Caravaggio: A Passionate Life by Desmond Seward Page A

somewhat questionable eighteenth-century source claims that when pressed to comment on the picture, Annibale Carracci replied, “I don’t know what to say, except that it is too natural.” If Carracci really did say this, perhaps it was because he was repelled by the brutality that, to a modern observer, seems to verge on sadism or sado-eroticism. One has the inescapable impression of an almost gloating enjoyment of the cruelty. However, Caravaggio’s motives involved much more than sadism.
    There was a very famous
Judith and Holofernes
in Rome, of which Caravaggio cannot have been unaware, Michelangelo’s painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, in which Holofernes’s head was a self-portrait of Michelangelo. It has been suggested that Michelangelo was identifying himself with evil, publicly confessing that he was a sinner. Similarly, it has been argued that in later self-portraits of himself, such as that of Goliath beheaded by David, Caravaggio was announcing to the world that he was a sinner.Certainly, at that date it was far from unknown for artists to depict themselves as penitents.
    By the time he died, he had painted a dozen severed heads, some of them unmistakable self-portraits. Contemporaries appear to have found nothing odd or morbid in this fascination with beheading. Mario Minniti even copied him, painting a
Judith and Holofernes
of his own. According to some modern historians, it was an obsession that stemmed from a subconscious fear of impotence, but this does not tell us very much about what went on in his mind. And the more one learns about Caravaggio, the more one realizes he was never simple or straightforward.
    Alchemy may provide part of the answer. “Beheading is significant as the separation of the ‘understanding’ from the ‘great suffering and grief’ which nature inflicts on souls,” explains Jung in
Mysterium Coniunctionis
, citing alchemy texts. He adds that, for alchemists, the head was the abode of the understanding and the soul. While it is too much to suggest that Caravaggio was painting an alchemical statement of his search for wholeness, he must have been well aware of alchemical symbolism. We shall never know why decapitation figured so often in his art. All we can be sure of is that it reflected some hidden anguish.

XV
    The Contarelli Chapel, 1599–1600
    S uddenly, Rome realized that Caravaggio was one of the great painters of his age. Once again, del Monte had intervened decisively in his career. Through the cardinal, Caravaggio secured a really important commission, of a sort that had so far eluded him: to decorate the side walls of a chapel in the church of Rome’s French colony, San Luigi dei Francesi. The chapel was named after the cardinal who had bequeathed money for this purpose, Matthieu Cointrel, in Italian, Contarelli. Arpino had originally been engaged to fresco the walls, but for some reason had not done so. Angered by the delay, the clergy in charge of the church tore up the contract with him and invited Caravaggio to decorate the walls with pictures of the martyrdom of St. Matthew and of his calling by Christ. Presumably after he had submitted satisfactory sketches, on 23 July 1599, a new contract was drawn up, in which he undertook to paint both for four hundred scudi, the amount asked by Arpino. It is not clear from the contract whether the clergy understood that he was going to give them paintings on canvas instead of frescoes, but it is likely, since del Monte knew that he never painted frescoes.
    It was highly flattering for Caravaggio to replace the most fashionable painter in Rome and command the same fee. Even so, it must have been adaunting commission. He had never before painted such vast pictures, in which the figures would have to be life-sized. The year 1600 was a jubilee year at Rome, which must have inspired a sense of urgency among the clergy of San Luigi de’ Francesi and may explain why they replaced Arpino by Caravaggio. There were