The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com
Published: September 30, 2011
A Life Sacred and Profane
By Andrew Graham-Dixon
Illustrated. 514 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $39.95.
In one of the last pictures he ever painted, a grim and startling “Resurrection” altarpiece, Caravaggio showed a scrawny, bedraggled Jesus Christ slipping out of the tomb and making off alone by night, “like a criminal escaping from his guards,” in the words of an 18th-century Frenchman. Shock was the conventional response to this painting (eventually destroyed by earthquake, along with the church where it hung). The artist himself was on the run at the time, wanted for murder and so jittery that he slept in his clothes with a dagger always at hand. “Whatever he set out to paint,” Andrew Graham-Dixon writes in his gripping biography, “he always ended up painting himself.”
Just over a decade earlier Caravaggio had painted Medusa, the Gorgon with snakes for hair who turned all who saw her to stone. He gave her staring eyes and a contorted mouth, apparently painted from his own reflection in a circular mirror. A sackful of water snakes from the Tiber modeled for the glistening, coiled and writhing plaits of her hair. It is an electrifying image of the artist in the concentrated act of catching and freezing a moment in time: “The painter takes on her role and in doing so claims for himself her dark powers of enchantment. . . . Her magic is his magic, a petrifying art.”
This reckless mix of myth with unadulterated realism stunned and appalled Caravaggio’s contemporaries. Caught at the turn of the 17th century between an increasingly degenerate Mannerism and the sumptuosity of nascent Baroque, he was a practicing modernist more than 300 years ahead of his time. Under constant attack in his day, disparaged, downgraded and all but forgotten after his death, his work had to wait until the second half of the last century to come into its own.
Caravaggio’s prime subject was the squalor, violence and energy of Roman street life. The biblical scenes he painted for wealthy churchmen were peopled by prostitutes, pimps, criminals, beggars, office workers, soldiers and ordinary laborers in drab, ragged clothes with dirty bare feet and grimy fingernails. His commissions all too often courted rejection when the priests who took delivery recognized a local prostitute in the refined and delicate features of his virginal young saints and Madonnas. The gruesome beheadings, throat-slittings and torture he depicted with such unparalleled immediacy reflect the rough justice to be seen every day in public executions and brawls.
His world was perilous and bloody. Born a week before the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, when Turkish invaders were driven out of Christendom with fearsome slaughter on both sides, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was just 6 years old when bubonic plague killed virtually every man in his family, including his father. He grew up contentious, aggressive and touchy. As a young man he roamed the streets in search of trouble with a band of “painters and swordsmen who lived by the motto nec spe, nec metu, ‘without hope, without fear,’ ” according to an early biographer, who might have been describing the opportunistic gangs bent on looting and rioting in the capitals of Europe today.
But all his life Caravaggio had friends in high places, starting with the influential Colonna family, which had close links with his mother’s family in Milan. Patrons and protectors responded, sometimes in spite of themselves, to the artist’s phenomenal imagination, the beauty and brilliance of his painting, his raw emotional exposure and the acute sensitivity that went with it.
Next to nothing is known of his private life, although much has been predicated on the early works featuring plump, pretty, provocative boys got up as angels or lutenists, as Bacchus, Cupid or Caravaggio’s favorite saint, John the Baptist. Some very young, all more or less naked, often seated on rumpled beds or draped loosely in bedsheets, they offer fruit, wine, music and all too plainly sex. The luscious baskets of fruit in these pictures are marked by bruises, wormholes and withered dry leaves. There is the same morbid frailty in the parted lips and sad knowing eyes of his epicene children, whose peachy skin and pudgy faces suggest dissolution or, in Graham-Dixon’s phrase, “the hormonal side effects of castration.”
Caravaggio’s only known studio assistant was the 12-year-old Cecco, who probably shared his bed. The same boy can be seen progressing with time on canvas from a seductive, laughing, open-faced child to the somber young David who dangles at arm’s length the dark, battered, bleeding, severed head of Goliath. This grisly head is unmistakably a self-portrait, painted on one of the flights that took Caravaggio — pursued by enemies, tormented by grief and horror — from Rome, where he had been sentenced to death for murder in 1606, to Naples, Malta, Sicily and back to Naples, heading once more for Rome.
“Fear hunted him from place to place,” an early biographer wrote. The majestic, stark and highly charged works of his last years were produced, often in haste, at way stations on these desperate journeys, which ended in 1610 with Caravaggio’s sudden, solitary, almost certainly accidental death at Porto Ercole, just short of Rome. Guilt and pain are compounded in these paintings by compassion, humanity and, in “David With the Head of Goliath,” profound and disturbing self-knowledge.
Several recent and increasingly authoritative accounts of Caravaggio’s life and work have helped precipitate the current revival, including two excellent reconstructions by the novelists Peter Robb and Francine Prose. Given the near-total lack of documentary evidence and the elusive nature of the subject himself, it is hardly surprising that fictional techniques have penetrated in some ways further and more surely than the sterner disciplines of art history. Graham-Dixon, the author of “Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel,” ably combines the two in “Caravaggio.”
He makes the most of Italian criminal records, intensively trawled by contemporary scholars to clear up confusion (especially concerning the final four years), and to provide graphic glimpses of the young Caravaggio squabbling, fighting, trading threats and insults, smashing plates in restaurants and slashing opponents with knife or sword. The only other available source is the art, to which Graham-Dixon brings the kind of imaginative and emotional intelligence that gives life and point to painstaking research.
“The Adoration of the Shepherds,” a last great altarpiece painted in Sicily, looks back to the first Christmas crib, devised by St. Francis; to the popular religious art the painter knew as a child; and to his own and his mother’s sense of abandonment in the plague-ridden 1570s. The painting shows no angels, trumpets, human tributes or celestial light, only, as Graham-Dixon says, a destitute refugee mother who owns nothing but the clothes on her back, clutching her newborn child and staring into a bleak future as she lies exhausted in the dark, propped against a feeding trough on the beaten earth floor of the stable. Three baffled workmen and her elderly husband “look on but cannot touch, like dreams or ghosts. . . . Iconographically, the gnarled and saddened men are Joseph and the shepherds. Emotionally, they are Caravaggio’s father, his uncles, his grandfather — all the men in the family that he might have had, but lost.” This book resees its subject with rare clarity and power as a painter for the 21st century.
Hilary Spurling’s most recent book, “Pearl Buck in China: Journey to ‘The Good Earth,’ ” won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography this year. She is writing a life of Anthony Powell.
Caravaggio: Rogue, Murderer, Brilliant Painter
And a versatile pain in the ass
By James Camp
The New York Observer
http://www.observer.com/
August 24, 2011
Michelangelo da Caravaggio was not, technically, a Renaissance man—that era was over by the time he was born, in 1571—but he was, by all accounts, a versatile pain in the ass. The painter was a punk. He bragged. He went for broke. He beat people up, and people beat him up. To the same acute degree that he lacked a neighborly disposition, Caravaggio also lacked a fine business sense, a noble decency, a funnybone, and an inclination to pick up the tab. He welshed on everyone. When his Roman landlady seized his effects for nonpayment of rent, in 1605, “the said Michelangelo came and threw so many stones at the shutters of my windows that he broke them all down one side,” as she claimed in court. But he was too precious for his patrons to part with; the said Michelangelo was rescued from his snafu. Such snafus seem to have been the status quo. We do not know exactly how Caravaggio died; we do know that “fucked-over cuckold” was an epithet he used “fairly frequently.”
Because he was a genius, Caravaggio kept catching breaks. Because he could not truckle, he kept screwing them up. The inability to tone it down was not a pose; the artist lacked an off switch. In the winter of 1605, Caravaggio was engaged to produce an altarpiece for Saint Peter’s Cathedral in Rome, the Park Avenue of painterly real estate. It was the loftiest commission he had ever received. The result, The Madonna of the Serpent, was exquisite. It was also a nonstarter. “He had stressed [the Madonna’s] tenderness,” writes Andrew Graham-Dixon in Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane, “leaning down over the child with gentle solicitude, but in the process he had revealed quite a lot of her cleavage.” The commissioners balked. The zaftig Virgin would not cut it. Caravaggio was turned away, his Madonna spurned.
In retrospect, the most surprising thing about the episode is that anyone was surprised. All the artist had done was live up to the reputation that got him the gig. Caravaggio is the father of Tenebrism, a method of painting that combines photorealistic granularity with Gothic dinginess. “He composed by staging scenes, or fragments of scenes, that he knitted together, collage-like, on his canvas, using shadow to mask the joints,” writes Mr. Graham Dixon. The technique behind it is known as chiaroscuro. Its effect on painting was comparable to that of grunge on music, or Hemingway on prose—at once a roughing-up and a paring-down, enacted in the name of cutting out the crap. It was a reaction to the conceits of an earlier age.
The Renaissance had been a time of aesthetic idealism; it erected a cult to ideal images. An ugly subject (a rape, a murder, a martyrdom) was merely a more complex opportunity for beauty. Human bodies, especially, had to look good. They had to be tuned, proportioned, poised. Caravaggio’s innovation was to revert to what he saw right in front of him. Michelangelo Buanarotti had mined Attic Greece for his models; Michelangelo da Caravaggio discovered his muse somewhere between the barroom and the back alley. “To animate the old stories of Christianity, to make them seem as though taking place in the present day, he had developed his own unique method,” Mr. Graham-Dixon writes, “he would systematically restage the sacred dramas, using real, flesh-and-blood people, and paint the results.” He painted whores, crones, wayfarers, the proles and perps of contemporary Rome. He adapted the Good Book to the idiom of the guttersnipe.
It was an exacting aesthetic. It left out landscape, sunlight, heavenly choirs, healthy cuticles. It put in grime; Caravaggio is the great painter of toejam. “Caravaggio was also becoming famous as the great painter of feet.” The result altered the DNA of Biblical imagery. Gone was the grandeur of a Raphael, the pure blues and unblemished pastures: “There is very little landscape in Caravaggio, very little feel of the open air.” In its place, stooped figures grappled in the gloom. Many of Caravaggio’s women have more in common with mollusks than they do with Botticelli’s maidens.
“In life as in art he hid what he wanted to hide in the shadows,” Mr. Graham-Dixon notes. The fragmentary paper trail of Caravaggio’s life oddly simulates the aesthetic that made it famous. The rap sheet shadows the oeuvre; the rumors inflect the facts. And indeed, a Dutch contemporary “described [Caravaggio] as a piece of living chiaroscuro.” The test for biographers of Caravaggio has therefore been to mimic the artist’s signature move—to make the murk eloquent. It requires style as well as research. Mr. Graham-Dixon pulls it off.
Michelangelo da Caravaggio grew up in Lombardy, splitting time between Milan and the exurb of his surname. He was lowborn, provincial, unlikely. Although previous biographers have made much of Caravaggio’s apprenticeship to Simone Peterzano, a mediocre local artist, Mr. Graham-Dixon argues, persuasively, that it meant little. “There was no reason to believe he was anything but an unruly teenager.” Caravaggio left Lombardy in his early 20s. He had the touchiness of the upstart; the orneriness of the autodidact. He may, according to some accounts, already have committed a murder. His destination was Rome.
The city flowed with testosterone. “Rome was not just an overwhelmingly male city; it was a city full of young and unattached men competing desperately with one another for favours.” There were 10,000 artists in a population of 100,000. The odds were bad, and they were compounded by Caravaggio’s temperament. But Caravaggio made it anyway, ascending from the streets into the retinue of an enlightened churchman, Cardinal Guidobaldo Del Monte. (The Cardinal looked “a little bit like a chess piece come to life,” as Mr. Graham-Dixon wonderfully describes him.) Under his aegis, Caravaggio grew famous. The fame had a tinge of infamy.
“There is no sign that success mellowed him,” Mr. Graham Dixon observes. Caravaggio’s rise augured his fall. His paintings were tense with violence. “The picture’s subject is a yearning for death so strong that it resembles sexual desire,” as the author writes of St. Catherine of Alexandria. Everywhere he went, Caravaggio wore a sword. He slurred rivals and irked the law. He brawled over women, artichokes, art criticism. Such was his entwinement with prostitutes that Mr. Graham-Dixon concludes, convincingly, that he was a pimp. A feud with a competitor reached the boiling point, and Caravaggio killed him in a tennis court. A bando capitale was imposed: “This meant that anyone in the papal stats had the right to kill him with impunity,” He skipped town, never to return.
From there he went to Naples—and then onto the isle of Malta, where he labored to become a knight, a rank that would annul the bando capitale. It took a year. A month after knighthood was granted to him, Caravaggio was stripped of it for assaulting a peer. Before Caravaggio died, in 1610, awaiting a pardon on the outskirts of Rome, that same peer would hunt him down and slash his face—“perhaps partially blind[ing]” him. His comeuppance had caught up with him. Caravaggio’s art did not recover.
Mr. Graham Dixon is an able tracker of his elusive subject. He tells a good story; he updates the factual record; he upends old hypotheses, and proposes others. Caravaggio was bisexual. He committed homicide in a duel, not a spontaneous ruckus. He painted his David in Rome. Where Mr. Graham-Dixon excels, however, is in the indication of irony. Caravaggio was a populist, yet his audience, while he lived, was elite; his paintings were too candid about the lives of the masses for mass consumption. Status obsessed the man, but scum mesmerized his art. The pious Catholic killer pimp “opened a Pandora’s Box of vulgarity.” Mr. Graham-Dixon is paraphrasing the observation of an enemy of Caravaggio’s here, but there may be something to it. The biographer gives Martin Scorsese, an avowed Caravaggiste, the last word in his book. Still, Caravaggio’s true cinematic heir may lie elsewhere. Blood and guts, rags and gloom, the literal-minded depiction of illiteracy—this sounds like a movie by Mel Gibson.
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