Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [9]
Repudiating all other rules, [Caravaggio] considered the highest achievement not to be bound to art. For this innovation he was greatly acclaimed, and many talented artists seemed compelled to follow him … Such praise caused Caravaggio to appreciate himself alone, and he claimed to be the only faithful imitator of nature. Nevertheless, he lacked invenzione, decorum, disegno [draughtsmanship], or any knowledge of the science of painting. The moment the model was taken from him, his hand and his mind became empty.
Bellori went on to say that ‘Just as certain herbs produce both beneficial medicine and most pernicious poison, in the same way, though he produced some good, Caravaggio has been most harmful and wrought havoc with every ornament and good tradition of painting.’1 In other words, the painter might have had a gift for mimicking reality, but there was no depth to him. If Bellori were to be believed, he was little more than a machine for producing optically convincing images – a kind of human camera, with his workshop a prototypical photographer’s studio, long before the invention of photography itself. In this way was the myth of Caravaggio as an untutored, thoughtless virtuoso, the master of a debased and pernicious brand of naturalism, attached like an anchor to his posthumous reputation.2 In fact, he was an extremely thoughtful, inventive painter, a close and careful reader of the texts that he was called to dramatize and to embody in the form of images. But how and where he got his education remains unknown, partly because his three biographers have so little to say about his early life.
MODEST ORIGINS, NOBLE CONNECTIONS
Caravaggio was born three years after the publication of the second, revised edition of Giorgio Vasari’s pioneering anthology of artists’ biographies, The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects. Vasari’s book was the model on which later writers such as Baglione and Bellori based their own collections of artists’ lives. In it, he confirmed and sought to extend a great rise in the status of artists within the Italian peninsula during the period now known – also largely thanks to Vasari’s efforts – as the Renaissance. Previously the profession of art had been ranked low because it involved work with the hands and was therefore classed as a form of manual labour, a craft rather than a liberal art. But implicit throughout Vasari’s thousand and more pages is the belief that the greatest artists deserve to be ranked with poets and philosophers as men of true genius, rightful companions of kings and princes.
As well as raising the reputation of his own profession, Vasari established certain formulae for writing the life of an artist. Particularly famous painters and sculptors, such as Giotto or Michelangelo, are established as miraculous prodigies from an early age: the brilliance of Giotto, for example, is said to have been discovered by the older artist Cimabue, who came upon the young man when he was still a callow shepherd and found him drawing perfectly upon a stone. But no such uplifting fables are attached to the youth of Caravaggio by his biographers. Mancini compresses his early life to just two sentences, and Baglione to a paragraph. Bellori has a tale to tell about the young Caravaggio, but it runs counter to the kind of prodigy stories favoured by Vasari because it is designed to stress the artist’s principal failing, as Bellori saw it – his supposed lack of intellect, which meant that his work could never rise from mere craft.
Bellori’s story tells of Caravaggio’s origins as the son of an artisan. Since the painter ‘was employed in Milan with