“Caravaggio’s art is made from darkness and light…”
- Andrew Graham-Dixon, Caravaggio: a Life Sacred and Profane
Caravaggio has been haunting me lately. The long dead Italian painter of light and darkness has been poking his head around the corners of my life, stepping in and out of the shadows just like the subjects of his shadowy paintings. First, it was near my workplace in London, where his last known work has come to hang in the National Gallery, the very gallery where my students take half of their classes. The artist’s own mug stares on helplessly at the intimate martyrdom of St Ursula, as her blue-pale face looks curiously at the arrow buried in her breast. Back home in Scotland, he visited me again in the black and white pretensions of the Netflix series Ripley, the story of a thief and—like Caravaggio— murderer on the run in Europe. Then, flipping through the digital pages of The Guardian, there he was again— the rule breaker for the ages. At last, I fled to Malta in search of sunshine and sabbatical, where I knew for sure he’d visit me again.
On the plane, I resolved to get to know Caravaggio a bit. I searched him out in the pages of Andrew Graham-Dixon’s Caravaggio: a Life, Sacred and Profane. As it turns out, it’s hard to get to know Caravaggio, because like the figures in his paintings, he hides in the shadows. Most of what we know about him, we get from the records of his brushes with the law and from his paintings. His paintings were unlike anything from his own time, foreshadowing or catapulting visual art into a new era. Where art at the time prized idealistic religious imagery, Caravaggio’s paintings were cramped, action-packed, violent, and human. He used a style called chiaroscuro, which featured striking contrasts of light and dark. From what we can tell, he was a tumultuous fellow; he got in fights, he defended his honor, he assaulted a waiter because the artichokes he ordered for lunch were not to his liking. Most significantly, and for reasons which remain mysterious, he murdered a man called Ranuccio Tommasoni, a crime which set him on the run for rest of his life. The little else we know of Caravaggio comes from the paintings he made along the way. First he fled to Naples, and then to Malta where he hoped to gain a papal pardon by joining the Order of Malta.
Once the most strategic military base in the Mediterranean, Malta’s sun-kissed streets sit upon layer after layer of history, from the classical to the medieval to the modern. It has been ruled by just about everyone at one point or another: the Phoenicians, the Carthaginians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Normans, Aragonese, French, British, and finally by their own people. (An aside: Queen Elizabeth said Malta was one of the places she felt most at home in the world). The vestiges of British rule are observable primarily through the cheerful red of the distinctively British phone booths and mailboxes— not the mention the black rubbish bins. It was warm, but not too hot when we arrived. I nearly forgot all about Caravaggio haunting me on the first day, absorbed as I was with sitting in the sunshine, drinking a cold white wine, and eating what the locals claimed was a starter-portion of pasta. I leave to your discretion and judgement about the verity of the claim that this portion of pasta could be an appetizer via the photo below.
After some days exploring the fortified former capital city of Mdina, and wandering through the rather remarkable catacombs of Rabat, I settled in for an afternoon with Graham Dixon’s biography and an espresso to prepare for Co-Cathedral the next day. If you ever get the chance, it is well worth a visit.
St John’s Co-Cathedral is more opulent than anything I’ve ever seen, including St Peter’s Basilica in Roma! Of course, the Vatican’s pearl is larger than the Co-Cathedral, but I would wager than per-square foot there is more gilding in St John’s. The Co-Cathedral is dedicated to St John the Baptist and was built by the Order of St John, also known as the Knights Hospitallers. This order was founded during the crusades first to care for injured and poor Christians on their way to Jerusalem but became a military order after the conquest of Jerusalem in 1099. Having existed for a long while without a territory, in 1530 the order took possession of Malta and then some years later won a great military victory against the Ottomans. It was this powerful and wealthy order that Caravaggio sought protection from after his death sentence— he sought to join the monastic military order, and with their protection obtain a papal pardon. All members of the order were meant to pay a vast sum to join the order (all of the Grandmasters until the most recent were of aristocratic descent), but Caravaggio, not being very wealthy offered as his payment a painting of the Co-Cathedral’s patron John the Baptist.
The Co-Cathedral reflects many aspects of its associations with the Order of St John. The façade of the building is remarkably plain, almost modern— it is constructed to look like a military fort or government building. But the inside is unfettered Baroque — gold gilding on every wall and richly decorated mosaic designs on the floor decorating the hundreds of tombs of knights down the centuries. There are nine side chapels, most dedicated to each of the divisions of the Order (France, Italy, Germany, etc.), ornately decorate in gold patterning (fleur de lis for France!) along the wall, paintings, and busts of the Grandmasters of the Knights of Malta over the years. I was struck by the pervasive imagery of warfare— angels spearing dragons, stonings, beheadings, battles, soldiers. I turned this over in my mind— Christians do speak of spiritual warfare, and the Bible has its fair share of bloodshed. But this was an explication of Christianity that seemed unfamiliar to me. Interestingly, the eight points of the St John’s cross, visible all throughout Malta, are meant to represent the beatitudes, but in this opulent, violent space, it feels strange to think of Jesus’ blessing of the poor and the peacemakers. It is like all the bloodshed common to man in the Bible had been depicted with the more radical calls to peacemaking and forgiveness omitted.
I was particularly disturbed by a bust I encountered one chapel. It depicted a Nicolás Cotoner y de Oleza, Grandmaster of the order 1663-1680, a buttery looking man, glistening even in brass and richly dressed, literally sitting on top of two crushed individuals wrapped in chains, straining under the weight of his opulence. They look like slaves, I thought to myself. And sure enough, as I listened to the audio guide it assured me that the statue meant to depict his dominance over the slaves of Africa and Asia. I later looked it up, and at various points in Malta’s history, up to twenty percent of its population were slaves. It’s not only very hard to see how this has anything to do with the Christian faith, but it seems that what this statue communicates is actively opposed to the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, who identified his ministry as being to set the captives free, not to be served but to serve, and who died at the hands of an oppressive government.
I came at last to Caravaggio’s The Beheading of St John the Baptist. It is in the very back of the cathedral, hidden in the oratory where the clergy would pray and chant psalms before conducting services in the cathedral. The painting is unlike anything else in the cathedral. The rest of the cathedral is crammed with gold, noble figures, and idealized victories. Like many of Caravaggio’s paintings, this one is dark but unlike his ordinary style of cramming the action into a small space so that it seems to burst out of the frame, this painting is vast and spacious, two thirds of the canvas taken up merely with an archway and a window. The people in this painting are not noble— they are an executioner and his assistants, and prisoners watching on at what their fate may be. Unlike the idealized paintings of victories won and spears neatly stabbed into scales, this image shows the grisly, painstaking difficulty of cutting someone’s head off. The executioner has not quite managed to get the head all the way off, so he holds in his hand a razor with which he will sever the rest of the head. A girl awaits with a platter. Blood spurts out of the neck of John the Baptist, and in the pool beneath it, Caravaggio signs his name in red, as though he’s dipped his finger in the blood as ink.
It's hard to describe how much standing before this painting affected me. The closest experience otherwise that I can think of was seeing a Rothko in person— I’d always though what’s the fuss, it’s only colors—but then standing before the work itself, one feels not only that one is looking at the painting, but that the painting is reaching out and doing something to the viewer. The image itself is striking, moving, disturbing, and all this is underlined by its presence in this temple of military strength. What did Caravaggio mean by signing the painting in blood? It was the only painting that we know of that he signed. He painted this to join the order of St John the Baptist, but in this painting identifies not with the patron saint of the order, but with the executioner. Was it a confession of his guilt for murder— an attempt to atone? Or a commentary on the order of St John itself, being more like the political authority that killed St John the Baptist than the Baptiser himself?
I wondered what Caravaggio made of all this— Caravaggio who used ordinary people as models for his paintings, whose career was shot into controversial fame by his painting The Seven Mercies, visceral in its depiction of human suffering and compassion. It is hard not to read into Caravaggio’s paintings and intense spirituality of compassion, of repentance, of a granular attention to the Christ and his ministry. But, perhaps I merely idealise his moral vision, reading into it my own. Here again, Caravaggio slips into the shadows.
Shortly after entering the order as a knight, he got into a brawl at a tavern and had to flee the island. The next two years of his life were a feverish dashing from place to place, painting where he could. Several of the paintings in his last years depict beheadings— St John the Baptist’s and Goliath’s— into which he painting his own severed head. He died under mysterious circumstances, pursue unto death either by the Knights of Malta or the nasty compatriots of Tommasoni. He died on a beach, and we do not know where he was buried.
Like Caravaggio, my visit to Malta wasn’t too long. Now I’m back, I find I’m not haunted so much by Caravaggio as by his paintings. While he and his paintings shift in an out of the shadows, what The Beheading of St John the Baptist brought into the light for me was the recurrence of human cruelty and the possibility of repentance. We may proclaim beatitudes and become gradually self-deceived and separate from them. Are we willing to write our name in the blood? To repent?
But I saw another painting of Caravaggio’s too: St Jerome Writing. In Caravaggio’s usual style, this is not strong and saintly Jerome, his old and wrinkled skin is draped over him like blanket. Even the skull which is on his writing desk to remind him memento mori (remember you must die) has lost a few teeth, seeming to drive home the fragility of life and shortness of time he has to do his work.
But Jerome works away on his Latin translation of the Bible, the translation which made it possible for the scriptures to be spread across many churches. And perhaps in this Caravaggio gives us a more hopeful model. “We must quickly carry out the tasks assigned us by the one who sent us. The night is coming, and then no one can work” says Jesus in John 9:4. In his own way, Caravaggio did this, furiously painting amidst a fraught life. Hopefully our lives will not be so fraught and violent, but perhaps like Jerome we can learn to step into the light to remember the brevity of life, and to work well with the light given us.
I visited a church in Rome that had some of Caravaggio's work. A little old lady smacked me across the back of my head with her hand bag because my shirt had slits on the shoulders. Then a diminutive monk scurried over, I thought to tell her that she shouldn't hit people, but instead he lectured me in Italian. Good fun!