Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [199]
This is the moment that Caravaggio chose to depict. As the flash of divine light fades, the old man stops breathing and his eyes begin to roll up into his head. This is the parody of a deathbed scene, with the dying man forced to expire, against nature, in an upright position. His livid yellow skin is stretched tight across his ribcage. Wizened and pathetically shrunken, he exhales his last breath. The painter captures that moment when a man does indeed give up the ghost, when he suddenly becomes strange and unfamiliar, no longer like himself, as the life slackens out of him and death takes over his mouth, his eyes, his limbs, twisting them into unfamiliar forms.
Might the painter have observed his model, this very man, at the moment of his death? Might he have used his contacts in the Pio Monte della Misericordia to gain access to the Hospital of the Incurables – not to ‘serve and succour’ the terminally ill, but to paint one of their number? It is an image that reeks of mortality. The dead man’s face and neck are sunburned, the rest of his emaciated body pale. He looks just like an actual human being at the end of an actual hard life, a malnourished lazzaro who has swapped the hardships of the land for the brutality of the city.
The odour of the geriatric ward hovers too about the figure of the old woman in the bottom-left-hand corner of the painting.32 Sun-scorched like the saint himself, with a face heavily lined and wrinkled and a goitre in the neck, she frowns with fellow feeling. Her strong and sad eyes are full of pity. Gazing up towards the dying martyr, she plays the part of a chorus of one, standing in for the twenty thousand who had listened as Andrew preached.
The party of Roman soldiers sent to untether the saint from his cross has also been reduced to a solitary figure, a man teetering on a ladder. He struggles to free his arms from the invisible force that has paralysed them. As he does so, he arches away from the saint. The two bodies perform a kind of dance, its symmetry shaping a contrast between life and death. One is curved in tension, balanced against the possibility of a fall. The other is curved involuntarily, by the sideways sag of its own dead weight. Below, the lightly bearded figure of Aegeas looks up wonderingly at the miracle. His armour gleams darkly, evoking memories of the malign armoured soldier in Caravaggio’s Betrayal of Christ. Two other figures loiter, their faces obscured by darkness. Landscape and sky have been reduced to a cursory smear.
CARAVAGGIO AND RUBENS
The other picture by Caravaggio to surface during his first visit to Naples was a large altarpiece of The Madonna of the Rosary. It was first mentioned by Frans Pourbus the Younger, a painter at the court of Mantua who was in Naples in the autumn of 1607. He had seen it for sale along with another painting by Caravaggio, a Judith and Holofernes that has since disappeared. On 15 September he wrote to his master, Vincenzo I Gonzaga, the Duke of Mantua, to inform him that ‘I have seen here two most beautiful paintings from the hand of Michelangelo da Caravaggio. One is a Rosary and was made as an altarpiece; it is 18 palmi high and they are asking no less than 400 ducats for it. The other is a painting of medium size with half figures and is a Judith and Holofernes; they will not let it go for less than 300 ducats. I did not want to make an offer because I did not know the intentions of Your Highness; however, they have promised not to let the painting go until they have been informed of the wishes of Your Highness.’33
In the same letter Pourbus implied that the picture had been painted