Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [188]
We do not have much information about his first few months of exile. All three early biographies refer to a picture of Mary Magdalen that the artist supposedly painted while he was in the Alban Hills, but it has never come to light.2 Mancini and Bellori also mention a Supper at Emmaus from the same period, which does survive. A solemn and introverted work, it now hangs in the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan. This second Supper at Emmaus is strikingly different from the painting on the same subject in London, created just five years earlier. It seems to announce a change within Caravaggio himself, and certainly marks the transformation of his style. With this troubled picture begins the last phase of the painter’s life and work.
The older Caravaggio would often revisit themes and motifs that he had painted before. But only on this occasion did he rework the entire composition of a picture from earlier in his career. The second painting is almost identical in size to the first, the figures are the same scale, and virtually repeated – with the addition, in the Brera version, of the innkeeper’s wizened wife, waiting to serve a rack of lamb. The tablecloth and the Turkish rug over which it has been laid are almost the same. But in this later painting it is as if someone has turned off the lights, so deep are the shadows.
Christ is no longer the beardless youth of five years before, the Apollonian judge calmly looking forward to the end of time. He is the conventional type of Jesus, with light beard and shoulder-length hair, but pushed to the point of exhaustion. He is a pained and troubled figure, a Man of Sorrows who has suffered much and struggles even to raise his hand, poised just inches above the table, in the revelatory gesture of blessing.
The first Supper at Emmaus, a spotlit drama of sudden recognition, has blurred to an image from a dream. The theatre of Caravaggio’s early Roman painting has contracted to a space that seems more like the inside of the artist’s mind, a space of memory or mental projection. That some of the figures in the picture almost certainly were painted from memory, rather than from life, enhances the effect. The innkeeper resembles the innkeeper in the earlier version of the picture, but seen at one remove or through half-closed eyes. The figure of his wife, so beaten down by existence, was surely based on Caravaggio’s recollections of the old woman who had recently modelled for St Anne in the Madonna of the Palafrenieri.
The lamb on the dish that she holds is a scrap of meat so shrivelled and inconspicuous that it barely performs the iconographic task required of it – the scantest of allusions to Christ’s sacrifice and the death of all flesh. Even the still life on the table has been reduced to a bare, eucharistic minimum, just some broken loaves and a chipped majolica jug. Darkness surrounds the huddled figures seated at this simple meal, but there are no shades of transcendence here: no halo is cast on the wall behind Christ, no pattern of the divine is suggested in the shadows that fall on the drab white tablecloth. The invigorating light of a miraculous dawn has weakened to the feeble gleams of the end of the day.
The paint has been applied thinly and the colours muted to earths and ochres. The faces of all the figures are less sharply differentiated than they are in any of Caravaggio’s earlier pictures. Many of the technical departures of the artist’s later work