Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [108]
In 1599 Fillide Melandroni appears once more in Caravaggio’s art, as St Catherine of Alexandria. The masterpiece of his early career, it is another picture that simmers with violent sexuality. Less shocking than the Judith and Holofernes, but equally striking, it encapsulates the intense and powerfully inverted eroticism with which the Counter-Reformation Church infused the idea of martyrdom. The haloed saint is isolated in a bare, featureless, dark room illuminated by a single light source coming from the left. She kneels on a red damasked cushion and wears splendid robes of purple, to indicate her royal birth. The mood is intimate, suspenseful. She holds the viewer’s gaze.
The saint is alone with the attributes decreed by her legend. A martyr’s palm lies crosswise on the floor at her feet. Beside her is the spiked wheel on which the Roman emperor Maxentius had intended to break her body, painted from an ordinary Roman cartwheel of coarse-grained oak. (A section of it is broken, because God sent a thunderbolt to shatter it before it could be used on the saint.) The actual instrument of her death was a sword. Caravaggio, with the expertise of a swordsman, has furnished Fillide with a weapon appropriate to her sex – a light, thin, perfectly deadly rapier. He did not have such a sword himself, so he borrowed one. The hilt is so intricate that it must have been painted from a real example.
The picture’s subject is a yearning for death so strong that it resembles sexual desire. The saint leans towards the wheel and its vicious spikes of grey steel as if leaning towards a lover. A fold of extraneous drapery has wrapped itself around the longest and darkest of the wheel’s spikes. She caresses the pommel of the sword and runs a finger lovingly along its blood-groove. Death by the sword is her consummation. To be penetrated by its steel is to be married, forever, to Christ. Her face is flushed, her eyes excited.
The composition is austere, the forms monumental, the paint handled with a subtle brilliance. The soft-focus depiction of the muted drapery around the wheel-spike anticipates the work of Velàzquez, and in fact Caravaggio would rarely repeat such levels of virtuosity. But it is not hard to see why some of the artist’s contemporaries might have been troubled by such a picture. Was it really a picture of St Catherine, rapt in the joyful embrace of death? Or was it just a picture of a sexy modern girl, with some studio props, alone in a room? In truth, it was both. Caravaggio’s technique opened his art to ambiguity because it exposed the painter himself directly to reality. His responses inevitably coloured every image that he created, whatever its mythical construction might be. Caravaggio could turn Fillide into Mary Magdalen, into Judith, into St Catherine, but the transformation could never be absolute. After all, it was Fillide that he saw in the room, Fillide with her damaged hand, breathing softly and looking back at him, with her wide appraising eyes, as she tried to hold the pose.
By the end of the 1590s Caravaggio had invented a new style and a new approach to painting, and in the three pictures for which Fillide posed he arrived at something like a fixed, settled method. In some early works he had used a light ground, like other painters from Lombardy. But in these later paintings he used a dark ground and worked from dark to light, a technique that he may have seen for the first time in the art of Tintoretto. It suited him in a number of ways. A dark ground enabled him to focus only