Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [123]
There was one notable precedent for the chosen arrangement. In the 1540s, in the Pauline Chapel, next to the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo had painted his last pair of monumental frescoes, a Conversion of St Paul and a Martyrdom of St Peter for Pope Paul III. They are forbiddingly gloomy pictures, part of Michelangelo’s long retreat from ideal beauty. By commissioning Caravaggio to repeat the same juxtaposition of themes in his own burial chapel, Cerasi was implicitly setting him in competition with the ghost of the most celebrated Renaissance artist of all.
To this challenge, the patron added another. In addition to Caravaggio’s lateral panels of Paul and Peter, he commissioned a painted altarpiece for his chapel. The artist chosen was the Bolognese painter Annibale Carracci, who had recently completed the breathtaking cycle of mythological paintings for the ceiling of the Palazzo Farnese. The subject for his new work was to be The Assumption of the Virgin. Carracci and Caravaggio were the two most talented painters in Rome. Cerasi had secured the services of both, beginning what he must have hoped would be a thrilling battle for pre-eminence.
Carracci was the senior of the two, some fifteen years older than Caravaggio. Before starting work, he looked at his rival’s new pictures in the nearby church of the French and probably assumed that Caravaggio would repeat the pattern of his Calling and Martyrdom of St Matthew: making the past seem present, painting from carefully posed models, using intense contrasts of light and shade. During the course of his considerably longer career, Carracci himself had flirted with similar methods and devices. But now his sense of competition pushed him to the opposite extreme.
Painting The Assumption of the Virgin, Carracci reverted to the pure, sweet style of the High Renaissance. He brightened and softened his colours and ruthlessly eliminated any hint of real life. Swathed in drapery the colour of a summer’s sky, arms outspread, an expression of beatific serenity on her perfectly round face, Carracci’s Virgin Mary rises from the tomb like an ecstatic doll. Her feet rest on a cushion of winged cherubim’s heads, while a decorous cast of bearded apostles has been arranged, below her, in various standard poses of politely expressed wonderment. The painting is airless and spaceless, all its figures pushed up to the picture plane as if to a sheet of glass. There is no suggestion of the sacred erupting into the world of the everyday. It is a dream of pure transcendence.
Carracci’s picture is a point-by-point refutation of all Caravaggio’s innovations in the Contarelli Chapel. Harking back to the serenity of Raphael’s middle style, it is an insistently retrograde work of art – a doctrinaire assertion of the importance of disegno, in the sense both of drawing and of idealized composition. But it also anticipates the swooning, aerially propelled visions of the incipient Baroque – the style that in Italy at least would for a time triumph over Caravaggio’s harsh brand of pious naturalism. The Assumption of the Virgin is a reminder of the powerful tides of taste against which Caravaggio was swimming.
Annibale Carracci delivered his work on time, to the approval of Tiberio Cerasi, and it was duly installed on the altar of the chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo. Caravaggio struggled with his own commission. Working on panels of cypress wood, as the contract had stipulated, was very different from his usual practice of working on canvas. Oil paint does not penetrate panel in the same way that it works its way into the weft of a canvas. The resulting surface is more reflective, with more emphatically succulent colours and shadows that do not recede as fully into darkness. According to Baglione, Caravaggio persevered with the two panel pictures, but they ‘were painted in a different style’ and ‘did not please the patron’. Cerasi rejected them and the artist had no choice but to start again, this time in his preferred medium of oil on canvas. His abortive first efforts were sold