Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [235]
The set square, the saw, the adze, the white rag, lie there unused, a memento mori, oblique memorial to an ordinary man who left an extraordinary child to fend for himself. This is Caravaggio’s last still life. These are among his last truly meaningful, eloquent brushstrokes. The picture is almost unbearable.
‘LIKE A CRIMINAL ESCAPING FROM HIS GUARDS’
It is hard to know what Caravaggio did during his time in Messina, other than paint. Susinno says that he paraded himself as a heretic: ‘Apart from his profession, Caravaggio also went about questioning our holy religion, for which he was accused of being a disbeliever …’107 But he also tells that dark story of the painter’s visit to a Messinese church, where he refused holy water on the grounds that it was only good for washing away venial sins. ‘Mine are all mortal’ were Caravaggio’s words, hardly those of a man untroubled by questions of salvation or damnation. Regrettably, there is no hard evidence about his beliefs. In religion, as in so much else, Caravaggio was perhaps a man divided – torn between doubt and faith, angry rebellion and sullen obedience.
He stayed longer in Messina than he had in Syracuse. He had won the favour of the Senate – which commissioned and paid for the Adoration, according to Susinno – and perhaps that added to his sense of security. But his behaviour remained erratic. ‘He used to have his meal on a slab of wood, and instead of using a tablecloth, most of the time he would eat on an old portrait canvas; he was foolish and crazy, more cannot be said.’108
Susinno’s weirdest story about Caravaggio concerns his alleged sexual interest in a group of adolescent schoolboys who used to play near the dry docks at the eastern end of Messina. It is an unusual anecdote in the context of the Sicilian author’s Lives, which are not otherwise salacious:
He used to disappear during holy days to follow a certain grammar teacher called Don Carlo Pepe, who escorted his pupils for recreation to the arsenal. There galleys used to be built … Michele went to observe the positions of those playful boys and to form his inventions. But the teacher became suspicious and wanted to know why he was always around. The question so disturbed the painter, and he became so irate and furious … that he wounded the poor man on the head. For this action he was forced to leave Messina. In short, wherever he went he would leave the mark of madness.’109
Having seemingly implied that the schoolteacher was accusing Caravaggio of an indecent interest in his pupils, Susinno himself asserts that the painter’s real motive for following the boys was artistic. The priest-biographer ends up by writing off the whole incident as yet another instance of Caravaggio’s mental instability. But because of its very oddity and untidiness, the story has the reek of truth. Caravaggio was hunted, haunted and lonely in Messina. It is by no means inconceivable that he should have sought companionship, even sexual solace, in the company of young men. Susinno’s anecdote might even help to explain one of the most enigmatic and homoerotic paintings of Caravaggio’s Sicilian period, his last depiction of St John the Baptist, now to be seen in the Borghese Gallery. Was this one of Don Pepe’s pupils? Did Caravaggio persuade him to model for him, and perhaps more?
Placed in a cursory wilderness, landscape lost in shadow, accompanied by a cursory lamb of God, the boy reclines on a swag of red drapery and fixes the viewer with a sullen, sultry, knowing gaze. Is this really John the Baptist, prophet and seer, possessor of secret knowledge, or a swarthy Sicilian boy, older than his years and conscious of his sexual appeal? The artist still had the picture with him when he died: it was in the inventory of his last effects, which suggests that it was not painted to order but on impulse.
Caravaggio had evaded capture, first in Syracuse, then in Messina.