Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [117]
Caravaggio’s self-portrait as one of the fleeing onlookers in the Martyrdom is partly a kind of signature, in line with well-established Renaissance convention. A hundred years earlier Luca Signorelli had included himself as a solemn witness at the end of the world, in his fresco cycle of scenes from the Book of Revelation in Orvieto Cathedral. Caravaggio too is a witness. Including himself in the scene may have been his way of proclaiming that he really did see it all unfold, just like this, in his mind’s eye. But there is perhaps more to it: he is not only an observer, but also a participant, a furtive accessory to the dreadful act. Like the converts in the foreground of the painting, he has stripped naked to be baptized; unlike them, he has gathered his blanket around him and taken to his heels. The self-portrait, in this instance, reads like a mea culpa. If Caravaggio had actually been there, he suggests, he would have had no more courage than anyone else. He would have fled like the others, leaving the martyr to his fate. According to the logic of his own narrative, he remains unbaptized and therefore outside the circle of the blessed. He is a man running away, out of the church and into the street.
A BACK-STABBING, AND OTHER MISADVENTURES
On 4 July 1600 the painter received a final payment of 50 scudi for The Calling and The Martyrdom of St Matthew. The two pictures were complete by that date, but may not have been set into the walls of the chapel until the autumn. Only in December did the carpenter employed to do the work submit his bill:
for lining the two pictures which are on either side of the chapel of Cardinal Contarelli, which are both 14½ palms broad and 15 palms long; for fixing the laths in the wall so that the boards may be nailed, for putting three [laths] for each picture … and for dividing the fir-wood boards, by 50, all my own material – it amounts to 20 scudi 20 baiocchi. For making the frames of the said pictures of my own white-poplar timber – it amounts to 20 scudi and 20 baiocchi.11
The pictures for the Contarelli Chapel were compellingly original public works of art. At a stroke they brought Caravaggio’s new style of painting to a much broader public. His matchless sense of drama and his use of extreme contrasts of light and dark would prove intoxicatingly influential. The painting of such seventeenth-century masters as Rembrandt in Holland, Georges de La Tour in France, Ribera in Spain, even the work of much later Romantic artists such as Géricault and Delacroix, all are inconceivable without the pictorial revolution first unleashed by Caravaggio in his two pictures of scenes from the life of St Matthew. It is no exaggeration to say that they decisively changed the tradition of European art. But in their own time, they were controversial.
Caravaggio’s rival, imitator and future biographer Giovanni Baglione went to see the pictures as soon as they were installed. His account of the visit conveys the impact of Caravaggio’s work on those who first saw it. But it also hints at the jealousies aroused by the sudden rise to fame of a previously little-known painter from Lombardy. Baglione went to see the pictures with Federico Zuccaro, the president of Rome’s art academy, the Accademia di San Luca. Sixty years old, Zuccaro was an éminence grise who aspired to the mantle of Michelangelo while painting late Mannerist monstrosities.12 He claimed to be unimpressed by Caravaggio’s work, as