Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (75 page)

Only one person could have told the papal nuncio about what happened when Caravaggio landed at Palo. Only one person could have told him about the painter’s death in Porto Ercole. That person was the boatman, who had just returned to Naples with the dead painter’s
belongings. His crew had accompanied him, but it was the owner of the
boat whom Deodato Gentile would have brought in for questioning. The whole story must have been his testimony. Hence the use of nautical terminology – ‘the
felucca
went back out into the open sea’, he had said,
alto mare
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– as well as the ship’s-eye perspective of the entire account. Hence too the vagueness after Caravaggio is arrested and the boat pulls off: that was the moment when the boatman lost sight of the painter.

The interview would have been short and to the point. The boatman was being accused of nothing and had nothing to hide. He had no reason to be evasive, so he simply told the truth as best he could.

Where did you take Michelangelo Merisi? Palo, the garrison. What happened there? Some kind of trouble. They arrested him. There was a real uproar, so it was best to take the boat on to Porto Ercole.

How did the painter get to Porto Ercole? The skipper does not know, so he shrugs and makes a guess, not thinking properly about the distances involved – ‘perhaps on foot’.

What happened at Porto Ercole? He is not sure about that either, probably because the painter had died before he got there. But he does know that Caravaggio had fallen ill, and had died at that place. It had probably only just happened when the boatman arrived. He may even have been asked to identify the body, so they could bury it as soon as possible.

What about the paintings? Of course, he knows all about them. They are back at the Marchesa of Caravaggio’s house, the palace at Chiaia, the one at the edge of the city, facing the bay. He had returned them just the day before. That is where he had taken them from in the first place, when the poor man had hired him.

Deodato Gentile could have had all this information second-hand from Costanza Colonna herself, because she must have quizzed the skipper of the
felucca
when he came back to her house in Naples, with the pictures but without Caravaggio. But he did not. Gentile makes it clear in his letter that he had
not
spoken to her, that he had only sent a message telling her to keep Caravaggio’s pictures safe at all costs. Gentile’s source can indeed only have been the captain of the
felucca
himself – the skipper, in all probability, of the
Santa Maria di Porto Salvo
.

Caravaggio appears for the first time as a flesh-and-blood human being in the documentary records through the fleeting testimony of a Roman barber-surgeon named Luca. The painter had been ‘a stocky young man, about twenty or twenty-five years old, with a thin black beard, thick eyebrows and black eyes, who goes dressed all in black, in a rather disorderly fashion, wearing black hose that is a little bit threadbare, and who has a thick head of hair, long over his forehead’. That was in 1597. Less than thirteen years later, wounded and worn down, our last glimpses of Caravaggio are through the testimony of a humble boatman, Alessandro Caramano. Like Luca the barber’s apprentice, Alessandro was just an ordinary man. He could not read and he could not write. But he could tell the truth about what he had seen with his own eyes.

Caravaggio had lived much of his life close to the margins of society, surrounded by poor and ordinary people. He painted them, staging the stories of the Bible with their bodies and their faces. He painted
for
them and from their perspective. In the end he died among them and was buried among them, in an unmarked grave. He was thirty-eight years old.

AFTERMATH

In Naples, Rome and Malta, people in high places briefly lamented the passing of ‘poor Caravaggio’. Then they got into an unseemly scramble for his last few paintings.

Having been told by the boatman that the three pictures in the painter’s luggage had been deposited with Costanza Colonna, Deodato Gentile had immediately written to her claiming them on Scipione Borghese’s behalf. But he had been too late. The Knights of Malta had also found out about Caravaggio’s death. On the very day that Gentile wrote to Costanza Colonna, the local prior of the Knights of Malta barged his way into her palace and forcibly confiscated the pictures. Caravaggio had been dead for only ten days, but an unholy row was already brewing over his last things.

On 31 July 1610, Gentile reported back to Borghese in Rome: ‘Most Illustrious and Reverend Sir . . . The Marchesa of Caravaggio has informed me that the paintings of Caravaggio are no longer in her house, but have been sequestrated by the Prior of Capua . . . said prior is claiming that Caravaggio was a serving brother in his religious order, and that therefore all the spoils are his to take. The Marchesa says that this is all folly and vanity, and the prior is not right. I will do my best to find where they are kept, and use all diligence to secure them in the name of Your Illustrious Lordship . . .’
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On the death of any Knight of Malta, his possessions indeed automatically reverted to the order. Suddenly it suited Wignacourt and his prior to pretend that Caravaggio’s defrocking had never taken place, and that he had still been a Knight of Magistral Obedience when he died. But the marchesa, who knew very well that Caravaggio had been stripped of his knighthood, saw straight through this rather crude gambit. Hence her audible disgust for the prior and his men, turning up at her house and taking the paintings, as if she were a bankrupt and they were the bailiffs – it was indeed all
vanità
.

Deodato Gentile concluded his letter of 31 July by advising Borghese to write to Don Pedro Fernández de Castro, Conde de Lemos, who had recently taken over the post of Spanish viceroy in Naples. Don Pedro was the most powerful man in the city. Borghese followed Gentile’s advice, informing the viceroy of the prior’s false claims and appealing to him for help. But the wheels of Spanish diplomacy moved painfully slowly. It was mid August before Don Pedro swung, rather confusedly, into action. He told the impudent Prior of Capua that it was no good pretending that Caravaggio had died a Knight of Malta, and that he would have to surrender all claims to the pictures. But the Spanish viceroy had evidently failed to realize exactly what had happened. Somehow or other he had got it into his head that the paintings were still being argued over in Porto Ercole, some two hundred miles north. So he fired off a peremptory letter to the head of the Spanish garrisons in Tuscany, together with an inventory listing the works of art that he particularly wanted to secure:

Honoured Sir, I have been informed that the painter Michael Angelo di Caravaggio has died at Port’ Ercole and that you have in your possession all his property, especially the items indicated in the inventory which accompanies this letter, the property having been taken over as a spolium under the pretext that the deceased was a member of the Order of St John, and that it belonged to the Prior of Capua who has declared that he has no right to this spolium inasmuch as the deceased was not a Knight of Malta; and thus I charge you that as soon as you receive this letter you send me the aforesaid property by the first
felucca
available, and especially the painting of
St John the Baptist
, and if by chance it has been disposed of or removed from the property for whatever reason, you shall endeavour by all means to see that it is found and recovered in order to send it well packed with the other property and deliver it here to the proper authority, and you shall carry this out unconditionally, informing me of the receipt of this letter. From my desk, Naples, August 19, 1610.
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It would be another five months before anything more was heard about the paintings. By then two of them had disappeared altogether, perhaps into the hands of Caravaggio’s creditors, perhaps to Malta. The only work of art that anyone could locate for sure was a
St John
, which turned out to be the picture of the saint as an olive-skinned Sicilian boy painted at around the time Caravaggio had left Messina for Palermo. By the winter of 1610 it had found its way into the house of the Spanish viceroy, who seems to have become singularly reluctant to give it up.

On 12 December the beleaguered Bishop of Caserta, Deodato Gentile, was finally able to report further developments to Scipione Borghese. He apologized for still not having despatched the
St John
, which his lordship ‘must have given up for lost’, and explained the reasons. The viceroy had wanted to have a copy made of the painting for his own collection. In addition, there had been obscure problems with Caravaggio’s inheritors and creditors – this part of the document is barely legible – and since he had left many debts there were people who had needed to be satisfied.
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Gentile promised to press the matter and obtain the painting. Only in August of the following year did the papal nuncio finally manage to prise it from the grip of the Spanish viceroy and send it, at long last, to Rome. He apologized that it had been slightly damaged in all the toing and froing. The picture has remained in the Borghese collection ever since.

DOING JESUS LIKE CARAVAGGIO

The messy story of what happened to Caravaggio’s last paintings is also a microcosm of his afterlife, and a parable illustrating his singularity as a painter. He had always been an outsider, a troublemaker, a difficult and dangerous man. Yet his art was so compelling, so original, so unforgettable, that people were simply transfixed by it. They fought to look at it, gathering in their hundreds every time a new altarpiece was unveiled, and they fought to acquire it, even though everything else about Caravaggio – his terseness, his weird dress sense, his violence, his sexual reputation, his unerring gift for getting into trouble – seemed so disconcerting and strange.

Caravaggio was not only the most disturbed but also the most unconventional of the truly great painters of the Italian tradition. His whole career ran counter to type, defiantly contradicting the patterns of training, patronage and even the actual practice of painting that were expected of a successful artist. It is clear that during his obscure early years, something went awry during his supposed apprenticeship to the Milanese painter Peterzano. Essentially, Caravaggio taught himself to paint. He may have picked up technical tips and clues in places like Giuseppe Cesari’s studio, but his basic method was empirical. He looked at the way light falls, and at the way people behave. The fact that he was obliged to invent himself may partly explain his deep originality. The advantage of not having been taught was that he had nothing to unlearn.

Once he had begun to find his own way, Caravaggio painted with such force, such a stunning sense of drama, such a deep sense of humanity, that prestigious commissions flooded towards him. The simple truth is that he was a far greater painter than any of his contemporaries. But, despite winning the support of Cardinal del Monte, and despite his network of protectors within the Colonna family, he never found a secure place in the hierarchies of power and patronage. He painted as if the rich and the powerful were his enemies, as if he really did believe that the meek deserved to inherit the earth. Ultimately, he acted in the same way too. Only once in his life did he come close to achieving a truly settled position, a respected place among men of real power and influence, and that was on Malta. But almost as soon as he had been knighted, he managed to have himself thrown into jail. With hindsight it looks like a complete act of self-sabotage, as if he could not bear the thought of truly belonging and of walking the corridors of power.

Caravaggio was also unique among the great Italian painters in
how
he went about painting. He had no studio in anything like the conventional sense. He had the odd boy to help him, Cecco in particular, but essentially he painted all by himself. He did not draw. He never established a workshop with specialist assistants to help with the painting of drapery or landscape, as other artists did. He gathered around himself no real circle of pupils, and there were no acolytes to spread the word, no one to disseminate his methods and his beliefs. There were no portfolios of his drawings to pass around. There was nothing except his pictures themselves, and there were not very many of those because he had died so young. Under the circumstances, the vast impact of his work is all the more remarkable.

For more than a century and a half after his death, the classicizing critics of Europe’s academic art tradition made a concerted and resolute attempt to blacken his name. According to their beliefs, much influenced by the strains of Neoplatonist philosophy, it was art’s duty to present an idealized version of reality, and not – as Caravaggio was held to have done – merely to represent the real world in all its unregenerate ugliness. Bellori was the arch-exponent of the anti-Caravaggist movement in academic thought, but there were many others, notably the Spanish painter and author Vicente Carducho, who demonized Caravaggio as an anti-Christ of art, the antithesis to his saintly predecessor and namesake, the ‘divine’ Michelangelo. So influential was the rhetoric of Caravaggio’s posthumous enemies that the great French seventeenth-century painter Poussin was persuaded that he had been ‘sent into the world to destroy painting’.

Despite the sustained drive to denigrate and marginalize his work, Caravaggio’s paintings were too profound and affecting to be suppressed. Gradually but inexorably, his dramatic sense of composition, his strikingly stark handling of light and dark and his sheer rawness of feeling worked themselves into the DNA of Western art. During the years immediately after his death, hardly a single important painter escaped his influence. Rubens, Velàzquez and Pietro da Cortona al
l e
choed his compositions or copied his devices and traits. Within
a gene
ration, entire schools of so-called Caravaggisti established themselves in both Italy and the Netherlands. Partly perhaps because of the location of the French Academy in Rome, at the top of the Spanish Steps, and within easy walking distance of so many of his most important altarpieces, he would have an especially powerful impact on French art. His influence can be detected in the work of such widely differing French painters as Valentin de Boulogne and Georges de La Tour. There was a particularly strong resurgence of interest in his art during the Neoclassical and Romantic periods. In England, Joseph Wright of Derby’s
Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump
of 1768 transformed the scientific demonstration of the effects of a vacuum on a living creature into a hushed modern version of a miracle as painted by Caravaggio. In France, the self-appointed painter to the Revolution, Jacques-Louis David, painted the dead Marat slumped in his bath as if he were one of Caravaggio’s spotlit martyrs, and in 1819 Theodore Géricault conceived arguably the first great masterpiece of French Romanticism,
The Raft of the Medusa
, as a modern, secularized version of an altarpiece by Caravaggio.