Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [256]
74. St Jerome Writing. Painted for one of the most senior Knights of Malta, a virtuoso demonstration of Caravaggio’s gifts to the artist’s new circle of patrons in the Order of St John.
75. Portrait of Fra Antonio Martelli. ‘This depiction of an obdurate and forceful man, in lean old age, rheumy eyes gazing off into the distance, anticipates the mature portraiture of Rembrandt by some half a century.’
76. Portrait of Alof de Wignacourt, with His Pageboy. Instead of a monastic habit, the Grand Master wears a suit of sixteenth-century armour, evoking the heroic defence of Malta at the great Siege of 1565.
77. The Resurrection of Lazarus. ‘Lazarus, come forth’ (John 11). As Christ bids him to rise from the grave, Lazarus seems reluctant to wake from death.
78. The Adoration of the Shepherds. The most tragic of nativities: Mary is a refugee mother utterly alone in the dark with her defenceless child.
79. The Beheading of St John. In the blood gushing from the saint’s neck, Caravaggio signed his name. It is his only signature on a painting.
80. St John the Baptist. Caravaggio’s last known depiction of the saint, who was modelled on this occasion by a swarthy and sun-tanned Sicilian adolescent.
81. The Adoration of the Shepherds. Painted for a Franciscan confraternity in Palermo, the last of Caravaggio’s Sicilian altarpieces was allegedly stolen by order of a Mafia boss in 1969. It has not been recovered.
82. The Burial of St Lucy. ‘The picture’s iconography is ingeniously suggestive of hope … but its mood is overwhelmingly bleak. Almost half the painting is dark bare stone.’
83. The Denial of St Peter. One of just two paintings that can be dated to after the painter’s face was slashed in late 1609. The seriousness of his injuries is shockingly apparent in the work’s ragged, fumbling style.
84. The Martyrdom of St Ursula. Caravaggio’s very last work contains his last self-portrait. Behind Ursula’s bowed head, the painter’s face appears. He seems to groan, as he stares sightlessly into space.
Caravaggio’s influence reached forward to the Enlightenment, continued into the Romantic period and has infiltrated the DNA of modern cinema.
85. Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump by Joseph Wright of Derby.
86. The Raft of the Medusa by Theodore Géricault.
87. Still from Mean Streets, directed by Martin Scorsese.
Epilogue
Caravaggio’s contemporaries would doubtless have been amazed by the extent of his posthumous fame. Few of those who knew him could ever have imagined that he and his work would survive so far into the future, that he would be remembered so long after they had all been forgotten.
But it was true. Hardly any of the artists with whom Caravaggio had been close made any mark at all on posterity. His Sicilian friend Mario Minniti lived into his sixties, turning out quantities of mediocre altarpieces and making himself a small fortune, but no great reputation, in Messina. His old assistant Cecco Boneri established something of a career for himself as Cecco del Michelangelo, but soon slipped into near-total obscurity. The hot-headed architect Onorio Longhi, who had been his second in the duel, returned to Rome a year or so after Caravaggio’s death, only to die himself five years later of syphilis.
Caravaggio’s old enemy Giovanni Baglione lived long and prospered, winning numerous grand commissions from popes as well as princes and aristocrats. When he died he was nearly eighty, a Knight of Christ and a wealthy man. But he too would soon be forgotten – or at least remembered mostly for being Caravaggio’s adversary and biographer. Orazio Gentileschi, who had once laughed along with Caravaggio at ‘Johnny Baggage’, was the only one of his close acquaintances to amount to much as an artist. A painter of considerable power and invention, he ended his career as a court painter to Charles I, dying in London in his mid seventies in 1639 just a few years before the start