Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [112]
It was a daunting challenge for a young and relatively inexperienced artist. So far Caravaggio had never painted a picture with more than four figures in it. None of his previous canvases had been more than four or five feet across. Suddenly, he would have to produce two monumental paintings, each more than ten feet in width and almost the same in height. He had, it is true, painted a number of devotional pictures, but he was known principally as a painter of genre scenes with a talent for still life. Now he was being invited to create complex religious narrative paintings. It was a chance to compete with the greatest artists of the past. But if it went wrong, Caravaggio’s failure would also be very public.
The subjects of the two lateral pictures for the Contarelli Chapel had been prescribed by Cardinal Cointrel himself. He had wanted his burial chapel to be dedicated to St Matthew, his name saint, and so the two pictures on either side of the altar were to tell stories from the apostle’s life. The painting on the left was to show Matthew, the tax collector, being summoned by Christ. That on the right was to show the saint’s glorious martyrdom at the hands of a pagan assassin. Cointrel had also had very particular ideas about how these scenes might be depicted, which are reflected in the unusually circumstantial wording of an attachment to one of the contracts for the painting of the chapel:
For the St Matthew Chapel … At the right side of the altar, that is, on the side of the gospel, there is to be a painting 17 palmi high and 14 palmi long in which is painted the same St Matthew in a store or large room used for tax collection with various items pertaining to such an office, with a counter such as tax collectors use, with books, and monies that have been received, or as shall seem best. From this counter St Matthew, dressed as a practitioner of his trade would be, should rise in order to follow Our Lord who passes along the street with his disciples and calls him to the apostolate; and the attitude of St Matthew should show the painter’s skill, as should also the rest. On the left side, that is, of the epistle, there should be another painting of the same height and length as above in which is painted a long wide space in the form of a temple, with an altar raised up on the top of three, four, or five steps: where St Matthew dressed in vestments to celebrate the mass is killed by the hands of soldiers and it might be more artistic to show the moment of being killed, where he is wounded and already fallen, or falling but not yet dead, while in the temple there are many men, women, young and old people, and children, mostly in different attitudes of prayer, and dressed according to their station and nobility, and benches, carpets, and other furnishings, most of them terrified by the event, others appalled, and still others filled with compassion.2
The level of detail in these instructions shows how carefully painters had to tread in Rome at the end of the sixteenth century. In the event Caravaggio took artistic licence, but he remained faithful to the spirit of the patron’s recommendations. None of the documentary sources specifies the medium in which the works were to be carried out, although such was the pre-eminence of fresco in the traditions of Rome’s Christian art that its use was probably assumed. But frescoes must be painted in situ, the pigment applied directly to a fast-drying layer of wet plaster. The technique would have required Caravaggio to depart from his studio practice – the painting