• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Caravaggio responded to the implied slight by hurling a plate at the man’s mouth. It was an impetuous act, but as usual the painter had put thought into his violence. The punishment mirrored the perceived crime: ‘You think I have no taste? Taste this.’ The insult that accompanied the assault, becco fottuto, or ‘fucked-over cuckold’, was the same phrase that had been used at the end of the poem addressed to ‘Johnny Bollock’. Caravaggio must have used it fairly frequently.

Despite only three major commissions in these troubled years, Caravaggio certainly had work to do. His altarpiece for The Death of the Virgin was years overdue and he still had the picture of the Madonna of Loreto to paint. But he seems to have found it increasingly difficult to concentrate for prolonged periods. In the past he had been a conscientious respecter of deadlines, but now he had a growing reputation for unreliability. It was with the Caravaggio of these years in mind that Karel van Mander wrote his comment about the painter spending a month in the streets for every two weeks in the studio, swaggering about with his sword at his side, ‘with a servant following him, from one ball-court to the next, ever ready to engage in a fight or argument’.72

It was probably in the summer of 1604, between fights, that Caravaggio painted the hauntingly intense St John the Baptist now in the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City. The picture was almost certainly painted for the Genoese banker Ottavio Costa. There is an early copy in the church of the Oratory of the Confraternity at Conscente, in Liguria, which was a fief of the Costa dynasty. The family had paid for the building of the church, so it may be that Caravaggio’s painting was originally destined for its high altar, and subsequently replaced by the copy for reasons unknown. Perhaps Ottavio Costa was so impressed by the work when he saw it that he decided to keep it for his art collection in Rome.

The picture is very different to the St John the Baptist painted for Ciriaco Mattei a couple of years before. As in the earlier painting, the saint occupies an unusually lush desert wilderness. Dock leaves grow in profusion at his feet. But he is no longer an ecstatic, laughing boy. He has become a melancholy adolescent, glowering in his solitude. Clothed in animal furs and swathed in folds of blood-red drapery, he clutches a simple reed cross for solace as he broods on the errors and miseries of mankind. The chiaroscuro is eerily extreme: there is a pale cast to the light, which is possibly intended to evoke moonbeams, but the contrasts are so strong and the shadows so deep that the boy looks as though lit by a flash of lightning. This dark but glowing painting is one of Caravaggio’s most spectacular creations. It is also a reticent and introverted work – a vision of a saint who looks away, to one side, rather than meeting the beholder’s eye. This second St John is moodily withdrawn, lost in his own world-despising thoughts. The picture might almost be a portrait of Caravaggio’s own dark state of mind, his gloomy hostility and growing sense of isolation during this period of his life.

Only one other painting by Caravaggio can be securely dated to 1604. It is The Entombment, a large and ambitious altarpiece for the Oratorian church in Rome, Santa Maria in Vallicella, a few hundred yards west of the Piazza Navona, close to where the Tiber snakes around the Vatican. He finished it some time shortly before 1 September, when the picture is described as ‘new’ in a document recording that it had been paid for by a man called Girolamo Vittrice. Girolamo commissioned the work for the burial chapel of his uncle, Pietro, who had died in 1600. Like many of the painter’s most important patrons, the Vittrice family was closely connected with Filippo Neri’s Oratory and therefore directly allied with the emphatically populist, pauperist wing of the Roman Church. Pietro Vittrice had been particularly close to Filippo Neri himself and had strongly supported the core values of the Oratory, with its stress on the importance