Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [53]
The picture has been interpreted in a number of sharply differing ways. It is plainly a kind of demonstration piece, painted to exhibit the young Caravaggio’s skill in depicting not only fruits and foliage, but also the human face and form. Some writers have regarded it as a straightforward genre painting, a portrait of a handsome young fruit-seller plying his trade. Others claim to detect echoes of classical literature26 – in particular, the fables of Pliny the Elder, whose Natural History is the principal source of information about the painters of antiquity. Pliny’s encyclopedic book contains several stories and parables intended to demonstrate the heights of virtuosity reached by the artists of ancient Greece, as they competed to create an art of perfectly deceptive illusionism:
The contemporaries and rivals of Zeuxis were Timanthes, Androcydes, Eupompus, Parrhasius. This last, it is recorded, entered into a competition with Zeuxis. Zeuxis produced a picture of grapes so dexterously represented that birds began to fly down to eat from the painted vine. Whereupon Parrhasius designed so lifelike a picture of a curtain that Zeuxis, proud of the verdict of the birds, requested that the curtain should now be drawn back and the picture displayed. When he realised his mistake, with a modesty that did him honour, he yielded up the palm, saying that whereas he had managed to deceive only birds, Parrhasius had deceived an artist.27
Pliny adds that, as a riposte to Parrhasius, Zeuxis also painted a picture of a child holding grapes. Once more the birds tried to eat the fruit, but this time Zeuxis felt he had failed. He disconsolately pointed out that if his picture had been perfectly lifelike, the birds would have been too frightened by the painted boy to peck at the painted grapes in his hands.
It was not uncommon for Italian artists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to create their own versions of lost paintings from the classical past. So perhaps Caravaggio’s choice of subject was intended to evoke that same picture of a child holding grapes by Zeuxis – and, indeed, to surpass it. No birds would ever dare to pick at the fruit in this basket. The blushing boy, whose tunic has slipped off his shoulder, is tremblingly alive. There is a slight awkwardness in the handling of his anatomy – an uncertainty in the juncture of his collarbone and right shoulder, which seems as a result unnaturally enlarged – but he is a compelling presence none the less. While the basket of fruit advertises Caravaggio’s ability to capture different tones, textures and colours, the figure of the boy demonstrates a yet rarer gift: the ability to suggest human emotion. Those ardent, intently gazing eyes are filled with longing, even love. This striking intensity of feeling is inconsistent with the notion that the picture is simply a genre painting, a snapshot of daily life. Neither can it be readily explained by reference to the classical past.
How should we think about this remarkable face? Those who subscribe to the romantic myth of Caravaggio as a social and sexual outsider, boldly expressing the love that dares not speak its name, are obliged to twist the fruit-bearer’s expression of amorous yearning into the come-hither eyelash-flutterings of a rent boy. Howard Hibbard’s biography of Caravaggio, published in 1983, contains a brief but exemplary statement of this line of argument: ‘There is a soliciting