Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [94]
But its biggest compliment of all is paid implicitly to the painter himself. He it is who personifies the Medusa, the monster who might be defeated but whose magical powers, none the less, loom larger than anything else in her legend. With eyes wide open and mouth agape, the painter takes on her role and in doing so claims for himself her dark powers of enchantment. Whomsoever the Medusa looks at, she freezes, preserving them forever in a single, charged instant of being. From the flux of life she takes a moment and makes it last for all time. That is what Caravaggio does too. Her magic is his magic, a petrifying art.
IN THE LABORATORY OF THE ALCHEMIST
Sometime around 1599 del Monte invited Caravaggio to his villa near the Porta Pinciana and commissioned him to decorate the ceiling of the Tesoretto, a narrow, rectangular room next to the distillery where the cardinal conducted his alchemical experiments. A hidden, private space, it is reminiscent of the studiolo of Francesco de’ Medici in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, a chamber like a jewellery box, which had been richly decorated in the Mannerist style by Giorgio Vasari and his assistants in the late 1560s. Francesco de’ Medici himself appears in one of those paintings, in the character of an alchemist. Although Caravaggio did not actually paint Cardinal del Monte surrounded by his phials and retorts, he did create a kind of portrait of the alchemically inclined mind. Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto is a wall painting but it was executed in the unusual and fugitive medium of oil on plaster, which strengthens the suspicion that Caravaggio had never learned to paint in fresco, despite his supposed apprenticeship to Peterzano. The picture, which is still in situ and in surprisingly good condition, was first described by Bellori:
In Rome in the Ludovisi Gardens near the Porta Pinciana, they attribute to Caravaggio the Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto in the casino of Cardinal del Monte, who was interested in chemical medicines and adorned the small room of his laboratory, associating those gods with the elements and with the globe of the world placed in their midst. It has been said that Caravaggio, reproached for not understanding either planes or perspective, placed the figures in such a position that they appear to be seen from sharply below, so as to vie with the most difficult foreshortenings …48
For the first and last time Caravaggio flirted with out-and-out Mannerism.49 The picture’s primary function might almost be, as Bellori insinuates, to demonstrate difficulties triumphantly overcome. The plunging perspective is of a type known as di sotto in sù, literally meaning ‘of above, from below’, executed here with light-hearted bravado. Jupiter, mounted on an eagle, reaches a hand into the translucent celestial sphere at the centre of the ceiling’s painted sky. The frowning figure of Neptune, mounted on a rearing seahorse, is yet another of Caravaggio’s self-portraits.50 The most dramatically foreshortened figure is that of Pluto, whose carefully painted penis is uncircumcised and surrounded by a dark bush of pubic hair. The Mannerist painter Giulio Romano had painted a similarly vivid di sotto in sù depiction of male genitalia – the undercarriage of a flying charioteer – in his mid sixteenth-century decorations of the Palazzo del Te in Mantua. Caravaggio’s bawdy fantasy of airborne larking about belongs squarely in the same tradition.
There is an allegorical alibi for the emphatic phallus. The overarching theme of the painting is the procreative role of the three elements. From their seminal confluence, everything in the