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By Root 1451 0

anyone might aspire. That is the significance of its most striking detail, the creased and eyes-closed face of the ecstatic saint. Caravaggio painted St Francis as a real, flesh-and-blood human being, a man with sharply defined features, someone who might be easily recognized, even on the dark streets of Rome by night. Not only that – he gave the saint his own face.42 It is an extraordinary statement of self-identification, but one that would be more than justified by Caravaggio’s subsequent religious works. No other painter of his time would do more to revive and proclaim the solemn, ascetic sense of humility at the heart of the Franciscan ideal.

BETWEEN SACRED AND PROFANE

The sacred and the profane are inextricably intertwined in Caravaggio’s early work. Pictures of apparently mundane subjects are depth-charged with spiritual yearning, while flashes of intoxicating eroticism dart from pictures of the saints or the Holy Family. The painter dreams of angelic beauty, but can only embody it as one beautiful boy after another. The sensual and sexual appeal of such youthful, smooth-skinned figures as the coquettish, music-playing angel in The Rest on the Flight, or the angelic ministrant to St Francis, has been taken as evidence of the painter’s homosexuality. The truth is not straightforward. Caravaggio was capable of being aroused by the physical presence of other men. He could not have painted such figures in the way that he did if that were not so. But he was equally attracted to women, as certain other paintings from the late 1590s, such as the transfixing St Catherine of Alexandria, plainly demonstrate. Insofar as the art reveals the man, Caravaggio’s painting suggests an ambiguous sexual personality. On the evidence of his paintings he was neither heterosexual nor homosexual, terms that are in any case anachronistic when applied to his world. He was omnisexual.

The devouring way in which Caravaggio looked at the world made it all but impossible for him to paint idealized forms. There is a quality of seemingly involuntary vividness in many of the details of his paintings – a quality that, increasingly, he learned to control and to manipulate. This both intrigued and fascinated his contemporaries, and brought a dangerous unpredictability to his pictures. Something base and ordinary might suddenly seem touched by a miracle; a holy mystery could shade into figments snatched from an erotic daydream. Caravaggio’s early work is beguiling, in part, because it is so ambiguous and metamorphic. It expresses the truancies of the painter’s imagination and allows space for the unregulated responses of the viewer’s wandering eye. It speaks of piety but makes concessions to the impious mind, guiltily mingling the pleasures of the world with a genuine sense of devotion.

Caravaggio’s more sophisticated patrons were attuned to such subtle ambiguities. The best evidence for this is an intriguing correspondence between a cleric from Vicenza named Paolo Gualdo and Cardinal Ottavio Paravicino. Paravicino, who had been present at Vittoria Archileo’s concert, was a friend of del Monte and one of three Roman cardinals certainly linked with Filippo Neri’s Oratory. Gualdo was a scholarly cleric with strong connections to the humanist culture of the Veneto in general and Vicenza in particular. He was a friend of the poet Tasso and wrote a biography of the architect Palladio. He was also a lover of painting, who had tried and failed to obtain a picture by Caravaggio.

In one of his letters to Paravicino, Gualdo harks back to that disappointment. Referring to himself in the third person, and writing in a spirit of knowingly ironical self-deprecation, he casts himself in the role of a simple impecunious man of the cloth, motivated by philanthropy as well as the love of art, whose overtures to Caravaggio have been unfairly rebuffed: ‘the good priest has a certain discernment when it comes to painting, but not very many jewels to fund his fancy, so this seemed a good occasion to help a galant’huomo of the art of painting, and in the process obtain