Caravaggio Read Free Page A

distancing themselves from his famously difficult personality. And until very recently, critics were still making a strenuous effort to distinguish the living devil from the angelic, immortal artist.
    Only now can we admit that we require both at once. The life of Caravaggio is the closest thing we have to the myth of the sinner-saint, the street tough, the martyr, the killer, the genius—the myth that, in these jaded and secular times, we are almost ashamed to admit that we still long for, and need. The arc of his life seems biblical as it compresses the Bible’s core—the fall of man, the redemption of man, the life eternal and everlasting—into one individual’s span on earth, one painter’s truncated existence. Each time we see his paintings, we are reminded of why we still care so profoundly about this artist who continues to speak to us in his urgent, intimate language, audible centuries after the voices of his more civilized, presentable colleagues have fallen silent.
    Â 
    One could say that Caravaggio has gotten what he wanted. His controlling desire, it appears, was not so much for wealth or personal fame as for a much purer sort of recognition. He wanted the greatness of his work to be acclaimed and understood. He wanted his ideas about art to be accepted as gospel, though he bridled and exploded whenever he felt that a disciple was following too closely in his footsteps. And finally he wanted his paintings to be acknowledged as vastly superior to anything else being done in his own time. Had he wanted us to know more about him, he might have left more evidence, documents and detritus, clues to his existence. But there is almost nothing. Police reports, legal depositions, court transcripts, cross-examinations, public notices, promissory notes, and contracts for commissions give us what few facts we have about Caravaggio’s biography.
    Only very rarely do we hear him speak, and, except for the testimony that he gave at his trial for libel in 1603 , it is always through the ventriloquism of others. He had, it would seem, two themes. One of his topics was insult, and the other was art. The insults are noted and preserved in the criminal record, the long list of provocations and responses that repeatedly got him into trouble. But we also hear him discoursing on the subject that meant most to him, on the correctness of his aesthetic theories and of the path he chose. His voice comes through in the famous anecdote about his boastful insistence that the first Gypsy woman who passed by on the street was a more appropriate subject for art than was any classical sculpture, and through the court records of a libel trial in which he used his appearance on the witness stand as an opportunity to hold forth on the qualities that constitute a good artist. There was nothing else that he appears to have cared about. And when, during his last years in Rome, he felt that his primacy was beginning to slip, that the light of respect and acclaim was beginning to shine on artists like Guido Reni, whose work he detested, disappointment and anger drove him to the edge of a sort of madness.
    Ultimately, he has left us his paintings as the incontrovertible proof of what he believed, of what he practiced, of how right he was. That, too, is what he would have wished: that the eloquence of his work should offer the decisive testimony and tell us all we need to know. But this means that for nearly everything else we must depend on his early biographers—Giovanni Bellori, Giulio Mancini, Karel van Mander, Joachim von Sandrart, and Francesco Susinno. The earliest, Giovanni Baglione, was Caravaggio’s contemporary, a painter who competed with and deeply resented Caravaggio, whose work Caravaggio destested, and who was also the plaintiff in the libel suit that named Caravaggio as a defendant. How are we to interpret the account of lifelong rival who sums up Caravaggio’s legacy in this almost comically