Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [93]
And afterwards, having given it a coat of gesso, and having prepared it in his own way, he began to think about what he could paint upon it, that might be able to terrify all who should come upon it, producing the same effect as once did the head of the Medusa. For this purpose, then, Leonardo carried to a room of his own into which no one entered save himself alone, lizards great and small, crickets, serpents, butterflies, grasshoppers, bats, and other strange kinds of suchlike animals, out of the number of which, variously put together, he formed a great ugly creature, most horrible and terrifying, which emitted a poisonous breath and turned the air to flame; and he made it come out of a dark and jagged rock, belching forth venom from its open throat, fire from its eyes, and smoke from its nostrils, in so strange a fashion that it appeared altogether a monstrous and horrible thing; and so long did he labour over making it, that the stench of the dead animals in that room was past bearing, but Leonardo did not notice it, so great was the love that he bore towards art.47
Caravaggio also studied live animals in the process of creating his own monster, but otherwise his Medusa could hardly have been more different to that described by Vasari. Leonardo’s painting sounds complicated and full of circumstantial detail, conjuring up rocks and crags, a theatrical entrance on the part of the monster, and even the air itself thick with fire and smoke, just the sort of picture that mirrored his restless mind. By contrast, the brilliance of Caravaggio’s Medusa reflects the painter’s remorseless pursuit of a realist conceit. Leonardo had painted a picture of the Medusa that seemed wittily appropriate as the decoration of a shield. Caravaggio did something bolder and conceptually far more pure. He created a painting that sought to transcend painting and become the very thing that it depicts. His Medusa is not a painting of a shield, or at least it pretends not to be. It pretends to be the shield itself, held in Perseus’s hand at the very instant when he has killed the Medusa. It is a painting meant to be admired at close quarters, passed round from hand to hand. To look at the picture thus would be to become the conquering hero himself – to gaze, through his eyes, at the reflection of the Medusa, as she in turn watches herself die, in her own reflection, in the shield’s mirror.
The best way to grasp the true nature of Caravaggio’s illusion – to complete the circle of gazes demanded by the painter’s conceit – would indeed be actually to hold it. Did Ferdinando de’ Medici do just that, and smile at the ingenuity of Caravaggio’s idea? Certainly, the sense that this was not a picture like other pictures, a picture simply to be hung on a wall, persisted among later generations of the Medici. An inventory of the family’s armoury from 1631 reveals that it was displayed as part of a suit of armour arranged to look like a standing knight at arms. It was brandished by the figure, in fact, just like a real shield.
Caravaggio’s Medusa was designed to transform its owner into Perseus himself. To give such a picture to a Medici was to pay him a comfortingly familiar compliment. The Perseus myth had been assimilated into the mythology of Medici power in the middle years of the sixteenth century, when the family had assumed absolute control over what had