Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [232]
The parable of Lazarus was traditionally regarded as a miracle performed by Christ in prefiguration of his own crucifixion. In raising Lazarus from the tomb, Christ saved him from sin and death, just as by dying on the Cross, he would save mankind from Original Sin and open the way to salvation. Caravaggio was certainly aware of the theological parallel, since he has arranged Lazarus’s body in the same configuration as that of Christ on the Cross. Lazarus’s two sisters, Martha and Mary, gather around him like the mourners of Christ at the moment of his deposition. The detail of Martha’s face, pressed so close to that of her reviving brother, was taken directly by Caravaggio from an ancient Christian prototype of the Mater Dolorosa, the Virgin Mary mourning the death of her son. Cheek pressed to cheek, eyes to mouth, mouth to eyes, the motif of two faces interlocked like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle had long been a standard trope of Byzantine painting. It was used, for example, by the twelfth-century master who painted the fresco of the Lamentation in the church of St Pantaleimon in modern-day Macedonia – and from Byzantium the device entered Italian painting in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Caravaggio probably took the motif from an Italian source, and it is not impossible that he saw it in a Byzantine icon in Sicily.102
Just as he had done in The Burial of St Lucy, where the two central mourners derive from early Renaissance images of the Crucifixion, Caravaggio introduced a deliberate archaism from a much earlier tradition of art into The Resurrection of Lazarus. In both cases, he did so to evoke a parallel between the subject in hand and the Crucifixion of Christ. Perhaps he meant the gestures as acts of humility, a renunciation of his own illusionistic virtuosity, a penitential clipping of his own Icarus wings. He had always been an austere painter, a painter for, and of, holy poverty, but never more so than now. In emulation of Cardinal Borromeo, who had counselled a return to the austere values of the ancient Church, Caravaggio formulated his own modern version of a purged and primitive style. There is almost no colour in these works, almost no sense of space, just twisted groupings of figures arranged frieze-like in the convulsions of sorrow, melancholy or agonized bewilderment.
Lazarus was traditionally believed to have died of the plague. Hence the Italian word for a plague house, lazzaretto (the slang word for the Neapolitan poor, lazzari, shares the same etymology). Once again, as in The Burial of St Lucy, Caravaggio had painted a scene like many he must have witnessed during the darkest years of his childhood in Milan – a group of people gathered around a grave, lit by what seems like guttering torchlight. He had set himself the challenge of redeeming those memories of death and desperation, of transfiguring them into representations of the miraculous. In this, he cannot be said to have entirely succeeded.
For all his efforts, what is expressed in this last and darkest flowering of Caravaggio’s art is anything but a simple and straightforward sense of piety. The shadowed figure of Christ in The Resurrection of Lazarus is another figment of the painter’s memory, a second version of the statuesque Christ beckoning Matthew from shadow into light in the painter’s very first large religious painting, The Calling of St Matthew in the Contarelli Chapel. But so shadowy is the Saviour’s form that he might be missed altogether by the inattentive