The genius of Caravaggio

The Canon Club podcast

A couple of years back I wrote about an idea for a modern-day salon where people got together to discuss the great canon of western civilisation. Since then, we’ve had three in-person events, on Milton, Wagner and Coleridge – and now comes the podcast, or at least the podcast mini-series, with seven episodes recorded with my friend, the demographer Paul Morland. 

Episode one – released today - is on Caravaggio, and features Andrew Graham-Dixon, author of an acclaimed biography of the artist, explaining to the curious beginner all there is to know. Paul and I hope to be a latter-day Viennese salon, transmitting a love of the canon to a wider audience, and educating ourselves along the way (before reading Graham-Dixon’s book, my knowledge of the subject was patchy at best).

Caravaggio is one of my favourite artists - Graham-Dixon calls him ‘the most wildly popular of all the old masters’ - but also probably the one I’d least like to be stuck in a bar with. Notorious for getting into fights, he had to flee Rome after killing a man in a duel, although his biographer suggests that the man in question – a pimp – basically deserved it. No one was entirely sure what the fight was about, but it almost certainly involved a woman: most likely the artist was involved with one of Ranuccio Tomassoni’s girls, certainly as a model but maybe as a lover. 

He was born Michelangelo Merisi in Caravaggio in 1571, a Lombard town that was ‘tranquil bordering on dull’, its people known for their ‘phlegmatic character, their solid business sense and their piety’.

The artist came from a respectable family, his mother’s side from the upper, professional bourgeoisie, and one of his early biographers described them as ‘very honourable citizens’, cittadini. Despite this, Caravaggio’s early life was incredibly hard: the plague hit Milan when he was five, forcing the family to move back to Caravaggio, but a year later it came for them and his father, grandfather and grandmother died within a few days of each other. The artist’s mother afterwards raised her five children in dire poverty - and when Caravaggio was 12 or 13, she died too.

Around the same time, he moved to Milan, then ruled by Charles Borromeo, who turned the city into something of a Catholic counterpoint to Geneva, and this austere religious regime had an influence on the artist. ‘Caravaggio’s reinvention of devotional religious painting along the lines of a direct, visceral, popular art would take place not in Milan but in Rome, and it would happen more than a decade after Borromeo’s death,’ he writes: ‘But it would represent, none the less, a strikingly faithful translation, into the field of art, of the imperatives of Carlo Borromeo’s piety.’ Although, Graham-Dixon adds, the sexually conservative bishop would been disturbed by his intense sensuality in his paintings, and would certainly not have approved of the full-breasted Virgin Mary in The Madonna of the Palafrenieri.

In Milan he was taken on as an apprentice to Simone Peterzano, although this seemed to go badly, and ‘essentially, Caravaggio taught himself to paint.’ He had developed his own distinctive style by the 1590s, characterised by chiaroscuro – the contrast of light and dark, which would have a huge influence not just on later artists, but on film directors like Martin Scorsese, a huge fan.

He moved to Rome in 1592, seeking ecclesiastical patronage which he got in the form of Cardinal del Monte, and there was a notable development of style seen in Supper at Emmaus and The Incredulity of Saint Thomas. His paintings are noted for the absence of landscape or open air, the action taking place inside a room ‘in which he can control the action and rigorously limit the cast of actors’.

Religious art was always political – even the depiction of feet was what we now call ‘left-coded’ because they were associated with the poor and humble (the etymology is even related). His tendency to paint Christ and the Apostles as poor simple men was also in line with the austere ideology of the Counter Reformation, but out of place with the dawning Baroque.

Sometimes politics and theology could land the artist into trouble, such as with the Death of the Virgin, rejected by the Carmelites in 1606. This was possibly because he’d used a prostitute as a model for Mary, or because it displayed her bare legs - or maybe the issue was theological, the Virgin’s death being contrary to Catholic teaching.

The artist was also highly volatile, and got into numerous fights. Funnily enough, as Graham-Dixon notes, there are three early biographies of Caravaggio, and one was by Giovanni Baglione, who had accused the painter of trying to murder him. Yet ‘Baglione is more circumstantial and surprisingly objective, given that he was writing the life of a man whom he suspected of having plotted to murder him.’ Considering the sometimes extremely petty nature of artistic feuds, this displays a remarkable magnanimity. 

Caravaggio was arrested several times over just five months in 1604 for carrying weapons, although in the violent atmosphere of Rome at the time he was wise to do so. The city was notorious in particular for the crime of deturpatio, or ‘house-scorning’, the daubing of paint or sometimes excrement on the doors or windows of an enemy’s home. Sometimes stones were thrown at windows, sometimes animal bladders filled with blood or ink, or cement - this, inevitably, did little to stem the tide of violence and feuding.

Artists were also notably violent because many suffered ‘painter’s colic’ from lead paint and vermilion, which caused depression, anxiety and increased aggression. ‘Most of the people around Caravaggio were involved in some kind of violent incident at one time or another,’ and the daughter of his contemporary Orazio Gentileschi was even raped by another artist, Agostino Tassi. That young woman, Artemisia Gentileschi, would go on to become a noted artist in her own right, hugely influenced by Caravaggio’s style and making a name for herself with ‘a darkly tenebristic style’ directly modelled on his work. Her father would also achieve relative success, becoming court painter to Charles I, and dying in London in 1639.

In April 1601 Caravaggio got into a fight with a waiter at his local restaurant, the Osteria del Moro, in a quintessentially Italian scene. He had asked whether the artichokes were cooked in oil or butter and the waiter had replied that he didn’t know and picked one up. Caravaggio then sprang to his feet, shouting: ‘it seems to me, you fucked-over cuckold, that you think you’re speaking to some kind of vulgar provincial [barone].’ Then he smashed the waiter’s face with a plate.

It was a classic intra-Italian spat: ‘The painter was accusing the waiter of a quasi-racist insult. The Romans were proud of their olive oil and scorned northern Italians for lacking the discrimination to appreciate its fine but faintly bitter taste. Lombards were easily caricatured as cowherds from far-off plains and mountains, who thought a meal was not a real meal unless it was dripping with butter and cheese.’

Soon after his rejection by the Carmelites, he killed Tomassoni in a duel, although with his thrust to the thigh he may have been trying to castrate him. He fled to Naples, and then to Malta, ruled by the Knights of Malta who were then at the height of their prestige after seeing off an Ottoman siege in 1565.

If the artist could get a knighthood from the order he would be pardoned for his crime and allowed to return to Rome. He may also have been interested in becoming a soldier, but on top of this Caravaggio was absolutely obsessed with status.

According to an apocryphal story, a fellow artist called Giuseppe Cesari had been riding through Rome on horseback when Caravaggio challenged him to a duel, to which he refused on account of the fact that it would not be fitting for a knight to fight a commoner. According to a contemporary: ‘With this politely cutting answer, he wounded Caravaggio more than he might have with his word’. So much so that he immediately sold his possessions to the Jews and went to Malta.

The knight’s life was strict, and they were barred from open womanising, brawling and even the smallest of insubordination – and in retrospect it was always going to go wrong for him.

A few years back I visited Malta, a lovely little island which visitors often fall in love with. The capital, Valletta, is an extraordinary city built after the Great Siege of 1565, and named after Jean de Valette, the French Grand Master who led the Christian forces to victory. He is buried at the St John’s Cathedral, along with hundreds of other knights, and one of the most remarkable, and most visited, spots inside the cathedral is the painting that Caravaggio now produced, The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist.

Yet as Graham-Dixon writes, the painting has a grim purpose:

‘The novices of the order of St John listened to sermons and received instructions in the oratory for which Caravaggio’s painting was destined. The place was both a school for the martyrs of the future and a burial ground for the martyrs of the past – the bones of the knights who had died in the Great Siege were interred beneath its stone-flagged floor. Within the oratory, novices were trained in the hard ways of the Knights of Malta and made to understand that they too might have to face death in a distant land at the hands of unbelievers.

‘Caravaggio’s altarpiece was designed to make sure that they could be under no illusions about what that might mean. A martyr’s death brought the reward of eternal glory with the saints in heaven, but there would be nothing glorious about the death itself. It could be a death much like this one, a sordid act of butchery in a dark and lonely place. The picture is like a catechism, an asking of questions. Are you sure you have it in you to be a Knight of the Order of St John? Are you ready to die? To die like this?’

(I can’t help feeling that my reaction would be, ‘Oh God, what have I got myself into?)

The Beheading is the only painting he ever signed - F. Michelangelo – the F signifying his membership of the order, which came as a reward for the work. The Grand Master was so pleased with the painting that, according to his early biographer Giovanni Bellori, ‘he put a gold chain around Caravaggio’s neck, and made him a gift of two slaves, along with other signs of esteem and appreciation for his work’. The unveiling of the painting was scheduled for August 29, the feast day of St John’s Martyrdom.

Yet on the day the painting was shown to the world, the artist was in jail, having now suffered his greatest fall from grace after - inevitably - getting in a fight. He escaped to Messina in Sicily, where he was noted as being a furtive character, always armed and accompanied by his dog Corvo (crow). Here he saw his ‘last and darkest flowering’, but after a revenge attack – the perpetrators are not known but he had picked up many enemies by this point - he fled north.

After producing his final works, Peter’s Denial and The Martyrdom of St Ursula, Caravaggio died on the way to Rome, the exact cause unknown, perhaps heart failure or sunstroke. Soon afterwards, the order tried to grab his possessions by claiming he was still a member, amid a general scramble to collect the work of this highly popular artist.

He was, quite simply, far better than his contemporaries, none of whom came close. As Dixon-Graham writes: ‘Caravaggio paints with a strong and unmistakable sense of the perils and the powers of looking. His pictures both embody and evoke an acute and piercing gaze. He sees with intensity and feels what it is to possess and be possessed.

‘This is why Caravaggio’s paintings have a destructive effect on pictures by other artists hung anywhere near them in art galleries. They exert such a sensually charged, magnetic attraction that they see almost as though backlit, or somehow illuminated from within, while the pictures round them – even those of great artists, whether Rembrandt or Poussin or Velazquez – appear by comparison to receded, to retreat from the gaze.’

If you’re ever in Malta, or indeed any of the many galleries where his work is displayed, go and have a look – in the meantime, listen to the Canon Club podcast here.