Caravaggio: A Passionate Life (9 page)

XVI

The New Patrons, 1600–1602

W
hen Caravaggio left the Palazzo Madama, the brothers Cardinal Girolamo Mattei and Marchese Ciriaco Mattei invited him to live in their house, now the Palazzo Gaetani. They belonged to a rich and distinguished family of the city’s old nobility, supposedly descended from the ancient Roman hero Mucius Scaevola. But although he was cardinal protector of Ireland, like del Monte, Girolamo was only one of the minor cardinals. Both he and Ciriaco were enthusiastic art lovers. Their initial interest in Caravaggio was probably aroused by the fact that the Mattei Chapel in the church of the Aracoeli was dedicated to St. Matthew, the family patron. During the 1580s, a fresco in the chapel by Girolamo Muziano,
The Martyrdom of St. Matthew
, had anticipated Caravaggio’s painting at the Contarelli Chapel. He may have inspected it while working on his own version, and quite possibly his visit brought him in contact with the Mattei.

At some time during 1600—1601, Ciriaco Mattei ordered a
St. John the Baptist
(later known as the
Pastor Friso
) from Caravaggio, as a gift for his son, Giovan Battista, a picture of a cheerful, naked boy embracing a sacrificial ram. In January 1602, Ciriaco paid for a painting originally called
Our Lord at the Breaking of Bread
, which is now the
Supper at Emmaus
in the National
Gallery in London. What made this so unusual was the beardless Christ, reflecting the interest recently shown in early Christian art by many leading churchmen, especially by Cardinal Baronius.

The following January, the marchese made another payment to Caravaggio for a
Taking of Christ
, much praised by Bellori, who particularly admired Judas giving the treacherous kiss and the soldier in armor seizing hold of Christ. (It was found in a Jesuit house in Dublin in 1990.) According to Baglione, Ciriaco Mattei also bought “St. Thomas who pokes his finger into the Saviour’s ribs,” now in Berlin, a gruesomely realistic portrayal of the Doubting Apostle’s moment of truth.

Baglione comments, with barely disguised envy, that Ciriaco Mattei had succumbed to stories of Caravaggio’s genius spread by his friends, so the artist was able to extract hundreds of scudi from the marchese. However, the artist’s most important patrons were undoubtedly the Giustiniani brothers.

Vincenzo Giustiniani, born in 1564, was a Genoese from the former Genoese colony of Chios, who, after its conquest by the Turks, had settled in Rome. His elder brother, Cardinal Benedetto Giustiniani, was papal grand treasurer, and he himself banker for the apostolic camera. A Jesuit, but also a friend of the Oratorians Filippo Neri and Baronius, and with an uncle, Cardinal Vincenzo Giustiniani, who was General of the Dominicans, Benedetto had far more influence than Francesco del Monte. He was also much richer. Although the Marchese Vincenzo was married, with a family, the brothers shared a palace almost next door to the Palazzo Madama, and were obviously on friendly terms with their neighbor.

Normally the Genoese were unpopular at Rome. They had spread all over Italy and were disliked everywhere as bankers, moneylenders, and tax collectors who bought titles and estates at knockdown prices, fawning on the Spaniards to such an extent that they were called
meretrici di Spagna
—“Spanish whores.” However, if the old Roman nobility may secretly have regarded the Giustiniani brothers as wealthy upstarts, they could not help being impressed
by the way they spent their money. Benedetto and Vincenzo shared the same tastes, filling their palace and their villa in Bassano Romano, which contained a private theater, with paintings and classical statuary. Benedetto was particularly fond of such artists as Jan Brueghel, Gerrit van Honthorst, and Luca Cambiaso, a fellow Genoese.

Clearly, both brothers were keen admirers of Caravaggio’s painting, eventually acquiring fifteen pictures by him, including six portraits. It has been suggested that Benedetto commissioned the religious works and Vincenzo the profane. Whatever Baglione may say about Ciriaco Mattei having bought the
Incredulity of St. Thomas
, it appears to have been one of the religious works painted for Benedetto. The Giustiniani did more than buy his pictures, they urged other Roman patrons to employ him.

In a contract of September 1600 for a
Crucifixion of St. Peter
and a
Conversion of St. Paul
, Caravaggio was given a banker’s order drawn on the Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani, but the pictures were to be painted for Monsignor Tiberio Cesari, Pope Clement’s treasurer, who had bought a chapel in the church of Santa Maria del Popolo and commissioned Annibale Carraci to decorate it. Vincenzo insisted that he use Caravaggio as well. In the
Crucifixion of St. Peter
, Peter is a fine old man with a bald head, showing complete indifference as the cross to which he has been nailed is raised upside down by three brutish executioners; from his reflective face, he is apparently remembering how Christ suffered the same death. In the
Conversion of St. Paul
, the apostle lies flat on his back, blinded by the vision and raising his arms to embrace it. Above him stands his patient horse, held by a groom, both unaware that anything is happening. The vision is conveyed by an explosion of dazzling light, signifying the presence of God. An earlier version of the painting in the Odescalchi Balbi collection is not so successful, although it has the same marvelous light.

Generally, light was the only symbolism Caravaggio employed. It had an essentially spiritual meaning for him, that of the “light shining in the darkness” of St. John’s Gospel. He used it for evoking holiness, the light of
heaven as opposed to the darkness of hell, and did so very movingly in his
Taking of Christ
. He also used it to signify inspiration, as in his portraits of St. Matthew and St. Jerome. But nowhere did he use light more effectively than in the
Conversion of St. Paul
at Santa Maria del Popolo.

Another commission was for the Discalced (Barefoot) Carmelites’ church of Santa Maria della Scala, where Laerzio Cherubini, a rich lawyer, had bought a side chapel. His professional activities having brought him into contact with Cardinal Giustiniani, he probably chose Caravaggio on the Marchese Vincenzo’s advice. In a contract drawn up in June 1601, Caravaggio agreed to paint a
Death of the Virgin
for an initial payment of fifty scudi, with the proviso that Vincenzo should decide the final price, which was the unusually high sum of 180 scudi. The most likely date for its completion is between November 1601 and June 1602.

What he painted may seem strange to modern Catholics, accustomed to the dogma of the Virgin’s bodily assumption into heaven. He shows her as a corpse that has fallen asleep in the Lord, what the Orthodox Church calls the “Dormition.” At the time, it was in full accord with Catholic teaching. The Virgin’s deathbed is surrounded by grieving apostles, with a bowed Mary Magdalene seated in the foreground. This is a true portrayal of death—one can feel the sense of shock and loss among those who had loved and cherished her. She is painted with stark naturalism. Hers is an exhausted, swollen body whose naked feet and ankles project stiffly from beneath the coverlet, yet one that lacks neither grace nor dignity. In her remarkable study of the picture, Pamela Askew concludes, “In the last analysis, pictorially, the experience for the apostles, and for all the observers of his scene, is death as illumination.”

For unknown reasons the Carmelites rejected this glorious painting. Baglione says it was because of the Virgin’s legs being “swollen and bare.” Bellori, who had not seen the picture, thought it was because he had painted the swollen body of a dead woman much too realistically. Mancini has a far more exciting explanation; Caravaggio had used as a model for the Virgin
“some dirty whore from the Ortaccio,” a red-light district in the Campo Marzio. He suspected that the artist’s subsequent misfortunes were divine retribution for such a blasphemy. A later legend even claimed that the model was the body of a drowned prostitute, dredged out of the Tiber.

Laerzio Cherubini kept the rejected
Death of the Virgin
for some years. Early in 1607 it was bought by Vincenzo Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, on the advice of Peter Paul Rubens, who had seen it in Rome and reported that it was unquestionably one of Caravaggio’s finest works. Before it left Rome for the fabulous Gonzaga collection at Mantua, it was exhibited for a week and warmly admired by many of the city’s artists. Later, it was bought by King Charles I of England.

On 7 February 1602, Caravaggio signed a contract for another altarpiece,
The Inspiration of St. Matthew
, which would show the saint in the process of writing his Gospel. It was commissioned for the Contarelli Chapel by the Abbate Giacomo Crescenzi, who agreed to pay him 150 scudi. When he had finished, sometime during 1602, it was placed over the chapel’s altar. However, Bellori informs us, “it was taken down by the priests, who said that the figure had neither a saint’s dignity nor semblance, sitting with crossed legs and feet rudely exposed to the people.”

“Caravaggio was in despair,” writes Bellori. Already, he must have been despondent enough over the
Death of the Virgin’s
rejection. Fortunately, “the Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani intervened on his behalf and helped him find a way out of this unpleasant situation; after negotiating with the priests, he bought the painting for himself while persuading him to paint another, which is still to be seen over the altar.” The new version, often known as
St. Matthew and the Angel
, amused Berenson by “the incongruity of the stately elder with one knee on a wooden stool, as if he had jumped out of bed to dash off a happy thought or phrase before it escaped him.” Even so, it is a magnificent image of divine inspiration.

In 1602, while working on the
Inspiration
, Caravaggio had signed a contract to paint an
Entombment of Christ
for the Vittrici family chapel in the
Oratorian church of Santa Maria in Vallicella. In Caravaggio’s day the building remained just as Filippo Neri had wanted it, plain, with whitewashed walls, which made the
Entombment
even more impressive for contemporaries. This time the Virgin was portrayed as a dignified mother superior in late middle age, wearing a nun’s coif, not as an attractive young woman; the artist was taking no chances after all the fuss over the model in the
Death of the Virgin
. Christ’s body is being lifted down from the Cross. Since the painting was hung over an altar where Mass was celebrated every day, when the priest said “This is my body” as he elevated the Host, it proclaimed the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, attacked with such fury by Protestants. Once again, Caravaggio’s carefully thought out composition was doing exactly what the Council of Trent asked, and, as always, his grasp of theology was impeccable. For a man of his time, it was still the most important of the sciences, a matter of eternal life, or eternal death.

He was probably much better educated than we realize. His friends were not uncultivated: two poets, the Cavaliere Marino and Aurelio Orsi; an architect, Onorio Longhi; and an unnamed bookseller. Paintings like
Narcissus
indicate at least a smattering of classical learning, and he seems to have read Baronius’s
Roman Martyrology
.

At some time during the second half of 1603, he painted
The Sacrifice of Abraham
for Monsignor—soon to be Cardinal—Maffei Barberini. In this alarmingly violent picture, now at the Uffizi, a tough young angel is telling Abraham to spare his shrieking son as he raises his knife to cut the boy’s throat. What was so revolutionary was to show Abraham as savagely cruel and Isaac as struggling desperately, instead of piously submissive. It has been argued recently that, in what is very far from being a naturalistic rendering of the story of the sacrifice, Abraham symbolizes God’s wrath and Isaac mankind atoning for the sin of Adam, while the angel is Christ interceding, and Abraham’s obedience to God is meant to stress the Catholic doctrine of justification by works.

Caravaggio also painted Monsignor Barberini’s portrait, now in a private
collection at Florence. He depicts a suave, cultivated senior bureaucrat, one of the handful of men who governed Rome and Roman Catholicism. In 1623 Barberini would be elected pope, taking the name “Urban VIII.” Del Monte may have introduced the artist to the Monsignor, who was a member of the Accademia degli Insensati.

Most of Caravaggio’s many other portraits have been lost, although some may await discovery. Among them were those of his friend Onorio Longhi, Onorio’s wife, Caterina, and members of the Crescenzi family. One especially interesting sitter was the Cavaliere Marino, who had been generally acknowledged, since Tasso’s death, as Italy’s greatest living poet. Marino’s praise for the Medusa shield prompted del Monte to give it to Grand Duke Ferdinand, while he introduced Caravaggio to the Crescenzi. Another sitter was Cardinal Benedetto Giustiniani.

During the 1990s a small portrait at the Uffizi of the Vatican librarian, Cardinal Baronius, has sometimes been attributed to Caravaggio, but that has not received general acceptance. If he really did paint Baronius, it would certainly confirm the impression that his sitters were beginning to include an imposing selection of the most influential men in Counter-Reformation Rome. The greatest church historian of his day, a man who had been one of Filippo Neri’s first followers, the Oratorian Baronius was Pope Clement’s confessor, spiritual adviser, and closest friend.

Caravaggio’s friendship with the two Giustiniani brothers continued to flourish. For Vincenzo, he painted an
Amor Vincit Omnia
, a laughing Cupid. The German artist Joachim von Sandrart, who long after Caravaggio was dead spent ten industrious years at the Palazzo Giustiniani recording the marchese’s cherished collection in drawings, recounts how “this picture was displayed in a room together with a hundred and twenty others by famous artists, but at my suggestion it was covered with a dark green curtain and only shown when the others had been seen, because it made all the rest seem inferior.” Post-Freudian critics have tended to exaggerate the Cupid’s homoerotic quality.