My next encounter with the name occurred a couple of years later courtesy of The English Patient, the book and the movie. Caravaggio is the name of the thief whose thumbs are cut off by the Nazis. "Caravaggio – the name was just too absurd to pass up," says Willem Dafoe in the movie. I looked up the painter in an art book. So began the process of getting hooked.
Michelangelo Merisi (1571-1610), who was called Caravaggio after his hometown near Milan, was a famous painter in his day. What little is known of him comes from police records, the account books of his patrons, and the not-altogether-reliable accounts of his biographers, who portray him as a madman, a murderer, and a tormented genius. To the latter group we owe the romantic legend, but Caravaggio did not fail to provide material. Despite his tempestuous personal life and violent behavior, not to mention his hygiene issues (he would wear the same clothes until they were rags), he managed to secure lucrative commissions from prominent clients, cardinals and aristocrats. He constantly got into trouble with the Church over his paintings – his Madonna was too buxom, his Christ child looked like any ordinary naked kid, and his dead Virgin Mary was not only bloated but modeled on a known prostitute. In an age of idealization he insisted on naturalism, and the key was light.
As the famed critic Roberto Longhi put it: "Caravaggio discovers the form of shadows: a style in which light, no longer subservient to the plastic definition of the bodies it falls upon, has the power to decide their very existence... For now light itself, and not man’s conception of himself, was to become style’s tool, its contrivance, its dramatic symbol." Subjects no longer have some predetermined dignity or importance – it’s all about how the light falls upon them. And while Caravaggio was challenging the hierarchy of human dignities, his contemporary Galileo was challenging the hierarchy of the planets.
Caravaggio died at age 39, a fugitive with a death warrant that anyone could execute. He was almost immediately forgotten. Critics called his work cheap and vulgar, "a base imitation of nature." For three centuries he was regarded as a minor painter who "fed upon horror and ugliness" (John Ruskin). In the mid-20th century he was rescued from obscurity by critics led by Longhi, who restored him to his rightful place in art history. Today Caravaggio is one of the best-known Old Masters, and his paintings sell for tens of millions of pounds. That is, if you can find them. There are only 80 known Caravaggios – some say only 60 – and many of them are thought to have been destroyed.
One missing Caravaggio is at the center of Jonathan Harr’s riveting book, The Lost Painting. Harr, author of A Civil Action, combines investigative reporting with art history, and his book reads like a romantic thriller. In 1989, in Rome, two master’s students search a family archive (how they got into the archive is a story in itself) for information as to the provenance of Caravaggio’s "Saint John the Baptist." While looking through old account books in a basement, they find a record of a payment of 125 scudi to Caravaggio for "The Taking of Christ," a painting that had been lost for hundreds of years. Art historians knew of its existence through a detailed description of the work by an art critic in 1672. Copies of the work had turned up over the years, all attesting to the magnificence of the original.
In 1990, as I fast-forwarded through the Jarman movie (there is no significance to this; I’m just writing myself into the story), an Italian restorer working in Dublin visited a Jesuit residence to clean up some paintings. Harr’s vivid, fuss-free prose makes painting restoration sound exciting – the old school method of using distilled water, saliva and pellets of fresh bread to remove the layers of grime, the delicate process of relining the canvas, and so on. The Jesuits bring the restorer to the parlor, where his eyes are immediately drawn to one painting. "It was dark, the entire surface obscured by a film of dust, grease and soot. The varnish had turned a yellowish brown, giving the flesh tones in the faces and hands a tobacco-like hue... He judged that it had not been cleaned or relined in more than a century."
The restorer says nothing, he keeps his expression neutral, but inside he’s screaming because he believes – no, he knows – that the thing he’s been waiting for for three decades, the fading dream he has clung to, has finally come to pass. He’s discovered a lost Caravaggio.
Harr is a master at depicting the process – he shows the reader how seemingly unrelated bits of information and glimmers of intuition lead to brilliant conjectures and grand discoveries. We are told that Caravaggio painted using live models and did not make preliminary drawings. He painted directly onto the canvas, and to remind himself where the models should be positioned, he would score the wet undercoat of the canvas with the butt end of his brush. If he changed his mind he simply painted over what he’d painted previously. This produced ghostly images that were visible on closer inspection – pentimenti which, along with the scored marks, served as a kind of signature. (Until fairly recently painters were regarded as skilled tradesmen and were not asked to sign their work.)
Some months ago I saw Caravaggio’s "The Sacrifice of Isaac." In the painting Abraham is holding his son by the neck, pressing his face against a rock. In his right hand he holds the knife. He’s seconds from cutting Isaac’s throat. The light falls on Isaac’s stricken face. Then we see a hand staying the old man’s arm. An angel has come to halt the sacrifice. He points to Abraham’s face as if to say, "Hold it." Your eye is drawn once more to the face of the son.
You can hear him screaming.