Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (44 page)

The painter was kept busy by other commissions as well as by the demands of the Mattei family during the first three years of the century. Early in 1602, several months before painting
The Betrayal of Christ
, he had learned that he was required once more at the church of San Luigi dei Francesi. Although more than a year had passed since Caravaggio had finished the lateral canvases for the Contarelli Chapel, the completion of the whole decorative scheme had been delayed by the prevarications of Jacob Cobaert. At the end of January 1602 the tardy Flemish sculptor finally delivered his marble altarpiece of Matthew and the angel, still partially incomplete. It was instantly rejected by the increasingly irritable and fractious coalition of Mathieu Cointrel’s executors.
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Just eight days later Caravaggio was asked to replace the sculpted altarpiece with a painting of the same subject. Matthew was to be shown writing his gospel. The contract specified that he must be depicted taking dictation from an angel; those were the only figures required. It was a clear brief, but its execution would prove to be far from straightforward and Caravaggio would end up having to paint two versions of the picture. The root of the problem would be his depiction of the saint’s feet.

Caravaggio’s first
Matthew and the Angel
for the Contarelli Chapel eventually passed to the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum in Berlin. Like the lost portrait of Fillide, it was destroyed by fire during the Second World War, but a record of its appearance is preserved in black-and-white photographs. Possibly because he knew that his picture was replacing a marble altarpiece, the painter created a powerfully sculptural composition. Matthew and his attendant angel, a tender winged boy who guides the saint’s writing hand, form a single monumental group. The evangelist sits with his body twisted effortfully around the great book in his lap. His shoulders are hunched, his neck arched forward so that he can peer at the text. The gleaming white pages of the book and the dark jerkin that he wears obscure and interrupt much of his anatomy. His body is reduced to its component elements: balding, bearded head on a bull neck; gnarled hands and forearm; bare legs and heavy feet; toes thrust almost into the viewer’s face. This Matthew is an aggressively inelegant, proletarian figure, conceived along the lines of St Peter in the Cerasi Chapel and very different from the pale-skinned tax-gatherer or the heroic fallen priest depicted in Caravaggio’s earlier pictures for the chapel. The suggestion is that he is both writing and reading for the first time, like a peasant made suddenly and miraculously literate.

The gospel of Matthew was at the centre of a controversy between Catholics and Protestants. In the fourth century, St Jerome had asserted that Matthew wrote in Hebrew. But at the start of the sixteenth century the humanist author Erasmus had questioned whether the received version had really been translated from a Hebrew original. This raised the possibility that the biblical book of Matthew was based on a later, corrupt version of the text – posing a grave threat to the authority of the Church itself. In 1537 a Protestant Hebraist named Sebastian Munster published his own translation of a Jewish manuscript that he claimed was the true text of Matthew’s gospel, and which differed from the received version in numerous places. Caravaggio was certainly aware of this: the words in the book on Matthew’s lap are written in Hebrew, and he has been careful to ensure that they exactly mirror the sense of the received version approved by the Catholic Church.
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Because Matthew has just started writing his gospel, the painter shows its opening lines: ‘The book of the generations of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.’ Matthew, aided by the angel, is about to finish the next phrase, ‘Abraham begat’, which marks the start of the gospel’s tracing of the lineage of Christ. As the bloodline leading to the salvation of mankind is announced, Matthew stares in wonder.

According to St Jerome, Matthew was the first of the apostles to write his gospel. By the time Caravaggio painted his picture, this had become part of Catholic tradition. He alludes to it by implication through his emphatic use of chiaroscuro. As the wizened, sunburned figure of Matthew receives the very first divinely inspired Christian text, he is bathed in light. Through him, the whole world will be illuminated. As so often during this phase of his career, Caravaggio defines his own art by contrast with that of Michelangelo. Once more, he has the Sistine Chapel in mind, specifically the vast, sculptural figures of the prophets who sit enthroned at the level of the pendentive arches. Michelangelo’s monumental figures, like Caravaggio’s Matthew, are shown in the spasms of divine revelation, reading or writing the prophecies vouchsafed to them by God. Also like Caravaggio’s Matthew, they are barefoot, and often accompanied by inspiring angelic figures.

But Caravaggio evokes the comparison with Michelangelo’s
prophets
only to offer his own, opposed conception of divine inspiration. His
St Matthew
perfectly reverses all of the properties of the Michelangelesque figure of the prophet. Michelangelo’s prophets are nobly idealized figures, decorously draped, but Caravaggio’s Matthew is an ordinary, imperfect human being in working clothes that leave his arms and legs bare. Michelangelo depicts troubled intellectuals, straining to grasp God’s veiled meanings, but Caravaggio’s sainted peasant is a simple man stunned by the directness of his revelation. Whereas Michelangelo’s prophets sit on carved thrones of marble, Caravaggio’s apostle sits on a simple wooden chair, the same savonarola chair already used for the
Calling of Matthew
and the
Supper at Emmaus
.

Perhaps the most touching aspect of the painting is the intimacy of the relationship between the stooped saint and the tender young angel, whose wings enfold the whole scene in a hushed embrace. The angel is God’s messenger but also the embodiment of Christian love – a love so generous it encompasses even those as ragged and gnarled as the cross-legged, doltish St Matthew. The contrast between the two figures is the contrast between extreme youth and encroaching old age. Frailty is being overcome, an old man is being made young by the teachings of a child, which are the teachings of Christ himself, and the writing of the first word of the first gospel marks the very instant when the Old Testament is being replaced by the New.

Despite or more likely because of its brusque singularity Caravaggio’s picture ‘pleased nobody’, according to Baglione. The
St Matthew
was rejected as soon as it was delivered. Bellori gave the fullest account of events: ‘Here something happened that greatly upset Caravaggio with respect to his reputation. After he had finished the central picture of St Matthew and installed it on the altar, the priests took it down,
saying that the figure with its legs crossed and its feet rudely exposed to
the public had neither decorum nor the appearance of a saint.’
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That was, of course, precisely Caravaggio’s point: Christ and his followers looked a lot more like beggars than cardinals. But the decision of Mathieu Cointrel’s executors – who included François Cointrel, his nephew and heir – was final. Saving Caravaggio’s blushes, Vincenzo Giustiniani took the painting of
St Matthew
for his own collection. According to Bellori, Giustiniani also prevailed on the congregation of San Luigi dei Francesi to allow the painter to try again.

The resulting picture, his second version of
St Matthew and the Angel
, was accepted without demur. It remains on the altar of the chapel. The character of the painting, and indeed the very fact that it was commissioned at all, suggests that those in charge of the commission had few doubts about the painter’s ability. As far as they were concerned, it was merely his taste, and the tenor of his piety, that was suspect: if he was given the right instruction, these could easily be amended.

The second
St Matthew
suggests that Bellori’s account of the reasons for the rejection of the first was correct. Matthew the shockingly illiterate peasant has suddenly been turned into Matthew the dignified, grey-haired sage. This scholar-saint kneels at his desk, quill pen at the ready. He is draped in red robes and has been equipped with an expression of dignified attentiveness. Rather than guiding his uncertain hand, the angel now counts off the verses as he dictates them. The pages of the book are no longer visible, but since the angel has got to the index finger of his left hand – number two, in the gestural rhetoric of the time, since Italians counted the number one with their thumbs – it seems that he has once more got to the start of the second verse, and Abraham’s begetting of Christ’s lineage. The angel’s airborne arrival from behind Matthew closely echoes the composition of Tintoretto’s
Virgin Appearing to St Jerome
, which Caravaggio may have seen in Venice. There is no suggestion of intimacy here. A message is not vouchsafed tenderly as an act of love, but handed down from on high as an emanation of divine authority.

Caravaggio’s second
St Matthew and the Angel
is a much diluted, dutifully toned-down version of his original idea. Matthew’s poverty and humility are not rudely proclaimed, but politely whispered. The most tellingly emphatic of the painter’s several adjustments relate to the apostle’s feet. They are shown in profile rather than thrust towards the viewer, still bare but unlikely to offend anybody.

For the first but not the last time, Caravaggio’s work had been censored. His sin when painting the first
St Matthew
had been to make holy poverty and humility unpalatably real. On this occasion his embarrassment was spared by Vincenzo Giustiniani, but Giustiniani’s purchase of the first
St Matthew
itself created a paradox. A work of art expressly designed to articulate ideals of popular piety, to appeal to the broadest possible audience, had been deemed unsuitable for mass consumption. Instead, the picture had found a home in the collection of a noted connoisseur. The implication was that there was something dangerous, even seditious, about Caravaggio’s emphatically humble vision of the origins of Christianity. In a prominent church, such an intoxicatingly powerful painting might serve as a rallying cry. It might have an influence. Its visual language might help shape the visual language of the Counter-Reformation Catholic Church. But confined to the collection of a rich man, it became something much less potent: an interesting work of art, an experiment in a new style, but altogether too strange and adventurous for anyone but a sophisticate and his friends to appreciate.

LOVE LIVE
V

Vincenzo Giustiniani was a torchbearer for Caravaggio’s intensely ascetic religious art. He had probably helped the painter to win the commission to paint the lateral canvases in the Cerasi Chapel, and if Bellori is to believed it was he who persuaded the executors of Mathieu
Cointrel to allow Caravaggio a second attempt at the
St Matthew
altarpiece for the Contarelli Chapel. Now, probably around the start of 1603, Giustiniani commissioned one of Caravaggio’s most uncompromisingly pauperist depictions of Christ and his disciples,
Doubting Thomas
,
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and when it was finished he displayed it prominently in the huge Palazzo Giustiniani, opposite San Luigi dei Francesi, on Via Crescenzi. Its presence there, in addition to that of the first
St Matthew
, meant that the Giustiniani collection was fast becoming an advertisement for Caravaggio’s new approach to devotional art. Vincenzo Giustiniani must have hoped that with his support the artist would eventually win papal favour, obtain great public commissions and become one of those painters who transform the depiction of Christian belief. Without him, many of Caravaggio’s most remarkable pictures might never have been created.

Doubting Thomas
is a raw picture about the palpable proving of faith. Joachim von Sandrart, impressed by the graphic realism of the work, described it as a picture of ‘Christ, in whose holy wounds, Thomas, in the presence of the other apostles, is putting his finger. By means of good painting and modelling he was able to show on the faces of all those present such an expression of astonishment and naturalness of skin and flesh that in comparison all other pictures seemed to be coloured paper.’
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Sandrart was responding not only to the flesh wound in Christ’s side but also to the wrinkled and wizened skin of Thomas and his companions. Thin and papery with age, perhaps it was this that elicited his thoughts about other pictures looking like
coloured paper. Caravaggio, once the painter of withered autumn fruits, was becoming increasingly the painter of withered human beings, battered by age and poverty.

Like
The Supper at Emmaus
,
Doubting Thomas
was inspired by a legend of the risen Christ. The painter’s source was a passage from the gospel of John:

when the doors were shut where the disciples were assembled for fear of the Jews, came Jesus and stood in the midst, and saith unto them, Peace be with you. And when he had so said, he shewed unto them his hands and his side. Then were the disciples glad, when they saw the Lord . . . But Thomas, one of the twelve, called Didymus, was not with them when Jesus came. The other disciples therefore said unto him, We have seen the Lord. But he said unto them, Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe. And after eight days again his disciples were within, and Thomas with them: then came Jesus, the doors being shut, and stood in the midst, and said, Peace be unto you. Then saith he to Thomas, Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing. And Thomas answered and said unto him, My Lord and my God. Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed’ (John 20:20–29).