Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [136]
The painter was kept busy by other commissions as well as by the demands of the Mattei family during the first three years of the century. Early in 1602, several months before painting The Betrayal of Christ, he had learned that he was required once more at the church of San Luigi dei Francesi. Although more than a year had passed since Caravaggio had finished the lateral canvases for the Contarelli Chapel, the completion of the whole decorative scheme had been delayed by the prevarications of Jacob Cobaert. At the end of January 1602 the tardy Flemish sculptor finally delivered his marble altarpiece of Matthew and the angel, still partially incomplete. It was instantly rejected by the increasingly irritable and fractious coalition of Mathieu Cointrel’s executors.39 Just eight days later Caravaggio was asked to replace the sculpted altarpiece with a painting of the same subject. Matthew was to be shown writing his gospel. The contract specified that he must be depicted taking dictation from an angel; those were the only figures required. It was a clear brief, but its execution would prove to be far from straightforward and Caravaggio would end up having to paint two versions of the picture. The root of the problem would be his depiction of the saint’s feet.
Caravaggio’s first Matthew and the Angel for the Contarelli Chapel eventually passed to the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum in Berlin. Like the lost portrait of Fillide, it was destroyed by fire during the Second World War, but a record of its appearance is preserved in black-and-white photographs. Possibly because he knew that his picture was replacing a marble altarpiece, the painter created a powerfully sculptural composition. Matthew and his attendant angel, a tender winged boy who guides the saint’s writing hand, form a single monumental group. The evangelist sits with his body twisted effortfully around the great book in his lap. His shoulders are hunched, his neck arched forward so that he can peer at the text. The gleaming white pages of the book and the dark jerkin that he wears obscure and interrupt much of his anatomy. His body is reduced to its component elements: balding, bearded head on a bull neck; gnarled hands and forearm; bare legs and heavy feet; toes thrust almost into the viewer’s face. This Matthew is an aggressively inelegant, proletarian figure, conceived along the lines of St Peter in the Cerasi Chapel and very different from the pale-skinned tax-gatherer or the heroic fallen priest depicted in Caravaggio’s earlier pictures for the chapel. The suggestion is that he is both writing and reading for the first time, like a peasant made suddenly and miraculously literate.
The gospel of Matthew was at the centre of a controversy between Catholics and Protestants. In the fourth century, St Jerome had asserted that Matthew wrote in Hebrew. But at the start of the sixteenth century the humanist author Erasmus had questioned whether the received version had really been translated from a Hebrew original. This raised the possibility that the biblical book of Matthew was based on a later, corrupt version of the text – posing a grave threat to the authority of the Church itself. In 1537 a Protestant Hebraist named Sebastian Munster published his own translation of a Jewish manuscript that he claimed was the true text of Matthew’s gospel, and which differed from the received version in numerous places. Caravaggio was certainly aware of this: the words in the book on Matthew’s lap are written in Hebrew, and he has been careful to ensure that they exactly mirror the sense of the received version approved by the Catholic Church.40
Because Matthew has just started writing his gospel, the painter shows its opening lines: ‘The book of the generations of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.’ Matthew, aided by the angel, is about to finish the next phrase, ‘Abraham