Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [90]
The allusion to Caravaggio as a galant’huomo suggests not only his pre-eminence as a painter but also a degree of social pretension. The term, which was used interchangeably with valent’huomo, signified a virtuoso or a man of especial expertise in his chosen field. But it also carried associations of worth and, by extension, honour. Gualdo’s letter was written in 1603, but, given that he refers to a small picture, and elsewhere mentions the name of Cardinal del Monte, it seems reasonable to believe that he had the painter’s work of the mid to late 1590s in mind.
A yet more interesting letter about Caravaggio was written by Paravicino to Gualdo in August 1603. It is a teasing text, composed in courtly riddles and insinuations, which takes the form of an imaginary encounter between the phantom of Caravaggio and a caricatured version of Paravicino’s friend, Gualdo himself, the cleric from Vicenza:
Michelangelo da Caravaggio, excellent Painter, says that he came as a shade or spirit to Vicenza, and met a galant’huomo who loves paintings and who asked him wondrous many questions. He describes, but does not paint with his brush, a priest with the air of a solemnly reformed cleric, a man who, if he did not speak, would appear to be a Theatine. [The Theatines were a Counter-Reformation order of clerics noted for their asceticism and moral severity.] But when he does open his mouth he touches on every topic, and does so in a spirit of gallantry. It seems to me that he has a tincture of all the sciences, says Caravaggio, but since I lack the necessary expertise myself I cannot touch the marrow of his actual knowledge. He describes himself as extremely keen to have something painted, one minute speaking of various churches, the next of having some beautiful work painted for his lordship the Bishop of Padua. But Caravaggio would have made for him some painting that would have been in that middle area, between the sacred, and the profane – a kind of picture that he would not have wanted to see from a distance …
The aim of the letter is to tease Gualdo and to puncture, with the lightest of touches, his holier-than-thou pretensions – which had themselves been expressed in a spirit of ironic self-parody. Caravaggio and his art are merely the tools employed to that ludic end. But, for all its cryptic circumlocutions, Paravicino’s letter reveals much about the risky pleasures enjoyed by keen-eyed connoisseurs of Caravaggio’s painting.
The whole passage turns on the play between appearance and reality. The figure of Gualdo seems at first to be a severe and utterly correct Counter-Reformation cleric, but he then discourses with gallantry on every subject under the sun, showing that he has a more restless mind than first appearances had suggested. He is not necessarily irreligious, although he thinks about more than religion alone. But even this second Gualdo, galant’huomo himself of art and all the sciences, may not be everything that he seems, since the fictional Caravaggio of the letter confesses that he himself lacks the wherewithal to judge the true extent of his knowledge.
A similar contrast between seeming and being is drawn in the second part of Paravicino’s tale, about the imaginary commissioning of a picture. Gualdo says that he is thinking of a painting to be given to a church, or to his superior, the Bishop of Padua. But Caravaggio sees through the smokescreen of Gualdo’s request and understands what would really please him. He decides not to paint an altarpiece, a monumental and unimpeachably pious type of painting. That is because a public work of art, designed to be seen and read from a distance, would not suit a man of Gualdo’s personality. Instead, Caravaggio will paint for him something very different – a work that might appear devout but will also appeal to a taste for profane pleasures. It will be a picture for private contemplation, ‘not one that he would have wanted to see from a distance’, because it would yield its secrets and pleasures only when viewed at close quarters. Such