Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [129]
Meanwhile the two disciples are frozen in the throes of astonished, dawning recognition. One has his back to us. As he prepares to lever himself upright, his hands are braced on the arms of the same savonarola chair that Caravaggio had used in The Calling of St Matthew. At the point of his bony elbow, there is a small rent in his rough green tunic, through which his white undershirt shows. The other disciple, who wears a pilgrim’s shell on his mantle, spreads his arms as wide as he can, measuring the extent of his amazement like an angler demonstrating the size of a fish that got away. His gesture also mirrors the Crucifixion, as if to shape the question springing to his mind. How is it possible that a man whom he so recently saw nailed to the cross, a bleeding corpse, should live and breathe and speak once more?
The hands of Christ and the wondering apostle seem to reach out of the painting, through the membrane that separates illusion from reality. The effect is worked through skilful foreshortenings of perspective. The apostle’s outspread arms plot the whole depth of the picture. His right hand, half lost in the darkness, seems blurred by movement. His other hand, so close to the picture plane as to seem almost touchable, is sharply in focus. From the tip of Christ’s thumb, back along the dappled sleeve of his red shirt to his shoulder, his arm is a piece of art that measures distance, in graded lights and darks, with such illusory precision that it is almost impossible to look at the painting and believe it truly flat.
Yet Caravaggio’s intense realism is also, on this occasion, shot through with a strong sense of the uncanny. It is as if the painter has asked himself a series of direct, straightforward questions about the story that he was given to depict. What happens to the world when a miracle takes place? How might it be possible to tell, should the risen Christ suddenly come among us? What do things actually look like at such moments? The Supper at Emmaus contains Caravaggio’s answers to those questions.
The idea that divine visitations are inevitably accompanied by thunderclaps and clouds of angels is dismissed as naive and childish. Caravaggio, himself so keen-eyed and attentive to every last nuance of visual experience, imagines the process to be subtler than that. God is light, so he announces his presence among men in the elusive forms of a shadowplay. The innkeeper cannot see it, but by standing where he does he casts a shadow on the wall that gives Christ a dark but unmistakable halo. Below, a basket of fruit is balanced precariously on the leading edge of the table. It is the same basket that Caravaggio had painted for Federico Borromeo, and its contents are nearly the same too – a worm-eaten apple, a pomegranate and fig, withered grapes and trailing vine leaves, embodying decay but also symbolizing the hope of Christian redemption. The fruit and the teetering basket cast a second meaningful shadow, this one shaped like the tail of a fish, the ancient mnemonic sign for Christ used by his earliest followers. Caravaggio’s painting suggests that those who would prefer to be saved, rather than damned, might do well to pay attention to such details. Even those in the presence of a miracle might easily miss it.
Bellori unwisely chose to single out The Supper at Emmaus as an example of the painter’s thoughtless literalism and lack of decorum: ‘in addition to the vulgar conception of the two Apostles and of the Lord who is shown young and without a beard, the innkeeper wears a cap, and on the table is a dish of grapes, figs and pomegranates out of season. Just as certain herbs produce both beneficial medicine and most pernicious