Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (45 page)

Caravaggio chose a half-length frieze-like composition and a close-up view, further excluding all extraneous detail with his usual blanket of shadow. The story is distilled to its essence. Four faces, arranged in the configuration of a diamond, bear mute witness to the miracle of the Resurrection. Christ gently accepts the indignity of being surgically investigated by his sceptical follower. Holding aside the folds of his burial sheet, he guides Thomas’s hand towards him and draws the disciple’s forefinger into his open wound. Two fellow-disciples crowd round, eyes fixed on the clinical probing of divine flesh. Christ too looks down, as though assisting at his own autopsy. The place where finger meets wound is a different kind of vanishing point, achieved without the calculations of perspective. All converges at the place where the miracle is proved to be true, and the metaphysical and the empirical meet.

Thomas and his fellow apostles are men in the same mould as the first
St Matthew and the Angel
, earnest, ordinary, with heavily lined brows and sunburned faces. Thomas’s sleeve needs restitching at the shoulder. An otherwordly radiance floods the scene, illumination the herald of revelation. Cured of his doubt, Thomas himself looks not at the wound in Christ’s side but instead to the light.

There is also, once more, the suggestion of a reminiscence of Michelangelo’s paintings for the Sistine Chapel. Thomas’s reaching gesture is another of Caravaggio’s inverted variations on the fingertip-touching act of generation at the centre of Michelangelo’s
Creation of Adam.
In the act of touching Christ, Thomas is born again in unquestioning faith.

Giustiniani commissioned one other, very different picture from Caravaggio. It is the single, stunning exception to the prevailingly solemn body of work produced by the artist during these middle years of his career.
Omnia vincit amor
, or
Love Conquers All
, was painted in the summer of 1602. The most nakedly libidinous of the painter’s secular mythological works, it is a mischievously joyful celebration of Eros – a laughing proclamation of the power of sexual love.

A smooth-skinned, naked young Cupid, far removed from the wizened saints of Caravaggio’s devotional pictures, confronts the viewer with a puckish smile. The figure half sits and half stands, one leg raised and bent at an angle of almost ninety degrees to his body. Awkwardly perched on a table draped with a white sheet, he occupies an interior cluttered with the stuff of intellectual, artistic, military and political endeavour: men may fight and dream, create and aspire, but in the end love will always triumph over all. The picture’s symbolism is concisely explained in a 1638 inventory of the Giustiniani collection, where it is listed as ‘A painting of a smiling Cupid, in the act of disparaging the world’.
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The question of whether it may have had other and deeper meanings, both for Caravaggio and for his patron, Vincenzo Giustiniani, has been hotly contested.

The pubescent boy who modelled for the picture also modelled for the
St John the Baptist
, painted by Caravaggio for Ciriaco Mattei at around the same time. Like that other picture,
Omnia vincit amor
is a variation on Michelangelo’s
ignudi
in the Sistine Chapel, although the effect on this occasion could hardly be more different. The
St John
is a sanctified version of a Michelangelo nude, spiritually transformed by Christian revelation. This dazzling Cupid in an airless room is devoid of conscience or piety. He embodies a triumphant, amoral, vibrant sexuality.

The figure’s pose carries echoes not only of the
ignudi
, but also of famous sculptures, one by Michelangelo, the marble figure of
Victory
,
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and one by Donatello, the celebrated bronze
David
, the first freestanding image of the male nude since antiquity, a work charged with homoerotic overtones. Caravaggio’s sexy adolescent is the extrovert alter ego of Donatello’s veiled, ambiguous, naked young man. The most sensually explicit detail of Donatello’s bronze is a feather, a plume from the felled Goliath’s helmet, that tickles David’s inner thigh. The same motif is repeated in Caravaggio’s painting, but here the boy’s leg is brushed by the tip of one of his own Cupid’s wings.

Joachim von Sandrart, a guest of Vincenzo Giustiniani between 1629 and 1635, reported that the marchese prized the
Omnia vincit amor
above all the other works in his collection. He gave an admiring, if not altogether accurate, description of the picture itself, and an arresting account of the manner in which it was originally displayed:

Caravaggio painted for the Marchese Giustiniani a life-size Cupid as a boy of about 12 years old, seated on a globe, and raising his bow in his right hand. On his left are various instruments, a book for studies, a laurel wreath. The Cupid has the brown wings of an eagle. Everything is accurately and clearly designed with bright colours and a three-dimensionality that approximates reality. This painting was among 120 others in a gallery of the most celebrated artists. But, I recall, it was covered with a curtain of dark green silk, and was shown last, after all the others, to avoid eclipsing the other works.
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The objects strewn at Cupid’s feet and by his side form a dispersed but uniquely haunting still life: a hallucination of things. They allude to the arts, sciences and letters. A compass and triangle, representing architecture as well as geometry, are prominent in the left foreground. A violin and a lute, rendered in extreme foreshortening, are propped on a musical part-book. A manuscript, emblem of literary ambition, lies open and abandoned on the floor. A laurel wreath has been dropped on to an empty cuirass and other scattered pieces of armour, of the same dark steel as that worn by the sinister soldier in
The Betrayal of Christ
. These signs of military glory undone are complemented by the crown and sceptre obscurely nestling in the dishevelled sheets near Cupid’s raised calf. Poking out from behind his right thigh is the rim of a celestial globe, blue with gold stars. Astronomy too has been laid low by Cupid, who holds up two arrows – not his bow, as Sandrart had asserted – to symbolize his triumph over all the works and schemes of industrious but easily tempted humanity.

The objects in the painting may have been selected to reflect Vincenzo Giustiniani’s own interests and family history. He was an author and a well-known musical amateur with a keen interest in astrology. The Giustiniani also had an illustrious military and political history. According to one ingenious (but incorrect) interpretation, the picture is not even intended to show love’s triumph over all worldly endeavours. Instead it is a celebration of Vincenzo Giustiniani’s many accomplishments, a Neoplatonic allegory of the passion propelling him and his family to so many different forms of excellence.
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But if art and culture really were being celebrated, why would their remnants litter the floor like bric-a-brac?

Sandrart’s remark about the patron keeping the picture until the end
of a tour through his house – saving the best until last – is sug
ges
tive. Having shown his guests his splendid palace, his collections of classical statuary, his musical
camerino
, his pictures by the great masters of Italian art, Giustiniani would show them
this
– an allegory of all hubris, creative and intellectual, brought low at the feet of love. An elegant gesture of knowing self-deprecation was surely intended. As rich and influential as he was, as accomplished in the arts, letters and sciences, even he still had to concede – with a graceful smile, of course – that there was a limit to his powers. Before love, all must give way.
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But
Omnia vincit amor
was more than just an excuse for that graceful flourish of rhetoric. The picture is arrestingly littered with letter
v
’s. The majuscule in the musical part-book is a
v
. The set square is arranged in the form of a
v
. The compasses form an upside down
v
. The violin and lute fall across each other to form a
v
. The crown and sceptre shape a
v
. So does the curiously awkward arrangement of the Cupid’s splayed legs. His wings echo the shape too. They are eagle’s wings, which also formed part of the Giustiniani family crest. All these
v
’s are also implicated in an orgiastic series of sexual consummations. The set square pushes at the furled circle formed by the part-book’s leaves. The compass straddles the set square. The bow of the violin has slid over the neck of the instrument. The sceptre phallically pierces the circle of the crown. Even the white sheet on which the boy rests has contrived to fold itself, at the point just below Cupid’s phallus, into the shape of the female sex.

The phrase
omnia vincit amor
is taken from Virgil’s
Eclogues
, where it is followed by the line
et nos cedamus amori
: ‘Love conquers all; let us lovers all yield to it.’ In Caravaggio’s painting, the objects of art and culture have not merely been conquered by love, they have given themselves up to passion. The picture buzzes and pulsates with libidinous energy. It is a mythology shot through with a raucously erotic and life-affirming sense of comedy, a fantasy of learning and knowledge suddenly caught up in the throes of sexual self-abandonment.

But why would Caravaggio have painted such a picture for a Roman nobleman? And why would a man such as Vincenzo Giustiniani have wanted one? There was in fact a long tradition of such erotically charged mythologies in Italian painting. They were usually created on the occasion of family weddings. The earliest examples were painted on the panels of the wedding chests traditionally given by groom to bride in fifteenth-century Tuscany.
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By the end of the fifteenth century the mythological love painting had emancipated itself from the decoration of wedding chests to become an independent art form. Botticelli’s
Birth of Venus
is the most famous example. The goddess of love rises from the sea and steps on to dry land. As she does, a cloak is readied by Venus’s handmaiden to wrap her perfect body. A particular bunched fold of that cloak, close to Venus’s face, has been painted by Botticelli to resemble the female sex and within it a tiny leaf is folded, an emblem of fertility. There are shades, here, of Caravaggio’s vulva-like twist of sheet in
Omnia vincit amor
– and an anticipation of its meaning.
The Birth of Venus
was painted as a gift to a Medici bride. Its message was unambiguous. Like the virgin Venus leaving the sea and arriving on earth, the bride was about to leave her former chastity behind and embark on married life. As she did so, the painting was offered to her as a prayer for the future fertility of the union.

This tradition was still alive in Caravaggio’s time, although by then it had mutated into yet more spectacular forms – none more so than the mythological-erotic ceiling painted by Annibale Carracci for the ceiling of the Farnese Palace between 1597 and 1601. A deliberately pagan parody of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, Carracci’s Farnese decorations constitute a vast panorama of the loves of the gods, a comical riot of the sexual indiscretions of Jupiter, Juno and a veritable horde of other, amorously inflamed deities. The overarching theme of the ceiling is
Omnia vincit amor
. The work was painted, just like the wedding chests of Tuscan tradition, just like Botticelli’s
Birth of Venus
, to celebrate a wedding.
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It is highly likely that Caravaggio’s own
Omnia vincit amor
was commissioned on the occasion of a wedding in the Giustiniani family. Whether it commemorates a particular event or not, its essential meaning is clear. Vincenzo was a family name among the Giustiniani, so all those orgiastically active
v
’s in the picture may be taken to stand both for the man who commissioned the work and for his many heirs and descendants. Long live the Giustiniani, the picture priapically exclaims: long may they prosper, and long may they procreate.

THE BLACK WINGS OF ENVY

Giovanni Baglione and his friends were not happy to see the painter from Lombardy doing so well. Forty years later, when he came to write his short biography of Caravaggio, Baglione still seethed with a sense of injustice when he thought of his rival winning a string of commissions from Vincenzo Giustiniani and Ciriaco Mattei. As far as Baglione was concerned, Caravaggio’s patrons had been fooled by nothing more than clever publicity: ‘The Marchese had been put into
this frame of mind by Prosperino delle Grottesche, Caravaggio’s hench
man
[Prospero Orsi, the painter of grotesques] . . . Moreover, Signor Ciriaco Mattei succumbed to the propaganda . . . Thus Caravaggio pocketed from this gentleman many hundreds of scudi.’
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Karel van Mander’s
Schilderboek
of 1604 includes some pithy remarks on the rivalries that divided Rome’s competing factions of artists during the early years of the seventeenth century. According to van Mander, Clement VIII and his papal court commissioned so many new works that they stirred up a frenzy of competition among painters and sculptors: ‘a new ardour is kindled; lean Envy secretly begins to flap her black wings and everyone strives to do his best to gain the coveted prize.’
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The dark wings of Caravaggio’s Cupid certainly fanned the flames of Giovanni Baglione’s envy. Infuriated by the acclaim with which Caravaggio’s
Omnia vincit amor
had been received – the curtain of green silk later described by Sandrart proof of its status as the
coup de th
éâtre
of Vincenzo Giustiniani’s whole collection – Baglione responded with an act of provocation. On 29 August 1602 he brought a new work to the artists’ exhibition held annually in the courtyard of San Giovanni Decollato. Caravaggio was not taking part in the show, but his friend and follower Orazio Gentileschi did have a picture on display. Baglione’s painting was an attack on both of them, as Gentileschi would later explain under cross-examination: ‘there certainly is some rivalry among us. When I hung a picture of
St Michael the Archangel
in San Giovanni dei Fiorentini [a slip of the tongue; the exhibition took place in San Giovanni Decollato], Baglione showed up and hung one of his opposite, a
Divine Love
that he had done to vie with an
Earthly Love
by Michelangelo da Caravaggio.’