Caravaggio (11 page)

 

To contemplate the work of Giovanni Baglione alongside that of Caravaggio restores our faith in those hopeful clichés that promise that posterity will prove wiser and clearer-sighted than the myopic present. Time will separate the wheat from the chaff. Cream will rise to the top even if it takes centuries to complete its erratic and uncertain percolation.

From this distance, it's astonishing to contemplate the notion that the two painters were considered, and considered each other, to be serious rivals. By now, at least, common sense has prevailed, since Caravaggio is everywhere acknowledged as a genius, while Baglione has become—to quote the press release for a recent scholarly volume bravely attempting to salvage the painter's reputation—“one of the most reviled artists who ever lived.”

Meanwhile, it's sobering, instructive, and useful to realize how many of their contemporaries failed to notice that Baglione's work, especially during one particular interval in his career, was not merely an imitation of Caravaggio's style but a parody that simplified what was most complex, stiffened what was most fluid, and trivialized what was most profound about the great painter's vision. Though the original is in a private collection, it's worth tracking down a reproduction of Baglione's
Saint Sebastian Healed by an Angel
—a treacly and bizarre depiction of an angel extracting an arrow from the swooning saint's creamy side—to see how very wrong things could go when the themes and techniques that would become known as “Caravaggism” were employed by a lesser talent. The intimation of an eroticized, sadomasochistic charge between the prepubescent martyr and the even younger boy playing the heavenly messenger is only the most blatant of the painting's creepy, disquieting elements.

The posthumous correction of the two artists' relative standing occurred despite the fact that Baglione did everything in his power to have the last word. His biography of Caravaggio—which was probably written around
1625
and which appeared in
1642
—provides the most detailed firsthand account of his rival, a portrait characterized by a tone that is not only dismissive and censorious (“Some people thought he had destroyed the art of painting”) but deeply unsympathetic (“He died as miserably as he lived”).

During the
1580
s, Baglione was commissioned by Pope Sixtus V and then by Clement VIII to take part in the decoration of the Vatican and the Cathedral of Saint John Lateran. Later, he was hired by Cardinal Nicolò Sfondrato to work on Rome's beautiful Church of Santa Cecilia. Deeply impressed by Caravaggio's originality, he became the first of Caravaggio's numerous imitators. His
Divine Love Overcoming the World, the Flesh, and the Devil
was a direct response to, and an attempt to outdo, Caravaggio's
Victorious Cupid
.

In Baglione's effort, a decidedly over-the-top silliness dulls the faintly pornographic, homoerotic, and sadomasochistic sheen of the scene in which a muscular youth costumed as a winged angel, with long ringlets and armor resembling metal underwear, rudely interrupts whatever has been going on between the devil and the naked-boy Cupid, who delicately recoils from the physical punishment that Divine Love threatens. After dedicating the painting to Cardinal Benedetto Giustiniani, the brother of Vincenzo, who was Caravaggio's loyal collector, Baglione redid the work to accommodate the criticisms of fellow artists, who suggested that the figure of Divine Love should be younger, and naked. In the second attempt, the angel bares one shapely leg, and the devil twists around to leer at the viewer with a grotesque face that, some have suggested, resembles Caravaggio's.

Oblivious to the painting's obvious flaws, Giustiniani rewarded Baglione with a gold chain, at the time an important public symbol of accomplishment and success that the most celebrated painters desired and proudly displayed in their own self-portraits. The very idea of Baglione's gold chain must have been like a dagger in Caravaggio's heart, and his sense of outrage and injustice spiked when in
1602
Baglione received the important and widely coveted commission to paint the altarpiece for the Church of the Gesù. It may be that the Jesuits, who would have heard about the difficulties associated with Caravaggio's work on the Cerasi and Contarelli Chapels, felt safer hiring the more conventional and predictable Baglione.

Baglione darkened his ambitious, overly busy, and unfocused vision of the
Resurrection
with some Caravaggesque touches—specifically, a group of hunky soldiers lounging in the recesses of the shadowy crypt. First exhibited on Easter Sunday in
1603
, the altarpiece was reviled by Baglione's peers, whose irrritation might have been tempered had they known how soon the painting would disappear from history. Its replacement, by Carlo Maratta, was installed at the end of the seventeenth century, and only a preliminary drawing survives to illustrate Baglione's design. Yet Baglione appears to have been one of those artists with a gift for failing upward. He worked on Saint Peter's and Santa Maria Maggiore; he was knighted and appointed president of the artist's association, the Accademia di San Luca.

After the unveiling of the Gesù altarpiece, the tensions between Baglione and Caravaggio—both supported by rival camps of followers—worsened. In his biography of Caravaggio, Baglione tells us how the arrogant Michelangelo Merisi, convinced of his own unique brilliance, often spoke ill of his predecessors and his contemporaries.

Interestingly, however, Baglione neglects to mention the fact that he himself was so upset by one of these insults that, in August
1603
, he lodged a complaint with the governor of Rome, alleging that Michelangelo Merisi, Orazio Gentileschi, and Onorio Longhi had been slandering him and defaming his art ever since his depiction of the Resurrection had been unveiled. The reason, he suggested, was that they were jealous because his work was more highly respected than theirs, and because they—or actually, only Michelangelo Merisi—had wanted the prestigious commission from the Jesuits. Specifically, claimed Baglione, the three rival painters had written a series of scurrilous poems about him. He requested that his tormentors and their accomplices be brought to justice and prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

The scandal, the poems, and the testimony at the hearings open a window through which we can glimpse the gladiatorial combat that passed for daily life in the Roman art world: the competition, the gossip, the nervous monitoring of every minuscule decline and uptick in a rival's reputation, and the very real threats lurking beneath the deceptively collegial surface. Anxiety, contempt, rage, and an aggrieved sense of injustice are the not-so-hidden subtext of the scatological and obscene poems directed at Baglione.

The verses predict that Baglione's utter lack of talent would soon reduce him to the point at which he could no longer afford the cloth for breeches to cover his naked behind. They suggest that he bring his drawings to the grocer, or use them for toilet paper, or give them to the wife of Baglione's friend Tommaso Salini (a hugely unpopular and notoriously nasty painter), who could put them in her vagina so as to prevent Salini from having sex with her. The poems refer repeatedly to the sore subject of the gold chain: Baglione is undeserving and unfit to wear it; an iron chain around his ankles would be more appropriate.

In his testimony, Salini claimed that the painter Filippo Trisegni gave him the poems when he asked Trisegni what the artists in Rome were saying about Baglione's altarpiece for the Church of the Gesù. The poems, Trisegni was supposed to have said, were written by Caravaggio, Gentileschi, and Longhi, and another painter, Ottavio Leoni. Concerned about the consequences of a possible scandal, Caravaggio, claimed Trisegni, had warned him not to let Baglione and Salini see the poems. But the temptation to show the verses to the men they defamed had proved irresistible. According to Salini, Trisegni reported that he'd gotten Caravaggio's poem from the
bardassa
, a boy named Giovanni Battista
,
whose affections Caravaggio shared with Onorio Longhi.
Bardassa
was a pejorative term for a young male prostitute, a promiscuous professional who had sex for money, as opposed to an ordinary adolescent who, for reasons of the heart rather than the purse, became the lover of an older man. Later, Trisegni would deny the detail of the
bardassa
, and Salini remains the only source of this incriminating allegation.

In September, Caravaggio was arrested in the Piazza Navona and imprisoned on the libel charge, as were Gentileschi and Trisegni. The police failed to catch up with Longhi but nonetheless seized papers and evidence from his lodgings.

In his testimony, Trisegni admitted that he'd shown the poems to Salini, but denied revealing who had written them. Instead, he said, he had teased Salini, dropping hints, inviting him to guess, and rather touchingly agreeing to tell him the truth only if Salini showed him how to paint the way a figure cast a shadow. But Salini refused to give Trisegni the lesson he had requested, and so Trisegni kept the poets' identities secret. Trisegni added that Gregorio Rotolanti, another painter, had informed him that one of the poems had been written by a young student of logic and medicine.

Orazio Gentileschi testified about the handwriting on some documents found in his home. And the next day, Trisegni and Salini were reexamined, in an unsuccessful attempt to resolve the discrepancies between their conflicting versions of events. The two men stuck to their stories, and Salini insisted with particular vehemence on the embarrassing and potentially damaging detail of Caravaggio's officially illegal
bardassa
.

Caravaggio took the stand on September
13
,
1603
. To read his deposition is an almost eerie experience. It is the only time we hear him speak directly, and at some length, and yet our encounter with him is ultimately as elusive and frustrating as it must have been for the magistrates who examined him. It could hardly have been his finest hour; he had been imprisoned and was being required to defend himself in what we would now call a nuisance suit brought by a man whose work he considered beneath contempt.

His testimony is digressive, contradictory, and only marginally relevant to the central question of whether or not he helped write the verses defaming Baglione. On trial, with his freedom at stake, he cannot resist the chance to discuss, in a public forum, his convictions about painting. All he really wants to talk about is art: who are the artists in Rome, who are the good artists, what constitutes a good artist, what good art is. The question of whether or not he libeled Baglione seems to him inconsequential compared with the fact that Baglione is a terrible painter and that everyone knows it.

Caravaggio begins by saying that he has no idea why he was arrested in the Piazza Navona. He identifies himself as a painter, claims to know almost all the painters in Rome, and goes on to list eleven of them by name. Nearly all of them are his friends, he says, though he soon amends this by adding that several, including Cesari, Baglione, Gentileschi, and a certain “George the German,” aren't speaking to him. In their testimony, both Caravaggio and Gentileschi go to some lengths to establish that they have not been in contact with each other and thus could not have co-authored the poems about Baglione. According to Gentileschi, their estrangement has lasted six to eight months, while Caravaggio says that they have not exchanged a word—oddly, for two close friends in Rome's small artistic community—for three years.

In any case, Caravaggio continues, not all the painters he has listed are good artists. Asked to define a good artist, he replies, a bit redundantly, that he means an artist who knows how to paint well and who has an understanding of painting. More important—and Caravaggio is making a particular point here, staking out territory, advocating the realism in which he believed so strongly—a good painter is one who knows how to imitate nature. Among the good painters, he says, are d'Arpino, Zuccaro, Il Pomarancio, and Annibale Carracci—a puzzling statement, considering that he was known to despise d'Arpino, and had no reason to admire the conventional Zuccaro, who had made the infamous remark about Caravaggio having accomplished nothing that Giorgione hadn't already done better. Perhaps Caravaggio was mocking the question, or perhaps the truth was that he considered none of them (with the exception of Annibale Carracci) to be good painters, and was merely choosing a few names at random to underline the pointlessness of this whole line of inquiry.

On the subject of Baglione, Caravaggio is comparatively terse. No one except Baglione's friend Salini has ever had a good word to say about Baglione's work, which Caravaggio has seen, nearly in its entirety. The new altarpiece in the Gesù is not only clumsy but the worst thing Baglione has ever done. In fact, no one but Salini has ever praised the painting. As for the libel charge, Caravaggio has never discussed Baglione's painting with his friend Onorio Longhi. He hasn't talked to Gentileschi for three years and has never spoken to Ottavio Leoni. Finally, he has never heard of the verses about Baglione, nor does he take any pleasure in writing poetry in Italian or Latin. And he has no knowledge at all of the so-called
bardassa
.

Returning for a second round of questioning, Gentileschi tells the story of how Baglione got his gold chain as a reward for his
Divine Love
, of his futile attempt to compete with Caravaggio, and of how Baglione repainted
Divine Love
after Gentileschi criticized it. After that, says Gentileschi, he and Baglione stopped speaking. Moreover Gentileschi claims not to have talked to Caravaggio for six or eight months, though during that time Caravaggio borrowed two studio props from him—a Capuchin's robe and a pair of angel wings, which he returned around ten days before the trial. The loan of the props is exactly the sort of unnecessary detail that the unsuccessful liar can't help adding, though it may also represent Gentileschi's efforts to cover himself in case someone produced the messenger or servant who actually brought back the wings.