Dead man painting: the late work of Caravaggio

In the film Dead Man Walking, as Matthew Poncelet’s hope of reprieve from his death sentence diminishes, he comes under increasing pressure from Sister Prejean to confess to the crime for which he is being punished. Although the film is based on Sister Prejean’s campaign against the death penalty, it leaves open the interpretation that it is only the certainty of death that finally compels Matthew to confess his guilt.

Walking round the National Gallery’s exhibition of late Caravaggio, I got the same sense of a man under sentence of death, forced to confront his own mortality.
In the early 1600s Caravaggio was one of the most successful artists of his day. Born Michelangelo Merisi in 1571, he was brought up in northern Italy in the town of Caravaggio — hence his nickname — but rose to stardom in Rome as a painter of dramatic realism. After decades of convoluted, artificial work by the Mannerists, Caravaggio’s painting came as a powerful restorative, influencing artists from Naples to the Netherlands. He used ordinary people as models, even for the most significant figures in his religious scenes: Jesus’s disciples at the Supper at Emmaus are shown as lined, aged men with shabby clothes. He did not stint with the gore as Judith beheads Holofernes. And Caravaggio created strong contrasts of light and shade, like spotlights on the stage, to focus our attention and heighten the drama, as when, in the famous ‘Calling of Matthew’, a shaft of light through an open door picks out Jesus’s face, his beckoning hand and the face of Matthew.

Changed through death

But then on May 28 1606, the painter, no stranger to public brawling and the inside of the court room, became involved in a fight which resulted in the death of his opponent. Overnight his life changed. He fled Rome and spent the next four years on the run. Italy was then still a group of independent city states with no formal extradition treaties, so he was reasonably safe from the authorities in Rome. There were enough art enthusiasts to give him shelter in exchange for the opportunity to buy his paintings, and Naples in any case was under the rule of Spain.

Life on the run clearly did not suit Caravaggio and he hankered to be able to return to Rome. It was on an ill-fated attempt to return to Rome in 1610 that he fell ill and died of marsh fever.

Last four years

The National Gallery’s exhibition focuses on Caravaggio’s work from these last four years. It is a jewel of an exhibition. It contains just 16 paintings, but every one is worth close examination. The viewer is also helped by a free booklet to guide you round the exhibition, which is a model of excellence in itself — scholarly, informative, and yet easy to understand.

The overriding effect of the exhibition is to bring out the powerful changes in the mood of Caravaggio’s work in these last four years of his life. The paintings become darker, more introspective, and often linger on the reality of death, and the painter’s increasing sense of helplessness in the hands of forces much greater than he. The figures become even less heroic, more lined and careworn. Even in ‘The raising of Lazarus’ (1608-09), which one would expect to be a celebration of life, the mood of the painting is remarkably sombre, painted in deep tones of brown. Jesus stands on the left beckoning with his arm to raise Lazarus up: he is so utterly authoritative that he does not even have to straighten his finger in order to work the miracle. Lazarus, however, instead of walking out of the tomb, is lifted bodily from a grave in the ground, and is shown still held horizontally by those lifting him up. By this contrivance he still looks more dead than alive, and the bones that have spilled out from the tomb remind the viewer that Lazarus, although now returned to life, will not escape death a second time. The upper half of this enormous picture is completely empty, as if Caravaggio has no upward hope or expectation other than to sink down into the grave again with Lazarus.

Guilt and remorse

Themes of guilt and remorse recur in Caravaggio’s paintings of this period, such as Salome with the head of John the Baptist (c. 1609-10). John’s head is centre stage, hanging by its hair from the hand of the executioner as he places it on Salome’s platter. The executioner, his other hand still on the hilt of his sword, gazes levelly at John’s head, entirely unmoved. Salome holds the platter but looks away out of the picture, apparently unwilling or unable to face the prize that she had been primed to ask for. The third figure at the back is Herodias, her hands linked under her chin as she looks down on the back of John’s head. Her plan has succeeded, her enemy is dead; and yet Caravaggio chooses to portray her as an old woman, lined and grey, as if to emphasise that her victory will be short-lived, and she too will soon be joining John in death.

Another striking study of guilt is the excellent ‘Denial of Saint Peter’ (c. 1610). This tightly composed group of three figures — Peter, his female accuser, and a soldier — works around the simple device of a set of hands in the centre all pointing towards Peter. The woman points at Peter with both hands, as she speaks to the guard. Peter also points back at himself in a gesture of surprise and innocence, as if to say, ‘Who? Me?’ The guard holds up one hand as if about to make up his mind and arrest Peter. Caravaggio uses light to compare and contrast Peter and the woman, both guilty in their own way. The woman’s face is close up to that of the soldier, as if betraying a secret, but her expression is of open-eyed innocence, emphasised by the whiteness of her skin. Peter, by contrast, has a darker complexion, and he avoids eye-contact with everyone.

Caravaggio’s dramatic realism is intended to increase the impact of the scene on the viewer. But the personal effect is made sharper still by his placing within the pictures figures who react to the events as they unfold. In the ‘Crucifixion of St. Andrew’ (1606-7) the light falls not only on the lined face and protruding ribs of the victim, but also on the upturned faces of two bystanders: one is a sharply dressed soldier, his hat at a rakish angle, and from his expression casually unmoved by Andrew’s suffering. The other is an elderly figure standing behind the cross, apparently sympathetic but powerless. Caravaggio invites us not only to sympathise with Andrew’s plight, but quite directly to consider with which of the onlookers we identify.

The themes of guilt and remorse, combined with realism and strong personal response, come together in what is thought may have been Caravaggio’s last work, ‘David with the Head of Goliath’ (c. 1610). Caravaggio had previously painted his own self-portrait onto bystanders in a number of his own works. Here, however, he brings himself centre-stage, by putting his self-portrait on the severed head of Goliath as, grey and bloody, it swings by the hair from the hand of David. It is thought that Caravaggio intended to send the work to a powerful patron in Rome, as an image of his utter humility in seeking forgiveness to be readmitted to the city.

Self-portrait

Scholars have compared this work to Michelangelo putting his self-portrait on the flayed skin of St. Bartholomew in the Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel. But whereas Michelangelo was there picturing himself in the presence of Christ on the basis of Christ’s grace alone, Caravaggio seems to know no such hope. Emerging out of an almost black background, his face is lined and ugly, and he is held with disgust at arm’s length by his slayer. It is an interesting comparison: Caravaggio, slain by David, has no hope or dignity. Michelangelo, depending on the power and goodness of great David’s greater Son, knows that in his helplessness he is still secure.

Damien Hirst named his famous pickled shark ‘The impossibility of death in the mind of someone living’. The title confronts the viewer with the fact that, even though we know we will one day die, we cannot conceive of that reality and we generally live as if it is not going to happen. Hirst said that, in bringing the viewer within two feet of his monster tiger-shark, he wanted to give us, if only for a split second, a real sense of our mortality. In his late painting Caravaggio seems to confront his own mortality with just that kind of open-eyed realism, but it leads him only to darkness and hopelessness.

Profound truths

In these late works Caravaggio confronts profound truths about his own life with a directness which is commendable. In our age of superficiality and escapism, they are impressive as well as enjoyably dramatic. In an unexpected way their honesty makes them enjoyable and uplifting, but they remind us that only in Christ is death truly conquered, and only in him is there the reliable hope that Caravaggio did not seem to find.

Nigel Halliday

February 23 Ð May 22 2005
Sainsbury Wing
Open every day 10am-6pm
Wednesdays until 9pm. Last admissions 5.15pm (8.15pm Wednesday).

© Evangelicals Now - April 2005
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