Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [127]
But for the noble Titianesque head of the victim, the rest is a study in the raising of a heavy weight without the aid of machinery. Of the chief performers, the one who acts as crane and the other as booster, we see the back of one and the buttocks of the other. We do not see their faces. No need. They are mere mechanisms. Hard to conceive a more dehumanized treatment of the subject. No doubt the arrangement of the four figures as crossed diagonals taking up the entire canvas was a happy thought …27
The executioners were certainly intended to shock. The presence of these coarsely posed, unmistakably low-brow figures underscored Caravaggio’s total rejection of High Renaissance and Mannerist elegance. This is all the more apparent in the Cerasi Chapel, where Annibale Carracci’s large and centrally placed altarpiece perfectly embodies the traditions to which Caravaggio’s work is so brutally opposed. Carracci had sought to pre-empt his rival by creating a work designed to reassert the values of idealized beauty, splendid colour and lofty transcendence. In doing so, he may have hoped to sow seeds of self-doubt in Caravaggio’s mind. But the younger painter was only spurred on to a more blatant statement of his own, very different priorities. In place of Carracci’s emotionless splendour of effect he offered up his own spare, low-toned, militantly ‘poor’ art. Carracci had used rich colours, colours that literally embodied wealth and magnificence, like the celestial blue of the Madonna’s cloak, painted in the costly medium of ultramarine. In stark contrast, Caravaggio kept rigorously to a palette of humble, ordinary, cheap colours: the earth colours, ochre and umber, carbon black, lead white, verdigris. The use of costly ultramarine was actually specified by Cerasi, who doubtless wanted posterity to know that no expense had been spared. But Caravaggio used the colour in such a way as to reject its rich associations. The dying Peter’s robe, lying in a heap in the bottom corner of the Martyrdom, has been painted in murkily shadowed ultramarine. As Bellori noted, Caravaggio avoided more brilliant vermilions and blues, and even when he did use them generally ‘toned them down’.28
The lives of Christ and his followers were neither rich nor splendid. Their deaths were brutal. Caravaggio insists on these home truths in every detail of the Cerasi Chapel paintings, whether it be the glint of the crouching executioner’s spade or the black dirt so deeply ingrained in the upturned heel and ball of his left foot. Like Carlo Borromeo preaching in rags, the art of Caravaggio expressed an aggressively harsh piety. With The Conversion of St Paul and The Crucifixion of St Peter, he took his uncompromisingly severe style of painting to an ascetic extreme. As a parting gesture to his rival, as if to stress the depth of his disdain for Carracci’s brand of vapid magnificence, Caravaggio contrived a cunning insult: the rump of St Paul’s proletarian carthorse is pointedly turned towards Carracci’s Assumption of the Virgin.
IN THE HOUSE OF THE MATTEI
Caravaggio finished his two lateral paintings for the Cerasi Chapel towards the end of 1601. Earlier in the year he had left the household of Cardinal del Monte to accept the hospitality of another powerful figure in the Roman Curia, Cardinal Girolamo Mattei.
The Mattei were powerful. They lived in a honeycomb complex of houses and palaces built over the ruins of the ancient Roman Teatro di Balbo, in the heavily populated district of Sant’Angelo, between the Tiber and the Campidoglio. The adjoining residences of the various branches of the family formed an entire block, known as the Isola dei Mattei. At its centre, looking out across the Piazza Mattei, was the massive Palazzo Mattei, home to Cardinal Girolamo.
Caravaggio moved there some time before 14 June 1601, when he gave his address on agreeing a contract for an altarpiece of