Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [176]
The Madonna of the Palafrenieri, sometimes known as The Madonna of the Serpent, is an unsettling picture. Monumental in scale, almost ten feet tall and more than six across, it shows three figures in a tall room, absorbed in a confrontation with pure evil. The Virgin and the infant Christ together crush the head of a serpent beneath their feet. As the foul creature writhes in its death agonies, St Anne, frail and bent by age, looks on in solemn contemplation. By God’s grace, the devil is defeated.
Raven-haired Lena, ‘donna di Caravaggio’, was required once again to play the part of the Virgin. Wearing a coral-coloured dress with a deep décolletage, she leans to support her son as he steps forward, his foot upon hers, hers upon the snake. He is a curly-haired, red-headed boy of about four years old. Were it not for the presence of the animal, they might just be mother and son playing a game of walk-on-my-feet as grandmother watches.
The mood of the picture is still and strange. There is no sense of drama, because instead of telling a story Caravaggio was obliged to embody an allegory. The result is like an image from an emblem book staged as a tableau vivant by flesh-and-blood human beings. The voluptuously full-breasted Virgin holds her smooth-skinned son under his arms. St Anne, half lost in the shadows, has corded sinews around her neck and collarbone, while the skin of her lined face looks as dry as autumn leaves.
The theme prescribed for the picture was calculated to make a specific theological point. Its origin lay in a much debated passage in the biblical Book of Genesis, in which God curses the serpent that has tempted Eve to eat from the Tree of Knowledge: ‘I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel’ (Genesis 3:15). There was a long tradition of regarding this as a prophetic reference to the Virgin Mary, the so-called ‘Second Eve’. By giving birth to Jesus Christ, she would redeem mankind from Original Sin and undo the evil done by the treacherous snake in the garden of Eden – bruising the head of the serpent, as had been predicted in Genesis. But Protestants, suspicious of the cult of the Virgin Mary and concerned that it detracted from the proper worship of Jesus Christ, disputed this interpretation. Martin Luther declared that Christ, and Christ alone, could redeem mankind. The Catholic Church had reaffirmed its position, in a papal Bull of 1569 that proclaimed ‘the Virgin crushed the head of the serpent with the aid of him to whom she had given birth.’
Caravaggio’s picture was intended to translate word into image, to embody this article of Catholic faith as a vivid picture that all could understand. He was careful, at every point, to emphasize the underlying significance of his allegory. The serpent writhes in uneven, broken coils, while Christ forms a perfect circle with the thumb and forefinger of his outstretched left hand, a circle mirrored by the floating haloes of his mother and grandmother. The serpent is death. Christ is eternal life, perfection incarnate. The humble figure of Anne is there not only because her presence was decreed by the spiritual allegiance of the Confraternity of Palafrenieri, but to reinforce the idea of the Immaculate Conception, the belief that her daughter, Mary, was preserved from Original Sin. In Caravaggio’s painting, Anne is shrouded in darkness, while her daughter is bathed in light. That is because Anne’s virtue, great as it had been, was only a dim prefiguration of Mary’s radiance.
The Virgin and Christ child seem tense and alert, as they concertedly crush the serpent. Caravaggio himself seems to have approached