Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [255]
51. St Matthew and the Angel (second version). More refined but less forceful, the saint has metamorphosed from illiterate bumpkin to dignified sage. The picture still hangs over the altar in the Contarelli Chapel today.
52. The Death of the Virgin, in which a prostitute modelled for the Virgin. The picture was rejected by the fathers of Santa Maria della Scala, the last straw that may have triggered Caravaggio to commit murder.
53. The Death of the Virgin by Carlo Saraceni, the picture that replaced Caravaggio’s rejected altarpiece (above).
54. Doubting Thomas. ‘Then saith he to Thomas, Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing’ (John 20).
55. The Sacrifice of Isaac. Abraham holds his squealing son down as if the boy were a lamb brought to slaughter. These are the last glimpses of landscape in Caravaggio’s work.
56. Omnia vincit amor. ‘Love conquers all.’ Cupid was modelled by Cecco. An English visitor to Rome was told that ‘’Twas the body & face / of [Caravaggio’s] owne boy or servant / that laid with him.’
57. Divine Love by Giovanni Baglione. The avenging angel triumphs over the devil, who has been caught in flagrante with his young catamite. The sodomitic Satan on the left is a libellous caricature of Caravaggio.
58. Study for The Resurrection by Giovanni Baglione. This study preserves the composition of Baglione’s lost altarpiece for the Gesù, which Caravaggio mocked openly: ‘It’s a bungle … the worst he has done.’
59. St Jerome Writing. A penitentially solemn picture. It may have been a gift to Scipione Borghese, papal nephew, for helping Caravaggio obtain a pardon for violent assault in the summer of 1605.
60. St Francis in Meditation. The saint is lost in contemplation of his own mortality, and of Christ’s crucifixion at Golgotha, ‘the place of the skull’.
61. St John the Baptist. A world away from the earlier St John modelled by Cecco. This glowering adolescent ‘might almost be a portrait of Caravaggio’s own dark state of mind’ during his later years in Rome.
62. The Madonna of the Rosary. This altarpiece was greatly admired by Peter Paul Rubens, one of a group of connoisseurs who bought the picture for a prominent church in Antwerp in 1651.
63. The Madonna of Loreto. Two humble pilgrims to Loreto, with patched clothes and dirt-ingrained feet, are granted a miraculous vision of the Madonna and child.
64. The Madonna of the Palafrenieri. The Virgin Mary and the infant Christ crush the serpent Satan as St Anne looks on. The picture was turned out of St Peter’s, probably because of the Madonna’s full cleavage.
65. The contract for the ill-fated Madonna of the Palafrenieri. His blood signature aside (Plate 80), this is the sole surviving example of Caravaggio’s handwriting.
66. View of Zagarolo in the Alban Hills outside Rome. Palazzo Colonna in Zagarolo was Caravaggio’s first hide-out after the murder of Ranuccio Tomassoni.
67. The Supper at Emmaus. A strikingly different interpretation of a subject Caravaggio had treated so subtly five years earlier (Plate 45). After the murder his style became increasingly bleak, dark and morbid.
68. David with the Head of Goliath. Cecco as David, Caravaggio as the severed head of Goliath. Often misdated to the end of the painter’s life, but actually painted in 1606 as a homicide’s plea for clemency.
69. Sleeping Cupid. Painted in Malta for a Florentine humanist, this picture was inspired by a celebrated sculpture of the same subject by Michelangelo.
70. The Seven Acts of Mercy. ‘This one dark street, scene of desperation and pain and death, is the painter’s microcosm for the brutality of existence itself.’
71. Roman Charity (detail) by Pierino del Vaga.
72. The Flagellation. Torture as a misbegotten act of intimacy.
73. The Crucifixion of St Andrew. The painting does not show Andrew being bound