Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [131]
The picture is so unconventional that even its very subject has been called into question. As early as 1620 the author of a guidebook to the Mattei collection gave the work a mythological title, referring to it as a Pastor Friso, which identified the naked young man as a pagan shepherd.32 A number of subsequent scholars have taken that attribution seriously. Others have argued that Caravaggio intended to depict the biblical Isaac, son of Abraham, stripped for sacrifice and rejoicing after his sudden stay of execution.33 None of these hypotheses has much merit. Ciriaco Mattei presented the picture to his son, Giovanni Battista Mattei, whose name saint it certainly depicts and for whom it was almost certainly intended from the outset. An inventory of his possessions drawn up in 1616 refers to ‘A painting of San Gio: Battista with his Lamb by the hand of Caravaggio’,34 and it is safe to assume that the picture’s owner knew its true subject. When Giovanni Battista made his will, seven years later, he gave instructions that the painting ‘of St John the Baptist by Caravaggio’35 be left to none other than Cardinal Francesco del Monte. This implies that the Mattei family felt an abiding sense of obligation to del Monte for releasing Caravaggio into their service.
Although its subject is easily established, the work is still intriguingly unusual. Why did Caravaggio paint John the Baptist in this strange, splay-legged pose? Why is the figure smiling so enigmatically? Why, above all, is he nude? Part of the answer to those questions lies in the art of the immediate past.
During the early years of the seventeenth century, when Caravaggio was forging his style and making his reputation, he gave a great deal of thought to the works of Michelangelo. He had been born just seven years after the death of ‘the divine Michelangelo’, as Vasari had called him. Like every ambitious painter of his generation, he would have regarded Michelangelo’s works as a summit of excellence. And as if to force such comparisons upon him, Michelangelo also happened to be his own namesake. Caravaggio had already been invited to compete with the older artist by the choice of subjects for the Cerasi Chapel. In that case, he had asserted his independence from his predecessor by reconceiving his two canonically Michelangelesque themes in a radically un-Michelangelesque manner. But in other works of the period, he complicated the game of rivalry and homage. The Supper at Emmaus, with its Michelangelesque Christ, is just one of several instances. The Capitoline St John the Baptist is another.
The picture is a variation on the theme of Michelangelo’s ignudi, the idealized male nudes which frame the nine great narrative paintings telling stories from the Book of Genesis on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Michelangelo’s male nudes are the only non-Christian elements in the whole of his scheme. They had been included as a compliment to Pope Julius II, who commissioned him to paint the ceiling: they bear festoons of oak leaves and acorns, emblems of the pope’s family name, della Rovere. Collectively, they symbolize the idea of a golden age described in the writings of antiquity, the conceit behind them being that the reign of Julius amounted to another such blessed period in the lives of men. But by the second half of the sixteenth century the ignudi had become controversial. Their nudity was deemed unbecoming, their pagan symbolism judged suspect, and a painter called Daniele da Volterra was hired to fig-leaf their genitalia.
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