Read Online Caravaggio by Francine Prose - Free Book Online

explorations—to add to his collection of arcane and unusual armor. The work provided an opportunity for Del Monte to display the bravado, the technique, and the mastery of his new favorite painter, while it enabled Caravaggio to make his own contribution to a long and venerable tradition of shields decorated with the decapitated heads of the Medusa, images that were superstitiously half believed to turn the Gorgon’s evil spell against the enemy.
    One such shield, by Leonardo da Vinci, was in the collection of Duke Cosimo de’ Medici. Another appeared in a painting by Andrea Mantegna. But neither of these attained quite the level of animated hideousnessness that Caravaggio reached, nor did they suggest the play of the concave and convex, the magical effects that could be achieved with mirrors, or the nightmare that might await anyone foolhardy enough to gaze too long in the glass. This last theme must have stayed on Caravaggio’s mind, since, several years later, he would paint an image of Narcissus, mythology’s most unfortunate mirror gazer.
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    For all their beauty and dazzling skill, works like The Basket of Fruit , Bacchus , Medusa , and Boy Bitten by a Lizard seem, in comparison with the masterpieces that Caravaggio would soon begin to paint, a bit like piano exercises performed by a musical genius. Perhaps we’re just responding to the persuasive whispers of retrospect, but we can’t help feeling that Caravaggio was contentedly biding his time, that he was (to extend the musical metaphor) vamping while he waited for his cue to begin the real performance.
    Under Pope Clement VIII, ecclesiastical fortunes and huge infusions of energy were being expended on making Rome’s churches ever more glorious and ornate. The pope took on the task of completing Saint Peter’s, and in 1603 , his favorite artist, Cesari—Caravaggio’s former employer—was hired to design the mosaics for the inside of the dome. Cesari had already painted the fresco of Christ’s ascension in the Cathedral of Saint John Lateran, where Giovanni and Cherubino Alberti had frescoed the vaulted ceilings in the sacristy; they were later employed to paint the Sala Clementina, a grand audience hall in the Vatican.
    It must have galled Caravaggio to see inferior talents like Cesari creating majestic altars while he was still producing teenage lutenists for the cardinal and his friends. But wisely, he waited and bided his time, meanwhile embarking on a series of religious paintings that combined the time-tested elements proven to please Del Monte—music, half-naked boys, references to Netherlandish still life and Venetian art—with subject matter that reached for an audience wider than a small coterie of cultivated older men. Perhaps, in depicting the Magdalene, Caravaggio was trying to transform himself, and the way in which he was perceived, from a portrayer of grifters into a painter of saints—fittingly, in this case, the patron saint of prostitutes.
    It’s not hard to believe what Bellori says about Caravaggio’s Penitent Magdalene —that its subject was yet another neighborhood girl whose appearance, like those of the Gypsy fortune-teller, appealed to the artist. He painted her seated, drying her hair, her hands folded in her lap, dressed in ordinary street clothes, surrounded by a jar of oil, a necklace of pearls, and some jewels—and pretended, for his purposes, that she was the former prostitute known for washing Jesus’s feet with her hair. Again it’s worth noting that other painters used the subject of the Magdalene as an occasion for portraying lots of repentant, naked female flesh barely concealed by the saint’s flowing hair. This was precisely the sort of picture in which Caravaggio displayed scant interest. And yet the most striking thing about Caravaggio’s Magdalene was not the artist’s lack of lascivious admiration for his subject but rather