Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [51]
SELF-PORTRAIT AS BACCHUS, BOY WITH A BASKET OF FRUIT
None of the still lives that Caravaggio painted while he was with the Cavaliere d’Arpino seem to have survived. But there are two early pictures with a provenance that places them in the Cesari workshop. Both contain carefully worked still life elements, although neither is a pure still life painting: Boy with a Basket of Fruit and the so-called Sick Bacchus, or Self-Portrait as Bacchus.
They must have been done for Giuseppe Cesari in 1593–4, because both were still in his possession as late as 1607, the year when he unwisely clashed with the covetous papal nephew Scipione Borghese. Borghese was an avid art collector, as well as a great admirer of Caravaggio’s work, who had long had his eye on Giuseppe Cesari’s considerable backroom stock. He made an insultingly low offer for the pictures, and when Cesari had the temerity to refuse, Borghese used his influence to have the troublesome painter-dealer arrested on trumped-up charges. He then appropriated Cesari’s entire collection of 105 paintings. The two pictures by Caravaggio have been in the Borghese collection ever since – and may still be seen in the Galleria Borghese today.
They are unusual works, with more than a hint of awkwardness about them, especially the Self-Portrait as Bacchus, which two of Caravaggio’s early biographers found sufficiently memorable to single out from the rest of his juvenilia. Mancini refers to ‘a beautiful Bacchus who was beardless’,24 while Baglione mentions ‘a Bacchus with different bunches of grapes, painted with great care but a bit dry in style’.25 ‘Dry’ seems a more appropriate epithet than ‘beautiful’.
The ancient god of wine and mystic revelry holds a bunch of white grapes in his right hand. At the same time he brings up his shadowed left hand to clasp and even crush them, as in a wine-press. The bloom on the grapes, which dusts them with a layer of whiteness and dulls the reflected light caught in their opalescent skins, is echoed by the dry and whitish lips of the god himself. His pallour is an enigma, which the dark pools of his eyes – mocking and mysterious – do nothing to dispel. The still life that lies before him has an unsettling pathos. Two ripe, furred peaches lie beside a bunch of purple grapes on a forbiddingly cold and otherwise bare ledge of stone. Vine leaves trail off into darkness.
The title frequently used in modern times, Sick Bacchus, is a legacy of the Italian art historian Roberto Longhi. Longhi believed that Caravaggio painted it as an allegorical self-portrait just after his discharge from the hospital of the Consolazione. Whether the work alludes to the artist’s illness is open to question, but it is certainly a self-portrait. Baglione groups it with a number of other, long-since vanished ‘portraits of himself in the mirror’. The distorted right shoulder of the figure, so close to the picture plane as to seem almost touchable, may reflect the painter’s use of a faintly convex mirror. The effect is at once intimate and disconcerting. The promise of a close relationship is held out by the figure’s proximity, but denied by the cool evasiveness in his eyes. His right leg, so lost in semi-darkness as to have become little more than a blur, is half raised, which suggests that he could be about to get up. Sensual gratification is the half-promised gift that he brings. But he might disappear at any moment, leaving behind just darkness and the taste of ashes, not of wine.
Why would Caravaggio have painted himself like this? What might he have meant by it? The notion that he intended the work as a record of his own illness is ingenious, but there is a better and simpler explanation for the artist’s liverish complexion. The picture is set at night, the time for Bacchic revelry. The light that flares so brightly on