Elusive Caravaggio

In Search of Caravaggio

Cynthia de Giorgio

Caravaggio’s early years

 Caravaggio’s personality, has remained both intriguing and elusive.  Although Caravaggio can never be fully known, because most of what he did was lost in time, some hints, why Caravaggio’s behaviour was so erratic, could be in his roots, where he was brought up.  The socio-religious environment he grew up in, shaped him into the turbulent person that he was and the artist capable of visualising electrifying images. Caravaggio painted with darkness and light his paintings have moments of extreme agonising human experiences. Faces that are brightly illuminated but threaten to be obliterated by the pools of darkness that lerk in the background.   One such image is his famous painting The Martyrdom of St John the Baptist in the oratory at St John’s Co-Cathedral.  Besides his harsh realistic rendering of events which was the most novel aspect of his paintings he also reveals much about his personality.  His treatment of this scene is a perfect example. And we will see why that is.

Caravaggio’s early years are the least documented part of his life.  He was born in 1571 in Milan and spent some of his earliest years in Caravaggio with his family.[1]At the age of 13 he signed a four-year contract with a painter Simone Peterzano in Milan. By the age of 20 he was in Rome.  The artist’s three early biographers; Giulio Mancini, Giovanni Baglione and Giovanni Pietro Bellori offer glimpses of his time in the eternal city. Mancini made a vital mention about his background stating that Caravaggio was of honourable citizenship and that his father was majordomo and architect to the Marchese di Caravaggio.[2]  This could account for Caravaggio’s belief that he was from high social standing, thus deserving respect on this account alone.  His elevated sense of his status could be the root of many of his future troubles.  Caravaggio’s biographer, Bellori, wrote about Caravaggio’s talent but criticised him severely stating that he could only imitate nature and lacked ‘invenzione, decorum and disegno’ which shows little understanding of Caravaggio’s intent.[3]  Baglione wrote mostly about Caravaggio’s trouble with the law and fall from grace.[4]  What is known about Caravaggio’s early adulthood comes from the criminal archives in both Rome and Malta.  His violent nature was recorded in the many skirmishes with the law and it is through these documents that we get a glimpse of him and his personality.  His violent experiences were often reflected in his extremely accurate painting of gruesome details.

Carlo Borromeo

But I am going to go back to his early life. During Caravaggio’s childhood, Milan was on the frontier of the torn Christian world – between the protestant reformers and the Catholic reformers.  The most influential personality in Milan was Carlo Borromeo, archbishop of Milan. Like Savonarola before him he denounced wealth and preached to the population of Milan to purge their sins through punishment. Carlo Borromeo’s dark ascetic teachings reveal a tough and adamant reformer of Catholicism who believed that human nature was tainted by sin.  The Borromean experience was meant to have an almost brain washing effect that went far afield from Milan and intended to create a guilt-ridden society, made to feel lacking in spiritual purity and correct virtues. His sermons had a profound hold on the population of the city where Caravaggio spent his childhood and surely his steely control would have had a tremendous effect on the fertile imagination of the would-be artist.[5]  

Caravaggio’s sense of doom, is witnessed in an account by a Messinese writer Francesco Susinno: ‘one day he went into the church of the Madonna of Pilero where he was offered some holy water.  Caravaggio asked what it was for and was told 'to cancel venial sins'.  ‘Then it is of no use because mine are all mortal’, he said.[6]  The terse remark reveals the darkness of his psyche and his conviction that nothing could ever wash his soul clean and certainly not holy water.  He then experienced the horrors of the plague epidemic that broke out in 1576 witnessing the death of his father, Fermo and grandfather.  Borromeo was quick to condemn the Milanese that the plague was a curse from God for neglecting their souls.

The quasi-hysterical spirituality pervading Milan in the last decades of the sixteenth century seems to be the root of Caravaggio’s bleak view of life.  The content of Borromeo’s preaches show that he had studied The Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius, a work that emphasised the role of visualization in Christian meditation.  His faith harboured a form of piety that was intense, intrinsically sensual and emotional.  Worshippers were encouraged to visual martyrdom scenes and to empathise with their suffering. This called for a mental process that was identical to that required in the process of painting pictures.  The encouragement of this form of popular devotion was closely linked to the development of painting.

These events had an influence on the development of imagery and soon after, art was transformed to reflect the circumstances.  Till the end of the sixteenth century art had developed into a refined form of idealized expressions using a language to entertain those of higher thought in the courts of the High Renaissance.  But after the reformers of the Council of Trent, artists were now being encouraged, according to the last session in 1563, to use more realistic depictions.[7]  It was now the job of art to educate spectators and move them to penance.

Caravaggio’s New Art

In the aftermath of the Council of Trent,[8] Caravaggio was the single artist who radically changed the course of painting.  The art he went on to create could hardly have been more closely aligned to the beliefs and sensibilities of the archbishop of Milan.  His unique ability to visualise human suffering is detected in his tactile feeling for flesh and blood. He turned out to be the most gifted artist in representing unprecedented stark realism deeply attuned to the ideals of counter-reformation piety that blanketed the city of his youth.

The more sophisticated artistic circles regarded the idea of appealing to popular with disdain. The intelligencia found it intriguing.  It is for this reason that Caravaggio’s art found two extreme reactions – those who loved it and those who hated it.

Caravaggio's reinvention of religious painting would take place in Rome and not in Milan.  After arriving in Rome at around 1592 he painted genre pictures, of cardsharps and young musicians there was a marked development in Caravaggio’s iconography.  He knew that reality was not in the fine courts of the dukes, but in the back streets of Rome.  It was the dangers of street life that ordinary people experienced that fuelled his realism.  One leap in this direction was the shocking rendition of human suffering depicted in the painting at Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome as St Peter looks in horror at his hand nailed to the cross.  

The violence in the streets of Rome, the duelling and the street brawls, his affairs with courtesans, especially Fillide,[9] clearly indicate his unruly nature.[10]  After duelling with Ranuccio Tomassoni, and killing him, while attempting to castrate him for sleeping with Fillide he was forced to flee Rome and go to Naples.[11]  He was now a fugitive with a bando capitale for his head.  It was from here that he came to Malta.  The knights’ chivalrous reputation, after the Great Siege of 1565 had caused resounding fame across Europe.  Surely the opportunity to escape his terrible past and start a new chapter on an island fortress that seemed to offer him both safety and stability was not to be missed.  Caravaggio’s Maltese period is directly linked to the Knights of Malta.  Within the Order were patrons that knew of his radical artistic reformation, daring iconography but also knew about his colourful past.  The circumstances that led him to Malta from Naples and his Maltese fifteen-month stay are well documented.[12]

Caravaggio in Malta

When Caravaggio walked through the streets of Valletta towards St John’s church on a hot summer’s day in July 1607, surely the bright sun-light caused him to squint.  As he stepped into the church, he would have been struck with the cool ambiance and the contrast of the dark interior that blinded him temporarily as his eyes adjusted.  As he gazed around the church he would have observed the plain unadorned interior.  His perception to the contrast of light and dark, as he was ushered into the oratory would have fuelled his interest in chiaroscuro.  This is where he would produce his masterpiece.

The Martyrdom of St John the Baptist painted as the altar piece of the oratory was probably given as his passaggio, which was the gift a knight presented to the Order upon being admitted as a member.  Since the signature ‘f[ra]’ indicates that he was already a knight, the canvas could have been completed soon after his investiture on 14 July 1608,[13] and was most likely planned to be unveiled on 29 august on the feast of the Martyrdom of St John.  During that time, the oratory was a plain room and the enormous painting that filled the wall must have had tremendous impact on those entering the bare chamber. Caravaggio’s painting of the Martyrdom is both gruesome and fatalistic, his gloomy formation in Milan and the violence he experienced in Rome fuelled his stark realism and intuitively led him to represent the agonising human experience of death by beheading with clarity. Deliberately, he heightens the execution by lighting up the horrid actions of the event.  They are clear and complete, except for the detachment of the head from the neck, this is the precise moment he preserves creating a suspense that captures the spectators’ attention.  The juxtapositions of contrasting characters that fit like a zig saw puzzle in shape, but are ill at ease in type and personality, show his remarkable choice of iconography.  Although the figures form a circle leaving a space for the viewer to participate, none of the characters make any eye contact amongst themselves nor with the viewer.  They operate in silent detachment.  The viewer is an intruder to the scene caught witnessing the horrendous execution.

The beheading of St John takes place in a prison courtyard.  Dragged out of his prison cell to be executed at the command of the Petrarch Herod to satisfy Salome’s wish, the executioner holds the saint’s head pressed against the ground.  The throat has already been slit, he now stands over John reaching out for his dagger and grasps the hair to better reveal the neck and finish off the job.  The cold, detached janitor gives instructions.  The blade of the sword gleams in the foreground demanding attention for the service it has rendered.  The young maid impassively holds out the basin to receive the head.  The old maid clasps her head covering her ears to block out the sound of tearing flesh and crushing bone.  She is the only person who displays some form of emotion.  Two prisoners look on intently contemplating their own fate.  Caravaggio exquisitely painted the janitor’s keys in detail.  Caravaggio did not waste time painting irrelevant details in this painting and the only reason why he paid so much attention to the keys is because he wanted to give them a symbolic significance.  These are the keys that imprisoned John in life and freed him in death.  

In contrast to his Roman paintings here, he used background leisurely and set his figures comfortably into the picture plane, gone are features leaping out of the picture plane.  Gone are the diagonal forms which he so often used to destabilise a composition that had become his Roman trademark. There is a sense of a contemplative approach to painting.  Also new is a restricted palette of earth colours, reserving cardinal red for the Baptist’s cloak.  Although known for his violent temper, Caravaggio seems to control the extreme violent actions with classic order.  The drama takes place entirely on the left side of the composition following the Golden rule with perfection.

From the blood gushing out of the Baptist’s throat Caravaggio writes his name.  This is not the first time he identified himself with the victim.  His sense of persecution and fixation on death is also found in previous works such as his self-portrait as St Francis, Wadsworth Atheneum, Connecticut and as Goliath in the painting of David and Goliath in the Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. 

What caused Caravaggio to sign the painting seems to lie in his need to verify his knighthood.  His only qualifying virtue for having joined an Order of blue bloods, was on merit of his art alone.  His signature affirms his new status as brother in one of the most powerful Orders.  The signature also reveals his competitive spirit as he flaunts his title as fra.  Through his signature in blood, Caravaggio seems to have the audacity to draw his bloodline as descending from the Order’s martyred patron saint and was reborn a knight through his precious blood.  This is based on the notion that at the beginning of the seventeenth century, martyrdom was perceived as rebirth through death.  Caravaggio knew that sacrifice was part of the spiritual culture of the knights.  Spargere sangue per la Religione were words Grand Master Alof Wignacourt used frequently in his diplomatic correspondence.[14]  This is significantly seen in the context that Grand Master Wignacourt had gone through great length to get Caravaggio knighted by writing to Pope Paul V to gain special dispensation and allow him to knight the painter and secure a waiver since murderers were by statute prohibited.[15]  Surely amongst some of the knights this would have brought some feelings of disdain.  He could now not only carry a sword but walk through the streets of Valletta with feelings of pride and vindication.  His signature is a demonstration of the power of his art.

By now Caravaggio had become a master at diabolic creativity and it was the shocking element that made him famous.  In the case of the Martyrdom he found a new way of putting himself in the picture and writes his name in the blood he painted gushing out of St John’s neck. The considering that signatures were rare in early seventeenth century painting.  Caravaggio’s placement of the signature is almost pathological,[16]  the well-crafted graffiti style of the signature where he is both a participant and spectator of the execution where his physical presence is still felt in the hurried and uneven brushstrokes.

St John’s Martyrdom is one of his most sensitive and yet unsympathetic interpretations of a man brutally executed.  There is no indication of salvation or reward for the saint’s martyrdom.  There are no halos or angels holding palm fronds for St John as a symbol of his martyrdom.  There is no divine intervention and no sign of redemption.  It is the hopelessness of the event that makes this work poignantly a depiction of human suffering.  The absence of emotions to such a brutal scene is telling of Caravaggio’s sense of human destiny.  Caravaggio no doubt suffered from existential problems and the purpose of human existence obviously haunted him.

Caravaggio is best known for his realism, yet the Martyrdom scene is infused with a refined theatrical element that is far from realistic.  The protagonists stand in the forefront almost motionless, selective lighting defines the play of light across silk, iron, and skin.  These pure theatrical elements make the painting seem like the opening scene of a theatrical performance.  Standing in front of the Martyrdom is like sitting in the front row.  The lights have gone down, the curtains have opened, and spot lit is a drama that feels intensively real.  In this painting Caravaggio makes use of a special three-dimensional effect to break down the divide and invading the spectators’ personal space forcing both physical as well as mental involvement.  New to his artistic language is the daringly rapid brushwork and the use of the reddish plain background with figures highlighted with such force that the painting still holds the freshness of a newly painted canvas.[17]

When Caravaggio finished painting the Martyrdom of St John the Baptist it was probably the last painting he executed and the last time he held a brush on the island.  On August 18, 1608, possibly only a few days after he signed the painting Caravaggio, got involved in a serious tumult in Valletta where a senior knight was seriously wounded,[18] that led to his arrest.  His subsequent escape from Fort St Angelo where he was imprisoned had a disastrous outcome, whereby he was defrocked and expelled from the Order.[19]  This ceremony was held in the oratory in the presence of the venerable council, which comprised several of his patrons, in front of the Martyrdom of St John the Baptist, the work he had so proudly and perhaps even defiantly signed f Michelangelo.  Malta that had been his pathway to freedom had him on the run once more. His masterpiece uncannily seems to reflect his life events.  A series of flashing moments that occur in the shadows caught by chance in a beam of light – heading for stardom one day then fleeing the next.  The predicament of his life experiences induced Caravaggio to paint a complex mix of pessimism and violence.  This was his commitment, to paint what he perceived as the truth.  His paintings and their ability to address and control the spectator - to stop time and to create visual and emotional paradoxes was his hallmark.  Art was never the same again after Caravaggio.