Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [59]
Vasari’s story about another work of art may shed light on the meaning of Caravaggio’s. The introduction of a faintly malevolent laughing girl complicates the story of a boy bitten by surprise. Perhaps Anguissola may have intended some playful allusion to the hazards of adult love that lie in store for every child. This, in turn, may begin to suggest the symbolic intentions that lay behind Caravaggio’s own choice of the theme. Is the presence of erotic temptation implied in his Boy Bitten by a Lizard? There is reason to think so.
There is an air of abandonment about the boy, imparted both by his languid state of undress and by the rose in his hair. Roses are traditional emblems of romantic love, but the other blossoms present in the picture add a less innocent note to its symbolism. Jasmine was a traditional symbol of desire (Caravaggio would include the same flower in his later portrait of a well-known Roman courtesan). The boy’s clothing, such as it is, a wispy piece of white drapery, might be no more than a twisted bedsheet. He who reaches for cherries and apples has grasped at sexual temptation. Now he is receiving his just reward. A sexual subtext lurks, as the lizard had done, in that pile of luscious fruit. The animal is zoologically inaccurate – real lizards have no teeth – but charged with metaphorical potency. A toothless reptile has been transformed into the very image of the vagina dentata.
It would have required no great ingenuity on the part of Caravaggio’s contemporaries to unlock his meaning. In the sign language of the Italian street – symbolism in its most vivid, popular form – the bitten finger represented the wounded phallus. The English diarist John Evelyn witnessed a quarrel between two boatmen in seventeenth-century Genoa, at the end of which one of them ‘put his finger in his mouth and almost bit it off by the joynt, shewing it to his antagonist as an assurance to him of some bloodie revenge’.37 The threat on that occasion, as Evelyn euphemistically hints, was castration. A different fate can be understood to lie in store for Caravaggio’s decadent young man: in Rome, city of courtesans, the reward for promiscuity was venereal disease. ‘The French disease’, they called it in Italy (although the French themselves preferred to think of it as ‘the Pox of Naples’).
Boy Bitten by a Lizard is a vanitas painting, a reflection on the pitfalls that await those who give themselves up to the pleasures of the flesh. It is a work of art that functions in a way exactly analagous to the action which it depicts. An apparently innocuous image, full of sweet fruit and lingering sensual detail, hides the sourest of morals. The message of the picture might seem unnecessarily severe, but it should be remembered that Caravaggio’s target audience was the higher Roman clergy. They needed the alibi of moral reflection to enjoy – let alone purchase – a picture such as this.
GYPSIES AND ROGUES AND A CARDINAL SNARED
For all his ingenuity, Caravaggio did not enjoy immediate success with Boy Bitten by a Lizard. According to Mancini, the painter was forced to sell the work for next to nothing. In Baglione’s yet bleaker telling of the story, Caravaggio failed to find a buyer for any of the pictures that he painted after leaving the Cesari workshop: ‘He was unable to to sell these works, and in a short time he found himself without money and poorly dressed.’
Desperate for money, the artist went to the picture-dealers of Rome. According to Baglione, ‘some charitable gentlemen expert in the profession came to his aid, and finally Maestro Valentino, a dealer in paintings at San Luigi dei Francesi, managed to sell a few.’38 This ‘Maestro Valentino’ was actually Costantino Spata, who did indeed have a shop in the piazza bordering San Luigi dei Francesi, the so-called ‘church of the French’. He befriended Caravaggio and Prospero Orsi. He sold their pictures on commission and was