Caravaggio (15 page)

Or perhaps he had once again managed to get into some sort of ugly entanglement, to become embroiled in a feud that had not yet attracted the attention of the authorities, but that threatened to erupt into a new version of the disaster that had forced him out of Rome. Perhaps this time it seemed wiser to leave town rather than to simply let matters take their perilous and inevitable course. Given his character, this supposition hardly seems unlikely, and certainly, when he revisited Naples two years later, some old trouble was waiting for him or some new trouble came to find him, and he was attacked and nearly killed in a fight in a tavern.

The least probable explanation is that offered by Sandrart, who claims that Caravaggio was still smarting from the insult he had received from the Cavaliere d'Arpino, who had refused to fight him because d'Arpino was a knight and Caravaggio wasn't. At this particularly stressful and turbulent period in his life, claims Sandrart, Caravaggio was driven by the determination to bump his social status up to the level of his former employer's. Sandrart seemed convinced that the quarrel with d'Arpino was such a watershed moment for Caravaggio that, as soon as he was knighted, the artist rushed back to Rome to have things out, this time on an equal footing with his former rival.

In any event, Caravaggio was living in Malta by the end of July. The society in which he found himself could hardly have been more different from the sybaritic aristocracy and the anarchic street life of Naples or, for that matter, from the artistic and political intrigues of Rome. Malta was essentially a military outpost manned by a religious volunteer army, a thickly walled fortress in which the Knights of the Order of Saint John had taken on the sacred duty of protecting Christendom and Western Europe from the onslaughts of the Ottoman Turks and, after the Battle of Lepanto in
1571
, the Barbary pirates.

By the time Caravaggio arrived, many Maltese could still remember the Great Siege of
1565
, when the Ottomans had filled the waters of the harbor with the headless bodies of dead knights tied to a flotilla of crucifixes that carried them, like rafts, toward shore. And the knights had retaliated by firing the heads of the dead Turks from cannons. Since then, captured Christians had been sold into slavery by the Turks, just as Turkish prisoners were made to work as galley slaves on European ships.

Malta's position at the center of a thriving slave market did little for its moral character, and it was common for the knights to have slaves as personal attendants. Nor was the tone of the place improved much by the influx of prostitutes who came to service the predominantly male society of merchants, traders, and theoretically celibate knights. In
1581
, the knights revolted and imprisoned their grand master, Jean de la Cassiere, who had made the tactical mistake of attempting to expel the whores from the island.

In the newly built baroque city of Valletta, Caravaggio's circle most likely included Marc'Aurelio Giustiniani, a relative of the painter's former patrons in Rome, and Fabrizio Sforza Colonna, whom the pope had sentenced to exile in Malta as a convenient solution to the embarrassing problems caused by the awkward conjunction of Colonna's lineage, his popularity, his fame—and his criminal activity. Most important, Caravaggio enjoyed the support of the current grand master, Alof de Wignacourt, an aristocratic Frenchman who had become grand master in
1601
, and whose architectural, civil, and cultural achievements included the building of the Tower of Malta, the construction of the aqueduct that furnished Valletta with its water supply, and the establishment of the National Library. Surely it must have been clear to everyone involved that Wignacourt's favor would prove to be Caravaggio's ticket to knighthood.

Taxing their imaginations to understand how the undeserving, lowborn Caravaggio could have received an honor designated for the favorite sons of the aristocracy, Bellori, Baglione, and Mancini come together in a rare moment of concurrence. All three suggest that the artist's knighthood was essentially granted him in return for the portrait or portraits (Bellori claims there were two) he painted of the grand master, which pleased Wignacourt so much that he admitted their creator into his order. Perhaps Bellori, like quite a few others who came after him, incorrectly assumed that Caravaggio's portait of another Knight of Malta, Fra Antonio Martelli, was also a likeness of Wignacourt.

Looking at these portraits—both depictions of old men—you may find yourself regretting how many Caravaggio portraits have been lost, for both of these paintings are among art history's most psychologically complex, astute, and sensitive renderings of the ways our physical appearance discloses all manner of information about our character and experience, even as it vigilantly guards our deepest secrets.

Like the portraits by Titian, Rembrandt, and Velasquez, the depiction of Alof de Wignacourt precisely calibrates the formula of just how much the face is compelled to reveal and how much it declines to tell us, so that we may think that we know something about its owner until we are forced to agree with Virginia Woolf that you can never say that a person is this or that, one thing or another.

Meanwhile, we can't help drawing our own conclusions about the sitter. Positioned in the center of the canvas, the grand master wears his heavy and elaborate armor as comfortably and magisterially as a metal suit can be worn. His stance conveys authority and control, he stands as if he owns the ground beneath his feet. His bearded, close-cropped head is turned to one side, his gaze tracks into the distance—perceptive, shrewd, but neither inhuman nor intimidating. He is proud of himself and of what he's accomplished in the course of his sixty-one years, but there is something about him that resembles all those old men, humbled by time, who appear so often in Caravaggio's work. Though the portrait makes no attempt to him look younger than he is, it thoughtfully conceals some of the fleshiness, and equivocates slightly about the size and shape of his nose, as well as the wart growing on it—features that other portraits of the grand master confronted more directly.

The painting could almost pass for a traditional military portrait, an unusually conventional effort from Caravaggio, which is understandable, since even the fiercely uncompromising painter doubtless understood that this time something more than pure art was at stake. But Caravaggio never disappoints, never settles for what is familiar or expected. The grand master is not alone. On the right of the canvas stands a page boy, a pretty blond youth of ten or so, carrying Wignacourt's plumed helmet, which is made to appear doubly enormous by the fact that it seems to be twice the size of the boy's head. Why is the little servant in the painting at all? And why is he staring out at us so fixedly that he is constantly on the edge of upstaging the grand master? What is he—and Caravaggio—trying to tell us? What is the boy's relation to the older man? Should we let ourselves register the fact that the boy is of the age that, in those times, would have been considered most appealing and most suitable as a romantic object for a man of Wignacourt's age?

The answers, which we will never have, are finally not what matter. The boy provides that singularly distinguishing detail—the bare feet of the pilgrim, the swollen belly of the Madonna, the gnarled legs of the saint, the jailer yanking Christ's hair—that so neatly combines reality and mystery in a single image that Caravaggio searched for and could not resist representing, and that identifies his presence and his vision as conclusively as a fingerprint.

It's impossible to say if events occurred in the order and for the reasons that Bellori believed. We may never know whether Caravaggio was really hired to paint
The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist
for the oratory of the Co-Cathedral of Saint John in Valletta because the grand master was so delighted by his portrait. But it's not unreasonable to suppose that the Maltese, who in all likelihood had never seen any of Caravaggio's paintings, might have wanted some small indication of what he could do before they asked him to create the massive altarpiece, which, measuring almost twelve feet tall and more than seventeen feet wide, was to be his largest work.

The composition of
The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist
marks a daring departure that would become characteristic of his last religious paintings—depictions of miracles, or of their preludes or aftermaths, transpiring in what appear to be the depths of an abyss. In these works the figures are crowded into a narrow band at the bottom of the painting, beneath a crushing expanse of space as weighty and earth-toned as the dirt under which, as every brush stroke reminds us, we will all be buried before too long. Bellori tells us that, in painting
The Beheading
, Caravaggio employed the full power of his brush, working so rapidly and fiercely that the canvas shows through the halftones.

Everything of importance is happening in the lower left of a dismal streetscape that, alone in Caravaggio's work, is based on an actual location: the entrance to the grand master's palace. Nothing but architecture—the stones of an archway, a barred gate—exists to intercede between the grisly scene and the two witnesses on the far right, who are trying to see as much as they can despite the barred window restricting their view. Unlike those Caravaggios in which the worst is about to occur, this painting is set at the moment in which it already has. With his hands bound behind his back, the dead or nearly dead saint is pressed flat, belly down, on the ground. Like his cruel counterpart in
The Flagellation of Christ
, the executioner jerks on his victim's hair, but this time, as in
The Crucifixion of Saint Peter
, it's not so much about casual sadism as it is about business: the business of butchery. The tragedy isn't finished, and lifting the victim's head is simply a way to facilitate what will happen next.

As blood streams from John the Baptist's neck, the executioner reaches behind his own impressively muscular back for the dagger with which he will complete the tough part of the beheading. So maybe the worst
is
yet to come, because decapitation with a dagger cannot be a pretty sight. Yet no one—except an old woman who puts her hands to her face in horror—seems to mind terribly much. They all have a job to do.

Years earlier, staging
The Calling of Saint Matthew
, Caravaggio discovered how a pointing finger can focus our attention, and now the finger is that of the warden who indicates the platter that Salome (not the familiar, veiled seductress but an ordinary young woman with her sleeves rolled up in anticipation of the messy chore before her) has just bent to pick up. The chilly impassivity of the warden's gesture is so disturbing and compelling that it draws our eye and holds it until we can detach ourselves long enough to search for the saint's body, or for the signature, in the Baptist's red blood:
f. michel
—that is, Brother Michelangelo. This proud declaration suggests that by the time the painting was installed, its creator was already a Knight of Malta. And the connection that Caravaggio is drawing between paint and blood, an association that recalls his
Judith and Holofernes
, has a deeper, more autobiographically resonant—and more moving—significance than it did in the earlier painting.

Luckily for history, the Order of Saint John believed in the value of archival documentation, and a series of official notices track Caravaggio's brief and characteristically dramatic career as a
cavaliere
. Indeed, among the holdings of the archiodese of Malta is an anonymous oval portrait of Caravaggio, beneath which is the legend: FR. MICH/ ANGELUS MERISIUS/ DE CARAVAGIO. The sitter, who has dark hair, a mustache, and a goatee, is wearing a cloak on which we can see a part of his Maltese cross. Instantly recognizable from the cameo self-portraits in his religious paintings, Caravaggio looks dissatisfied and angry; his mouth is downturned and pouting. But the portrait makes you wish that it had been done by someone with a gift that even remotely approached the genius of his subject. The painting tells us little that we couldn't have surmised on our own from the facts of Caravaggio's life or from his own visual self-representations.

At the end of December
1607
, six months after Caravaggio sailed to Malta, Grand Master Alof de Wignacourt wrote to his ambassador to the Holy See, asking his emissary to sound out the pope on the subject of knighting two unnamed persons, one of whom who had committed a murder during a fight. The letter expressed the grand master's hope that knighthood would persuade this anonymous person to remain in their community, a decision that, given Caravaggio's prestigious reputation, would have represented a coup for the order. In February, an exchange of letters between Wignacourt and Pope Paul V secured papal permission for the still unnamed murderer to be knighted despite his crime, together with the second person alluded to in the previous letter, a French nobleman whose illegitimacy was considered far more problematic than a mere homicide or manslaughter.

Finally, on July
14
,
1608
, approximately a year after his arrival in Malta, Michelangelo da Caravaggio was made a Knight of Obedience, a category of knights who were not obliged to take monastic vows. The official document explains that the pope had given his approval and leaves no doubt about why Caravaggio was being so honored—because the order welcomed not only aristocrats but also men with great artistic and scientific ability. It was hoped that the goal of knighthood would encourage men to apply themselves to these important pursuits. The cross and the belt of the Order of the Knights of Saint John were conferred on its newest inductee, and according to Bellori, Caravaggio was also given a gold chain and two slaves.

With his gold chain and his knighthood, Caravaggio could have taken some satisfaction in the thought that he was finally on an equal footing with his old rivals, Baglione and d'Arpino. And, Bellori claims, Caravaggio was extremely happy to receive the Maltese cross, to have his work so enthusiastically appreciated, and to live with so much personal dignity and such an abundance of good things.