Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [132]
Whereas Michelangelo’s nudes collectively represent a languorously beautiful ideal, an imaginary museum of male beauty raised up to the vault of heaven, Caravaggio has clearly painted a picture of a real, flesh-and-blood boy. The fact that the model has been posed just like an ignudo emphasizes the gulf between Michelangelo’s idealizing aesthetic and Caravaggio’s countervailing realism. The flesh of Michelangelo’s nudes is chiselled, marmoreally perfect. Caravaggio’s adolescent saint is slight and skinny. His ribcage shows through the light-dappled flesh of his side and there is dirt under his toenails. He is an ignudo brought down to earth, but not in a spirit of homage. The echo is there to assert Caravaggio’s difference, to make it unavoidable.
Caravaggio has also reversed the sense of Michelangelo’s nudes in the act of appropriating their form. Those who have seen the Capitoline St John as a daringly sexy depiction of a Christian saint, laughing provocatively as he turns to face the viewer, miss the point of the picture entirely. The truth is that Caravaggio has taken Michelangelo’s notoriously pagan imagery, a classically phrased compliment paid to a pope, and fully reclaimed it for Christianity. His ignudo is no sleepy, sensual emblem of a vanished golden age, but an ecstatic prophet bathed in the light of divine revelation. The naked, rejoicing boy embraces the animal by his side because it has been sent to him by God to show him what will come to pass. He sees in it the destiny of Christ the saviour, with whose fate his own is intertwined, and whom he will one day baptize.
The painter’s decision to give the animal horns is unusual, but underscores the significance of the scene. It recalls the image of a sacrificial ram, and may also have been inspired by a detail of the Sistine Chapel ceiling: only a few feet from the ignudo whose pose is closest to that of Caravaggio’s St John, Michelangelo had painted a ram being prepared for slaughter in The Sacrifice of Moses. Those who have misinterpreted Caravaggio’s picture as an image of Isaac delivered from sacrifice are in one way simply overreacting to a genuine element of the painter’s intended meaning. He meant to emphasize the idea of sacrifice by giving the sheep horns, but the sacrifice he had in mind was not that of Isaac but of Christ himself.
In the upper-right-hand corner, barely visible in the shadows, a small detail clarifies the picture’s iconography: the foliage of a vine, symbolizing grapes and the wine of the Eucharist. The sacrificial sheep and the vineleaves are the outward signs of the saint’s inner contemplation. In his mind’s eye, he is looking into the future, seeing Christ’s blessed death and the salvation of mankind. That is the reason for the smile on his face. It is the beatific smile of a mystic, a seer.
The last of the three pictures commissioned from Caravaggio by Ciriaco Mattei was The Betrayal of Christ. It was paid for on 2 January 1603, and probably painted just a few weeks or months before. The picture has had an eventful history. It remained in the Palazzo Mattei in Rome for nearly two centuries, after which it disappeared into the obscurity of a Scottish private collection. In 1990 it was rediscovered in the possession of the Irish Jesuit Fathers of the house of St Ignatius in Dublin, who placed it on indefinite loan to the National Gallery of Ireland.
The story of Christ’s betrayal by Judas is told in all