures to sometime during the last two years of the seventeenth century. There is no direct evidence that it was at the end of 1599, yet arguably what had been done to the Cenci at the Ponte Sant’ Angelo first inspired him.

The poetry readings at the Palazzo Madama, or in any other great Roman household, must have included descriptions of decapitation. Sixteenth-century poets had seen plenty of beheadings. In
Orlando Furioso
Ariosto describes the death of the monster Orrilo, whose limbs had an alarming knack of rejoining his trunk after they had been severed. Having cut off his
head, under the delusion he has triumphed, the hero Astolfo rides away with it, but:

Astolfo realizes his mistake just in time, learning that Orrilo can be killed by destroying a magic hair on his head. He shaves the monster’s skull and ensures a happy ending.

It is clear to anyone who looks at Caravaggio’s paintings that he was unhealthily fascinated by decapitations, especially those in the Bible. The first beheading he painted did not, however, come out of the Bible. It was, to use Baglione’s description, “a really frightening Medusa with vipers for hair, set on a shield.” The Medusa was one of the Gorgons, the three fearsome maidens from Greek mythology, with hissing serpents instead of hair and brazen claws instead of hands. She possessed a face so terrifying that anyone who looked upon it was turned to stone. To kill her, the hero Perseus had to use a mirror, so that he could cut off her head without looking at her face.

The picture is painted on a leather shield. Blood drips from the head of Medusa, who shrieks in horrified disbelief, her eyes protruding in anguish. Bernard Berenson commented that it was very like the photograph of a head he had seen, taken “the instant after its owner was guillotined.” What makes the Medusa still more unnerving is that she may be a self-portrait of the young, clean-shaven Caravaggio. Despite its macabre quality, Cardinal del Monte valued the shield so highly that later he sent it as a gift to his illustrious friend the Grand Duke Ferdinand, at Florence, where it remains today in the Uffizi.

Judith and Holofernes
was painted at about the same time as the
Medusa
. Judith was a Jewish heroine who saved Israel from the Assyrians by decapitating their general, Holofernes, as he lay in his tent in a drunken stupor. The Book of Judith relates how: “she took him by the hair of his head, and
said ‘Strengthen me, O Lord God, at this hour.’ And she struck twice upon his neck, and cut off his head, and took off his canopy from the pillars, and rolled away his headless body. And after a while she went out, and delivered the head of Holofernes to her maid, and bade her put it in her wallet.”

As his model for Judith, Caravaggio employed the prostitute Fillide Melandroni, who had sat for
St. Catherine
and for the
Conversion of the Magdalene
. Brows bent in fierce concentration, her strong, handsome face wears a look of disgust and savage concentration as she hacks off the Assyrian’s head with a hunting sword, the only sword a sixteenth-century lady would have been accustomed to handling. Holofernes screams in agony, a stream of blood spurting out as the blade slices through his neck. His contorted face is almost certainly a self-portrait of the artist, bearded by now. Judith’s maid, standing next to her mistress, holds a bag in which to put Holofernes’s head. An old crone, bald and toothless, her face is disfigured by huge wrinkles. For all the horror of the scene, there is something slightly comical about her—she is very nearly a caricature.

Judith and Holofernes
is much more alarming than the
Medusa
. A somewhat questionable eighteenth-century source claims that when pressed to comment on the picture, Annibale Carracci replied, “I don’t know what to say, except that it is too natural.” If Carracci really did say this, perhaps it was because he was repelled by the brutality that, to a modern observer, seems to verge on sadism or sado-eroticism. One has the inescapable impression of an almost gloating enjoyment of the cruelty. However, Caravaggio’s motives involved much more than sadism.

There was a very famous
Judith and Holofernes
in Rome, of which Caravaggio cannot have been unaware, Michelangelo’s painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, in which Holofernes’s head was a self-portrait of Michelangelo. It has been suggested that Michelangelo was identifying himself with evil, publicly confessing that he was a sinner. Similarly, it has been argued that in later self-portraits of himself, such as that of Goliath beheaded by David, Caravaggio was announcing to the world that he was a sinner.
Certainly, at that date it was far from unknown for artists to depict themselves as penitents.

By the time he died, he had painted a dozen severed heads, some of them unmistakable self-portraits. Contemporaries appear to have found nothing odd or morbid in this fascination with beheading. Mario Minniti even copied him, painting a
Judith and Holofernes
of his own. According to some modern historians, it was an obsession that stemmed from a subconscious fear of impotence, but this does not tell us very much about what went on in his mind. And the more one learns about Caravaggio, the more one realizes he was never simple or straightforward.

Alchemy may provide part of the answer. “Beheading is significant as the separation of the ‘understanding’ from the ‘great suffering and grief’ which nature inflicts on souls,” explains Jung in
Mysterium Coniunctionis
, citing alchemy texts. He adds that, for alchemists, the head was the abode of the understanding and the soul. While it is too much to suggest that Caravaggio was painting an alchemical statement of his search for wholeness, he must have been well aware of alchemical symbolism. We shall never know why decapitation figured so often in his art. All we can be sure of is that it reflected some hidden anguish.

XV

The Contarelli Chapel, 1599–1600

S
uddenly, Rome realized that Caravaggio was one of the great painters of his age. Once again, del Monte had intervened decisively in his career. Through the cardinal, Caravaggio secured a really important commission, of a sort that had so far eluded him: to decorate the side walls of a chapel in the church of Rome’s French colony, San Luigi dei Francesi. The chapel was named after the cardinal who had bequeathed money for this purpose, Matthieu Cointrel, in Italian, Contarelli. Arpino had originally been engaged to fresco the walls, but for some reason had not done so. Angered by the delay, the clergy in charge of the church tore up the contract with him and invited Caravaggio to decorate the walls with pictures of the martyrdom of St. Matthew and of his calling by Christ. Presumably after he had submitted satisfactory sketches, on 23 July 1599, a new contract was drawn up, in which he undertook to paint both for four hundred scudi, the amount asked by Arpino. It is not clear from the contract whether the clergy understood that he was going to give them paintings on canvas instead of frescoes, but it is likely, since del Monte knew that he never painted frescoes.

It was highly flattering for Caravaggio to replace the most fashionable painter in Rome and command the same fee. Even so, it must have been a
daunting commission. He had never before painted such vast pictures, in which the figures would have to be life-sized. The year 1600 was a jubilee year at Rome, which must have inspired a sense of urgency among the clergy of San Luigi de’ Francesi and may explain why they replaced Arpino by Caravaggio. There were very good grounds indeed for Baglione’s jealous suspicion that del Monte
(“his
cardinal”) had helped them make up their minds, since he was a member of the Fabbrica of St. Peter’s, which controlled the fund left by Contarelli. Starting late in 1599, Caravaggio finished by midsummer the following year.

Fortunately, both
The Martyrdom of St. Matthew
and
The Calling of St. Matthew
are still at San Luigi dei Francesi. “Because of the darkness in the chapel and their color, these two paintings are not easy to see,” Bellori commented. However, Caravaggio exploited the chapel’s gloom to create a chiaroscuro of dramatic contrasts between dark and light, making his pictures all the more startling.

Bellori described the
Calling:
“He painted several of the heads from life, among which is that of the saint, bending down to count his money, but with a hand on his breast and turning toward the Lord. Near him an old man puts his spectacles on his nose, watching a young man who pushes the money toward him to where he sits at the corner of the table.” The picture startles by its realism, and Berenson thought it resembled a police magistrate’s arrival at a gambling den, “like the illustration to a detective story.” Yet the scene is moving and deeply spiritual, dominated by the shadowy, mysterious Christ, who calls Matthew with a majestic gesture.

The other painting, the
Martyrdom
, is no less flippantly dismissed by Berenson. “An elderly man lying on the escarped edge of a pit, presumably in the vaults
of
a prison, is seized by a slender nude with a drawn sword…. The startled onlookers scatter, while a child dives down from above with a palm in his hand.” This is not too bad a description, but there is much more to the composition. Caravaggio took the story from
The Golden Legend
, a collection of the lives of the saints first compiled by Jacobus de Voragine
in the thirteenth century. It recounts how, after having apparently been converted to Christianity by St. Matthew, King Hyrcanus of Ethiopia ordered his execution when he reproached him for keeping two wives. Hyrcanus’s face is at once gloating and compassionate as he sees him being killed. What makes the face fascinating is that it is a self-portrait, perhaps reflecting how Caravaggio felt when he was a spectator at the death of the Cenci. An X ray of the
Martyrdom
has revealed that at some stage the artist altered the composition drastically, painting in what became his normal manner, directly onto the canvas without any preliminary drawing.

The
Calling
and the
Martyrdom
caused a sensation when they were unveiled at San Luigi dei Francesi in July 1600. Both were acclaimed. Baglione concedes, “This commission made Caravaggio famous,” but he also claims that ill-natured people, especially those who disliked Arpino, went out of their way to “overpraise” the paintings, to upset established artists.

“Because Caravaggio put an end to dignified art, every artist did just as he pleased, destroying all reverence for Antiquity and for Raphael,” Bellori grumbled half a century later. “Now began the depiction of worthless objects, a preference for filth and deformity … the clothes they paint are stockings, breeches and shaggy caps, while in their figures they show only dead skin, knotted fingers and limbs twisted by disease.” Predictably, the Victorians shared this aversion. Caravaggio had “resolved to describe sacred and historical events as though they were being enacted in the Ghetto by butchers and fishwives,” wrote John Addington Symonds. “His martyrdoms are inexpressibly revolting, without appeal to any sense but savage blood-lust.”

However, more Romans approved than disapproved. He was elected to the prestigious Accademia di San Luca, while younger painters began to hero-worship him, and there were offers of valuable commissions. He had already signed a contract in April 1600 with a Siennese gentleman for a large painting, which he finished by November, receiving two hundred scudi. Nothing else is known about this picture, or about the person who commissioned it.

Meanwhile, throughout 1600, the Church provided a helpful background in Rome for the display of Caravaggio’s paintings. On Ascension Day 1599, Pope Clement announced that the coming year would be a “jubilee” or “holy year,” when indulgences could be obtained at Rome by anyone who confessed, did penance, and received Communion. On Christmas Eve he went in procession to the portico of St. Peter’s, where a great crowd of worshipers was waiting outside. One of the five doors opening from the portico into the basilica had been bricked up and adorned with a gold cross, the “Golden Door.” After praying and reading from the Scriptures, the pope descended from a throne in front of the door and knocked on it with a silver hammer. Having been cut away from its jambs and lintels, the door fell in at once; it would be closed again on the following Christmas Eve. Sprinkling the doorway with holy water, Pope Clement, bareheaded and carrying a torch, processed to the high altar and began chanting the first vespers of Christmas Day. At the same time, the other doors were opened and the waiting crowd poured in. Cardinals conducted similar services at each of the seven “pilgrimage basilicas,” and Caravaggio’s duties may have included attendance on del Monte at a service of this sort.

All public amusements were banned. An almost Lenten austerity prevailed. From innumerable pulpits, preachers harangued the pilgrims who had come from all over the Catholic world, reliably estimated at over a million during the year. This was the somber atmosphere in the city when the
Calling of St. Matthew
and the
Martyrdom
were unveiled in the Contarelli Chapel.

The year also saw the execution of the Neoplatonist heretic Giordano Bruno. The archives of the Confraternity of St. John the Beheaded relate how in February 1600, “fixing his brain and mind in a thousand errors and vain conceits, he remained altogether stubborn while being taken by the officers of justice to the Campo dei Firoi where, after being stripped naked and bound to a stake, he was burned alive. Our brethren sang litanies throughout, begging him until the very last moment to conquer his obstinacy.
And so ended his agony and his miserable life.” Caravaggio may not have even noticed Bruno’s burning, although the Campo dei Fiori was the city’s main shopping center. An obscure, runaway friar from Naples did not stir the imagination in quite the same way as did Beatrice Cenci.

While Giordano Bruno may have been a hero to Victorian freethinkers, to those few of his contemporaries who knew anything about him, as an atheist he was no better than a lunatic. Sane men believed; conformity was considered to be in no way mediocre or stultifying. Most of the period’s great artists were devout, practicing Catholics; Rubens, Guercino, and Bernini, for example, generally went to Mass several times a week, spending long hours in prayer. And Caravaggio himself was to join a religious order.

The coincidence of Bruno meeting his death in the year of Caravaggio’s first triumph underlines the artist’s commitment to the Christian faith. Despite being a rebel by temperament, he was passionately orthodox in his religious beliefs and never in trouble with the Inquisition. One has only to look at his paintings to realize that he totally rejected Neoplatonism and ideal forms, let alone heresy or witchcraft. Essentially a Catholic of the Counter-Reformation, after the Contarelli Chapel he produced few secular pictures, and during the crises of his later life he chose religious themes, generally from the New Testament, as an outlet for his emotions. When he painted light, it symbolized the light of the Gospel, while the timeless quality of his art came from prayer and meditation.

Undoubtedly, 1600 was a turning point for Caravaggio, and the man who had made his fortune was Cardinal del Monte. Yet he decided to leave the cardinal, moving out of the Palazzo Madama in the late summer or early autumn of the same year. Probably he found life in del Monte’s household too restrictive and uncomfortable, and the cardinal, who was not rich, paid him comparatively little for his pictures. By now, Caravaggio could afford to do whatever he wanted; he was beginning to secure lucrative new commissions from wealthy new patrons.