XII
Although Caravaggio no longer needed to support himself, he worked with ferocious energy. Nor did he have any intention of restricting himself to jeux d’esprit like the Concert or the Lute Player, produced in unusually sunny moments. A man of many moods, he suffered from the same overriding melancholy as his namesake Michelangelo.
Caravaggio “thought Nature the only subject fit for his brush,” says Bellori, explaining that Caravaggio painted The Fortune Teller to make the point. He “stopped a gypsy as she was going down the street near his house, and, taking her home, painted her foretelling the future, as is the custom of the Egyptian race.” He was, however, by no means the first painter in Rome to reject Mannerism. In 1595 Cardinal Odoardo Farnese, nephew of Cardinal Alessandro, had brought Annibale Carracci from Bologna to work on frescoes at the Palazzo Farnese. Annibale and his two Carracci cousins were so eager to learn from nature that they made detailed anatomical studies of human corpses, while Annibale painted a Butcher’s Shop. Nothing could be more brutally realistic than the dead and bleeding Christ of the Crucifixion with its dreadful wounds, which Annibale took with him to Rome. This gruesome emphasis on Christ’s suffering reflects the Tridentine decrees on art, which urged artists to stress the reality of the Gospel story. It is unlikely that Caravaggio did not, at some stage, see Annibale’s frescoes and the Crucifixion. Ironically, Annibale would one day dismiss Caravaggio’s style as troppo naturale.
Caravaggio must have been aware of naturalist painters of the past before he heard of the Carraci or saw their work. Now that he was being noticed, he rejected every current artistic theory in a way that many of his contemporaries thought verged on iconoclasm. He painted only what he could see in nature. Yet, like Annibale Carracci, and no doubt unconsciously, he was responding to the Counter-Reformation’s demand that simple people be able to understand any religious painting. Even before entering the Palazzo Madama, he had been attempting religious themes. The first example to survive may be the Penitent Magdalene at the Doria Pamphili Gallery. Scarcely one of his best pictures, it was admired by Bellori: “He painted a girl sitting on a little chair in the act of drying her hair, with her hands on her lap, and he shows her in a room on whose floor he has placed a little jar of ointment, with ornaments and jewels to signify that she is Mary Magdalene. She holds her head a little on one side, her cheek, neck and bosom being painted in clean, easy, honest colors, their simplicity emphasized by the whole figure’s sheer straightforwardness, with her arms covered by a blouse and with her yellow dress pulled up to her knee, revealing a white petticoat of flowered damask.” Bellori explains that he has described the picture at such length to demonstrate what a natural style Caravaggio had, and how he had been able to find exactly the right color.
Another of Caravaggio’s early religious paintings was the Rest on the Flight into Egypt, also at the Doria Pamphili Gallery, which was much admired by Bellori: “An angel stands on one side and plays the violin, while a seated St. Joseph holds open a book of music for him; the angel is very beautiful and, by graciously showing us his profile, displays his winged shoulders and the rest of his naked body, which is partly covered by drapery. On the other side sits the Madonna who, bending her head, seems as though asleep with her baby on her breast.”
With its wonderful serenity, this is probably the happiest picture ever painted by Caravaggio. The gentleness and tranquility are most moving. Each face is full of kindness, even that of the donkey, whose brown eye is like a great gleaming jewel. The whole composition has been described by the historian Giorgio Bonsanti as “a miracle of peace and quiet.” Unaware of the artist’s identity, one could imagine that it was the work of a saint. The model for the serene Virgin was the same model who sat for the Magdalene, a not unappealing young woman. Since the Flight dates from just before Caravaggio’s del Montean period, or from its beginning, she makes an interesting contrast to the so-called “homosexual pinups” from the same period.
Although painted at some time during the first half of Caravaggio’s stay at the Palazzo Madama, St. Francis in Ecstasy, now at Hartford, Connecticut, was not acquired by del Monte until many years after his protégé had left the famiglia. This is surprising in view of the cardinal’s close links with the Capuchin Franciscans of Sant’ Urbino, and given the likelihood that his friendship with them prompted his choice of subject. Del Monte’s delay in acquiring it was probably due to its novelty. Caravaggio seems to have started with the intention of painting St. Francis receiving the stigmata, a miraculous repetition on his own body of the wounds suffered by the crucified Christ. He then appears to have changed his mind. Instead of receiving the stigmata, Francis, portrayed as bearded like a Capuchin, has the wound on his right hand deliberately painted out and is shown swooning in an ecstasy of the sort later associated with Teresa of Avila or John of the Cross. It looks as if Caravaggio was aware of mystical prayer and the Via Negativa, the Dark Night of the Soul. The painting is so deeply felt that one almost wonders if it reflects the artist’s own experience. And, for the first time, he uses darkness and the chiaroscuro.
What made the St. Francis such a novelty was the ecstasy. Although mystical ecstasies were later to become familiar from Baroque representations of St. Teresa (notably by Bernini) and other saints, in the 1590s they were little known, startling, and open to an embarrassing sexual misinterpretation. Caravaggio seems to have been the first to paint this kind of mystical experience. Presumably, it was doubt about the ecstasy’s propriety that made del Monte hesitate before adding the picture to his collection. Ironically, while the cardinal saw nothing improper in the Concertor the Lute Player—both nowadays cited as evidence of homosexuality—and hung them in his gallery, it looks as if he feared the St. Francis might cause scandal.
Caravaggio chose a young woman with a strong, beautiful face for his St. Catherine of Alexandria. A fourth-century Egyptian martyr, Catherine’s executioners tried to put her to death with a spiked wheel, but when it broke, they finished her off with a sword. Here she kneels apprehensively in a white blouse and black velvet dress, her dark blue mantle partly hiding the great spiked wheel, while a martyr’s palm lies at her feet. Her large, rather coarse, red hands clutch an elegant sword, not an executioner’s clumsy tool but a gentleman’s long, slender rapier, designed for dueling. Perhaps it was Caravaggio’s own weapon.
The model for St. Catherine was a famous prostitute, Fillide Melandroni, who came from Siena, no mere streetwalker but a lady at the very top of her profession. Often, courtesans were surprisingly pious. According to Montaigne, even if making love, every young whore in Rome would jump out of bed and say her prayers when the Angelus rang. He adds, “These girls are always in the hands of some old bawd, whom they call ‘mother’ or ‘aunt.’ ”
Fillide posed for another picture. In the Conversion of the Magdalene, Mary is magnificently dressed, with sleeves of costly red velvet. She stands in front of a mirror but looks spellbound at her sister, Martha, who rebukes her for her vanity. The Magdalen is about to cover with a cloth the mirror that tells her of her beauty, for it is the moment of conversion. The tension is heightened by strong light and shade. Having been lost for centuries, then found but dismissed as a copy, this picture—now in Detroit—has been widely accepted as genuine.
In the old Roman Missal, the Lesson for the Mass of Mary Magdalen’s feast day, taken from the Song of Solomon, contained these words: “Swear to me, then, maidens of Jerusalem, by the wild things that roam in the woods, by hart and doe, that you will not wake my beloved untimely. Hold me close to your heart, close as ring or bracelet fits; not death itself is so strong as love, not the grave itself as love unrequited; the torch that lights it is a blaze of fire.” This would have been read out in church, in the simple, easily understandable Latin of the Vulgate.
A year or two later, Caravaggio painted a portrait of Fillide Melandroni as she really was, totally impenitent, The Courtesan “Phyllis.” Although the picture perished during the destruction of Berlin in 1945, we can see what it looked like from old photographs. No longer posing as a saint, hard, predatory and cheerful, in real life Fillide must have been been recognizable at once as a highly professional prostitute. What is so impressive is the painter’s insight into her nature and his ability to convey it.
Despite the lack of interest in classical statuary that so horrified Bellori, Caravaggio’s Narcissus seems to have been partly inspired by a well-known antique statue of a boy drawing a thorn out of his foot. The artist was far from ignorant of the classics, probably better read than we realize. A crouching Narcissus, his sleeves rolled up, gazes entranced at his reflection in a pool, a boy with a sensual face and loose lips. Some detect a Christian message—know yourself in order to know God. Since its discovery in 1913 by Roberto Longhi, the painting’s authenticity has been constantly disputed, but after a recent restoration, bringing back its luminous quality, it has again been generally attributed to Caravaggio.
He produced the occasional still life, though Bellori says “he painted such things with very little pleasure and always felt unhappy at not being able to concentrate on painting people.” He once told an enthusiastic patron, Vincenzo Giustiniani, that as much patience was needed for a really good picture of flowers as for one of people. Several still lifes have been attributed to him, but the only example definitely known to survive is a Basket of Fruit, commissioned by Cardinal Federigo Borromeo, who, when he left Rome, took it with him to Milan, where he gave it to the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana. The fruit in the basket is strangely autumnal and appears to have been chosen so as to catch the precise moment when it begins to decay. There are some overripe grapes and figs, an apple with a worm in it, an almost rotting pear, and an aged peach, all placed among spotted, withering leaves. Odd and melancholy, the picture has a wistful, haunting beauty.
Bellori was obviously impressed by another of Caravaggio’s still lifes, lost long ago, though he says mistakenly that it was painted for Arpino, when it was almost certainly done for Cardinal del Monte. “He painted a carafe of flowers with the transparency of the water and the glass, and the reflection from the room’s window, sprinkling the flowers with fresh dewdrops.” Caravaggio may have been inspired by Jan Brueghel, “Flower Brueghel,” whose patron was Federigo Borromeo. He could even have met Brueghel, who lived in Borromeo’s palace near the Palazzo Madama, and had perhaps seen his own Carafe of Light, now at the Villa Borghese.
Caravaggio painted many pictures during his years at the Palazzo Madama, although it is impossible to date any of them with certainty. Others have been lost. Meanwhile, his marvelous talent was beginning to be recognized all over Rome, Cardinal del Monte presumably singing the praises of his brilliant young discovery: “Caravaggio, as he was called by everybody from the name of his birthplace, attracted more and more interest each day by the new colors he was introducing; not as sweet as hitherto, much fewer, dark and powerful, almost as dark and powerful as the blackness he used to throw figures into relief,” Bellori records.
He went so far with this method that he avoided exposing his subjects to the slightest ray of sunlight, but instead placed them in the darkness of a closed room, hanging a lamp high up which shone down on the main part of the body in such a way as to leave the rest in shadow, so that it created a truly striking contrast between light and dark. The Roman painters of those days were much intrigued by this innovation, especially the younger ones, who came flocking round him with their congratulations on being “the only imitator of nature.”
An important consequence of Caravaggio’s revolutionary use of artificial light—candles and oil lamps—seems to have escaped notice. It meant that, unlike other painters, he did not have to depend on daylight and was able to work whenever he wanted. Neither the weather nor the time of day made any difference to him. If he wished, he could paint throughout the night. Yet the really important commissions at Rome continued to elude him because of his inability to produce frescoes. Perhaps to demonstrate that his protégé could produce something better than a fresco, the cardinal asked him to paint a mural in oils on the ceiling of his laboratory, his “alchemy room,” in the casino, or little house, he owned in the Ludovisi Gardens. The result was “Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto … with the globe in their midst… placed so that they can be seen from below … painted in oils on the vault.” This painting, rediscovered in 1969 and identified from Bellori’s description, is still intact in del Monte’s long-forgotten alchemy room at the Villa Buoncompagni Ludovisi.