Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [177]
On 8 April, Caravaggio delivered the painting and gave a certificate to the deacon of the confraternity. It is the only known example of a statement by the artist written in his own handwriting: ‘I, Michelangelo da Caravaggio, am content and satisfied with the picture that I have painted for the Company of St Anne, in faith I have written and underwritten this 8th day of April 1606.’109 On 14 April the picture was put on display in the confraternity’s chapel. The record shows that 1 scudo was paid on that day to a carpenter named Pierfrancesco, for installing the painting on the altar of St Anne in St Peter’s. On 16 April, two days later, the picture was removed. Orders were given that it should be taken away and stored in Sant’Anna dei Palafrenieri, the church of the papal grooms. The confraternity records ‘payment to two porters to carry the painting of St Anne from St Peter’s to their church’. On a spring morning, Caravaggio’s monumental altarpiece was loaded into a mule-driver’s cart and drawn slowly along the cobbled streets of the city.
To a painter so sensitive about his honour, the humiliation of this sudden reverse must have been deeply wounding. Why was the painting rejected? At around the time when Caravaggio delivered his picture, a dispute had arisen over the Palafrenieri’s rights to the altar in St Peter’s, but even after its resolution in early May the Palafrenieri made it clear that they still did not want the painting. By the middle of June 1606 they had sold it to Scipione Borghese for 100 scudi. The arrangement suited both parties: the Palafrenieri disposed of the picture that displeased them, clearing a small but tidy profit on their original outlay, and Borghese acquired a new work by the painter he most admired at a knockdown price.
It is possible that the Palafrenieri had simply taken exception to Caravaggio’s portrayal of their beloved patron, St Anne, as a withered old lady thrown into deep shadow. The theology behind it allowed her to represent all the ancient generations before the coming of Christ, who had lived in darkness – but the Palafrenieri still might not have liked the overall effect. Their main objections, however, probably centred on the portrayal of the other two figures. The most plausible account of the picture’s rejection is given by Bellori, who baldly states that it was taken out of St Peter’s ‘because of the offensive portrayal of the Virgin with the nude Christ child’.110
The infant Christ’s nudity may have been thought improper but a wisp of drapery could easily have been added. It was surely Caravaggio’s embodiment of the Virgin as Lena in a low-cut dress that really caused the difficulty. Appealing once more to the mass of ordinary Catholics – and especially women, among whom the cult of Mary was strongest – Caravaggio had painted her as the kind of mother with whom real mothers might identify. He had stressed her tenderness, leaning down over the child with gentle solicitude, but in the process he had revealed quite a lot of her cleavage. It is not difficult to see why such a voluptuous Virgin Mary might have caused misgivings. Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti, whose Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images was a widely consulted book of rules for the Counter-Reformation artist and patron, wrote that a picture of the Madonna with even the slightest hint of lasciviousness made him ‘sick to my stomach’.111
There is no reason to doubt Caravaggio’s pious intentions. He probably