Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [162]
There is a hint of theatricality about the pair of figures modelled by Fillide, which jars with Caravaggio’s prevailing rhetoric of brutal realism. Perhaps he was trying to sweeten the bitter pill of his art, at least to a degree. There would be hints of compromise in one or two other Roman pictures of the period, a sign perhaps that his confidence had been knocked by rejection. In fact the whole composition of The Entombment has a slightly staged and artificial feel to it, although this may reflect a specific aspect of the image’s meaning. There was a tradition of painting Christ’s entombment not as a dramatic event but as a moment of votive stasis – a presentation of his sacrifical body both to the congregation of the church and, symbolically, to all mankind. Caravaggio’s Nicodemus looks directly out of the picture as he and John seem, indeed, to hold Christ’s body up to view, and Bellori’s description of the painting repeatedly refers to the image of Christ as ‘the Sacred Body’. This element of the composition may well have been created to complement the actual liturgy of the Mass, as the painting originally hung directly above the altar in the chapel: at the moment when the priest elevated the host, the actual flesh of Christ, he was obliged by the design of Caravaggio’s composition to align it with the painted body of Christ.
STONES THROWN AND A DOOR DEFACED
On 4 June 1604 Caravaggio was sentenced for his attack on the waiter, along with several people convicted of unrelated offences. The other men and women in the dock included a furrier, a launderer and a recent convert to Christianity from Judaism. Their various crimes and punishments are detailed in the judicial Latin of the document, but whereas the entry under Caravaggio’s name gives the nature of his offence – wounding a man under the left eye with an earthenware plate – it fails to specify the penalty. Perhaps he was again let off with a warning, thanks to his powerful friends.
On 19 October he was back in prison at the Tor di Nona. This time he and some friends were accused of throwing stones at some police officers. The alleged incident had taken place two days earlier, at 9.30 in the evening, on the Via dei Greci. His fellow defendants were Ottaviano Gabrielli, a bookseller; Alessandro Tonti of Civitanova, a perfume-maker; and Pietro Paolo Martinelli, a courier to the pope. Their testimonies are contradictory, but they give at least a piecemeal picture of the incident.
Caravaggio had eaten with Martinelli and Gabrielli that evening at the Osteria della Torretta, the ‘Tavern of the Little Tower’. After dinner they had decided to walk to the Piazza del Popolo. They were halfway there when they were arrested for throwing stones. ‘We were arrested because a stone had been thrown and they wanted me to tell who had thrown it, whereas I didn’t know,’ Caravaggio testified. ‘I told the constables, “Go and look for the man who threw the stone, and no more abusive words.” ’74 In his version of events, he had been walking along with his old friend Onorio Longhi, as well as the bookseller Gabrielli and someone else whose name he did not know. They had stopped to chat in the street to a girl called Menicuccia – a nickname for the courtesan Menica Calvi – when he heard stones flying through the air. He was under the impression that the stones had been thrown at his friends. He insisted that he was just an innocent bystander.
The pope’s courier, Martinelli, distanced himself from the whole affair. He claimed to have walked on ahead with another friend. Ottaviano Gabrielli denied having been present at dinner with the others. He asserted that he was on his way to meet the girlfriend of a friend of his when he got caught up in the evening’s events. Gabrielli admitted having been in prison once before, on suspicion of selling prohibited books. On the evening in question, he said,