Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [161]
Caravaggio’s monumental and dramatic altarpiece for Vittrice’s burial chapel was immediately recognized as one of his most accomplished paintings. Baglione baldly stated that ‘this is said to be his best work’, a judgement that was echoed rather more circumstantially by Bellori:
One of the best works by Caravaggio is the Deposition of Christ [sic] in the Chiesa Nuova of the Oratorians which has received well-deserved praise. The figures in the painting are placed on a stone in the opening of the sepulchre. In the centre Nicodemus supports the Sacred Body under the knees, embracing it, and as the hips are lowered, the legs jut out. On the other side St John places one arm under the shoulder of the Redeemer whose face is upturned and his breast deathly pale; one arm hangs down with the sheet and all the nude parts are drawn forcefully and faithfully from nature. Behind Nicodemus are seen the mourning Marys, one with her arms upraised, another with her veil raised to her eyes, and the third looking at the Lord.73
Caravaggio had Michelangelo in mind again when he created The Entombment. Pietro Vittrice’s burial chapel was dedicated to the Pietà, the solitary lamentation of Mary over the dead Christ. Caravaggio deliberately harked back to one of the most hallowed images of that earlier event in the story, namely Michelangelo’s marble Pietà in St Peter’s. The limp right arm of Caravaggio’s dead Christ, with its prominent veins, is a direct paraphrase in paint of the same element in Michelangelo’s composition. The flesh of the arm gently bulges over the supporting hand of St John, just as it does over the hand of the Virgin Mary in the marble Pietà. But in Caravaggio’s painting, John’s hand inadvertently opens the wound in Christ’s side. For the pathos and poetry of Michelangelo’s sculpture, in which Mary mourns the man she once cradled as a child, Caravaggio substitutes his own intense morbidity. Caravaggio’s dead Christ is punishingly unidealized. He truly is the Word made flesh: a dead man, a real corpse weighing heavily on those who struggle to lay him to rest. John strains not to drop the sacred burden. Nicodemus stoops awkwardly as he clasps the body around the knees in a bear-hug, locking his right fist like a clamp around his left forearm.
Once more, the painter emphasizes the bare feet of Christ and his disciples. Nicodemus’s feet, so firmly planted on the tomb slab by the heavy load of the corpse, are veined and creased at the ankle. Christ’s feet dangle limply in space. Such details could be controversial elsewhere, but the Oratorians’ sense of decorum was evidently undisturbed by Caravaggio’s insistence on holy poverty. Christ’s drapery has been given strong emphasis, shining with particular force in the darkness of Calvary. His winding sheet dangles below the tomb slab, touching the leaves of a plant – a juxtaposition perhaps meant to symbolize the hope of new life brought even to the darkness of the grave. Pietro Vittrice had especially venerated the Holy Shroud of Turin, fabled as the winding sheet in which Christ had been interred.
The Entombment is a powerfully sculptural painting. It alludes to Michelangelo’s Pietà but ultimately looks back again to the polychrome mises-en-scène of the sacri monti and the vivid terracotta sculptures of northern Italian tradition. The figures are tightly grouped, each responding to the tragedy of death in a different way. Caravaggio’s Madonna, who has been given a wimple so that she resembles a nun, gazes solemnly at the dead body of her son. The other two female figures are more overtly expressive. Mary Magdalen, eyes uptilted in a trance of sorrow, raises her hands to the heavens. The third Mary bows her head and weeps. Both these figures were modelled by Fillide Melandroni. She had dropped out of Caravaggio’s art for a while, but was clearly still part of his life. Her continued presence in Rome at around this time is confirmed