Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [135]
Caravaggio knew very well that studio lighting, the trick for which he was fast becoming famous, can only ever be a device. What counts is what is done with it. The dim paper lantern in Caravaggio’s hand may indeed be the emblem of his method. But its ineffectiveness is significant. The painter brings light to the scene, but in a symbolic rather than a literal sense. The real light-source is his imagination.
DIRTY FEET
Caravaggio was increasingly well known in Rome – the volatile, aggressive painter with the lightning-strike style, who made stories from the Bible look as though they were taking place right here, right now. He was also becoming famous as the painter of feet: the overlapped feet of Joseph, feeling the chill during the flight to Egypt; Christ’s bare feet, on the stone flags of Matthew’s counting house; the nail-pierced feet of St Peter and the dirt-ingrained feet of his coldly indifferent executioner.
Feet were controversial. Here is a passage from a book about the Christian saints and martyrs, written by the theologian Niccolò Lorini del Monte in the second decade of the seventeenth century:
In sum, feet may be taken by the holy Church as symbolising the poor and humble. In addition to the authority of the Holy Fathers, there are also fundamental reasons [for this], because the poor may be called the feet of the Church, and to caress the feet is to caress the poor of Christ. Because if the feet are the last and most lowly part of the human body, the poor and humble are the last part, and those who hold the last place in the Church. The poor carry the heaviest burdens of the world. They are exposed to all the blows, bumps and knocks … And if the feet are a member [of the body], then nude and uncovered they lack rosiness, and it is not a shameful thing to discover them: the poor servants of Christ were not guilty and had nothing of which to be ashamed … But yet, as they are vile the poor may be humiliated; nevertheless, God has honoured them so much that he has willed the greatest Heroes of the world serve them, and caress them, and fatten them up with servitude and earthly sustenance.38
Lorini’s paean to feet was part of a discussion of the life of a popular thirteenth-century saint, Elizabeth of Hungary. The daughter of a king, she was famous for receiving the poor into the apartments of her palace, where she fed them, dressed their wounds and washed their feet as Christ himself had washed the feet of his disciples. Francis of Assisi, whose followers called him alter Christus, ‘another Christ’, had also abased himself at the feet of the poor and needy. In Caravaggio’s time wealthy members of certain religious confraternities emulated such venerable examples – clothing, feeding and washing the feet of poor pilgrims coming to Rome. To do so was quite literally to embrace humility, to lower the proud self to the ground in emulation of Christ. The Latin root of humilitas is the word humus, meaning ‘ground’. The word ‘humble’ is part of the same linguistic family. To honour the foot is to honour the lowest part of the human body, and implicitly to humble the self in the sight of God.
When Caravaggio painted the saints and martyrs with bare feet, he was firmly allying himself with the pauperist wing of the Catholic Church. Not only was he explicitly welcoming the poor into his pictures, making them feel part of the same impoverished family as that of Christ and his followers, he was also implicitly calling on the rich to follow the example of those such