Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [130]
Bellori’s misreading of The Supper at Emmaus does at least have the virtue of highlighting some of the picture’s most effective devices. The writer found his eye drawn to Caravaggio’s wicker basket of fruit, so beautifully painted, only to complain that the fruits within were ‘unseasonal’. He clearly felt they should have been the fruits of Easter, the time of Christ’s crucifixion. Guilty of the very literalism for which he blamed Caravaggio, Bellori was oblivious to the symbolic meanings concealed within the basket of fruit, and completely blind to the significant shape of its shadow.
He was also perturbed by the disrespectful figure of the innkeeper, who wears his cap in the presence of Christ. But this is no mere oversight, or vulgar lapse, on the part of the painter; it is a detail essential to his telling of the story. The innkeeper fails to doff his cap because he does not realize whom he serves. He remains in darkness, even though a miracle is taking place before his eyes. In Caravaggio’s interpretation, the story of the meal at Emmaus becomes a parable about those who see and those who do not.
Bellori disliked the evident poverty of the two disciples and can almost be heard tut-tutting over that prominent torn sleeve. More telling is his other complaint, about Caravaggio’s depiction of Christ as ‘young and without a beard’. The painter’s decision to depart from the traditional image of a solemn, bearded Christ – such as he had recently painted in The Calling of St Matthew – was certainly unusual. But once again, it is essential to his understanding of the story as a tale of hard-won recognition.
The principal source for the story of the Supper at Emmaus is the gospel of Luke, Chapter 24, but there is also a fleeting reference to it in Chapter 16 of the gospel of Mark: ‘After that he appeared in another form unto two of them, as they walked, and went into the country.’ Caravaggio seized on the three words, ‘in another form’. They are the only explanation given in the Bible for the apostles’ failure to recognize Christ. Risen from the dead, he took on a different physical appearance. It seems that Caravaggio’s inspiration for the picture’s main idea – the idea of an unobvious miracle, a miracle that men must struggle to see – had its origins in a careful reading of the Bible.31
Back in the 1540s Michelangelo had placed a similarly controversial, young and beardless Christ at the centre of his Last Judgement, on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel. The image was meant to evoke the early traditions of Christian Rome, where Christ had often been depicted in the guise of the sun god, Apollo. There are strong echoes of Michelangelo’s Apollonian Christ, judging all mankind at the end of the world, in Caravaggio’s own figure of Christ in The Supper at Emmaus. In the fresco of The Last Judgement, Christ’s left arm is turned against the seething mass of the damned, while with his right he beckons the blessed up into heaven. Caravaggio appropriated those same gestures, adapting them with surprisingly little modification for his own figure’s act of blessing the bread. It is another formal echo charged with spiritual meaning. Christ’s appearance to his two disciples at Emmaus prefigures his final appearance to the whole human race on the day of judgement.
Two more payments were made to Caravaggio by Ciriaco Mattei in 1602, one in July, the other in December. These were for a painting which has been plausibly identified with the St John the Baptist now in the Capitoline Museum in Rome. Once again, Caravaggio treated his appointed subject in an unusual and idiosyncratic way. The saint, who is shown during