Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [84]
The music being played has been identified. It is the four-voiced Quam pulchra es et quam decora, composed by Noel Bauldewyn (c. 1480–1520) to a medieval text drawn in patchwork fashion from the verses of the Song of Songs.35 The angelic music solemnizes the spiritual union of Caravaggio’s sleepy mother and child, so they are to be understood as the true husband and wife in the scene. Joseph earnestly contemplates the angel, as if straining to understand the mystical significance of the heavenly vision. But, like the slow and faithful ass with which he has been paired, he does not fully grasp the elusive meaning of the notes that fill the air.
His incomprehension might well have been echoed by many of Caravaggio’s contemporaries. Because the painter rendered the notes in the musical part-book without the actual words from the Song of Songs, a vital part of the iconography of his painting was encrypted from the outset. The Rest on the Flight to Egypt has an air of secrecy about it. In many respects it is a touchingly direct dramatization of a biblical story. But it is also occluded, a painting of different levels and layers designed to speak fully only to those who have been initiated into its mysteries.
The standing angel is one of the young Caravaggio’s most haunting inventions. There was nothing in the Bible or any of the Christian apocrypha to suggest the playing of heavenly music during the Holy Family’s flight to Egypt. A music-making guardian angel did appear in medieval miracle plays telling the story. The painter may have seen dramas of this kind, which were traditionally staged at Christmas, and perhaps he intended to evoke popular sacred theatre. But Caravaggio’s precise visual source for the angel was far removed from the world of medieval piety. He lifted the figure directly from The Judgement of Hercules, a mythological picture of 1596 painted for one of the ceilings of the Palazzo Farnese by Annibale Carracci. That painting, now in the Museo di Capodimonte, Naples, shows the mythical character Hercules choosing between two female figures personifying Vice and Virtue. It was the scantily clad figure of Vice that Caravaggio daringly chose to transform into his own half-naked angel. Caravaggio’s career would be marked by bitter rivalry with a number of other painters, including Annibale Carracci. So it seems likely that he was deliberately courting comparisons between his own work and Carracci’s Judgement of Hercules, which was painted only a few months earlier.
Appropriation is Caravaggio’s pretext for a virtuoso display of his own powers. The thief turns out to be a magician. Annibale’s figure is a heavy, sculpturally draped figment of the late Renaissance, a being abstracted from reality into the realm of art. Caravaggio’s angelic boy is a type of ideal beauty, but he has been brought down to earth. His feet touch the dark soil, his slender legs shift to transfer his weight to his left side, his curly hair is tousled by the wind. Even his wings, evidently modelled on those of a pigeon, announce Caravaggio’s distinctive attachment to actuality. An unnecessary curl of surplus string coils from one of the pegs of the angel’s violin, a final grace note of captivating realism. All this serves to emphasize the gulf between Carracci’s disembodied spirit of sensuality and Caravaggio’s fully realized angel. But the most daring trope of inversion is the transformation of the figure’s essential meaning. An embodiment of temptation has been recast as an angel. Vice has been