Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [138]
The second St Matthew suggests that Bellori’s account of the reasons for the rejection of the first was correct. Matthew the shockingly illiterate peasant has suddenly been turned into Matthew the dignified, grey-haired sage. This scholar-saint kneels at his desk, quill pen at the ready. He is draped in red robes and has been equipped with an expression of dignified attentiveness. Rather than guiding his uncertain hand, the angel now counts off the verses as he dictates them. The pages of the book are no longer visible, but since the angel has got to the index finger of his left hand – number two, in the gestural rhetoric of the time, since Italians counted the number one with their thumbs – it seems that he has once more got to the start of the second verse, and Abraham’s begetting of Christ’s lineage. The angel’s airborne arrival from behind Matthew closely echoes the composition of Tintoretto’s Virgin Appearing to St Jerome, which Caravaggio may have seen in Venice. There is no suggestion of intimacy here. A message is not vouchsafed tenderly as an act of love, but handed down from on high as an emanation of divine authority.
Caravaggio’s second St Matthew and the Angel is a much diluted, dutifully toned-down version of his original idea. Matthew’s poverty and humility are not rudely proclaimed, but politely whispered. The most tellingly emphatic of the painter’s several adjustments relate to the apostle’s feet. They are shown in profile rather than thrust towards the viewer, still bare but unlikely to offend anybody.
For the first but not the last time, Caravaggio’s work had been censored. His sin when painting the first St Matthew had been to make holy poverty and humility unpalatably real. On this occasion his embarrassment was spared by Vincenzo Giustiniani, but Giustiniani’s purchase of the first St Matthew itself created a paradox. A work of art expressly designed to articulate ideals of popular piety, to appeal to the broadest possible audience, had been deemed unsuitable for mass consumption. Instead, the picture had found a home in the collection of a noted connoisseur. The implication was that there was something dangerous, even seditious, about Caravaggio’s emphatically humble vision of the origins of Christianity. In a prominent church, such an intoxicatingly powerful painting might serve as a rallying cry. It might have an influence. Its visual language might help shape the visual language of the Counter-Reformation Catholic Church. But confined to the collection of a rich man, it became something much less potent: an interesting work of art, an experiment in a new style, but altogether too strange and adventurous for anyone but a sophisticate and his friends to appreciate.
LONG LIVE V
Vincenzo Giustiniani was a torchbearer for Caravaggio’s intensely ascetic religious art. He had probably helped the painter to win the commission to paint the lateral canvases in the Cerasi Chapel, and if Bellori is to believed it was he who persuaded the executors of Mathieu Cointrel to allow Caravaggio a second attempt at the St Matthew altarpiece for the Contarelli Chapel. Now, probably around the start of 1603, Giustiniani commissioned one of Caravaggio’s most uncompromisingly pauperist depictions of Christ and his disciples, Doubting Thomas,42 and when it was finished he displayed it prominently in the huge Palazzo Giustiniani, opposite San Luigi dei Francesi, on Via Crescenzi. Its presence there, in addition to that of the first St Matthew, meant that the Giustiniani collection was fast becoming an advertisement for Caravaggio’s new approach to devotional art. Vincenzo Giustiniani must have hoped that with his support the artist would eventually win papal favour, obtain great public commissions and become one of those painters who transform the depiction of Christian belief. Without him, many of Caravaggio’s most remarkable pictures might never have been created.
Doubting Thomas is a raw picture