Caravaggio

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Eminent Lives, brief biographies by distinguished authors on canonical figures, joins a long tradition in this lively form, from Plutarch's
Lives
to Vasari's
Lives of the Painters
to Dr. Johnson's
Lives of the Poets
to Lytton Strachey's
Eminent Victorians
. Pairing great subjects with writers known for their strong sensibilities and sharp, lively points of view, the Eminent Lives are ideal introductions designed to appeal to the general reader, the student, and the scholar. “To preserve a becoming brevity which excludes everything that is redundant and nothing that is significant,” wrote Strachey: “That, surely, is the first duty of the biographer.”

H
E WAS THIRTY-NINE
when he died, in the summer of
1610
. He had been in exile, on the run, for the last four years of his life. He slept fully clothed, with his dagger by his side. He believed that his enemies were closing in on him and that they intended to kill him.

He was wanted for murder in Rome, for stabbing a man in a duel that was said to have begun over a bet on a tennis game. It was not the first time that he had been in trouble with the law. He had been sued for libel, arrested for carrying a weapon without a license, prosecuted for tossing a plate of artichokes in a waiter's face, jailed repeatedly. He was accused of throwing stones at the police, insulting two women, harassing a former landlady, and wounding a prison guard. His contemporaries described him as mercurial, hot-tempered, violent.

Michelangelo Merisi, known as Caravaggio, was among the most celebrated, sought after, and highly paid painters in Rome. But not even his influential patrons could arrange for the murder charge to be dismissed. After the crime, he fled to the hills outside the city, and then to a village near Palestrina, where he could have lived safely under the protection of the Colonna family, who were among his patrons, and beyond the range of papal jurisdiction. But the bucolic small town must have seemed dull compared to the chaotic street life of the Campo Marzio, to the taverns, the whorehouses, the gang fights, and—most important for Caravaggio—the fierce, energizing competition with his fellow artists, most of whom he despised.

In Rome, he had seized every opportunity, however impolitic or inappropriate, to criticize his contemporaries and to advance his own ideas about the true purpose of art—ideas he held with the force of a fanatical conviction and that fueled his erratic behavior, his vertiginous descent from wealth into vagrancy, and his ultimate self-destruction. In retrospect, his contempt and impatience seem more understandable: the frustration of a genius surrounded by a great deal of very bad, very popular, very lucrative and respected art.

During the years he spent in flight, he painted almost constantly. And despite or because of the impossible pressures and makeshift working conditions, his art became even more ambitious, darker and more deeply shadowed. Months after the murder, he turned up in Naples, where he completed two major altarpieces and a number of smaller canvases. But once again he grew restless. Perhaps he was being followed, or perhaps he just thought so. In any case, he felt that he had no choice but to leave the city.

Sometime before, he had challenged his former employer and subsequent rival, Giuseppe Cesari, the Cavaliere d'Arpino, to a duel. The
cavaliere
had replied that, as much as he would have liked to fight, his status as a Knight of Malta prevented him from participating in pointless street brawls with men who, not being knights, were beneath him. Now, as Caravaggio decided where to go after Naples, the old insult may possibly have factored in to his decision to sail to Malta. He would become a Knight of Malta, he would join the Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, a confraternity of soldiers who took monastic vows of poverty and chastity and who pledged to defend the Christian faith. Also he may have heard that the Maltese were seeking a painter to decorate the Cathedral of Saint John in Valletta.

His experience in Malta established a pattern that would be repeated throughout his exile from Rome. Because his fame had preceded him, and thanks to his contacts in the Maltese capital, he was welcomed by the local nobility and given prestigious commissions. He painted furiously, brilliantly. Driven by his belief in the importance of working from nature, he employed live models whom he posed in theatrical tableaux re-creating scenes from the New Testament and from the lives and deaths of the early Christian martyrs. Always, he reimagined these dramas in novel ways that reached beyond the conventions of art to tap directly into the power and resonance of biblical narrative, and to engage the viewer with an immediacy that made these dramas of suffering and salvation seem comprehensible and convincing. Often ahead of his patrons, the people responded to an art that reminded them that these miracles had transpired neither in primary colors, nor in brilliantly hued paintings of sanitized saints and celestial fireworks, but in dusty streets and dark rooms much like the streets and rooms in which they lived.

Inevitably, his work was widely discussed, passionately admired or hated, and his fees increased along with his reputation. As he traveled, awaiting the pardon that might enable him to return to the capital, he seemed to have found a way of surviving, of supporting himself and practising his art away from the reliably generous patrons and the distracting intrigues of Rome. And then, just as inevitably, something would go wrong.

So, in Valletta, he succeeded in having himself appointed a Knight of Malta—not an easy task, since the honor was mostly reserved for sons of the nobility. Doubtless his knighthood had something to do with the influence of his supporters in Rome, and with the magnificent portrait he did of the grand master of the Knights of Malta, Alof de Wignacourt. But again the artist's situation took a sudden and drastic turn for the worse. Caravaggio insulted a fellow knight, a superior, and was imprisoned in the notoriously escape-proof fortress, Valletta's Castel Sant'Angelo.

Caravaggio escaped. Pursued, he believed, not only by the pope's men but now also by a posse of vengeful Maltese knights, whose military code of honor had been grievously affronted, he fled to Sicily. In Syracuse, he was reunited with Mario Minniti, a close friend and fellow artist who had served as Caravaggio's model and with whom he had lived in Rome. During his sojourn in Syracuse, Caravaggio painted
The Burial of Saint Lucy
for the church of Santa Lucia, where the virgin martyr had originally been entombed.

In the winter of
1608
-
9
, he left Syracuse for Messina, where he promptly received a commission to paint
The Resurrection of Lazarus
. According to one early biographer, he destroyed the first version of the painting when he felt that it had been underappreciated by the doltish provincials who were now his principal patrons. Later he repainted it, presumably assisted by the same local laborers he asked to carry the corpse he used as the model for the dead Lazarus. After a fight with a local schoolmaster who alleged that Caravaggio stared too fixedly at the young male students, he left Messina for Palermo, where he painted a Nativity, which was later destroyed in an earthquake.

From Palermo he returned to Naples. There, he was wounded—killed, people said—in a fight at a tavern. His face was slashed and so disfigured that he was nearly unrecognizable; it was assumed that the attack had been arranged by his old enemies from Malta. While he recovered, he began a series of smaller paintings for the influential Romans who were pleading his case. Ultimately, he received word that he had at last been granted an official pardon for the
1606
murder.

Bringing along several paintings, he set sail for Rome. But en route he suffered a chance misadventure—and then a disaster. In a Tuscan port, which was at that time under Spanish jurisdiction, his ship was detained. Perhaps mistaken for someone else, Caravaggio was held for questioning. The tide turned, and the ship went on without him.

Two days later, he was released from prison. Ill, most likely with malaria, enraged, desperate, possibly delirious, he decided to chase the boat that had sailed off with all his possessions and paintings. When that failed, he resolved to walk along the scalding beach and catch up with the ship farther up the coast. He got as far as Port'Ercole, where he collapsed and died of fever in the small infirmary run by the brothers of San Sebastiano.

Within days, reports of his death had spread throughout Rome. It was rumored, and then confirmed, that he had died at Port'Ercole, and that before his death he had been pardoned by the pope. The bishop of Caserta was sent to track down the missing paintings, one of which, a Saint John the Baptist, was found in Naples and now hangs in the Galleria Borghese in Rome.

It seems entirely appropriate that his paintings survived that last voyage, those final days of bad luck, bad timing, and bad judgment. For history has proved that this last unfortunate turn of events was indeed a promise for the future, a portent of the fact that Caravaggio's work would outlive the drama and violence of his life.

And yet that promise would not be kept for several centuries, during which the question of his immortality was perpetually in the balance and the survival of his art was far from guaranteed. For more than three hundred years, his work was despised or simply ignored. One of his early biographers, Giovan Pietro Bellori, set an example for future critics by claiming that he “emulated art—astonishingly enough—without art,” that he “suppressed the majesty of art” and “devalued beautiful things.” Caravaggio, wrote Bellori, “possessed neither invention, nor decorum, not design, nor any knowledge of the science of painting. The moment the model was taken away from his eyes his hand and his imagination remained empty.”

According to Nicolas Poussin's friend and biographer, André Felibien, Poussin despised Caravaggio and said that he had come into the world to destroy painting. For Caravaggio's portrayals of whores, criminals, and laborers with rough hands and dirty feet threatened what Poussin considered to be the most essential principle of art—specifically, the notion that the artist should represent ideal beauty, perfect proportion, and classical decorum. Moreover, Caravaggio's belief in painting directly on the canvas ran counter to Poussin's insistence on the necessity of elaborate planning and preparatory drawing. In
1789,
the historian Luigi Lanzi wrote that Caravaggio's figures “are remarkable only for their vulgarity,” and during the Victorian era, John Ruskin grouped him “among the worshipers of the depraved.”

It's shocking to realize how long that judgment prevailed and how very recently it was reversed—not until the
1950
s, when a major exhibition in Milan reminded the world that one of its greatest artists had been overlooked. And yet it seems less startling when we realize that, while Caravaggio was very much a creature of his era, he was also an anomaly, one of those visitors from the future who touch down sporadically along the time line of art, a painter who simultaneously disregarded and redefined the conventions of his age, who borrowed from antiquity and from the masters who preceeded him while stubbornly insisting that he had no interest in the past or in anything but nature, the street life of his neighborhood, and the harsh realities around him. Caravaggio was a preternaturally modern artist who was obliged to wait for the world to become as modern as he was.

In our own time, his work has become so popular that it's hard to be alone with his paintings for very long. In European and American museums, and in the Italian churches where his canvases and altarpieces can also be found, you can almost always locate the Caravaggios by following the crowds.

 

On an ordinary winter morning, several dozen people have gathered at the Contarelli Chapel in Rome's Church of San Luigi dei Francesi. On one wall of the chapel is Caravaggio's
The Calling of Saint Matthew
. Facing it is his depiction of Matthew's martyrdom, of the murder of the elderly saint on the steps of the altar, where he is being seized by the half-naked executioner about to run him through with a sword. Between these two paintings is Caravaggio's
The Inspiration of Saint Matthew
, an image in which the same saint whose violent death is so graphically portrayed in the painting beside it kneels at a desk, writing, and turns away from his manuscript to find an angel suspended in the air, hovering over his shoulder, dictating or reminding him of something that belongs in his Gospel.

An English tour guide is lecturing her large and rather restless group on the
The Calling of Saint Matthew
. She explains that the work is based on a verse from the Gospel of Saint Mark: “And as he passed by, he saw Levi the son of Alphaeus sitting at the receipt of custom, and said unto him, Follow me. And he arose and followed him.” She urges her charges to note the shaft of dusty golden light that enters from the right of the painting, the same side on which Jesus stands, accompanied by a disciple, presumably Saint Peter. She suggests they admire the way the light catches Christ's outstretched hand as Jesus points at Matthew, who, in turn, points at himself, quizzically and in obvious awe and wonder.

Seated at the table in the left half of the painting are three young men. Two of them are elegantly dressed pages in feathered hats; both regard Jesus with blank and slightly goofy looks of half attention. A third boy stares down at the coins on the table, gathering them toward him, while an old man in spectacles and a fur collar leans over Matthew's right shoulder.

The tour guide suggests that everyone take notice of how much Jesus's gesture recalls God's in Michelangelo's
Creation of Adam
in the Sistine Chapel, and she informs them that this chapel was Caravaggio's first major public and religious commission. But even the most dutiful tourists have long since stopped listening. There is nothing she is telling them that they absolutely need to hear, and the power of the paintings is drowning out her voice.

Because the truth is that it is possible to understand this painting without knowing much about art history, or Caravaggio, or even, perhaps, about the New Testament. None of that is necessary to comprehend what Caravaggio is showing us: the precise moment at which a man's life changes forever—and becomes something else completely. By the time this moment has ended, Levi will have become Matthew, and the world he steps into will bear no resemblance to the world he is leaving now, the world of the counting-house. As Matthew points at himself—does Jesus really mean him?—some part of him intuits that the course on which he is embarking will lead inevitably to the bloody and terrible martyrdom that, if he were standing where we are standing, he could see across the intimate space of the Contarelli Chapel.