Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [178]
The hellfire Dominican preacher Savonarola had once declared that artists should depict the Virgin as a pauper, not a queen, but that had been in Florence a hundred years before Caravaggio’s time, when collective repentance was in the air along with smoke from Savonarola’s bonfires of the vanities. In Rome under Pope Paul V such views were not widely held. The Borghese papacy was characterized by a return to pomp and magnificence, a decisive rejection of the austerity that had marked the age of Carlo Borromeo and, to a lesser degree, that of Clement VIII. Caravaggio, whose approach to religious painting had been shaped so powerfully by Borromean ideals of piety, found himself in a difficult position. In one sense his work was favoured by those in power. But in another and more important sense it was deemed entirely unacceptable.
Scipione Borghese, who ended up buying The Madonna of the Palafrenieri, clearly liked Caravaggio’s powerfully dramatic style. But he did so as a connoisseur. As a cardinal, he looked at it differently. Caravaggio may have had friends among the elite clerics of the Borghese papacy, but they were not prepared to put the weight of the Church behind his visions of holy poverty. The rejection of his altarpiece for St Peter’s, and its acquisition for the Borghese collection, fundamentally altered its nature as a work of art. It was secularized, and in the process was also neutered.
The same thing had happened to him once before, in 1602, when Vincenzo Giustiniani had stepped in to buy the first St Matthew. But on that occasion the picture had been for a burial chapel in the church of the French and Caravaggio had been invited to paint another version. This time the picture was for St Peter’s and he was given no second chance. It was a watershed in his career. Thereafter he became an increasingly isolated figure – an artist whose work would be tolerated, even admired, in private, or at the provincial margins of the Catholic world, but not at its centre.
Despite this enormous setback Caravaggio refused to change his approach. Shortly after delivering The Madonna of the Palafrenieri, he finally completed his long overdue altarpiece of The Death of the Virgin.113 This huge and deeply moving picture is stark evidence of the painter’s reluctance to compromise, and of his moral resilience.
Never before in the history of Christian painting had Mary, mother of God, been made to seem as poor and frail and vulnerable as this. Wearing a simple red dress, unlaced at the bodice to make her more comfortable in her last moments, she lies stretched out on the makeshift bier of a plank of wood. She looks shockingly dead. The apostles have gathered around her lifeless form, to pay their last respects. They are grave and serious men in the winter of their lives, each expressing pain and sorrow in his own different way. Those nearest the body are the most convulsed by grief. One man cries and rubs at his tears. Another covers his eyes and holds himself by the throat as if to choke off his own sorrow. Two others stare intently at her prone body, as if rapt in contemplation of the miracle that once grew within this mortal flesh.
Caravaggio suggests that the Virgin’s own last thoughts had been of that miracle, and that even now she might be dreaming of it. Her right hand rests gently on her own slightly swollen stomach, remembering the sacred baby that once grew in the blessed womb. Standing slightly to one side, St John the Evangelist, his head propped on one hand, is the picture of melancholy