Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [167]
Departing from the limited conventions of existing Lauretan imagery, Caravaggio depicted two poor modern pilgrims kneeling at the entrance to the famous shrine. They are husband and wife, or perhaps mother and son. They have come in all humility, as every pilgrim was advised to do, to pray to the Queen of Heaven. Their feet are bare and dirty, their clothing begrimed, patched and poor. They have been rewarded for their honest piety and their weeks on the pilgrimage trail with a vision. The Virgin has chosen to appear to them, in the very doorway of the Holy House of Loreto itself. The infant Christ appears with his blessed mother, clasped in her arms, a finger of his right hand raised in the gesture of benediction. Haloed by a filigree circle of gold, Mary cranes her neck towards the pilgrims, as if to make sure that she catches every last word of their prayers.
In Caravaggio’s time, it was the custom for pilgrims to enter Loreto barefoot, wearing simple clothes. Their immediate destination was the simple dwelling of the Holy House itself, which, like the modest barn of Francis of Assisi’s first church, had been shoehorned into a splendid marble architectural casing, itself contained within the vast nave of a later cathedral. Once arrived, the pilgrims were to circle the holy dwelling three times, on their bare knees. Having made this slow crawl towards the hope of salvation, they were finally allowed to enter the shrine.83
All this is the implied prelude to Caravaggio’s gentle fantasy of a painting. The work is a tour de force of naked religious populism: spare to the point of banality, blatant in its appeal to the masses. The gratification that it offers is instant, the idea that it embodies too good to be true. It is the realization, in art, of every pilgrim’s dream. At the end of the barefoot, knee-scraping journey, a vision. The door to the Holy House has become the door to Heaven itself. The two weary pilgrims are greeted by the Virgin and Child and implicitly welcomed towards another, better place. They will have no further need of their walking sticks, now they have come this far.
Such is the sheer directness of its appeal to popular piety, The Madonna of Loreto has often been regarded as something of an embarrassment – a saccharine, sentimental picture, the only work in Caravaggio’s entire œuvre with something of the chocolate-box about it. But in its time it was unusual and daring. No artist had ever given such prominence, in a major religious altarpiece, to two such nakedly proletarian figures as the pair of kneeling pilgrims.
There was an old tradition of including portraits of men and women who had paid for certain altarpieces within the work themselves. Such donor portraits, as they have become known, often place the kneeling figures of such pious benefactors to either side of the Virgin and Child. They are included within the scene, yet they are also apart from it, witnesses rather than participants. In The Madonna of Loreto, Caravaggio turned this convention on its head, first by making the kneeling figures central to the sacred story (the story’s catalyst, even, since it is their faith that has called forth the vision of the merciful Madonna and child), and secondly by depicting them not as wealthy donors but as poor pilgrims who have circled the shrine at Loreto three times on their bare knees. The man’s filthy naked feet, turned towards the viewer, emphasize this shockingly complete inversion of an old pictorial tradition.
What might the true donors of the picture, the Cavalletti, have made of all this? Might they not have been disconcerted by Caravaggio’s substitution of their images by those of the two poor pilgrims? It would only