Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [189]
The disciple sitting with his back to the viewer is seen only as a silhouette, a few stray curls of his tousled hair picked out against the folds of Christ’s blue-green robe. His hands express surprise but also uncertainty, as if he cannot quite believe the miracle to which he is a witness; his right hand is a shadowy form set against shadows, light glimmering in the interstices between the fingers. This recalls similar passages in the darkest paintings of Tintoretto, and indeed an eloquent Venetian indistinctness enters Caravaggio’s painting at this time.
The wiry, sunburned disciple seated to Christ’s left is fiercely intent. He grips the table hard with both hands, grasping for a sense of reality. Can it really be true? Can he really be performing this one last miracle? Can he really have come back from the dead? The tendons in his neck stand out as he stares with desperate intensity at the half-lit face of Christ. But there is a stoop in his shoulders, a defeated weariness about him, suggesting that in his heart of hearts he still cannot quite bring himself to believe in the miracle, that it would be too much to hope for. Christ himself seems about to disappear into the surrounding blackness of the inn – as indeed he does, in the gospel of Luke, at the very moment when the disciples realize who he is. This dark and occluded picture has the quality of a confession. How much harder Caravaggio now finds it to see the possibility of salvation.
One other painting survives from the early months of Caravaggio’s exile, a depiction of David with the Head of Goliath, which has traditionally been misdated to the end of his life.3 Its subject is David’s well-known act of giant-slaying, recounted in the Old Testament (1 Samuel 17:48–51): a familiar story, but treated by Caravaggio in a strikingly unfamiliar way. The sombre young hero is intriguingly unexultant in his moment of triumph. He holds his grisly prize at arm’s-length, staring down almost absently at the trails of blood still pouring from the severed neck of his vanquished foe. Mild disgust is mingled, in David’s complicated and contemplative expression, with gentle sadness. Cecco modelled for this figure, as he had for the exuberant Omnia vincit amor. But what a change has come over him. He looks older, more drawn. His brow is furrowed and there are bags under his eyes. Exile and flight had taken their toll on him too.
The disembodied head of Goliath seems still to be screaming, in an extension of his death agony. Light glints on his irregular row of front teeth and is reflected in the wetness of his lower lip. The extreme tenebrism of Caravaggio’s technique isolates these few charged details, distilling the drama to a compelling vignette while casting everything extraneous into darkness. Having reduced the story to an apparent bare minimum of incident, the painter deepens the meaning of his picture by deftly weaving in other layers of association. David’s earlier act of hurling his shot at the giant’s head is subtly implied by the way his white shirt has been looped through his belt to shape a kind of sling. His vulnerably naked torso and softly compassionate, almost Christ-like expression hint at the larger perspective of theological meaning in which the slaying of Goliath was to be understood.
David evokes the youthful Christ, because the story of David slaying Goliath was often seen as an Old Testament prefiguration of Christ subduing Satan. The inscription on the blade of the sword held by David spells out the letters ‘H.OC.S’. This is the acronym of a phrase from St Augustine’s commentary on Psalm 33, in which he remarks that ‘As David overcame Goliath, this is Christ who kills the Devil.’ The Latin phrase used by Augustine is humilitas occidit superbiam: ‘humility kills pride’.
The most insistent of the picture’s meanings is carried by its most blatant detail. The