Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [197]
Caravaggio painted the monumental altarpiece at breakneck speed, in little more than seven weeks. He received the balance of his fee on 9 January 1607, by which time the painting was probably installed on the high altar of the church of the Pio Monte. The confraternity soon came to see it as one of their greatest treasures. At a group of meetings held in the summer of 1613 the congregation decided that the painting could never be sold at any price. By then, several offers of 2,000 scudi or more – five times the original fee for the work – had already been turned down. One of the would-be purchasers was the Spanish poet Juan de Tassis y Peralta, Conde de Villamediana, but he was forced to content himself with a copy painted from Caravaggio’s original.24 In the 1650s, when the complex of the confraternity’s buildings was remodelled, a new centrally planned Baroque church was created with the specific aim of giving Caravaggio’s altarpiece yet more prominence, space and light – a rare instance of an entire building being constructed around a single picture.
The Seven Acts guaranteed further commissions and more work for Caravaggio. Sometime in the early months of 1607 he agreed to paint another altarpiece, on the subject of Christ’s flagellation, for a chapel within the courtyard of a Dominican monastery in Naples.25 The picture was finished by 11 May 1607, when a final payment of 250 ducats was made.26 It has remained in Naples ever since, although it is no longer in the chapel for which it was commissioned, but in the Museo di Capodimonte.
With The Flagellation of Christ, Caravaggio resumed his old rivalry with Michelangelo. The most celebrated earlier version of the subject had been for the Roman church of San Pietro in Montorio, painted by Sebastiano del Piombo but to Michelangelo’s designs. Sebastiano’s High Renaissance Christ is sorrowful but withdrawn. He is an idealized victim enduring the blows of a group of animated, mildly grotesque tormentors, in the setting of a grand apsidal chapel supported by marble columns with finely carved Corinthian capitals.
Caravaggio took the same basic composition but made it his own by giving yet more emphasis to the cruelty and suffering implicit in the subject. He moved the viewer much closer to the grim act of torture, enlarging the figures and narrowing the complex architecture of the earlier painting to the truncated shaft of a single pillar in a darkened space. To that shadowy pillar, a reduced cast of torturers strive to bind the spotlit figure of Christ. Naked save for a loincloth and a crown of thorns, he is a strikingly statuesque figure. Just like the Christ of Michelangelo and Sebastiano, he might almost be a sculpture come to life. But he is more beaten down, more nakedly vulnerable. His exhaustion is conveyed by the line of his neck, the way he has wearily allowed the weight of his head to sag on to his shoulder. Too tired to hold himself upright, he has stumbled forward from the base of the pillar.
Responding to their victim’s state of collapse with angry determination, two of his tormentors are kicking and yanking him back into place. The torturer at the right, whose face is half hidden by shadow, is tightening the cords with which Christ’s arms are bound. The man on the left is pulling his hair to straighten his body for the first blows. He snarls bestially, brandishing a makeshift whip in his other hand.
A third torturer kneels at Christ’s feet, binding a sheaf of twigs into a flay. He goes about his work with care, only looking up to see how soon the work of flagellation need begin. Just as he had done in The Crucifixion of St Peter for the Cerasi Chapel, Caravaggio focused on the grim mechanics of evil. The kneeling man’s shadowed profile is shown in silhouette against Christ’s left thigh and bright white loincloth. Placing such emphasis on the proximity of one man’s body to another is Caravaggio’s way of heightening the horror of the scene. Torture is a misbegotten form of physical intimacy.
His new audience was impressed but also startled by Caravaggio’s