As Caravaggio's masterpiece, 'The Taking of the Christ', returns to the National Gallery following a stint in Rome, BRIAN LYNCHlooks at a new study of the artist's life and the conflicted man behind the myths
TO GET an idea of what Caravaggio was like, think of him as a member of one of Limerick’s crime gangs – he was, after all, a murderer and the Rome he rampaged through at the end of the 17th century wasn’t much bigger than present-day Limerick. It is also just about possible to imagine this iconic homosexual as if he were a protégé of the Archbishop of Dublin John Charles McQuaid. In his early career, Caravaggio was supported by a prelate just as powerful as McQuaid: the Archbishop of Milan, Charles Borromeo. That saint and social reformer, one of the core leaders of the Counter-Reformation, was, if anything, even more prudish than John Charles: he had, for example, a fetish about the danger of the feet of priests and female penitents touching in the confession box.
All his life, Caravaggio had one foot on the altar and the other in the underworld. He was not a well-balanced individual.
The power and drive of his masterpiece The Taking Of Christ(just now returned to the National Gallery from a major exhibition in Rome to mark the 400th anniversary of the artist's death), depends in large part on that lack of balance: this is a frozen frame in a street brawl observed by a street fighter – the man holding up the lamp is Caravaggio himself – and in the next moment, Jesus will be knocked to the ground.
When the artist moved to Rome in his early 20s, he kept up his church connections, living for four years in the palace of Cardinal Francesco del Monte and supplying him with plainly gay paintings of semi-naked youths. In the secular world, too, he could always rely on the Colonna family: they were as influential in Italy as, say, the Guinnesses or the de Valeras in Ireland. The Colonnas repeatedly protected him from the police and, following the murder, provided him with a safe house to hide in.
In less parochial terms, it is provocative to think of Caravaggio as a corrupting influence in Western art. Of course, artists of the first order, such as Rubens, Rembrandt, Velasquez and Vermeer, owed an enormous debt to his gloomy and, in both senses of the word, shadey bank. And yet Nicolas Poussin, one of the greatest artists who ever lived, said of him that he was “sent into the world to destroy painting”.
In his always fascinating but sometimes thinly argued biography, Caravaggio A Life Sacred and Profane, Andrew Graham-Dixon says the artist "painted as if the rich and powerful were his enemies, as if he really did believe that the meek deserved to inherit the earth". As a consequence, "the classicizing critics of Europe's academic art tradition made a concerted and resolute attempt to blacken his name". In doing so these "enemies" persuaded Poussin to accept their neo-platonist ideology, essentially that "art should not represent the world as it is, but as it should be, sweetened and idealized".
The notion of a conspiracy of art critics, unlikely and horrible though it be, persuading the supremely astringent Poussin to talk nonsense in favour of sweetness is simplistic from a critic as intelligent as Graham-Dixon.
His own sentimentality is occasionally startling. To him, for example, The Madonna of the Serpent, one of the most disturbing images of woman as sexual destroyer in all art, is painted "as the kind of mother with whom real mothers might identify".
This book also tends to treat Caravaggio as if he sprang out of nowhere. On the contrary, his work fed off the zeitgeist, for instance the concettismo movement in Italian literature with all its radical and republican tendencies.
Most importantly, Graham-Dixon’s methodology, essentially a chronological and minutely detailed examination of the paintings, militates against answering the large questions Caravaggio raises: the conflicts between nihilism and idealism, immanence and transcendence, revolution and conservatism, and what some believers regarded as the mortal threat to faith of humanising the divine, of depicting “the creator as a creature”.
In some respects we know an astonishing amount about Caravaggio's private life. But the knowledge comes to us in part from early biographers who envied his genius and blackguarded his character, and in part from police and court reports that describe him at his worst. Nonetheless, while it is possible that in his daily working life Caravaggio was a pussy cat, it's clear that in his leisure hours he walked on the wild side. Certainly, when roused, he was not the sort of guest The Irish Timesrestaurant critic wants to take to dinner. For instance, a waiter who gave the artist cheek about a plate of artichokes, got the plate smashed into his face. On another occasion, he sneaked up on a rival and hit him on the head with his sword – a witness with an eye for the unforgettable detail said in court that Caravaggio then made three jumps in the air and ran away into the night.
Other stories, especially those originating with the biographers, are less believable. He is alleged, for example, to have attacked a picture by a second-rate artist in St Peter’s by cuttting a slit in it and poking his head through the hole, saying: “[It’s] as bad as I thought.” The pope, who met the artist around this time, would hardly have put up with such vandalism in his own basilica.
CARAVAGGIO'S BEHAVIOURwould have been suicidal if he hadn't known he could rely on powerful friends to get him out of jail: he variously threw stones at the police, called them obscene names, fought in the streets, distributed libels, terrorised householders (probably by smearing excrement on their front doors) and persistently carried unlicensed weapons at a time when the mere possession of a dagger could lead to its carrier being strung up in public.
The murder that finally ended Caravaggio's career in Rome used to be said to have resulted from a dispute over a game of tennis. Graham-Dixon shows that the bone-shattering clash, which involved eight men, was pre-arranged. It involved rivalries that may have boiled up out of political divisions in the city between French and Spanish factions. The proximate reasons for the fracas certainly related to Caravaggio's entanglements with high class but viciously violent courtesans – he often used prostitutes as models for his biblical subjects (such as The Madonna of the Serpent), which was in itself scandalous, perhaps deliberately so. It may also be possible, as Graham-Dixon suggests, that he was profiting from their prostitution, that he was, in effect, a pimp.
Whatever the complexities, Caravaggio slashed the leg of a man called Ranuccio Tommasoni, who died shortly afterwards, probably from the severing of his femoral artery. But as the motivations are murky, so too are the details. Graham-Dixon tells us that the panic-stricken and seriously wounded Caravaggio fled the city, never to return, and hid out in a castle owned by the Colonnas in a village called Zagarolo. The castle was only 20 miles from Rome, and his presence there was soon known to the authorities and to Tommasoni’s vengeful relatives. And yet the artist seems to have carried on painting as if nothing had happened. Hardly the attitude of someone who had been sentenced to death and could be killed on sight for a bounty.
Contemplating Caravaggio’s paintings is, as Graham-Dixon aptly puts it, “like looking at the world by flashes of lightning”. Similiarly dark and garishly lit are the artist’s sojourns in Naples (at that time three times larger than Rome), Malta and Sicily. Far from regarding the rich and powerful as his enemies, he did everything he could to join them, becoming a Knight of Malta at a time when the rulers of the island were still enjoying the fruits of halting the forces of Suleiman the Magnificent in 1566. Why he should have been imprisoned in a horrifying Maltese dungeon as a result of yet another affray is still unclear, as are the reasons why his face was cut to ribbons outside a Naples brothel.
When it comes to the death of the 39-year-old artist, probably of a fever, Graham-Dixon announces its “supposed mystery” is “nothing of the kind . . . This is what happened.” But he has no satisfactory explanation as to why on his way back to Rome in anticipation of a Papal pardon, Caravaggio was briefly arrested. In addition, he says the artist would have struggled to make a journey of some 40 miles “in less than four or five days” while neglecting to remember that he earlier described Caravaggio making a round trip from Rome to Genoa, a distance of 654 miles, in less than a month. Considering that while in Genoa he had time to be offered a commission for 6,000 scudi – some 15 times more than anything he had ever earned before – and that he turned it down in order to return to Rome, where he was wanted by the police, makes the story even more unlikely.
But these are quibbles.
In the end – and Caravaggio’s work is almost all made up of endings and sudden transitions – the reader cannot fail to respond to and be instructed by Graham-Dixon’s often brilliantly expressed passion for the terrible imagination crying out from these claustrophobic pictures. There is no day in Caravaggio; he is a painter of the perpetual night. How different Western intellectual history would have been if he had ever looked up at that “little tent of blue which”, as Oscar Wilde says, “prisoners call the sky”.
Caravaggio – A Life Sacred and Profaneby Andrew Graham-Dixon Penguin 481pp £25stg
Brian Lynch's books include New and Renewed: Poems 1967-2004and The Winner of Sorrow, a novel. As an art critic he is editor of Visual Diaries: Fifty Years of Tony O'Malley's Sketchbooks
