Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [233]
Whereas light flooded into Caravaggio’s earlier religious paintings, here the illumination struggles to penetrate the gloom. The whole painting conveys a sense of just how hard it is truly to see – and perhaps believe in – salvation. Both men holding up Lazarus’s tombstone look back with bewildered expressions at Christ, squinting and blinking in confusion. Above them, Caravaggio has included his own self-portrait. He gazes out of the picture, staring directly at the invisible source of light pulsing into the sepulchre, a look of yearning desperation on his face.
ADORATION, DESOLATION
Caravaggio’s Sicilian biographer told colourful tales about how he painted The Resurrection of Lazarus. According to Susinno, Caravaggio asked for a room in the hospital run by the confraternity of the Padri Crociferi, hired some workmen, and arranged a grisly modelling class:
in order to give the central figure of Lazarus a naturalistic flavour he asked to have a corpse dug up that was already in a state of decomposition, and had it placed in the arms of the workmen who, however, were unable to stand the foul odour and wanted to give up their work. Caravaggio, with his usual fury, raised his dagger and jumped on them, and as a result those unlucky men were forced to continue their job and nearly die, like those miserable creatures who were condemned by the impious Maxentius to die tied to corpses. Likewise Caravaggio’s picturesque room could in some fashion be called the slaughterhouse of the same tyrant.103
This is surely a parable invented to illustrate the painter’s reputedly excessive attachment to naturalism. Lazarus cannot have been modelled from a corpse in a state of decomposition, because his body is shown in the involuntary stasis of rigor mortis; that the painter could find the corpse of a real man who just happened to have died in a cruciform pose is less than plausible. The figure is an invention, although it seems likely enough that the three workmen were painted from local models, since their faces are unfamiliar from the rest of Caravaggio’s work, and they do have the ungainly actuality of real individuals. Susinno tells an equally tall tale about a lost first version of the picture, which the painter supposedly slashed to ribbons with his dagger when a member of the de’ Lazzari family had the temerity to criticize one or two elements. It is a story designed to perfect the caricature of the painter as a wild man of art, deranged by his own passions.
The biographer is more illuminating when he turns to the third and last of Caravaggio’s surviving Sicilian altarpieces, The Adoration of the Shepherds. Long neglected, because so far off the beaten track, it is one of the most startlingly direct, wrenchingly emotional religious paintings of the seventeenth century. A sombre and profoundly personal work, it is the last great painting of Caravaggio’s traumatic life. Susinno, who responded to it with heartfelt sincerity, believed it to be in fact the greatest of all his works:
In this canvas he represented the Nativity with life-size figures, and this in my opinion is the best of all his paintings, because here this great naturalist abandoned his sketchy, allusive style and demonstrated his naturalism once more without the use of bold shadows … This one great work of art would have been enough for Caravaggio’s glory for centuries to come, because here he removed himself completely from dryness and from exceedingly dark tones. Instead, on the ground is a basket with carpentry tools alluding to St Joseph’s trade. Above, on the right, the Virgin is seen stretched out on the ground, looking at the Christ child wrapped in cloth and caressing