Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (30 page)

Shortly after painting
The Penitent Magdalen
and
The Rest on the Flight to Egypt
, Caravaggio created perhaps the most daring of all his early devotional pictures.
St Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy
is now in the Wadsworth Atheneum, Connecticut. The painting is a nocturne, set in a landscape of gloomy indistinctness lit by the first distant gleams of dawn. The painter directs a focusing beam of divine light on to the form of the ecstatic saint, as he swoons into the arms of his guardian angel.

Scholars disagree about who commissioned the picture from Caravaggio. The two candidates are Ottavio Costa, a rich banker, and del Monte himself. There is a case to be made for either, and even for both. A picture of St Francis by Caravaggio is recorded in Costa’s will of 1605, while ‘A
St Francis in Ecstasy
by Michel Agnolo [
sic
] da Carav
aggio with an adorned gold frame of four palmi’ was sold by del Monte’s
heir in 1627.
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It is not known if these were one and the same picture, or two versions of the same composition. Cardinal del Monte’s Christian name was Francesco, and as we have seen he had a particular fondness for images of the saints. So, though the complications of its early history may never be fully unpicked, the picture now in Connecticut may well have hung at one time in the Palazzo Madama – perhaps not far from Caravaggio’s earlier painting of a musical
rehearsal. There is a striking resemblance between the boy with Cupid’s wings in
The Musicians
and the angel cradling the ecstatic saint in the later picture. The same model probably posed for both figures.

St Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy
is a crucial painting in Caravaggio’s early development. It announces the stark tenebrism that would become the hallmark of the painter’s revolutionary style – that ‘boldly dark and black colouring,’ in Bellori’s words, ‘which he used abundantly to give relief to the forms’.
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It also displays for the first time Caravaggio’s lifelong fascination for the strongest and most intense strains of Counter-Reformation Catholic spirituality. It expresses the idea of a transfiguring love of Christ, a love so deep that it becomes a form of mystic self-annihilation.

In Italy during the later years of the sixteenth century, the thirteenth
-century Francis was regarded as the saint to emulate above all others. The Counter-Reformation Church looked back to the Middle Ages as a time of powerfully simple piety, uncomplicated by divisive theological speculation. Francis had practised an emotive, theatrical form of preaching, which spoke to the feelings rather than the intellect. He encouraged his followers to venerate nature as God’s blessed creation, and held that the only way to follow Christ’s message was to live it out in daily life. In prayer, he sought to visualize the events of the New Testament. In public, he would act them out, turning his own body into the living image of Jesus Christ. In sackcloth and ashes, haltered like a beast, he would re-enact the humiliations of the journey on the road to Calvary. The central event of Francis’s life was itself a miracle of empathetic identification. One day the saint focused his prayers so strongly on the image of Christ that the wounds of Crucifixion were miraculously branded on his own body. The idea of the stigmata was in turn burned into the Christian folk memory, becoming the ultimate symbol of the power of prayer and visualization to lead the believer towards God. This is the theme of Caravaggio’s picture, and it became a guiding principle of his art. All his religious paintings would be re-enactments or reimaginings, closely akin to the vivid theatricality of Franciscan devotion.

The miracle of the stigmata is most fully described in St Bonaventure’s mid thirteenth-century
Life of St Francis.
Bonaventure relates that the saint went up to Mount La Verna, an isolated mountain at the centre of the Apennines, with one of his followers, Brother Leo, to pray and fast. While he was absorbed in devotion to Christ, a seraph with six flaming wings appeared to him in the sky. As the seraph came nearer, Francis saw the figure of a man crucified between its wings:

He marvelled exceedingly at the appearance of a vision so unfathomable, knowing that the infirmity of the Passion doth in no wise accord with the immortality of a Seraphic spirit. At length he understood therefrom, the Lord revealing it unto him, that this vision had been thus presented unto his gaze by the divine providence, that the friend of Christ might have foreknowledge that he was to be wholly transformed into the likeness of Christ crucified, not by martyrdom of body, but by enkindling of heart. Accordingly, as the vision disappeared, it left in his heart a wondrous glow, but on his flesh also it imprinted a no less wondrous likeness of its tokens. For forthwith there began to appear in his hands and feet the marks of the nails, even as he had just beheld them in that Figure of the Crucified . . . The right side, moreover, was – as if it had been pierced by a lance.
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St Bonaventure makes a minute distinction here. The Lord makes it known to Francis that he will be transformed into ‘the likeness of Christ crucified’ not by the mortification of his flesh but by the inner burning of love in his heart – ‘not by martyrdom of body, but by enkindling of heart’. It is love, not pain, that transfigures the human being in search of God. Once Francis understands this, the seraph disappears. A wound appears in Francis’s heart at that very moment;
immediately afterwards the marks of the stigmata appear on the saint’s
hands and feet.

Caravaggio’s composition indicates not only that he had read St Bonaventure’s
Life of St Francis
, but that he intended to dramatize
the crucial moment in the story – the moment when, as the seraph dis
appears, the wound appears in the saint’s heart. As Caravaggio’s saint swoons backwards, he reaches involuntarily with his right hand towards a rent in his habit where a wound in his side has already started bleeding. There are no signs of stigmata in his hands or his feet, and there is no seraph in the sky. There was no precedent, in depictions of St Francis, for including the wound in his side and omitting the others. There was no precedent, either, for the compassionate kneeling angel who cradles the saint in his arms. Caravaggio was also the first artist to depict the saint lying down at the moment of his stigmatization.

In every sense – style, iconography, drama – the painting broke new ground. It certainly gives the lie to the slander that Caravaggio was an untutored Lombard realist, bent solely on dazzling with the mimetic brilliance of his art.
St Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy
is a picture full of subtle, poetic reflections on the deeper meaning of Francis’s transfiguring moment of communion with Christ. Barely visible in the gloom behind the angel and the saint, a little group of shepherds is gathered round a campfire, one of them pointing excitedly to the heavens. Here, Caravaggio consciously echoes the traditional imagery of Christ’s Nativity – which had itself often been painted as a nocturne – as if to imply that at the moment of his swooning ecstasy Francis really has been reborn in the image of Christ himself. Implicit in this brief
moment of death-in-life is, therefore, a second birth for Francis, marking
out his destiny to live only in and for Christ – to live as
alter Christus
, or ‘another Christ’, as his legend had it.

The group of saint and angel echoes another tradition of Christian art, recalling images of the dead Christ cradled in the arms of his mother, the Virgin Mary. Caravaggio’s angel is taller than the figure of St Francis, which has sometimes been put down to the painter’s youthful clumsiness, but this too is actually a poetic device, enhancing the pathos of the saint’s helpless body: in many images of the Virgin mourning Christ’s death, including Michelangelo’s celebrated marble
Pietà
in St Peter’s, the mother’s supporting body is much larger than that of her lifeless son. This echo of Christ’s death and lamentation may also have been meant to express the idea that it was through the act of meditating on Christ’s passion that Francis brought the miracle of his own transfiguration upon himself. By thinking about the dead Christ, he achieved the state of electrifying empathy that summoned forth the blessed vision of the seraph.

Francis was a figure from the relatively recent past. His legend was treasured by Catholics, not least because it seemed such a tangible demonstration of the continuing presence of a miracle-working God in the real and actual world. Protestants disapproved of the veneration of saints and their relics, arguing that too much worship had been displaced from its proper focus on God alone. The destruction of shrines and the suppression of pilgrimage in countries of the Protestant north was, in part, an attempt to stem this perceived haemorrhaging of holiness from the divine centre to the apocryphal margin. But in Catholic Italy, it was feared that such theological purism might rob the world altogether of its Christian magic. To abandon the images and relics of the saints, together with the rituals associated with their veneration, might create the sense of a terminally disenchanted present, cut adrift from the sacred past.

Many of the religious initiatives of the Counter-Reformation addressed this nexus of fear, desire and belief. One of the challenges that the Catholic Church set itself in Caravaggio’s time was that of demonstrating that the old and the modern Christian worlds were not distinct and separate eras but formed, instead, a single unbroken continuum. The very fabric of Rome, where so many of the dramas of Christian history had been played out, was itself interrogated for evidence of this. The discovery of the catacombs, burial places of the earliest generations of Roman Christians, led to a boom in the field of what might be called sacred archaeology. The seventeenth-century Bishop of Vaison, Joseph Maria Suarez, examined the mosaics of ancient Rome from a Christian perspective. Antonio Bosio’s study of the city’s buried architectural bones,
Roma Sotterranea
, was posthumously published in 1632. Another scholar, Antonio Gallonio, spent years studying the instruments and reconstructing the methods of early Christian martyrdom, publishing the results in 1591 as
The Tortures and Torments of the Christian Martyrs
. Gallonio gave the different chapters of his book gorily circumstantial titles – ‘Of the Wheel, the Pulley and the Press as Instruments of Torture’, or ‘Of Instruments Wherewith the Heathen Were Used to Tear the Flesh of Christ’s Faithful Servants, to wit Iron Claws, Hooks and Currycombs’ – and his text proved immensely popular. The more lavishly illustrated editions bear vivid witness to the author’s underlying ambition, that of making the holy deaths of venerable memory seem as gruesomely fresh as yesterday’s executions.

The past was not to be thought of as the past. The age of miracles and martyrdoms was not another time, dead and buried, the passing of which was to be mourned; it was part of the present. To go on pilgrimage, as Catholics were encouraged to do, was to reaffirm precisely that belief, because to travel to a holy site was to move through time as well as through space – journeying back through the centuries, in mind and spirit, to relive the events of sacred history as if they were taking place in the here and now. Ascanio Donguidi, Augustinian Canon Regular of San Giovanni in Laterano, one of the principal pilgrimage churches of Rome, published a guidebook for prospective pilgrims in 1600. On approaching St Peter’s, he advised,

You will greatly enjoy thinking about your visit to all the Saints whose relics are kept in that Church. Imagine yourself having found the saints present and alive . . . O with how much great devotion and fervour and joy of heart you would go into Saint Peter’s, if you truly believed to find him . . . sitting in his Pontifical Throne, or how you would hurry, even run, if you imagined being able to find present [and alive] in said Church where they are buried, all the Holy Martyrs, Popes, Confessors and Holy Virgins. And [it is not only a figment of your imagination] because it is true that you are going to visit them, and it is very true that they are living a life of glory. And they will listen to your petitions, prayers and supplications and will present them to God.
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Not only were the old saints to be venerated, to be conversed with as if they were still alive. It was to be known that their miracles were being actively repeated in the contemporary world, in the lives of new saints elect. Ecstasies of empathetic love akin to those of Francis loomed large in the lives of sixteenth-century penitents, priests and charismatic nuns. St Teresa of Avila’s memoirs, published in 1588, famously told of an angel coming to her when she was deep in prayer and piercing her breast with an arrow of divine love: ‘It is not bodily pain, but spiritual, though the body has a share in it – indeed, a great share, so sweet are the colloquies of love which pass between the soul and God that if anyone thinks I am lying I beseech God, in his goodness, to give him the same experience.’
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Caravaggio’s painting was intended to prompt reflections on more than the stigmatization of Francis alone.
St Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy
embodied an ideal of transfiguring Christian love, exemplified not only by St Francis, and by St Teresa, but also – still closer to Roman hearts – by St Filippo Neri, founder of the Oratory. Like Teresa, Neri
had been fascinated both by the legends of a saint such as Francis of Assisi, and by the power and authority of the primitive Church. In early life he prayed continually in the catacombs of Rome’s most ancient saints of all; and it was in the Catacomb of San Sebastiano that he experienced his own ecstasy and his own divine wound of love:

In 1544, just before the feast of Pentecost, Philip, while still a layman, was praying to the Holy Ghost in the Catacomb of San Sebastiano, when he seemed to see a globe of fire which entered his mouth and sank down into his heart. At the same time he felt a fire of love which seemed to be a positive physical heat, so that he had to throw himself on the ground and bare his breast to cool it. When he rose he was seized with a violent trembling, accompanied by an extraordinary sense of joy, and putting his hand to his heart, felt there a swelling as big as a man’s fist . . . At the same time there began that palpitation of the heart which lasted throughout his life, and made itself felt particularly when he was praying, hearing confession, saying Mass, or giving communion, or when he was speaking on some subject which stirred his emotions. So violent was this palpitation that it was described by those who knew him best as being like the blows of a hammer, while the trembling it caused was such as to shake his chair, his bed, or sometimes the whole room. Yet, when he pressed his penitents to his heart they felt an extraordinary consolation . . .
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