Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [56]
There were no fond farewells to Giuseppe Cesari. Whether Caravaggio left Cesari’s employ before or after the murky events that led to his hospitalization, they parted on bad terms. Whatever the personal reasons for the bad blood between them, professional jealousy also probably played a part. There are hints, in Mancini’s manuscript notes, that Cesari deliberately attempted to hold his talented young apprentice back for fear of being outshone. The perennially abrasive Caravaggio was a born innovator who had little time for the art of most of his contemporaries (he would later say as much in one of his several appearances before the Roman magistrates), so likely regarded the fey late Mannerism of Cesari’s mature style with naked contempt. Cesari’s prestige among the most influential Roman collectors and patrons can only have made Caravaggio’s own position all the more galling to him. Being studio assistant was bad enough, but being studio assistant to an overrated mediocrity must have been more than his pride could stand.
Accusations of arrogance echo through the early biographies of Caravaggio. ‘Michelangelo Merisi was a satirical and proud man,’ writes Baglione; ‘at times he would speak badly of the painters of the past, and also of the present, no matter how distinguished they were, because he thought that he alone had surpassed all the other artists in his profession.’32 Bellori explicitly says that pride drove Caravaggio to leave Cesari and strike out on his own. At this point Bellori introduces another character into the narrative, a well-known painter of amusing bizzareries named Prospero Orsi, who suddenly appears as the rebellious Caravaggio’s sidekick, egging him on to rebellion and independence: ‘When he met Prospero, a painter of grotesques, he took the opportunity to leave Giuseppe in order to compete with him for the glory of painting. Then he began to paint according to his own inclinations; not only ignoring but even despising the superb statuary of antiquity and the famous paintings of Raphael, he considered nature to be the only subject fit for his brush.’
Bellori treats Caravaggio’s rejection of Cesari as if it had been the publication of a manifesto. In his eyes, Caravaggio had not just turned away from one man’s influence; he had repudiated the entire classical and Renaissance canon and abandoned those principles of selection and idealization on which all truly great and lasting works of art must be founded. He describes it as an act of foolhardy hubris. ‘As a result, when he was shown the most famous statues of Phidias and Glykon, in order that he might use them as models, his only answer was to point towards a crowd of people, saying that nature had given him an abundance of masters.’
The idea that anyone would have taken the time to call the young Caravaggio’s attention to the sculptures of classical antiquity is probably fanciful. The neatness of his rejoinder strengthens the suspicion that this is parable, rather than fact (Bellori in effect admits as much when he concedes that ‘A similar story is told about the painter Eupompus’). Yet the fiction is revealing because it contains, in a nutshell, the academic artist’s innate distrust of Caravaggio’s startling naturalism. The painter is cast as gifted but fatally proud, a man bent on dragging art down into the gutter – leading it towards the mere unthinking replication of reality. The same attitude, softened by time but equally misguided, lies behind more recent attempts to expose the presumed trickery behind Caravaggio’s art – the suggestion that the painter must have used some kind of lens to achieve his effects, or the hypothesis that it was all (literally) done with mirrors. The one grain of truth in Bellori’s account may lie in what it has to say about the sheer strength of early audience response, favourable or otherwise, to the seductively lifelike