Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [137]
According to St Jerome, Matthew was the first of the apostles to write his gospel. By the time Caravaggio painted his picture, this had become part of Catholic tradition. He alludes to it by implication through his emphatic use of chiaroscuro. As the wizened, sunburned figure of Matthew receives the very first divinely inspired Christian text, he is bathed in light. Through him, the whole world will be illuminated. As so often during this phase of his career, Caravaggio defines his own art by contrast with that of Michelangelo. Once more, he has the Sistine Chapel in mind, specifically the vast, sculptural figures of the prophets who sit enthroned at the level of the pendentive arches. Michelangelo’s monumental figures, like Caravaggio’s Matthew, are shown in the spasms of divine revelation, reading or writing the prophecies vouchsafed to them by God. Also like Caravaggio’s Matthew, they are barefoot, and often accompanied by inspiring angelic figures.
But Caravaggio evokes the comparison with Michelangelo’s prophets only to offer his own, opposed conception of divine inspiration. His St Matthew perfectly reverses all of the properties of the Michelangelesque figure of the prophet. Michelangelo’s prophets are nobly idealized figures, decorously draped, but Caravaggio’s Matthew is an ordinary, imperfect human being in working clothes that leave his arms and legs bare. Michelangelo depicts troubled intellectuals, straining to grasp God’s veiled meanings, but Caravaggio’s sainted peasant is a simple man stunned by the directness of his revelation. Whereas Michelangelo’s prophets sit on carved thrones of marble, Caravaggio’s apostle sits on a simple wooden chair, the same savonarola chair already used for the Calling of Matthew and the Supper at Emmaus.
Perhaps the most touching aspect of the painting is the intimacy of the relationship between the stooped saint and the tender young angel, whose wings enfold the whole scene in a hushed embrace. The angel is God’s messenger but also the embodiment of Christian love – a love so generous it encompasses even those as ragged and gnarled as the cross-legged, doltish St Matthew. The contrast between the two figures is the contrast between extreme youth and encroaching old age. Frailty is being overcome, an old man is being made young by the teachings of a child, which are the teachings of Christ himself, and the writing of the first word of the first gospel marks the very instant when the Old Testament is being replaced by the New.
Despite or more likely because of its brusque singularity Caravaggio’s picture ‘pleased nobody’, according to Baglione. The St Matthew was rejected as soon as it was delivered. Bellori gave the fullest account of events: ‘Here something happened that greatly upset Caravaggio with respect to his reputation. After he had finished the central picture of St Matthew and installed it on the altar, the priests took it down, saying that the figure with its legs crossed and its feet rudely exposed to the public had neither decorum nor the appearance of a saint.’41 That was, of course, precisely Caravaggio’s point: Christ and his followers looked a lot more like beggars than cardinals. But the decision of Mathieu Cointrel’s executors – who included François Cointrel, his nephew and heir – was final. Saving Caravaggio’s blushes, Vincenzo Giustiniani took the painting of St Matthew for his own collection. According to Bellori, Giustiniani also prevailed on the congregation of San Luigi dei Francesi to allow the painter to try again.
The resulting picture, his second version of St Matthew and the Angel, was accepted without demur. It remains on the altar of the chapel. The character of the painting, and indeed the very fact that it was commissioned at all, suggests that those in charge of the commission had few doubts about the painter’s ability. As far as they were concerned, it was merely his