Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [7]
London, February 2010
PART ONE
Milan, 1571–92
DARKNESS AND LIGHT
Caravaggio’s art is made from darkness and light. His pictures present spotlit moments of extreme and often agonized human experience. A man is decapitated in his bedchamber, blood spurting from a deep gash in his neck. A man is assassinated on the high altar of a church. A woman is shot in the stomach with a bow and arrow at point-blank range. Caravaggio’s images freeze time but also seem to hover on the brink of their own disappearance. Faces are brightly illuminated. Details emerge from darkness with such uncanny clarity that they might be hallucinations. Yet always the shadows encroach, the pools of blackness that threaten to obliterate all. Looking at his pictures is like looking at the world by flashes of lightning.
Caravaggio’s life is like his art, a series of lightning flashes in the darkest of nights. He is a man who can never be known in full because almost all that he did, said and thought is lost in the irrecoverable past. He was one of the most electrifyingly original artists ever to have lived, yet we have only one solitary sentence from him on the subject of painting – the sincerity of which is, in any case, questionable, since it was elicited from him when he was under interrogation for the capital crime of libel.
Much of what is known about him has been discovered in the criminal archives of his time. The majority of his recorded acts – apart from those involved in painting – are crimes and misdemeanours. When Caravaggio emerges from the obscurity of the past he does so, like the characters in his own paintings, as a man in extremis.
He lived much of his life as a fugitive, and that is how he is preserved in history – a man on the run, heading for the hills, keeping to the shadows. But he is caught, now and again, by the sweeping beam of a searchlight. Each glimpse is different. He appears in many guises, moods and predicaments. Caravaggio throws stones at the house of his landlady and sings ribald songs outside her window. He has a fight with a waiter about the dressing on a plate of artichokes. He taunts a rival with graphic sexual insults. He attacks a man in the street. He kills a man in a swordfight. He and a gang of other men inflict grievous bodily harm on a Knight of Justice on the island of Malta. He is himself attacked by four armed men in the street outside a low-life tavern in Naples. His life is a series of intriguing and vivid tableaux – scenes that abruptly switch, as in the plays of his English contemporary William Shakespeare, from comedy to tragedy, from low farce to high drama.
Anyone attempting a biography of Caravaggio must play the detective as well as the art historian. The facts are rarely straightforward and the patterns of intention that lie behind them often obscure. The artist’s life can easily seem merely chaotic, the rise and fall of an incurable hot-head, a man so governed by passion that his actions unfold without rhyme or reason (this was, for centuries, the prevailing view of him). But there is a logic to it all and, with hindsight, a tragic inevitability. Despite the many black holes and discontinuities in the shadowplay of Caravaggio’s life, certain structures of belief and certain habits of behaviour run through all that he did and all that he painted. The evidence has to be decoded using guesswork, intuition, speculation and above all a sense of historical imagination – a willingness to delve as deeply as possible into the codes and values