Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [237]
In the third chapel on the left, one sees a painting representing the resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is a singular invention, Christ is not even shown rising into the air and he walks past the sentries [who guard the holy sepulchre]. All of which gives a low idea of him, and makes him look like a criminal escaping from his guards. Also, he has been given the character of a scrawny suffering man. From a purely pictorial point of view the composition is really beautiful and the style is strong and felt with great taste. It is much blackened. No one knows the name of the artist. This piece is beautiful.117
Only in these words is the vivid ghost of a great painting preserved. Cochin was unaware of the painter’s identity, his flight from Rome, his escape from Malta, his restless peregrinations through Sicily – yet still, purely from the power of his work, he sensed the depth of Caravaggio’s unease. The painter had made Christ ‘look like a criminal escaping from his guards’. Just as he had done in his haunting Sicilian pictures, Caravaggio was putting his own memories and emotions at the heart of his work. Whatever he set out to paint – the death of a martyr, the infancy of Christ or his resurrection – he always ended up painting himself.
THE KNIGHT’S REVENGE
His work had never been bleaker or more emotionally naked. But in the autumn of 1609 Caravaggio had some grounds for optimism. Alof de Wignacourt seems to have been appeased, which lifted the threat of sudden rendition to Malta, and negotiations were reopened for the papal pardon that would allow him to return to Rome at last. Emboldened, perhaps, by the sense that his fortunes were about to change, Caravaggio fatally let down his guard. He paid an ill-advised visit to the Osteria del Cerriglio, a Neapolitan tavern frequented by artists and poets and much celebrated in the popular literature of the time.
The Cerriglio was located in a narrow alleyway behind the Neapolitan church of Santa Maria La Nova. There are a number of theories about the original meaning of its name, which may have derived from the cierro, local slang for the long forelock worn by the cut-throats who were often to be seen there; from the merry appearance (cera) of those who had enjoyed its hospitality; from an oak forest (cerrillo) that had once stood nearby; from the cerilleros, the vagabonds and wastrels who caroused at the tavern; or simply from the name of its owner. It was famously a place where the wine flowed more freely than water, but a number of hitherto overlooked documents reveal that the Osteria del Cerriglio was also notorious as a brothel. Giulio Cesare Cortese, an exact contemporary of Caravaggio, wrote a mock-epic poem entitled La conquista del Cerriglio, in which the imaginary moment of the tavern’s foundation is marked by ‘huge orgies’.118 Real orgies took place there too: another of the painter’s contemporaries, Giambattista Basile, called it ‘that place where the courtesans / wallowed / in front of disapproving passersby / stripping the gullible to the bone’,119 while yet another poet of the period, Giovan Battista del Tufo, added the detail that ‘moreover, for gentlemen, / There is a door for entering secretly.’120 The Cerriglio was especially popular among men seeking sex with other men, to judge by the insinuation in Basile’s description of it as a place ‘where Bacchus reigns and Venus is shunned’.121
The nineteenth-century Neapolitan poet, playwright and historian Salvatore di Giacomo, whose work on the underworld of seventeenth-century Naples has been largely forgotten, unearthed several incriminating references to the tavern in the archives of the city. ‘The Cerriglio was not wholly frequented by well-mannered individuals, and the innkeeper would often turn a blind eye