Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [228]
He started work on the altarpiece soon after arriving in Syracuse, probably at around the beginning of November. He must have worked extremely fast. The altarpiece was monumental in scale, the largest work of his Sicilian period and one of the largest pictures he had ever undertaken. Yet it was finished by the start of the following month, comfortably in time for St Lucy’s feast day on 13 December. ‘The big canvas came out so well that it became famous,’ wrote Susinno; ‘the idea behind it was so good that there are many copies in Messina and in other cities of the Regno.’87
The sources indicate that Caravaggio was in a state of nervous anxiety during much of this period. During his first weeks in Sicily, the galleys of the Order of St John were a constant and highly visible presence around the harbours of the island, including that of Syracuse.88 Susinno records that ‘Caravaggio was very distracted, restless, indifferent to his own existence: many a time he would go to bed fully dressed, with his dagger (from which he was never separated) at his side … Even when dressed ordinarily he was always armed, so that he looked more like a swordsman than a painter.’89 Baglione tells us that it was around this time that he acquired ‘a black dog that was trained to play various tricks, which he enjoyed immensely’.90 The animal was probably not just for amusement and company. Caravaggio gave it the ill-omened name of Corvo – ‘Crow’ – a raucous creature with an aggressive personality to match.
THE TYRANT’S EAR
Caravaggio may have painted The Burial of St Lucy in Mario Minniti’s substantial workshop. It was quite unlike any of his own modest studios. In pursuit of success and respectability, Minniti had reinvented himself as a gentleman-painter, employing an army of assistants to transfer his compositions from paper to canvas and adding only the finishing touches himself. So busily productive was Minniti’s workshop that quality inevitably suffered. ‘Many weak paintings by him can be seen around,’ wrote Susinno. ‘If he had contented himself with just a few public works he would have been as celebrated as Caravaggio himself.’91
Caravaggio made at least one other acquaintance in Syracuse, with whom he went on a foray to see some of the sights of the town: Vincenzo Mirabella, antiquarian, mathematician and archaeologist. Caravaggio may have sought his help in researching the Christian catacombs of Syracuse, to give The Burial of St Lucy an authentically antique setting: the catacombs were one of Mirabella’s specialities, and he would include a lengthy account of them in his book, the Dichiarazioni della pianta delle antiche Siracuse, published in 1613.
Elsewhere in the same book, Mirabella would tell of how he took Caravaggio to see another of the oldest sites of Syracuse, a huge grotto said to have been used as a prison by the ancient tyrant Dionysus. According to local folklore, Dionysus had ordered a deep and narrow slit to be cut into the roof of this ‘speaking cave’, so named because of its extraordinary acoustic qualities, which amplified noise in such a way as to make the least sound perfectly audible. At the cave’s single entrance, the tyrant built a great gate, so that he could confine his prisoners within. On the hilltop above the cave, perched directly over the slit cut into its apex, he placed the house of his jailor. While his captives languished hundreds