Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (60 page)

The prime mover of the commission was probably Giovanni Battista Manso, the Marchese di Villa, one of the seven founding members of the Pio Monte.
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Manso was interested in the arts, especially poetry. He was a patron of Giambattista Marino, a poet famous for his restless and unruly nature, who had himself struck up a friendship of sorts with Caravaggio in Rome, and had possibly cast an eye over the scurrilous verses addressed to ‘John Baggage’.
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Manso was sharp and open-minded, with a keen and speculative intelligence. He was a friend of Galileo and regularly visited Tommaso Campanella, freethinking cleric and author of
The City of the Sun
, during his 27-year imprisonment by the Inquisition. Manso was also friendly with Costanza Colonna’s nephew, Luigi Carafa Colonna. Together, in 1611, they would found the Accademia degli Oziosi, one of the leading literary academies of Naples. Manso liked to entertain poets and other writers at his villa in coastal Puteoli, a place he fondly described in his biography of the poet Torquato Tasso: ‘on a most beautiful sea-shore . . . a beautiful house somewhat elevated above all the others and encompassed all around by very beautiful gardens’.
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Many years later Manso would play host to the English poet John Milton on his visit to Naples. Milton described him in a Latin epigraph as ‘a very noble and authoritative man’.
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Tolerant of outsiders and misfits, interested in intellectual innovators, close to the Colonna family – all this indicates that Manso is likely have been well disposed to Caravaggio. He was first and foremost an author, a connoisseur of literature rather than painting, but this too points to his involvement in the commission, which seems to have reflected a very literary conception of the subject of the acts of mercy. All seven acts were to be depicted on a single canvas, together with the figure of the Madonna della Misericordia, the ‘Virgin of Pity’, descending from heaven to give her blessing. Caravaggio would rise to the challenge of this busily elaborate iconography with one of the most compellingly humane pictures of the seventeenth century.

The painter was deeply responsive to the different worlds through which his stormy life would take him. He had an unerringly keen sense of milieu, a sharp eye for all that sets one place apart from another, whether architecture or mood, the quality of light or the quality of human behaviour. That responsiveness was one of the foundations of his art. It was the means by which he made holy legend seem real and true to those who looked at his pictures, embodied in a painted world that looked and felt like
their
world. When in Rome, he had brought the Bible and its stories to Rome. When he moved to Naples, he shifted his visions of the sacred past there too.

The Seven Acts of Mercy
is set at the bottom of the crowded well of a Neapolitan street corner. It is night-time, but the street is full of people. In the foreground a beggar half kneels and half crouches, light flaring off his pale naked back. His skin is stretched tightly across his shoulderblades, over the curve of his vertebrae and the cage of his ribs. A young man in silk and velvet clothing, wearing a feather in his cap, looks down at the half-naked pauper with an expression of troubled compassion. They are just two in the midst of a throng. Beside them, an innkeeper gives the nod to a sad-faced pilgrim and a sunburned man looks skyward with pained relief as he slakes his thirst with a trickle of water.

To their right, someone really has seen Naples and died. The corpse is being carried away. Only the dirt-ingrained soles of the cadaver’s feet are visible. The face of the dead person’s pallbearer is lost in deep shadow. Behind, a swarthy and bearded sexton in plain white vestments is reciting the funeral office. There is a flickering, mobile quality to the light, especially where it falls on the folds of the priest’s cassock, which has an almost phosphorescent glitter. Its source is the pair of candles that the priest holds aloft, a torch against the blackness of night. A more mysterious light also falls from above, its source hidden.

Smoke rises from the coarse tallow and the priest chants in a deep, melancholy voice. Next to the departing corpse, a dull-eyed woman bares her breast and gives succour to an old man through the grille of his prison cell. Above, a contemplative Virgin Mary cradles her son and looks down on the scene. The Madonna and child are wrapped in the embrace of two intertwined angels.

‘For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.’ The different groups in Caravaggio’s painting represent the different forms of charity listed in the gospel according to Matthew (25:36–7). To the six biblical acts of mercy the medieval Church had added one more: the burial of the dead. It was traditional to represent each of the acts separately. But, having been asked to combine them all in one picture, Caravaggio turned an apparent handicap to his own advantage. For a dark and desperately overcrowded town, he created a dark and desperately overcrowded altarpiece.

With the exception of the burial of the dead, which is implicitly set in the present, each of the acts of mercy is enacted by a figure from history or legend. The sunburned man with a desperate need for water is Samson, whose thirst was miraculously quenched from the jawbone of an ass (Judges 15:18–19). The bearded traveller sheltered by the stolid innkeeper is Christ the pilgrim. The young
bravo
with a plumed hat, who evokes bittersweet memories of the finely dressed ne’er-do-wells in Caravaggio’s first Roman pictures, is a representation of St Martin of Tours. He has drawn his sword to cut his cloak in half, as the medieval saint had done, to clothe a pauper, in the most frequently recounted episode of his life. The unclothed wretch at the saint’s feet has already been given his piece of cloth, which the pauper grasps in his left hand as if to begin covering his nakedness. The blade of St Martin’s sword glints in the darkness to the left of the beggar’s face. Half lost in the shadows, virtually under the innkeeper’s feet, another curly-headed figure squats with his hands clasped in supplication. The solemn and melancholy saint may be about to give away the second half of his cloak to this second beggar. He gives his charity to two people and is presumably meant to embody two different acts of mercy, not only clothing the naked but visiting the sick. Of all the charitable figures, he has been placed closest to the picture plane, and therefore closest to the congregation in the church of the Pio Monte. Literally, he represents St Martin, but he is also an alter ego for the seven young Neapolitan noblemen who had founded the Pio Monte. Like them, he is an aristocrat helping those who have been struck down by sickness and poverty.

The two figures at the right, the half-undressed woman and the greying old man behind the bars of his cell, are drawn from the legends of ancient Rome. They also embody twin acts of charity, namely feeding the hungry and visiting prisoners in jail. The imprisoned Cimon was starving to death when his daughter, Pero, came to him and nourished him with milk from her breast. The subject was known as the
Caritas Romana
, ‘Roman Charity’, and seen as a classical prefiguration of the Christian spirit of mercy. Since Caravaggio had visited the Palazzo Doria, in Genoa, on his brief flight to the city in the summer of 1605, he must have known Pierino del Vaga’s fey Mannerist version of the same subject, in which an elegantly dressed young woman in a windswept cloak smuggles her left breast through the grille of a prison cell with a gesture of improbable grace. Caravaggio’s interpretation is harsher, darker, gratingly realistic. Looking around her furtively, as if wary of detection, the dark-haired young woman performs her act of mercy with a troubled and anxious air. The old man who suckles at her breast has been reduced by his plight to a second infancy. Her dress is folded up under his chin like a bib. Two viscous drops of milk are caught in the strands of his beard.

The Seven Acts of Mercy
is a picture that collapses time and space, drawing the whole world and all the world’s history into its dark centre. Classical antiquity, the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Middle Ages and the present day – every epoch is symbolically represented in the different episodes that crowd the canvas. ‘Naples is the whole world,’ Capaccio wrote, and in Caravaggio’s painting a corner of the city has been transformed into precisely that. This one dark street, this scene of desperation and pain and death, is the painter’s microcosm for the brutality of existence itself. Briefly, it has been blessed and transfigured, made other than cruel experience normally proves. Here, the thirsty drink, the homeless are given shelter, and a sword is used not to kill a man but to put clothing on his back.

The embracing angels, themselves a celestial vision of fraternal love, descend earthwards in a rush, bearing the Madonna and Child with them. The leading angel’s hand reaches down and into the world of fallen humanity – the highest reaching towards the lowest, the hand of the angel extended towards its visual rhyme, the left hand of the wretch at the very bottom of the painting, itself pressed down on the hard and unyielding ground. But a gulf of darkness and confusion separates the angel from the wretch. In that darkness there is space for the shadow of a doubt.

The tumbling angels and Madonna of Mercy are unusually heavy and corporeal, so emphatically realized that the wings of one angel cast the clearest of shadows on the prison wall. Yet the sense of hectic, jostling movement that ripples through the entire composition has the effect of making everything in it seem unsettlingly provisional. At any moment the celestial vision might disappear, the lights that flare gutter and go out, and the world plunge back into impenetrable night.

THE MECHANICS OF EVIL

Caravaggio painted the monumental altarpiece at breakneck speed, in little more than seven weeks. He received the balance of his fee on 9 January 1607, by which time the painting was probably installed on the high altar of the church of the Pio Monte. The confraternity soon came to see it as one of their greatest treasures. At a group of meetings held in the summer of 1613 the congregation decided that the painting could never be sold at any price. By then, several offers of 2,000 scudi or more – five times the original fee for the work – had already been turned down. One of the would-be purchasers was the Spanish poet Juan de Tassis y Peralta, Conde de Villamediana, but he was forced to content himself with a copy painted from Caravaggio’s orig
inal.
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In the 1650s, when the complex of the confraternity’s building
s was remodelled, a new centrally planned Baroque church was created with the specific aim of giving Caravaggio’s altarpiece yet more prominence, space and light – a rare instance of an entire building being constructed around a single picture.

The
Seven Acts
guaranteed further commissions and more work for Caravaggio. Sometime in the early months of 1607 he agreed to paint another altarpiece, on the subject of Christ’s flagellation, for a chapel within the courtyard of a Dominican monastery in Naples.
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The picture was finished by 11 May 1607, when a final payment of 250 ducats was made.
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It has remained in Naples ever since, although it is no longer in the chapel for which it was commissioned, but in the Museo di Capodimonte.

With
The Flagellation of Christ
, Caravaggio resumed his old rivalry with Michelangelo. The most celebrated earlier version of the subject had been for the Roman church of San Pietro in Montorio, painted by Sebastiano del Piombo but to Michelangelo’s designs. Sebastiano’s High Renaissance Christ is sorrowful but withdrawn. He is an idealized victim enduring the blows of a group of animated, mildly grotesque tormentors, in the setting of a grand apsidal chapel supported by marble columns with finely carved Corinthian capitals.

Caravaggio took the same basic composition but made it his own by giving yet more emphasis to the cruelty and suffering implicit in the subject. He moved the viewer much closer to the grim act of torture, enlarging the figures and narrowing the complex architecture of the earlier painting to the truncated shaft of a single pillar in a darkened space. To that shadowy pillar, a reduced cast of torturers strive to bind the spotlit figure of Christ. Naked save for a loincloth and a crown of thorns, he is a strikingly statuesque figure. Just like the Christ of Michelangelo and Sebastiano, he might almost be a sculpture come to life. But he is more beaten down, more nakedly vulnerable. His exhaustion is conveyed by the line of his neck, the way he has wearily allowed the weight of his head to sag on to his shoulder. Too tired to hold himself upright, he has stumbled forward from the base of the pillar.

Responding to their victim’s state of collapse with angry deter
mination, two of his tormentors are kicking and yanking him back into place. The torturer at the right, whose face is half hidden by shadow, is tightening the cords with which Christ’s arms are bound. The man on the left is pulling his hair to straighten his body for the first blows. He snarls bestially, brandishing a makeshift whip in his other hand.

A third torturer kneels at Christ’s feet, binding a sheaf of twigs into a flay. He goes about his work with care, only looking up to see how soon the work of flagellation need begin. Just as he had done in
The Crucifixion of St Peter
for the Cerasi Chapel, Caravaggio focused on the grim mechanics of evil. The kneeling man’s shadowed profile is shown in silhouette against Christ’s left thigh and bright white loincloth. Placing such emphasis on the proximity of one man’s body to another is Caravaggio’s way of heightening the horror of the scene. Torture is a misbegotten form of physical intimacy.

His new audience was impressed but also startled by Caravaggio’s intense and troubling realism. The shock of their initial reaction can still be sensed in an account of
The Flagellation
, written more than a hundred years later, by the Neapolitan art historian Bernardo de Dominici: ‘This work when it was shown to the public attracted much attention, in particular the figure of Christ which was taken from a common and not a noble model as is necessary for the representation of God made Man: everyone, from the amateurs to the professors, was shocked by his new manner: the use of deep and terrible
shadows
, the truth of the nakedness, the cold light without reflections.’
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