Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [142]
This tradition was still alive in Caravaggio’s time, although by then it had mutated into yet more spectacular forms – none more so than the mythological-erotic ceiling painted by Annibale Carracci for the ceiling of the Farnese Palace between 1597 and 1601. A deliberately pagan parody of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, Carracci’s Farnese decorations constitute a vast panorama of the loves of the gods, a comical riot of the sexual indiscretions of Jupiter, Juno and a veritable horde of other, amorously inflamed deities. The overarching theme of the ceiling is Omnia vincit amor. The work was painted, just like the wedding chests of Tuscan tradition, just like Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, to celebrate a wedding.50
It is highly likely that Caravaggio’s own Omnia vincit amor was commissioned on the occasion of a wedding in the Giustiniani family. Whether it commemorates a particular event or not, its essential meaning is clear. Vincenzo was a family name among the Giustiniani, so all those orgiastically active v’s in the picture may be taken to stand both for the man who commissioned the work and for his many heirs and descendants. Long live the Giustiniani, the picture priapically exclaims: long may they prosper, and long may they procreate.
THE BLACK WINGS OF ENVY
Giovanni Baglione and his friends were not happy to see the painter from Lombardy doing so well. Forty years later, when he came to write his short biography of Caravaggio, Baglione still seethed with a sense of injustice when he thought of his rival winning a string of commissions from Vincenzo Giustiniani and Ciriaco Mattei. As far as Baglione was concerned, Caravaggio’s patrons had been fooled by nothing more than clever publicity: ‘The Marchese had been put into this frame of mind by Prosperino delle Grottesche, Caravaggio’s henchman [Prospero Orsi, the painter of grotesques] … Moreover, Signor Ciriaco Mattei succumbed to the propaganda … Thus Caravaggio pocketed from this gentleman many hundreds of scudi.’51
Karel van Mander’s Schilderboek of 1604 includes some pithy remarks on the rivalries that divided Rome’s competing factions of artists during the early years of the seventeenth century. According to van Mander, Clement VIII and his papal court commissioned so many new works that they stirred up a frenzy of competition among painters and sculptors: ‘a new ardour is kindled; lean Envy secretly begins to flap her black wings and everyone strives to do his best to gain the coveted prize.’52
The dark wings of Caravaggio’s Cupid certainly fanned the flames of Giovanni Baglione’s envy. Infuriated by the acclaim with which Caravaggio’s Omnia vincit amor had been received – the curtain of green silk later described by Sandrart proof of its status as the coup de théâtre of Vincenzo Giustiniani’s whole collection – Baglione responded with an act of provocation. On 29 August 1602 he brought a new work to the artists’ exhibition held annually in the courtyard of San Giovanni Decollato. Caravaggio was not taking part in the show, but his friend and follower Orazio Gentileschi did have a picture on display. Baglione’s painting was an attack on both of them, as Gentileschi would later explain under cross-examination: ‘there certainly is some rivalry among us. When I hung a picture of St Michael the Archangel in San Giovanni dei Fiorentini [a slip of the tongue; the exhibition took place in San Giovanni Decollato], Baglione showed up and hung one of his opposite,