Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [92]
The Bacchus soon found its way into the collections of the Medici in Florence. It is likely that del Monte specifically commissioned it as a gift for the grand duke. But the present does not seem to have gone down well. The god with dirty fingernails and sunburned skin may have struck the Medici as a joke in poor taste, or perhaps they were scandalized by the picture’s close focus on the sensual body of a half-naked boy. Either way, the picture disappeared from view as soon as it entered the Medici collections. When it finally resurfaced, some four hundred years later, in a basement storeroom of the Uffizi Galleries, not only had it never been catalogued, it had never even been framed.
In 1598 del Monte gave another painting by Caravaggio to his Medici protector. Baglione writes that the artist created ‘a head of a terrifying Medusa with vipers for hair placed on a shield, which the Cardinal sent as a gift to Ferdinando, Grand Duke of Tuscany’.45 Unlike the Bacchus, the Medusa was enthusiastically received and prominently displayed in the Medici collections. It is one of Caravaggio’s most startling inventions. Painted on to a circular piece of canvas stretched over a convex shield of poplar wood, the picture conjures up the legendary monster at the instant when she breathes her last. In Greek myth, the serpent-haired Medusa turned all who gazed upon her to stone, until the hero Perseus, looking only at her reflection in his brightly polished shield, cut off her head. In Caravaggio’s painting, thick jets of blood spurt from the horrible creature’s neck, which has been neatly severed just below the jaw. Her eyes stare and her mouth opens in a soundless scream. The snakes of her hair coil convulsively, each writhing in its own separate corkscrew agony of death.
The dying monster with arrestingly masculine features is yet another of the artist’s self-portraits.46 ‘Item: a convex mirror’, reads one of the entries in an inventory of Caravaggio’s possessions. The distortions of the painter’s face as it appears in the Medusa indicate that he used a convex mirror to paint it. As in a convex reflection, the cheeks and forehead have been slightly broadened and elongated. Caravaggio deepens the game further by making his own convex reflection, painted on to a convex shield, look as though it is actually concave. The shadow cast by the Medusa’s head creates the illusion of a curved circular surface scalloped away from the viewer, like a shallow bowl.
Caravaggio treated the commission as a pretext for the display of his own special skills and techniques – so much so that the picture might almost be regarded as his own emblem, or impresa. Just as the face is the painter’s own, studied from life, the snakes too were painted from actual, wriggling specimens. It is a mark of Caravaggio’s pragmatism that the snakes are not vipers, but watersnakes of a type commonly found in the Tiber. He must have asked a fisherman to net some for him.
Just as Perseus had slain the snake-haired Gorgon, Caravaggio set out to vanquish every other artist to have attempted the subject. The Medusa is a work of such flourish and bravado that it has the look of a painting submitted for a prize. Giorgio Vasari had argued that without the intense spirit of competition between Florentine artists there could have been no Italian Renaissance. His Lives of the Artists is full of accounts of such rivalry, and tales of actual contests that had taken place between artists in earlier times – for example, the story of Ghiberti and Brunelleschi competing for the commission to create a set of