Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [88]
Not only were the old saints to be venerated, to be conversed with as if they were still alive. It was to be known that their miracles were being actively repeated in the contemporary world, in the lives of new saints elect. Ecstasies of empathetic love akin to those of Francis loomed large in the lives of sixteenth-century penitents, priests and charismatic nuns. St Teresa of Avila’s memoirs, published in 1588, famously told of an angel coming to her when she was deep in prayer and piercing her breast with an arrow of divine love: ‘It is not bodily pain, but spiritual, though the body has a share in it – indeed, a great share, so sweet are the colloquies of love which pass between the soul and God that if anyone thinks I am lying I beseech God, in his goodness, to give him the same experience.’40
Caravaggio’s painting was intended to prompt reflections on more than the stigmatization of Francis alone. St Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy embodied an ideal of transfiguring Christian love, exemplified not only by St Francis, and by St Teresa, but also – still closer to Roman hearts – by St Filippo Neri, founder of the Oratory. Like Teresa, Neri had been fascinated both by the legends of a saint such as Francis of Assisi, and by the power and authority of the primitive Church. In early life he prayed continually in the catacombs of Rome’s most ancient saints of all; and it was in the Catacomb of San Sebastiano that he experienced his own ecstasy and his own divine wound of love:
In 1544, just before the feast of Pentecost, Philip, while still a layman, was praying to the Holy Ghost in the Catacomb of San Sebastiano, when he seemed to see a globe of fire which entered his mouth and sank down into his heart. At the same time he felt a fire of love which seemed to be a positive physical heat, so that he had to throw himself on the ground and bare his breast to cool it. When he rose he was seized with a violent trembling, accompanied by an extraordinary sense of joy, and putting his hand to his heart, felt there a swelling as big as a man’s fist … At the same time there began that palpitation of the heart which lasted throughout his life, and made itself felt particularly when he was praying, hearing confession, saying Mass, or giving communion, or when he was speaking on some subject which stirred his emotions. So violent was this palpitation that it was described by those who knew him best as being like the blows of a hammer, while the trembling it caused was such as to shake his chair, his bed, or sometimes the whole room. Yet, when he pressed his penitents to his heart they felt an extraordinary consolation …41
Such modern stories of saintly ecstasy were well known to those who commissioned and paid for Caravaggio’s early devotional pictures. Neri had confided the tale of his blissful ordeal by divine fire to none other than Cardinal Federico Borromeo, owner of Caravaggio’s Basket of Fruit. Near the end of his life, Cardinal del Monte delivered a laudatio of St Teresa, on the occasion of her canonization.
Caravaggio’s strong and unusual emphasis on the love that burned within Francis’s heart expressly evoked the parallels between his legend and those of the modern saints. The sacred past is projected into the present. The holy light that shone on Francis might still shine on anyone with eyes to see. St Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy is more than an illustration of an episode in the life of a saint. The picture offers a consoling dream of transfiguration, a condition of oneness with Christ to which