Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [217]
This boldly idiosyncratic gesture has been subjected to a variety of anachronistic modern interpretations. It has been read, for example, as the veiled retrospective confession of Caravaggio, the murderer; and as a proto-Freudian token of his fetishistic obsession with violence and death. But the true meaning of the signature in blood is clear and unambiguous. The key to it lies in a tradition of Christian symbolism to which Caravaggio had already alluded earlier in his career. Years before, when painting The Martyrdom of St Matthew for the Contarelli Chapel in Rome, he had evoked the ancient link between martyrdom and baptism by having Matthew’s blood flow into a baptismal pool. The blood signature alluded to the same association, although its meaning was subtly different. In The Martyrdom of Matthew, it was Matthew and Matthew alone who had been reborn into immortality through his own martyrdom. In The Beheading of St John, it is not only the martyr who gains eternal life. Caravaggio himself has been symbolically reborn, through his acceptance into the ranks of those dedicated to the martyred John the Baptist.
The Beheading of St John was Caravaggio’s gift to the Knights of Malta, a due paid in lieu of his passaggio into the Order of St John. Its completion, therefore, marked his entry into the brotherhood of knights. Hence that prominent ‘F’ before his name. It stands for ‘Fra’, or ‘Brother’, the official prefix of any Knight of St John.63 The artist’s signature, written in John the Baptist’s blood, was a public proclamation. It was Caravaggio’s way of asserting that his own mortal sin, the murderous letting of a man’s blood, had been washed away by the blood of his new patron saint. Now he could return to Rome, not as a criminal but as a proud Christian soldier.
COMPETING WITH MICHELANGELO
Caravaggio must have added his signature to the work some time shortly after 14 July 1608; because it was on that date, exactly a year and two days after his arrival on Malta, that he was invested with the habit of a Knight of Magistral Obedience and given the title ‘Fra Michelangelo Merisi’. The address given by the Grand Master at the ceremony of the investiture can only have increased the artist’s pleasure in his newfound status. In the Bull of his reception, Wignacourt went so far as to compare Caravaggio with Apelles of Kos, the celebrated painter of ancient Greece:
Whereas it behooves the leaders and rulers of commonweals to prove their benevolence by advancing men, not only on account of their noble birth but also on account of their art and science whatever it may be, so that human talent, hopeful of obtaining reward and honour, might apply itself to praiseworthy studies:
And whereas the Honorable Michael Angelo, born in the town Carraca, in the vernacular called Caravaggio, in Lombardy, having been called to this city, burning with zeal for the order, has communicated to us his fervent wish to be adorned with our habit and insignia.
Therefore, as we wish to gratify the desire of this excellent painter, so that our island of Malta, and our order, may at last glory in this adopted disciple and citizen with no less pride than the island of Kos (also within our jurisdiction) extols her Apelles; and that, should we compare him to more recent artists of our age, we may not afterwards be envious of the artistic excellence of any other outstanding man of equally important name and brush … and as we wish to comply with the pious wish of the aforesaid Michael Angelo, we receive and admit him, by the grace of God almighty and by a papal authorization especially granted to us for the purpose, to the rank of Brethren and Knights known as Brethren and Knights of Obedience …64
This pretty sequence of tributes pays the greatest compliment of all to Wignacourt himself, because if Caravaggio is a new Apelles, the Grand Master is by implication a second Alexander the Great. The author of the encomium,