Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [116]
Conversion and baptism were themes highly appropriate to the national church of the French, whose own king had himself been so recently converted to Catholicism. The setting of Caravaggio’s painting is a baptismal chapel, with steps leading down from the altar to a lustral pool, around the edges of which the naked converts have gathered. The significance of the painting’s architecture was long unrecognized, for the simple reason that hardly any such baptismal chapels have survived. But they were once a common sight in Italian churches, especially in the north. In Rome, where baptism by aspersion was the general practice, stepped pools were not necessary. But in Milan, where they practised the Ambrosian rite of baptism by full bodily immersion, such chapels contained a deep pool at the base of the altar. The liturgically precise Archbishop of Milan, Carlo Borromeo, writing in his Instructiones fabricae et supellectilis ecclesiasticae, described an arrangement that closely corresponds to the setting of The Martyrdom of St Matthew: ‘a baptistery should be in the centre of the chapel. It should be eleven cubits wide and deep enough so that the descent to it from the floor of the chapel consists of at least three steps. By the descent and moderate depth it should resemble a sepulchre.’8 It seems that Caravaggio painted the kind of baptismal chapel that he remembered from his childhood in Milan.
Borromeo’s instruction that the baptistry should resemble a sepulchre reflects the Christian belief that baptism and death are closely connected: to be baptized is to enter a new life in Christ, and to die is also to embark on the journey to a new existence – eternal life among the blessed. Baptism and death by martyrdom were even more intimately linked in Christian theology, in part because of the belief that the wound in Christ’s side had flowed with water as well as blood during the Crucifixion. The early Church father, Tertullian, commented that this was ‘to make us, in like manner, called by water, chosen by blood. These two baptisms He sent out from the wound of his pierced side in order that they who believed in his blood might be bathed with the water; they who had been bathed in the water might likewise drink the blood.’9
These ideas are woven together in The Martyrdom of St Matthew. The artist has imagined Matthew, missionary to the heathen, being murdered in the very act of conducting Mass during the sacrament of baptism. As he dies his blood flows into the baptismal pool. In this detail, murder is sanctified to a holy rite. The saint’s death is a baptism of blood, a rebirth into immortality. Above, invisible both to the assassin and to the saint’s shocked congregation, an angel perched on a heavy outcrop of cloud descends to thrust the palm of martyrdom into Matthew’s open right hand.
Caravaggio’s hard-won solution to the challenge of the picture combined theological subtlety with dramatic immediacy and narrative plausibility. The murderer, all but naked like the circle of converts awaiting baptism, has sprung up from their midst. He turns out to have been a pagan in disguise, lurking among the ranks of the faithful.
The principal visual inspiration for The Martyrdom of St Matthew is often said to have been Titian’s famous St Peter Martyr, which had been painted for an altar in the Venetian church of SS Giovanni e Paolo.10 That work must have been in Caravaggio’s mind as he