Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [95]
Michelangelo had made dramatic use of di sotto in sù perspective for his depictions of God Separating Light and Darkness, God Creating the Sun and Moon and God Calling Forth Life from the Waters on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The subject of Caravaggio’s painting for del Monte is, in essence, a profane version of the same story, told at the start of the Book of Genesis. Caravaggio’s use of the same device may have been his way of mischievously pointing up the parallel between the most famous cycle of religious frescoes in all of Rome and his own, rather more playful ceiling decoration.
Caravaggio was always highly responsive to circumstance and milieu. Throughout his life, his art would be deeply coloured by the different social, political and religious environments that he encountered. Entering the circle of Cardinal del Monte, living in his palace, absorbing his ideas, listening to his musicians, looking at his art collections – those experiences are all clearly reflected in Caravaggio’s paintings of the late 1590s. His work becomes more sophisticated, and more intellectually rarefied. Certain details, such as the exquisite wine glass held up by Bacchus, with its delicately blown stem and the whirlpool patterning of its shallow bowl, express his palpable delight in a previously unknown world of beauty and luxury.
The work of this period is also marked by a spirit of experiment. The artist is trying out new ideas and striving to impress, so much so that he occasionally paints against the grain of his own dark and intense personality. The mythical Mannerist comedy of Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto would not be repeated. But the fact that Caravaggio was prepared to undertake a commission so alien to his own sensibility demonstrates his determination to succeed.
Away from his painting room, and away from the company of Cardinal del Monte, Caravaggio was still the same turbulent young man who had committed nameless misdeeds in Milan. Those who knew him at this time thought of him as a person split asunder, a man who contrived to live two opposing lives. Karel van Mander, a Dutch painter in Rome, described him as a piece of living chiaroscuro:
There is … a certain Michelangelo of Caravaggio who is doing remarkable things in Rome … he … has risen from poverty through his industry and by tackling and accepting everything with farsightedness and courage, as some people do who refuse to be held down through timidity or through lack of courage but who advance themselves candidly and fearlessly and who boldly pursue gain – a procedure which, if it is taken in honesty, in a proper manner, and with discretion, deserves no censure. For Fortuna will offer herself by no means frequently of her own accord; at times we must try her, prod her, and urge her …
But again there is beside the grain the chaff, to wit that he does not pursue his studies steadfastly so that after a fortnight’s work he will swagger about for a month or two with his sword at his side and with a servant following him, from one ball-court to the next, ever ready to engage in a fight or argument, with the result that it is impossible to get along with him. All of which is wholly incompatible with our Art. For certainly Mars and Minerva have never been the best of friends. Yet as regards his painting, it is such that it is very pleasing in an exceedingly handsome manner, an example for our young artists to follow …51
Caravaggio lived his life as if there were only Carnival and Lent, with nothing in between. His pictures are the legacy of his lenten days. To encounter his carnivalesque