Caravaggio: A Passionate Life by Desmond Seward Page B

very good grounds indeed for Baglione’s jealous suspicion that del Monte
(“his
cardinal”) had helped them make up their minds, since he was a member of the Fabbrica of St. Peter’s, which controlled the fund left by Contarelli. Starting late in 1599, Caravaggio finished by midsummer the following year.
    Fortunately, both
The Martyrdom of St. Matthew
and
The Calling of St. Matthew
are still at San Luigi dei Francesi. “Because of the darkness in the chapel and their color, these two paintings are not easy to see,” Bellori commented. However, Caravaggio exploited the chapel’s gloom to create a chiaroscuro of dramatic contrasts between dark and light, making his pictures all the more startling.
    Bellori described the
Calling:
“He painted several of the heads from life, among which is that of the saint, bending down to count his money, but with a hand on his breast and turning toward the Lord. Near him an old man puts his spectacles on his nose, watching a young man who pushes the money toward him to where he sits at the corner of the table.” The picture startles by its realism, and Berenson thought it resembled a police magistrate’s arrival at a gambling den, “like the illustration to a detective story.” Yet the scene is moving and deeply spiritual, dominated by the shadowy, mysterious Christ, who calls Matthew with a majestic gesture.
    The other painting, the
Martyrdom
, is no less flippantly dismissed by Berenson. “An elderly man lying on the escarped edge of a pit, presumably in the vaults
of
a prison, is seized by a slender nude with a drawn sword…. The startled onlookers scatter, while a child dives down from above with a palm in his hand.” This is not too bad a description, but there is much more to the composition. Caravaggio took the story from
The Golden Legend
, a collection of the lives of the saints first compiled by Jacobus de Voraginein the thirteenth century. It recounts how, after having apparently been converted to Christianity by St. Matthew, King Hyrcanus of Ethiopia ordered his execution when he reproached him for keeping two wives. Hyrcanus’s face is at once gloating and compassionate as he sees him being killed. What makes the face fascinating is that it is a self-portrait, perhaps reflecting how Caravaggio felt when he was a spectator at the death of the Cenci. An X ray of the
Martyrdom
has revealed that at some stage the artist altered the composition drastically, painting in what became his normal manner, directly onto the canvas without any preliminary drawing.
    The
Calling
and the
Martyrdom
caused a sensation when they were unveiled at San Luigi dei Francesi in July 1600. Both were acclaimed. Baglione concedes, “This commission made Caravaggio famous,” but he also claims that ill-natured people, especially those who disliked Arpino, went out of their way to “overpraise” the paintings, to upset established artists.
    “Because Caravaggio put an end to dignified art, every artist did just as he pleased, destroying all reverence for Antiquity and for Raphael,” Bellori grumbled half a century later. “Now began the depiction of worthless objects, a preference for filth and deformity … the clothes they paint are stockings, breeches and shaggy caps, while in their figures they show only dead skin, knotted fingers and limbs twisted by disease.” Predictably, the Victorians shared this aversion. Caravaggio had “resolved to describe sacred and historical events as though they were being enacted in the Ghetto by butchers and fishwives,” wrote John Addington Symonds. “His martyrdoms are inexpressibly revolting, without appeal to any sense but savage blood-lust.”
    However, more Romans approved than disapproved. He was elected to the prestigious Accademia di San Luca, while younger painters began to hero-worship him, and there were offers of valuable commissions. He had already signed a contract in April 1600 with a Siennese gentleman for a large painting, which he