Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [48]
Mancini records that during his time with the parsimonious Pucci, Caravaggio ‘painted some copies of devotional images’, which the priest took home to Recanati with him when he left Rome in 1600. No trace of them has been found. Lost too is ‘a portrait of an innkeeper who had given him lodgings’ as well as another, unnamed portrait mentioned by the biographer. But the young Caravaggio’s painting of a ‘boy who is peeling a pear with a knife’, also mentioned by Mancini, has perhaps survived.
There are at least ten versions of a similar subject, all showing the same rudimentary composition. The painting in the British Royal Collection, which is thought to have been acquired by Charles II, is conceivably the original picture described by Mancini. It was already recorded in the James II inventory of the collection as a work by ‘Michael Angelo’, which indicates that it was regarded as an autograph Caravaggio as early as the seventeenth century. An adolescent boy in a white shirt sits at a table on which various fruits, including cherries, peaches and nectarines, are scattered. The boy’s shirt is spotlessly white, his hands unblemished, details suggesting that he is of noble birth. He peels not a pear but a green Seville or Bergamot orange, a bitter fruit. Perhaps this symbolizes his determination to choose the path of virtue, to avoid the sweeter temptations that life has to offer, or perhaps it is an emblem of the disappointments and difficulties that lie ahead even for a boy like this, blessed by wealth and fortune – a characteristically sour note for Caravaggio to have struck. But the mood of the painting is anything but ominous, so it might be unwise to burden it with too much hidden meaning. If it is indeed an autograph work, this undistinguished genre picture confirms just how little progress Caravaggio had made as a painter by the early 1590s. The handling is crude, the boy’s expression wooden. Only in the extreme contrast of light and shade – the whiteness of the shirt, the depth of the shadows – can some presage of Caravaggio’s later work be discerned.
THE BROTHERS CESARI
For the rest of his early time in Rome, Caravaggio appears to have been very much out on his own. Having left Monsignor Salad to his greens, he probably spent some time in the studio of a Sienese painter called Antiveduto Gramatica.21 Gramatica was an artist of limited gifts about whom little is known save for the fact that his father had a questionable sense of humour. After predicting his son’s premature birth, he registered his prescience by giving him his joke of a name – antiveduto, meaning ‘foreseen’.
Caravaggio may have entered his studio in early 1593. In the same year Gramatica became a member of the guild of painters, the Accademia di San Luca. He was prolific, turning out small-scale devotional pictures, portraits and copies of portraits by the score. Particularly popular were his copies of a series of Famous Men then at the Villa Medici. Caravaggio, whose work for Lorenzo Siciliano had probably included similar pictures, may have painted his own copies of the Villa Medici ‘heads’ while in Gramatica’s studio. If so, it is possible that he now came to the attention of his future protector, the Medici cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, for the first time.
The next studio in which Caravaggio found work was more exalted. It was that of Giuseppe Cesari, otherwise known as the Cavaliere d’Arpino, one of the most prominent artists in Rome in the 1590s. Giuseppe Cesari was only three years older than Caravaggio but far more successful. He was from a family of artists: his father, Muzio, was a painter. His brother, Bernardino, was his chief assistant and may also have acted as workshop manager. When he was a boy, Giuseppe had shown such precocious gifts as a draughtsman