Caravaggio (2 page)

Unless you get close enough to a Caravaggio to see his brush-strokes—an impossibility in the chapel, which is plunged into blackness as soon as someone stops feeding coins into the light machine, though you could see a lot more if you allowed your eyes to accustom themselves to the dimness—you tend to forget that what you are looking at is, after all, only canvas and paint. Which is a pity, because one of the most astonishing things about his work is the fact that he was able to make paint and canvas communicate
exactly
what he wanted to convey—the paradoxical ordinariness of a miracle, the fact that these miracles happened not only to patriarchs or saints in haloes and robes, not only to levitating figures in ethereal firmaments surrounded by feathery clouds, but to human beings whose faces resemble faces we know, and who share our inescapably human doubts and pain and fear. By making us inescapably aware that we are looking at flesh-and-blood men and women, painted from nature, Caravaggio emphasizes the humanity of Christ and his disciples, of the Virgin and the Magdalene.

Unlike so many of his contemporaries and later artists, such as Poussin, Caravaggio never tries to make us imagine that the figures we are seeing are biblical or mythological figures. Instead he reminds us that we are looking at models, theatrically lit and posed for long periods of time, often in considerable discomfort, so that the artist could portray a single moment. What Poussin may have meant when he referred to Caravaggio's mission to destroy painting was, paradoxically, Caravaggio's determination to make it clear that he
was
painting.

Caravaggio speaks to us directly, without any need of translation from a distant century or a foreign culture. His voice is eloquent and strong, resonant with emotion. We feel we understand him, though we can never paraphrase what we intuit he is saying. His work is beautiful by any standard, except perhaps by those of John Ruskin and the other critics who dismissed his work as coarse and vulgar. Yet only lately, since we have learned to accept the idea of art without conventional beauty, art that is rough and strange and disturbing, can we tolerate art that is this
honest
about the nature of suffering and divinity, about the way in which a painting is created, about human nature, and the nature of art itself.

It's not hard to understand why the repressed and prudish Victorians would have been appalled by a painter with such an unflinching view of the way sex and death pull the strings, turning all of us into their marionettes. Or why a critic like Ruskin would have been horrified by an artist with so much to say about the pain that people, given half a chance, obediently or willfully inflict on one another. Or about the grief involved in simply being alive, first in being young, ambitious, ready to conquer the world, and then in growing old, ill, weak, suffering and dying. Even, or perhaps especially, now, we are unaccustomed to seeing such fierce compassion untempered and unmediated by sentimentality.

Tracking Caravaggio through the course of his meteoric career, studying his paintings in chronological order, you can watch his models age along with him. He repeatedly inserted his own portrait—his dark, craggy, surly features, his increasingly lined forehead—into his work, so that centuries later we can trace every scar and groove etched by time as he appears to us in the face of a witness to the murder of a saint, or in the severed head of the dead Goliath that David holds at arm's length and as far as possible from his pretty young body.

The world needed to mature, to evolve past eighteenth-century decorum and Victorian prudery in order to accept the sexuality of Caravaggio's paintings, a sexuality that is at once bravely unapologetic and furiously private. It's worth noting that the spike in Caravaggio's popularity took place during an era in which our sensitivities were being simultaneously sharpened and dulled by artists like Robert Mapplethorpe, whose passion for formal beauty and stillness, and whose own brief dramatic career, made him as emblematic of his time as Caravaggio was of his. In order to love Caravaggio, we ourselves had to learn to accept the premise that the angelic and the diabolic, that sex and violence and God, could easily if not tranquilly coexist in the same dramatic scene, the same canvas, the same painter.

These contradictions partly explain why Caravaggio so nearly fulfills every popular notion—and cliché—about the personality of the artist. The genius, or so we have learned, is a soul in the process of being drawn and quartered, pulled in countless different directions, a psyche struggling to balance the impulse to seduce against the compulsion to offend, weighing the desire for acceptance against the terror of confinement, laboring to calibrate the optimal chemistry of compassion and loathing, despair and transcendence. Several of Caravaggio's earliest biographers grudgingly admired his art while condemning his bad behavior and distancing themselves from his famously difficult personality. And until very recently, critics were still making a strenuous effort to distinguish the living devil from the angelic, immortal artist.

Only now can we admit that we require both at once. The life of Caravaggio is the closest thing we have to the myth of the sinner-saint, the street tough, the martyr, the killer, the genius—the myth that, in these jaded and secular times, we are almost ashamed to admit that we still long for, and need. The arc of his life seems biblical as it compresses the Bible's core—the fall of man, the redemption of man, the life eternal and everlasting—into one individual's span on earth, one painter's truncated existence. Each time we see his paintings, we are reminded of why we still care so profoundly about this artist who continues to speak to us in his urgent, intimate language, audible centuries after the voices of his more civilized, presentable colleagues have fallen silent.

 

One could say that Caravaggio has gotten what he wanted. His controlling desire, it appears, was not so much for wealth or personal fame as for a much purer sort of recognition. He wanted the greatness of his work to be acclaimed and understood. He wanted his ideas about art to be accepted as gospel, though he bridled and exploded whenever he felt that a disciple was following too closely in his footsteps. And finally he wanted his paintings to be acknowledged as vastly superior to anything else being done in his own time. Had he wanted us to know more about him, he might have left more evidence, documents and detritus, clues to his existence. But there is almost nothing. Police reports, legal depositions, court transcripts, cross-examinations, public notices, promissory notes, and contracts for commissions give us what few facts we have about Caravaggio's biography.

Only very rarely do we hear him speak, and, except for the testimony that he gave at his trial for libel in
1603
, it is always through the ventriloquism of others. He had, it would seem, two themes. One of his topics was insult, and the other was art. The insults are noted and preserved in the criminal record, the long list of provocations and responses that repeatedly got him into trouble. But we also hear him discoursing on the subject that meant most to him, on the correctness of his aesthetic theories and of the path he chose. His voice comes through in the famous anecdote about his boastful insistence that the first Gypsy woman who passed by on the street was a more appropriate subject for art than was any classical sculpture, and through the court records of a libel trial in which he used his appearance on the witness stand as an opportunity to hold forth on the qualities that constitute a good artist. There was nothing else that he appears to have cared about. And when, during his last years in Rome, he felt that his primacy was beginning to slip, that the light of respect and acclaim was beginning to shine on artists like Guido Reni, whose work he detested, disappointment and anger drove him to the edge of a sort of madness.

Ultimately, he has left us his paintings as the incontrovertible proof of what he believed, of what he practiced, of how right he was. That, too, is what he would have wished: that the eloquence of his work should offer the decisive testimony and tell us all we need to know. But this means that for nearly everything else we must depend on his early biographers—Giovanni Bellori, Giulio Mancini, Karel van Mander, Joachim von Sandrart, and Francesco Susinno. The earliest, Giovanni Baglione, was Caravaggio's contemporary, a painter who competed with and deeply resented Caravaggio, whose work Caravaggio destested, and who was also the plaintiff in the libel suit that named Caravaggio as a defendant. How are we to interpret the account of lifelong rival who sums up Caravaggio's legacy in this almost comically ambivalent coda: “If [he] hadn't died so soon he would have made a great contribution to art because of the skill with which he painted things from nature, even though he showed poor judgment about representing the good and omitting the bad. Even so, he became well known, and was paid more for painting a head than other painters received for whole bodies, which proves that reputation has more to do with what people hear about an artist than with what they see. His portrait is in the Academy.”

All we know, or think we know, about Caravaggio has been subject to revision and reinterpretation. Informed guesses made by early biographers harden into facts in the work of later writers, while events recorded by those same biographers and long accepted as truth are later—after years of research have failed to substantiate them—dismissed as anecdotes with little basis in reality. There are protacted, undocumented periods in his short life, and considerable uncertainty about such seemingly straightforward matters as his place and date of birth.

He was not, as was once believed, poor and uneducated, a self-taught brute who came out of nowhere to overthrow and revolutionize the well-mannered, conventional, moribund art of his day. In fact his family was relatively prosperous. They owned land near Milan, in the village of Caravaggio, where they belonged to the new middle class.

His father, Fermo Merisi, worked principally in Milan as a chief mason, builder, architect, and majordomo for Francesco Sforza, the Marchese di Caravaggio, whose wife, Costanza, was a member of the illustrious Colonna family. In January
1571
, Fermo married his second wife, Lucia Aratori, who was also from the town of Caravaggio. Francesco Sforza attended the wedding, which suggests that Fermo Merisi was a respected member of the
marchese
's household. That autumn, Fermo and Lucia's son Michelangelo was born, most probably in Milan.

His birth occurred at an extraordinary moment in the history of our culture. Shakespeare's life span, from
1564
to
1616
, was remarkably close to Caravaggio's. And indeed an intensely Shakespearean spirit—theatrical, compassionate, alternately and simultaneously comic and tragic—suffuses Caravaggio's art, though it must be noted that Shakespeare possessed a considerably more panoramic and forgiving view of human nature. In the year of Caravaggio's birth, Galileo was a boy of seven, in Pisa; Claudio Monteverdi was a child of four, in Cremona. Rubens would be born six years later, in Westphalia.

It was also a period during which whole generations of artists were periodically wiped out by the virulent plagues that were notably indifferent to status, talent, and reputation. Titian was killed by the pestilence that swept through northern Italy in
1576
. During that same epidemic, Carlo Borromeo, the bishop of Milan, was beloved for the courage he showed in remaining in his city to help the suffering victims, even as other church and civic officials fled to the countryside. A seventeenth-century painting shows Saint Carlo Borromeo ministering to the ill, possibly in the Lazaretto di San Gregorio, the plague hospital that, by the early
1800
s, could accommodate
16
,
000
victims.

Throughout Europe, Italy had long been known for its efficient and relatively—that is, by the abysmal standards of the day—effective methods of plague control, a system that imposed draconian measures on both the sick and the healthy. The dead were buried in mass graves, their clothing and possessions burned. The families of victims were walled up in their houses, and the legal penalties for defying quarantine laws often involved torture and death.

Understandably, Fermo Merisi decided to move his family from Milan to the comparative and, as it would turn out, deceptive safety of his hometown. As so frequently happened, the disease proved hard to outrun, especially when it was being imported to the rural areas by refugees from the city. In one night, Caravaggio's father and grandfather succumbed to the plague; his uncle had died not long before. Michelangelo's mother was left alone (fortunately, with the support of her parents) to raise her four children and a stepdaughter.

Caravaggio is believed to have received at least the rudiments of a formal education, which at that time would have included the Greek and Latin classics. Decades later, his work would display the lifelong legacy of an effective religious training. His younger brother would go on to study at a prestigious Jesuit college in Rome, and it seems likely that the two brothers started out in school together. Even for a painter, however, Caravaggio had notably little interest in writing—unlike, say, Leonardo da Vinci, who composed learned treatises on subjects ranging from art to medicine and warfare. Nor was he moved to record, or comment on, the events of his life, as was Jacopo Pontormo, whose diary offers intimate updates on the fluctuating state of his appetite and his digestion. No letters from Caravaggio survive; neither, like Michelangelo Buonarroti, did he leave us written work that included poems and grocery lists. Not a single drawing or preparatory sketch by Caravaggio has ever been discovered.

As far as we know, Caravaggio wrote nothing about himself, certainly nothing about his childhood, and his adult life seems to have included no one who had known him as a boy. Indeed, when his younger brother, Giovan Battista, who had become a priest, asked to see him in Rome, Caravaggio—by then a successful artist—claimed that he did not know him, that they were not brothers at all, that he had no relatives. The rejected Giovan Battista replied “with tenderness” that he had not come for his own sake but for that of his older brother, and for that of his family, if God was someday to grant Michelangelo a wife and children of his own. Tenderness, indeed! Perhaps there was a double edge to this selfless fraternal valediction, since by then it must have been clear to all involved that Caravaggio was unlikely to settle down and become a family man.