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Caravaggio's DeathsAuthor(s): Philip SohmSource: The Art
Bulletin, Vol. 84, No. 3 (Sep., 2002), pp. 449-468Published by:
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Caravaggio's Deaths
Philip Sohm
Derek Jarman opens his claustrophobic, skyless Caravaggio (1986)
with the feverish artist on his shadowy deathbed (Fig. 1). The film
pieces together Michelangelo da Caravaggio's life retrospectively,
from the vantage point of the dying artist. Death gives structure
and meaning to Caravaggio's life. Mor- tality, for Jarman,
explained the essence of his art. When asked why he made the film,
Jarman responded obliquely by paraphrasing two early biographies of
the artist, by Giovanni Baglione (1642) and Giovan Pietro Bellori
(1672):
The beach at Porto Ercole stretches lazily into the heat haze; a
crescent dune walling up stagnant and dank un- dergrowth, dense,
infested with midges that brush you like nettles. It was on this
beach that Michele ran, in a fury, to retrieve the souvenirs of his
life, disappearing over the horizon in a fishing boat in lieu of
his failure to pay his passage. He collapsed in the sun and was
carried by fish- ermen to the Spanish garrison high up on the cliff
face, to die the next day.'
The beach as a scene of desperation and death, the loss of
"souvenirs," and the subsequent collapse in the sun were key
elements in the seicento biographies thatJarman had read in Howard
Hibbard's sexualized Caravaggio (1983). Although he never used the
beach scene in the film (too bright, too furious, too Hollywood), a
voice-over by "Caravaggio" at the beginning of the film tells us
how he arrived at his deathbed:
Malta, Syracuse, Messina, Naples-four years on the run, so many
labels on the luggage and hardly a friendly face, always on the
move, running into the poisonous blue sea, running under the July
sun,July 18 of 1610, adrift.... The boats are on the beach, the
nets hung out to dry, the dog star creeps out to bark the raging
sun into the west, Sole da Leone, the Lion sun, hunted into the
dark.
Throughout most of Caravaggio, Jarman flouted historical
objectivity by introducing motorbikes and typewriters, but a strict
historicity marks the deathbed scene. The story that Baglione and
Bellori narrated remains intact: Caravaggio runs on the beach,
desperate to retrieve his luggage, while the hot summer sun-the
Sole da Leone-beams down. The wounded, dirty, dark painter
struggling under a bleaching summer sun survives in other modern
fictional accounts, as, for example, when Enzo Siciliano evokes the
sun to create an alien environment for the dying Caravaggio:
The fortress [at Port'Ercole] bathed in the last burning rays of
the sun. The heat of thatJuly day was dying on the surface of the
clear water.... There was too much light, so
clear that it hurt your eyes... and made him wish with
passionate, urgent longing for the torch hanging from the roof...
for the closed room, the nocturnal atmo- sphere.... 2
Caravaggio's seicento biographers might have appreciated the
narrative poignancy of the scene in similar ways, just as they
probably believed in its historical veracity, but the per- sistence
of the story can be explained in other ways. My thesis is that
Caravaggio's biographers adjusted their stories of his death in
order to characterize his life and personal style. His death
reveals for them the essence of his art. Art imitates life,
certainly, but so, too, does life imitate art, especially in biog-
raphy, where fictional verisimilitude is used to attain the higher
goal of truth. An artist's biography can be docu- mented and
factual, and indeed some seicento art biogra- phers pushed archival
research much deeper into their writ- ing than had previously been
the norm. But biography is also an artful construction of
embellished or even invented "facts" that explains why paintings
look the way they do. In various stories of Caravaggio's death,
biography can be read as art criticism.
Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz introduced to art history the notion
that early modern biographies elide the boundaries between fact and
fiction in order to conceptualize the cate- gory of artist and to
mythologize individual artists.3 However, just because a "narrative
cell," to use Kris and Kurz's term for the elemental building
blocks of anecdote, borrows from a fictional tradition does not
necessarily mean that it, too, is fictional. Paul Barolsky embraced
their lesson, perhaps too heartily, in his conviction that Giorgio
Vasari's Le vite de' pii eccellenti pittori, scultori e
architettori is "a masterpiece of Renais- sance fiction," and
extended the typological reading of Vasa- ri's biographies as a
higher form of truth: "Vasari's tales are never mere fiction,
because such fictions tell us a great deal about how Vasari
imagined 'reality,' which is part of the historical record. Knowing
how to read Vasari, we come to see just how much history is
poetically embedded in his tall tales."4 Kris and Kurz and Barolsky
read biography primarily as mythmaking where the literal truth is
supplanted by a higher, poetic truth about art and the artist as
hero or, in Caravaggio's case, antihero.
The stories of Caravaggio's death offer two corrective cor-
ollaries to their accounts: first, that historical truth can coex-
ist with mythologized biography, and second, that biography can
shape interpretations of paintings and, inversely, that paintings
can shape biography.5 I am interested in the bor- derlands where
fiction bleeds into fact in the afterlives of his death, where the
literary forms start to shape the biographi- cal content. Scholars
who aspire to document the singularity of historical events often
turn to biographies as reasonable substitutes for more unbiased
evidence. To say that they
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450 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 2002 VOLUME LXXXIV NUMBER 3
1 Still from Caravaggio, written and directed by DerekJarman,
British Film Institute in association with Channel Four Television,
U.K., 1986 (photo: British Film Institute)
extrapolate plausible narratives from incomplete data and hence
are complicit in accepting an early mythologizing mode of artist
biography sounds like a condemnation of current practice. Actually,
my intention is only to suggest that the migration of fact into
fiction is a necessary and even desirable precondition of writing
history, that all biography constructs a text from other texts.
Biographers produce com- plex and allusive texts by importing such
storytelling tech- niques as irony and narrative closure. Art
history, as a rela- tively new literary genre in the seicento,
needed to borrow from other dominant forms like hagiography,
biography, poetry, and novelle. Because language is not a neutral
medium but a densely allusive and subliminal one, writers can tell
their readers many things at once. Historical narratives, as Hayden
White argues, are effective not so much as a literary structure to
convey information as a means to
test the capacity of a culture's fictions to endow real events
with the kinds of meaning that literature displays to con-
sciousness through its fashioning of patterns of "imagi- nary"
events. Precisely insofar as the historical narrative endows sets
of real events with the kinds of meaning found otherwise only in
myth and literature, we are justified in regarding it as a product
of allegoresis. Therefore, rather than regard every historical
narrative as mythic or ideo- logical in nature, we should regard it
as allegorical, that is, as saying one thing and meaning another.
Thus envisaged, the narrative figurates the body of events that
serves as its primary referent and transforms these events into
intima- tions of patterns of meaning that any literal
representation of them as facts could never produce.6
Of White's four tropes of historiography (metaphor, synec-
doche, metonymy, and irony), the lives of Caravaggio, or more
exactly the "deaths" of Caravaggio, lend themselves to analysis
primarily by means of irony and metaphor.
Biography as Art Criticism Because Caravaggio was a murderer,
and because he often stabbed, battered, and molested, and because
he populated his painted world with a high incidence, per capita,
of be- headings and decapitated heads, biographers have seen vio-
lence and death as the central conceit of his life and art.
Beginnings and endings, the dual portals of narrative, are often
charged with portent and revelation. Most artists died
inconspicuously of old age or unspecified causes. Some devoutly
prepared themselves for death (Michelangelo and Bernini) or died in
pious acts (Bandinelli); others worked themselves to death. There
are also status deaths, such as Leonardo expiring in the arms of
Francis I. However, a few artists died artistically in ways that
bind the mode of dying to the style of painting, where death
imitates life.7 Spinello Aretino, ever timorous (like his figures)
after being mugged, painted a bestial Satan so terrifyingly real
that it escaped from the painting and appeared to Spinello in his
sleep, a night- mare Pygmalion scenario.8 He awakened "half mad
with star- ing eyes" and a few days later "he slipped into the
grave," having frightened himself to death, killed by his own
artistic success. Other artists died in the embrace of women or in
hot pursuit-Giorgione, Raphael, and Domenico Puligo-and
consistently these were artists whose styles were given femi- nine
attributes: softness, grace, delicacy, and tenderness. Pon- tormo
died of dropsy, a disease that deformed his body, making it look
like the figures in his late, failed work, "with- out proportion,"
with a large torso and small arms and legs.9
Death, in other words, is the final act that reveals the
ultimate truth about an artist's work. "Look at a man in the midst
of trouble and danger facing death," wrote Lucretius, "and you will
learn in his hour of adversity what he really is.... The mask is
torn off and reality remains."'? Death provides an explanatory
mirror of artistic practice or, in Caravaggio's case, malpractice.
What distinguishes Caravag- gio's death from those in other early
modern art biographies is the number of stories told and the
variety of their signifi- cation. Every seventeenth-century poem
and biography that mentions his death gives it meaning-in each case
a different meaning-with evidence manipulated, sometimes wildly and
fancifully, in order to prove a particular point. Baglione
concluded that "he died as miserably as he lived"; its corollary
might be that "he died as badly as he painted."
Various articles and books, notably by Denis Mahon, Mau- rizio
Calvesi, and Vincenzo Pacelli, have been devoted to Caravaggio's
death." The results of their remarkable archival studies have
extended our factual knowledge about Caravag- gio's last few months
of life far beyond what we knew from seicento biographers. Because
these documents generally confirm the accuracy of Baglione,
Bellori, and Filippo Baldinucci, and because they supplement the
biographies with new information, they seem to have rendered the
biog- raphies redundant. This may be true if the biographies are
read only for factual information. However, considering the
literary fabric of the biographies provides new insight. The titles
of the articles by Mahon, Calvesi, and Pacelli, "Caravag- gio's
Death" or "The Death of Caravaggio," make the obvious clear-that
Caravaggio died in only one way-and espouse a more problematic
objective: that as historians they aspire to document the
singularity of historical events. I propose in-
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CARAVAGGIO'S DEATHS 451
stead to look at the literary forms of biographical content- the
container instead of its contents-and to examine "Cara- vaggio's
Deaths" as one (among many) means to illuminate seicento
understanding of his art.
Fictionalizing artists' lives can also make them conform to and
explain the visual evidence of their art. Artists may be the
creators of their work, in which "every painter paints him- self,"
but biographers sometimes inverted the process and created artists
in the image of their work, as Vasari did with the cowering
Spinello and the murderous Andrea del Ca- stagno. Vasari wants us
to believe that art imitates life-that because Spinello was mugged
he therefore painted figures shying away-but actually he often made
life conform to art. Castagno never murdered Domenico Veneziano,
but as a story it allowed Vasari to polemicize the artistic contest
be- tween Florence and Venice, to trace the genealogy of oil
painting, and to explain why Castagno painted in a "crude and
harsh" style.
The accounts of Caravaggio's death can be divided into two
categories: mythologizing poems and stories with little or no claim
to truth telling, and biographies whose authors be- lieved (or
wanted us to believe) in their historical accuracy. The first
category of texts, being obviously fictional, can be more easily
read as interpretations of art. Giambattista Marino, writing at the
time of Caravaggio's death, imagined "Nature" and "Death"
conspiring in "a cruel plot" against Caravaggio because "Nature
feared being surpassed by your hand in every image" and Death
resented how "your brush returned to life... as many men as his
scythe could cut down."12 In other words, Caravaggio died because
of his artistic success as a naturalist. Caravaggio's friend and
the author of his epitaph, Marzio Milesi, wrote a sonnet likening
him to Icarus because both flew too high and were struck down.13
Milesi might have had Icarus's hubris in mind, a fitting model for
Caravaggio's sometimes overbearing arro- gance, but, given his
intention to extol "this great genius," he probably means
Caravaggio's flight as one of artistic talent and imagination.
Without the high-flying wings of genius, he would not have
perished. Again, the same moral pertains: artistic success leads to
death. Caravaggio challenges Nature and is, in turn, killed by
her.
Joachim von Sandrart's story, published in 1675 but possi- bly
recalling stories he heard in Rome from 1629 to 1635, turns
Caravaggio's death into a generational rite of passage and artistic
progress. One day Caravaggio challenged his former employer to a
duel in order to settle "an old quarrel." The Cavaliere Giuseppe
Cesare d'Arpino refused on the grounds that it would be undignified
for a nobleman to fight someone beneath his station, a response
that cut Caravaggio deeper than any sword could. He sold his
belongings and set out for Malta in order to become a knight: "As
soon as Caravaggio was knighted, he hurried back to Rome with the
intention of settling his quarrel with d'Arpino. This haste,
however, resulted in a high fever and he arrived in Arpino (the
very birthplace of his adversary) as a sick man and died."
Sandrart's version of Caravaggio's death took root only in France.
Roger de Piles has Caravaggio murder Ranuccio Tomassoni as a
surrogate for the Cavaliere d'Arpino before challenging d'Arpino
directly to a duel.14 And in 1832 Felix
Pyat elaborated the account with invented dialogue that
transforms Caravaggio into a proto-Romantic hero.15
Sandrart's story of Caravaggio's death is easily interpreted as
an apologue rather than as biography because there is so little
ground to confuse moral and factual truths. The alle- gorical
content is too close to the surface, and its applicability as art
criticism too obvious, to be confusing. It is really concerned with
the life of art more than the life of artists. Sandrart has
Caravaggio act oedipally in desiring the death of his former boss
and capo of the old guard in order to drama- tize a generational
passage from late Mannerism to Baroque naturalism.
In biographies with truth claims Caravaggio's death be- comes
murkier and more interesting, where the space be- tween art and
life is more permeable. The ur-text for most later biographies was
published in 1642 by Giovanni Bagli- one, Caravaggio's erstwhile
follower and later a plaintiff in court against him:
When Caravaggio went ashore he was mistakenly arrested. He was
held for two days in prison and when he was released, the felucca
was no longer to be found. This made him furious and in his
desperation he started out along the beach under the merciless rays
of the sun trying to catch sight of the vessel that was carrying
his belongings [le sue robe]. Finally he reached a village on the
shore and was put to bed with a malignant fever. He was completely
abandoned and within a few days he died as miserably as he
lived.16
In writing this account, Baglione adhered to various notices
that began to circulate just days after Caravaggio's death.17 An
announcement addressed to the duke of Urbino, for example, tells
him that "Michelangelo da Caravaggio, the famous painter, died at
Port'Ercole, while he was on the way from Naples to Rome because a
pardon had been granted him by His Holiness from the sentence of
banishment which he was under for the capital crime [of murder]."18
And a letter from the bishop of Caserta to Scipione Borghese spec-
ifies Caravaggio's itinerary, his mode of transport, and the
sequence ofjail and release:
Caravaggio did not die at Procida, but at Port'Ercole, because,
having arrived by felucca at Palo, forced to port by high seas, he
was imprisoned by that captain and the felucca returned to Naples.
Caravaggio remained jailed until he was released following payment
of a large sum of money. By land, and possibly by foot, he made his
way to Port'Ercole where, sick, he died.'9
From these and similar reports, Baglione learned the means of
transport (a felucca, an all-purpose shipping tub), the episode of
imprisonment and release, and the final trek on foot to
Port'Ercole, where Caravaggio died. This, however, does not stop
them from being meaningful. Whatever factual basis they might have,
and despite their primary intention to transmit information
reliably, the seeds of narrative are planted by these reports that
would later blossom into fiction in the biographies.
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452 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 2002 VOLUME LXXXIV NUMBER 3
2 Portrait of Nicolas Poussin, from Bellori, Le vite, Rome:
Mascardi, 1672, woodcut (photo: Florence, Kunsthistorisches
Institut)
The reports to Scipione Borghese and the duke of Urbino present
motive and causality with a succinct irony. Caravaggio died on his
way home after the death sentence had been lifted. Absolution by
the pope precipitates death, which pro- vides closure to murder.
The death sentence is executed not by law but by nature. Reprieve
and retribution stand side by side. Intended or not, the reports
embed irony into the facts, and it was this literary trope that
Baglione most conspicuously developed in his biography. Because the
biographies by Bagli- one and Bellori conform so closely to
documentary sources, it is easy to overlook their embellishments to
the story: the disembarkation in the midday sun; the summer sun as
a dramatic persona ("il Sol Leone" also appears in Baglione's story
of Raffaelle Motta's death),20 and the desperate beach trek. Given
the circumstances and time of year, these ele- ments are entirely
possible, but then so is an evening disem- barkation or a cloudy
day. With the moralizing epithet "he died as miserably as he
lived," Baglione (who personally contributed to that misery) tells
us that Caravaggio's death is a fitting conclusion to his life, not
only the final chapter of a violent life but also a just
retribution for the damage that he had inflicted on art, causing
"the very ruination of painting."
Caravaggio Iscariot Who was this Caravaggio who could destroy
painting and deserved to die miserably? Many different Caravaggios
have been proposed by art historians, and I do not plan to add
another one; instead, I would like to introduce you briefly to
3 Portrait of Agostino Carracci, from Bellori, Le vite, 1672,
woodcut (photo: Florence, Kunsthistorisches Institut)
Bellori's Caravaggio, someone we might call Caravaggio Is-
cariot. When Bellori chose portraits for his Lives, by a still
unidentified artist, he or his amanuensis decided to include such
props as a book for Nicolas Poussin and a burin for Agostino
Carracci (Figs. 2, 3). Caravaggio's tool is a sword, whose hilt he
grasps (Fig. 4). It introduces readers to his status as murderer
and repeat offender attacking and threat- ening rivals, police, a
notary, and many others, and to his status as knight (and then
excommunicant) of the order of Malta. His furrowed brow, thicket of
dark hair, bushy arched eyebrows, and coarsened features, as well
as the sidelong shift of his eyes and their accusatory glare, give
him a sinister air. By comparison, the eleven other artists
portrayed in the Lives look positively friendly, or at least
pensive and adherent to codes of polite behavior. Bellori's
suspicious and threatening Caravaggio removes any vestige of
innocence found in Otta- vio Leoni's portrait of his friend
(Biblioteca Marucelliana, Florence; Fig. 5) designed, possibly, for
a suspended series of biographies, Gareggio pittorico, that Giulio
Cesare Gigli was writing in 1614-15.21 Leoni defined Caravaggio
primarily through his dark curly hair, beard, and eyebrows, much as
"Luca the barber" did when he described Caravaggio in court as "a
large young man, around twenty or twenty-five years, with a thin
black beard, black eyes with bushy eyebrows, dressed in black, in a
state of disarray, with threadbare black hose, and a mass of black
hair, long over his forehead."22 Unruly curly hair defined
Caravaggio's appearance for Gigli as well.23
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CARAVAGGIO'S DEATHS 453
4 Portrait of Caravaggio, from Bellori, Le vite, 1672, woodcut
(photo: Florence, Kunsthistorisches Institut)
By manipulating Caravaggio's face in this way, Bellori's
portraitist helped him to justify the conclusion that physiog- nomy
is destiny, both in art and in life:
Caravaggio's style corresponded to his physiognomy and
appearance. He had a dark complexion and dark eyes, black hair and
eyebrows, and this appears again, even naturally, in his
painting.... Later, driven by his peculiar temperament, he gave
himself up to the dark style, and to the expression of his
turbulent and contentious nature. Because of his temperament,
Caravaggio was forced to leave Milan and his homeland and then to
flee from Rome and from Malta, to go into hiding in Sicily, to live
in danger in Naples and to die wretchedly on a deserted
beach.24
Physiognomics interprets the structure of nature-"the faces and
order of the whole world"-in order to divine the "invis- ible
world" from the visible.25 It thus functioned in the sei- cento as
a semiotic system that structurally resembled style
analysis: if inner realities of character are projected out-
ward-"all animate bodies are material portraits of their
souls"26-then the process must work in reverse, and the inner
reality therefore can be adduced by examining external form.
According to Camillo Baldi, inventor of graphology and translator
of the pseudo-Aristotelian Physiognomica (Bo- logna, 1621),
physiognomy and style were closely related.27 Styles of handwriting
are like faces, he tells us: each is differ- ent and yet beautiful;
those differences are easier to observe than to describe and
explain; both express many things at once.28 Physiognomic
interpretations often suit the needs of their inventors, but in
Bellori's case the attributes and signi- fications conform to
contemporary stereotypes: men with thick, dark, curly hair and
arched eyebrows are disposed toward anger.29
Dark in aspect, character, dress, and style, Caravaggio com-
pleted his public persona with his faithful companion, a black dog
named Crow (a bird that brings bad tidings).30 By com- parison,
Gigli's Caravaggio lacks the consistency of Bellori's
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454 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 2002 VOLUME LXXXIV NUMBER 3
5 Ottavio Leoni, Portrait of Caravaggio. Florence, Biblioteca
Marucelliana (photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY)
caricature: his face is described as pale instead of darkly
complected, his sunken eyes are lively, and instead of a sword,
Gigli gives him a golden baton, which can be used to "loosen,
tighten and direct as it pleases him."31 Caravaggio's portrait in
the Vite thus exaggerates his dark side: coarser in feature,
untrustworthy in expression, and darkly complected, he re-
semblesJudas. Somewhere between 1615 and 1673, Caravag- gio became
an archetype. Mythologized, Caravaggio lost some of his humanity
but gained a signifying power as a morally and artistically bad
artist. Ethics and aesthetics wove biography and art criticism
together in Vasari's Vite, but nowhere are they fused together so
thoroughly as in the
seicento lives of Caravaggio. Great Renaissance artists (Michel-
angelo, Raphael, Leonardo, and Titian) were deemed to be divine,
saintly, and even Christ-like; Caravaggio, to the con- trary, was
dangerous and evil in both life and art. If Renais- sance art
historiography is an adaptation of hagiography, wherein a new
literary genre finds its themes in an ancient form,32 then might
there not be a place for a Judas figure?
When Bellori called the twelve artists of his Vite eleven saints
(santi) or venerables (venerabili) and one bad man (cat- tivo), it
is clear that among these twelve apostles Caravaggio played the
role of Judas.33 He was also, to use another of Bellori's
metaphors, a "pernicious poison" who caused "great
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CARAVAGGIO'S DEATHS 455
damage" and "havoc" to painting.34 In life he was a traitor to
friends and admirers, turning against Guido Reni, Giovanni
Baglione, and supposedly Guercino. Even before the famous murder,
Mariano da Pasqualone called him "an excommuni- cant and cursed
man." According to police records, the painter Girolamo Stampa
called him a "traitor" as he was fending off Caravaggio's blows one
night, just before some butchers rushed in with lanterns to
illuminate the crime scene. Christ's betrayal (John 18.1-9) seeped
into Stampa's description (a nocturnal surprise; a group with
lanterns en- circling an innocent), where Stampa performs the role
of Christ and Caravaggio of Judas.35
Poussin thought that Caravaggio had betrayed art, accusing him
of having "destroyed painting," and according to Bagli- one, he was
not alone in this view. Francesco Albani blamed Caravaggio for "the
decline and total ruin" of painting.36 Federico Borromeo thought
that Caravaggio's "taverns and debauchery" lacked beauty and that
this made him the "op- posite" of Raphael.37 Vincenzo Carducho
called Caravaggio the "anti-Christ" and the "anti-Michelangelo"
because he led followers away from the truth.38 If Raphael can be
identified with Christ, a notion popularized by Vasari's story of
his death, then Caravaggio, who "despises" and "disdains" Ra-
phael, is assigned an analogous relationship as Judas to Christ.
Just as he rejected artistic authorities (antiquity and Raphael),
so, too, did he deny Church and family, according to a reliable
story told by Giulio Mancini. Lorenzo Pasinelli called Caravaggio's
tenebrism one of two "new heresies" (nuove eresie). Caravaggio's
death was not a suicide, but like Judas he died "alone and
friendless" in a "deserted" place.39
Only one other Italian Renaissance or Baroque artist, to my
knowledge, was presented as a Judas. According to Vasari, Andrea
del Castagno "painted himself with the face of Judas Iscariot, whom
he resembled both in appearance and in deed."40 Castagno's
nefarious deeds, such as his alleged mur- der of Domenico
Veneziano, are probably fictional, but their similarity to
Caravaggio's life is striking. Both lost their fa- thers at an
early age; both slashed and scratched the work of fellow artists;
both were murderers and generally treated others belligerently;
both loved the art of painting "violently" and abused artists and
critics physically and verbally. Their dark and troubled characters
permeate their styles. Casta- gno's figures acted with the
"vehemence" of their maker; his coloring was "crude and harsh."
Lost Baggage I would now like to pose two questions: Why was
Caravaggio running after his belongings when he died? And why did
he die "under the merciless rays of the sun"? How can these
narrative motifs serve analogically as symptoms of his paint- ings?
By chasing his belongings and by succumbing to the sun, Caravaggio
enacts his failures as an artist. Baldinucci (1688) and Francesco
Sussino (ca. 1724) followed Baglione's version of the run in the
sun: they mentioned the beach (twice each) and sunstroke.41 Bellori
also adopted Baglione's version in most of its details, even
borrowing key words and expressions, and established it as
canonical for over a cen- tury:42
When he went ashore the Spanish guard arrested him by mistake,
taking him for another Cavaliere, and held him prisoner. Although
he was soon released, the felucca that was carrying him and his
possessions was no longer to be found. Thus, in a state of anxiety
and desperation he ran along the beach in the full heat of the
summer sun, and when he reached Port'Ercole he collapsed and was
seized by a malignant fever. He died within a few days at about
forty years of age in 1609, a lamentable year for painting since it
also took Annibale Carracci and Federico Zuccaro. Thus, Caravaggio
was forced to end his life and was buried on a deserted
beach.43
All four biographies specify the beach as the location of
Caravaggio's final, fatal run. (Actually, the coastline between
Palo and Port'Ercole is more often rocky and swampy than sandy.)
From Dante's Inferno to Thomas Mann's Death in Venice and Paul
Theroux's Mosquito Coast, the beach has been a place of death,
isolation, loss, and punishment.44 Bellori added two elements to
Baglione: first, he tidied up the un- even edges of history by
having Caravaggio, Carracci, and Zuccaro all die in the same year,
simultaneously closing a historical era and three artists' lives,45
and second, Bellori clarified the reason for Caravaggio's arrest as
a case of mis- taken identity. With Caravaggio's wrongful arrest,
where "the Spanish guard arrested him by mistake, taking him for
an- other Cavaliere," Bellori charges the episode with irony, at
least when it is read in light of Caravaggio's frustrated ambi-
tions to be recognized as a nobleman, an ambition fully documented
by Roman police records. For Sandrart this misbegotten ambition
initiated the sequence of events that supposedly led to his
death.
Most artists died uneventfully at the hands of Baglione, usually
being "delivered gratefully into the hands of God." Only seven
artists died badly; all were naturalists of some kind, and four
were devout caravaggisti who, like their men- tor, died young.
Valentin de Boulogne, who went out drink- ing and smoking with his
"gang" one summer night, became so "enflamed" that on returning
home he found it in flames. After hours spent quelling the fire
with cold water, "he suc- cumbed to a fever so malign that in just
a few days he expired in the icy embrace of death."46 Bartolomeo
Manfredi, whose paintings were often mistaken for Caravaggio's,
"died young, full of wickedness that consumed him in the end" and
"at a young age filled with evil."47 Orazio Borgianni died from
greed, "struck down even before knowing it." Matteo da Leccio
brought death upon himself because, "seeking riches, he became
impoverished and ended his life miserably in lands far away."48
By giving Caravaggio's death a materialist motive, running under
the sun to retrieve his worldly possessions, Baglione implied that
his goal in art was similarly mistaken: chasing nature's
superficial appearance instead of its hidden ideals. Bellori
attached Caravaggio's rejection of classical ideals (an- tiquity
and Raphael) to a story of him choosing, randomly, a gypsy in the
piazza as his model:
He not only ignored the most excellent marbles of the ancients
and the famous paintings of Raphael, but he despised them, and
nature alone became the object of his
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456 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 2002 VOLUME LXXXIV NUMBER 3
brush. Thus, when the most famous statues of Phidias and Glycon
were pointed out to him as models for his painting, he gave no
other reply than to extend his hand toward a crowd of men,
indicating that nature had provided him sufficiently with teachers.
To prove his words he called a gypsy who happened to be passing in
the street and, taking her to his lodgings, he drew her in the act
of fortune- telling, as is the custom of these women of the
Egyptian race.49
In this story, as with most concerning Caravaggio, he is de-
prived of verbal language and has to resort to manual ges- tures.
Wordless and implicitly unlearned, Caravaggio man- ages to quote
Eupompus's famous gesture: "being asked which of the former
Artificers a man had best to follow, answered pointing at a
multitude of men that Nature itself was rather to be followed than
any Artificer."50
Because Caravaggio's art depended entirely on the pres- ence of
the physical object or model, "imitating only what appears before
his eyes" according to Poussin, Bellori, and others, he was thought
to be helpless without his models and props: "He claimed that he
imitated his models so closely that he never made a single
brushstroke that he called his own but said rather that it was
nature's.... The moment the model was taken from him, his hand and
his mind became empty." Or, according to Luigi Scaramuccia, "he did
not know how to make anything without the actual thing in front of
him." Malvasia tells the story of Leonello Spada posing for
Caravag- gio's Death ofJohn the Baptist: afraid that Spada might
flee and, in effect, escape with his art, Caravaggio imprisoned him
in a room until he had finished.51 If things with physical pres-
ence-models and props- capture the essence of Caravag- gio's art in
the minds of his critics, then his lost possessions exact a
terrible justice from a materialist painter.
Other artists than Borgianni, Leccio, and Caravaggio re- vealed
their style by dying of cupidity. Pinturicchio, who in life had
sprinkled so much gold over the walls of Siena and Rome, died of
envy when some friars discovered a trove of gold hidden in the room
where he had been sleeping: "he took it so much to heart, being
unable to get it out of his mind, that it was the death of him."
According to Giulio Mancini, Caravaggio's onetime physician,
Caravaggio's death most resembled that of his compatriot Poliodoro
da Caravag- gio, even though in life the virtuous Poliodoro could
not have been more different: "It is worthy of reflection to see
such similar ends of two paesani and artists, to see them die an
almost identical death." Mancini is referring to Vasari's tale of a
"strange" and "dreadful" death involving a covetous studio
assistant who "bore greater love for his master's money than for
his master" and decided to strangle Poliodoro as part of an
elaborate, failed robbery. What Mancini seems to be saying is that
Poliodoro and Michelangelo shared a birth- place and deaths driven
by greed. Actually, the death that most resembles Caravaggio's, at
least in my view, is Terence's as told by Suetonius. Frequently
accused of plagiarism- "covetting the possessions of other
writers"-the playwright died suitably "after falling ill from grief
and annoyance at the loss of his baggage, which he had sent by ship
[when he was returning to Rome] and with it all of the new plays
that he
had written."52 Caravaggio stole from nature, or so his critics
alleged, and finally nature stole from Caravaggio.
Baldinucci, like Sandrart, identified the originating mo- tives
of Caravaggio's death as social vanity. He captured Cara- vaggio's
self-delusion by referring to the proverb 'You can deck out an ass
with a fancy saddle and gold braids as if it were a noble horse,
but once it brays you know it is just an ass."53 Baldinucci makes
two points in citing this proverb: first, that the exterior sign of
nobility (the medal itself of the Cross of Malta) did not change
Caravaggio's brutish inner reality; according to Sussino,
Caravaggio mistook the sign of nobility for reality and, after
being knighted, he paraded his medal in front of everyone and
became "blinded by the madness of thinking himself a nobleman
born."54 Second, that the quest itself for the Cross of Malta
signified Caravag- gio's failure as an artist to look beyond the
surface of things. The higher artistic realm of beauty, like the
higher social order of nobility, was beyond his grasp. "He
abandoned," according to Giovanni Battista Agucchi, "the Idea of
beauty, inclined instead to follow only similitude."55
Irony is the literary conceit that binds these stories to-
gether: Caravaggio seeks in life what is absent in his art, valuing
material possessions and outward signs over life and inner reality.
He is, in some way, an agent of his own death and dies enacting an
essential characteristic of himself, much as the ever curious Pliny
died in trying to get a closer look at the exploding Vesuvius.
Diogenes subjected several of his philosophers to deaths that
enacted voluntarily their ideas. The vegetarian Pythagorus,
believer in reincarnation, chose death by fire rather than
trampling through a field of beans, "either because beans are like
genitals or because they are like the gates of Hades."56
Corporality triumphs over spiritu- ality in Renaissance deaths of
philosophers, perhaps nowhere more mordantly than in Piero
Valeriano's biography of Gior- gio Valla, who, before going to
lecture on the immortality of the spirit, died "while evacuating
his excrement... [when] he expelled his spirit too."57 And
according to Paolo Giovio, the physician and anatomist Gabriele
Zerbi was dismembered by the Turks, a just punishment according to
a former stu- dent for "cutting up cadavers incorrectly."58
By the seventeenth century this kind of black humor was codified
in "Playful epitaphs," as Giovanni Francesco Lo- redano and Pietro
Michiele called them in their Cimiterio (Venice, 1674), where they
dispatch people with ironically suitable deaths.59 Irony also
centers much of the art criticism itself. For example, when Bellori
has Caravaggio reject art as a model for art by pointing to the
piazza crowd as his models, he actually makes Caravaggio reenact
Eupompus's famous gesture. Caravaggio may think of himself as a
rebel, but really he is just another aspirant to ancient glory.
Federico Zuccaro adopts a similar ironic ploy when he dismisses
Caravaggio's allegedly "never-seen-before" style as just an
atavistic recycling of Giorgione.
The Killing Sun Writers and artists whose flames burn brightly
often die, like Caravaggio, exposed to the "merciless rays of the
sun." Virgil, for example, visited Megara on his journey back to
Rome "where, in a very hot sun, he was taken with a fever" and died
shortly thereafter. Correggio also died when "placing the
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CARAVAGGIO'S DEATHS 457
6 Michelangelo da Caravaggio, Calling of Saint Matthew. Rome, S.
Luigi dei Francesi (photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY)
money on his back, he set out to walk [to Correggio] on foot;
but being smitten by the heat of the sun, which was very great, and
drinking water to refresh himself, he was seized by pleu- risy and
had to take to his bed in a raging fever, nor did he ever raise his
head from it."60 Raffaelle Motta supposedly died of a "malign
fever" after his return to Rome "in the hot weather of the Sol
Leone."61 Transposed to Caravaggio, this pseudomedical
mythologizing of genius takes on different meanings. In Milesi's
poem, the sun kills the Icarus Caravag- gio, or, as Giambattista
Marino put it, nature kills its emula- tor. For Baglione, Bellori,
and Baldinucci, the sun conspires to kill the "dark" painter.
Exposed to the sun in a "public place" and dying "alone and
friendless in the open air," it seemed to Baldinucci a fitting end
for the dark, secretive painter who placed his figures in
"cellars... without much sunlight" (Fig. 6).62 He derived this
conclusion after reading Bellori, who recorded a common complaint,
one that he agreed with, that Caravaggio "did not know how to come
out of the cellar" and that "he never brought his figures out into
the daylight but placed them in the dark brown atmosphere of a
closed room."63 Caravaggio deemed blue pigment to be "the poison of
colors," and for this reason one never finds "the clear blue air,"
only black ground and black back- ground.64 Exposed to the sun on
the beach, "alone and
friendless," Caravaggio thus found himself in a hostile envi-
ronment, fatally different from the one that he created for himself
in painting.
The membrane that loosely separates art and life in phys-
iognomic and other psychobiographic theories of style is more
permeable than ever here. It resembles in affect the death of
Francesco Borromini, who, preceding his suicide, "twisted his mouth
in a thousand horrible grimaces" and "rolled his eyes," becoming
like his allegedly distorted build- ings.65 Borromini in his death
throes did not literally resem- ble his buildings, but the
architect and his architecture are merged by means of an
overlapping lexicon. Caravaggio criticism often drew on metaphors
of abnormal psychology and unethical behavior in ways that loaded
pictorial forms with biographical content. His provocative art
helped to in- spire such art-world neologisms as shuttered
(serrato), shatter (fracasso), and sly and malicious or in the
lingo of thieves (furbesco), as if a new language had to be found
to describe a new and challenging art form. Caravaggio's tenebrism
was dangerous and subversive, an offensive weapon used to "de-
stroy" art, to anticipate that powerful metaphor used by Pous- sin,
Albani, and others against Caravaggio.
The leonine sun and the dark painter derive from Horace,
Quintilian, and others who oppose public-private, bright-
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458 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 2002 VOLUME LXXXIV NUMBER 3
dark, nature-art, outside-inside. Tacitus, for example, takes
the side of an older educational system where students "carry on
their studies in the light of open day" and contrasts it to the
modern system of oratory where students practice only in the
protective shade of academia.66 Annibale Carracci first applied
this dialectic to Caravaggio, if we are to accept the veracity of a
quote in Malvasia (there are doubts that Anni- bale actually spoke
these words, but even if they were in- vented by Malvasia this does
not affect my conclusions):
Is there anything so marvelous here? Did it seem to you that
this was something new? I tell you that all those fellows with the
never-seen-before style that they themselves in- vented will always
have the same reception when they appear and will have no less
praise. I know another way to make a big splash, in fact to beat
and mortify that fellow [Caravaggio]; I would like to counterpose
to that fierce [fiero] coloring one that is completely tender
[tenero]. Does he use a falling, shuttered light? I would like it
to be open and direct. Does he cover up the difficult parts of art
in nighttime shadows? I, by the bright light of noon, would like to
reveal the most learned and erudite of my studies.67
The competitive, almost combative, stance shown by Anni- bale-"I
know another way... to beat and mortify that fel- low"-may sound
like Caravaggio himself, but actually it is a display of humanist
erudition that plays against the popu- lar construction of
Caravaggio as an unlearned painter. Francesco Algarotti, working
from an adulterated version of Malvasia's quotation, recognized
Cicero as one of Annibale's sources, and it is not too hard to find
Federico Zuccaro's response to Caravaggio and Horace's call for
oratory to be exposed to the full light of day lurking beneath his
words as well.68 Like Tacitus, Annibale associates modernity with
se- crecy and shadows that hide artistic defects. When Annibale
proposes to expose Caravaggio's shady ignorance to his "bright
light of noon," he casts himself in the same role that Bellori,
Malvasia, and others gave to him as the enlightener of art after
years of Mannerist darkness; in the words of Sca- ramuccia, the
Carracci were "bright, shining Suns who dis- pelled every turbid
and shadowy (tenebroso) suspicion of igno- rance."69
Annibale proposed to "beat and mortify" Caravaggio by means of
painting, adopting a visual form of critique much as he did when he
ended a learned dispute about the Laocoon by making a drawing.
Annibale often used visual instead of verbal statements to argue
with painters. To his cousin Lu- dovico he wrote, "Let us apply
this beautiful style [of Correg- gio's] in order to one day mortify
this beret-wearing rabble that attacks us." And later in Rome he
faked some old masters in order to humiliate local painters who
resented his intru- sion into their domain. Despite his comment on
this occasion that "we painters ... have to speak with our hands,"
his initial foray into Caravaggio criticism rests on a cleverly
deployed word.70
"Shuttered" (serrato) belongs to a subset of psychologically
charged terms that attacks Caravaggio's tenebrism on the basis of
biography.71 For example, Malvasia accused Caravag- gio of painting
in a "dark and hunted [cacciata] style" that has a "violent"
(violento) light and creates a great "clash" or "up-
roar" (fracasso) of light and shadow.72 Other critics called his
tenebrism "cutting" (tagliente) and "gloomy," "savage," and "dirty"
(in its many senses of turbid, troublesome, or ob- scene).73
Militaristic and physically aggressive metaphors en- liven the
paintings with an artistic psychomachia that makes them appear more
vivid and animated than a more neutral language would. According to
Giovanni Battista Passeri, Cara- vaggio's "robust" style "charges
ahead" and "attacks" contem- porary painting.74 Not all artists
lent themselves to this kind of linguistic fusion of art and life,
but, at least in Malvasia's mind, the two were inextricably
connected in Caravaggio's case. In recounting how Caravaggio, after
meeting Leonello Spada, declared that he had found a man after his
own heart, Malvasia had to admit that he did not know whether Cara-
vaggio was attracted to Spada's art or his character. Both were
equally "precipitous" and "dissolute."75
"Shuttered" refers most obviously to Caravaggio's cellar
locations, alluding to both artistic quality and social rank, to
his murky painted light and to his plebeian figures and
sensibility.76 According to the painter-theorist Giovanni Bat-
tista Volpato, the most conspicuous feature of Jacopo Bassa- no's
late work was the serrated light that rakes across figures, picks
out prominences such as the crown of a head, a shoul- der, or knee,
and detaches them from the whole figure. Caravaggio shared with
Bassano more than a lume serrato in its formal sense.77 Both were
deemed to be base naturalists who did not (or could not) improve on
the appearance of physical existence. Agucchi drew the two together
syntactically and stylistically when he called Bassano the
Peiraikos of modern painting and Caravaggio the new
Demetrius.78
The socially based "shuttered" light of the basement also
conveyed a sinister private world closed to the public forum of
civilized behavior. It signaled a psychic space as much as a
physical and social space, where, for example, Caravaggio could
imprison Leonello to prevent his model from escaping. The word
serrato recruits an interlocking set of associations including
morbidity, danger, and secrecy, all connected to aspects of
Caravaggio's psychobiography, so that in looking at his paintings
we are reminded of the "shadows of the shut- tered tomb."79
The "shuttered light" suggested seclusion and secrecy to several
of Caravaggio's critics in other ways. For Pellegrino Antonio
Orlandi, Caravaggio's cellar tenebrism fit the gen- eral category
of "furtive painting" (un dipingerefurbesco), a style that was
intended to conceal shortcomings by means of cloak- ing shadows.80
As the root furbo indicates, his style is a cheat because it
enables him to avoid the difficulties of art (disegno, anatomy, and
perspective). Like "shuttered," the "furtive style" refers
simultaneously to biography and art criticism, packing into a
single word Caravaggio's masking shadows, his fugitive life, his
renditions of cheats in the Fortune-Tellerpaint- ings, and the
ruffian flavor of his religious works all packed together into a
word.81 Francesco Algarotti took his "shut- tered light" to be a
visible symptom of Caravaggio's "surly" (burbero) and "wild"
(selvatico) character, thus bringing a ser- rated edge of menace
and danger.
These cloaking, furtive, or shuttered shadows are variants of
another aesthetically and morally defective style that was often
attached to Caravaggio, the form-denying shadows known as macchia,
defined by Baldinucci as "a dense and
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CARAVAGGIO'S DEATHS 459
frightfully dark forest... where brutes and thieves hide in the
shadows [macchie] to engage in their malfeasance secretly, as one
says, to make whatever it may be alla macchia, that is, to make it
in hiding, secretly and furtively; thus of printers,
counterfeiters, and forgers who print and make money with- out any
authorization, one says to print or mint alla mac- chia."82
Annibale proposed to expose the dark secrets of this de- fective
style to the sun of his painting. The painter who destroyed
painting is himself destroyed when submitted to Annibale's "bright
light of noon." Baglione, Bellori, and Baldinucci made him expire
under the same consuming fire that ignites a deadly fever and
unmasks the failure of his art. What might Caravaggio's response
have been to Annibale's challenge? There is no direct evidence, and
what follows is too contingent on a series of hypothetical
suppositions to be convincing. Still, the case deserves airing if
for no other reason than to encourage alternative readings. Just as
Bagli- one, Bellori, and others mythologize Caravaggio as a "dark
painter," so Caravaggio himself engaged in a related self-
fashioning, as David Stone has recently shown.83 Caravaggio did so
by inserting his portrait into his paintings and by adopting a
style that would (in Baldinucci's words) "confirm in himself that
proverb that says that every painter paints himself."84 If Annibale
Carracci challenged Caravaggio's tenebrism with a truth-filled
painting of light on first seeing Caravaggio's work, as Malvasia
claimed for him, then we may assume that the occasion was the first
public exhibition of Caravaggio's tenebrism, in the Contarelli
Chapel paintings of 1600. When Annibale questions whether "this was
something new" and groups Caravaggio's work with other "fellows
with the never-seen-before style," he sounds very much like Fede-
rico Zuccaro responding to the Contarelli paintings: "What is all
the clamor about? ... I don't see anything here except the thought
of Giorgione. .. ."85 Baglione claimed that this state- ment was
made "while I was present." The Betrayal of Christ (National
Gallery of Ireland, Dublin) was painted two years later in 1602.86
In it, according to Roberto Longhi, we find Caravaggio representing
himself as the figure holding a lan- tern and illuminating the
nighttime scene of Christ's betray- al.87 If this identification is
correct, and scholars have ac- cepted it with an uncritical
alacrity, then Caravaggio might be seen as casting himself in an
opposing role as a latter-day Diogenes seeking redemption and
casting light on a decep- tive and morally dark world.88 In this
reading, however hypo- thetical it may be, Caravaggio presents
himself not as the dark painter who came into the world to "destroy
painting" but as another Carracci, savior of art, who shines the
light of truth into Mannerist obscurity.
Narcissism, Naturalism, and Death I would like to conclude
briefly with two overlooked seicento sources on Caravaggio that
pathologize his pictorial natural- ism and iconographic morbidity
as signs of narcissism. The first is a book published in 1672 by a
Theatine seminarian from Syracuse, Ippolito Falcone (1623-1695),
Narciso alfonte, cioe l'uomo che si specchia nella propria miseria
(Narcissus at the spring, that is, man who regards the reflection
of his own wretchedness). The second is an engraved portrait of
Cara- vaggio (Fig. 9) by Henri Simon Thomassin (1687-1741),
avowedly (but improbably) a copy after an original self-por-
trait. (Without further evidence, the designer will be called
"Thomassin.") Even without Falcone identifying Caravaggio as a
narcissistic painter or "Thomassin" depicting him ab- sorbed in his
mirror reflection, there is no lack of evidence for such a
diagnosis. According to Bellori, "Caravaggio did not appreciate
anyone but himself, calling himself a uniquely faithful imitator of
nature."89 Baglione's libel suit was based, in part, on the belief
that Caravaggio regarded his art as unique and inimitable.
According to him, Caravaggio "spoke badly of the painters of the
past, and also of the present, no matter how distinguished they
were, because he thought that he alone had surpassed all the other
artists in his profes- sion."90 Despite Caravaggio's denial in
court to this charge, the evidence, both biographical and archival,
supports Bagli- one. Narcissists were proud and arrogant, according
to Tom- maso Stigliani, just those qualities Baglione found in his
rival.91 When Caravaggio attacked Guido Reni for, allegedly,
"stealing my style," or when he locked Leonello Spada ("a man after
his own heart") in a room so that he could serve as his model,
Caravaggio was acting narcissistically.
Because narcissism is a universal and inevitable condition that
varies only in degree and kind, it cannot be limited to these
symptoms, nor do these symptoms always signal narcis- sism.
However, with style, subject, and character converging on
morbidity, and with Caravaggio's repeated insertion of himself into
his paintings, a narcissistic profile emerges. His habit of
painting himself might have been motivated at first by exigency,
but by the time he painted the Betrayal of Christ and David and
Goliath (Galleria Borghese, Rome), he had more personal motives,
whose psychological origins can only be guessed.92 One intriguing
possibility proposed by Michael Fried is that Caravaggio was
showing himself in the act of painting, simultaneously creating and
regarding himself like Narcissus at the pond.93 Many other early
modern painters engaged in automimesis, depicting themselves either
as inci- dental observers of an event, as Caravaggio did in the
Mar- tyrdom of Saint Matthew (S. Luigi dei Francesi, Rome) and in
the Betrayal of Christ, or as principal characters, as in Sick
Bacchus (Galleria Borghese) or as Goliath in David and Goli- ath.
However, Caravaggio did so with greater frequency, to a degree that
it personalized his art in ways that fascinate scholars, artists,
and novelists today. His art was deeply per- sonal and recalled for
Baldinucci the proverb concerning automimesis:
One can pardon Caravaggio for his style. Whereas he wanted to
confirm in himself that proverb that says that every painter paints
himself since, if one observes the way that he talked, one finds
something of that mentioned above. If we turn to the behavior of
this person, we see there an over-the-top extravagance. It is not
an understate- ment to say that, wanting to nourish his arrogance
espe- cially after being granted the dignity of knighthood, he
dressed as a nobleman, but this did not change him since he still
behaved like a brute and was negligent in hygiene and eating
habits.94
Baldinucci's proverb that "every painter paints himself" be- gan
circulating in the circles of Cosimo de' Medici, Angelo
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460 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 2002 VOLUME LXXXIV NUMBER 3
7 Caravaggio, Burial of Saint Lucy. Syracuse, S. Lucia al
Sepolcro (photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY)
Poliziano, and Leonardo, serving different functions for dif-
ferent writers. For Cosimo and Poliziano, it was a psycholog- ical
projection of one's character onto the surrounding world: "One
would rather forget a hundred charities than one insult and that
the offender never forgives and that every painter paints
himself."95 Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary-one
hundred acts of kindness versus one in- sult-an "offender" will
form his worldview around the ex- ceptional, rather than the usual,
because it matches his na-
ture. The anticipatory attacks of Caravaggio, a frequent and
ready offender, exemplify this cognitive aberration. Leo- nardo
took the proverb in both its literal and psychological senses:
It is a fault in the extreme of painters to repeat the same
movements, the same faces and the same style of drapery in one and
the same narrative painting and to make most of the faces resemble
their master, which is a thing I have
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CARAVAGGIO'S DEATHS 461
often wondered at, for I have known some who, in all their
figures seem to have portrayed themselves from life, and in them
one may recognize the attitudes and manners of their maker. If he
is quick of speech and movement his figures are similar in their
quickness, and if the master is devout his figures are the same
with their necks bent, and if the master is a good-for-nothing his
figures seem laziness itself portrayed from life. If the master is
badly propor- tioned, his figures are the same. And if he is mad,
his narrative will show irrational figures, not attending to what
they are doing, who rather look about themselves, some this way and
some that, as if in a dream. And thus each peculiarity in a
painting has its prototype in the painter's own peculiarity. I have
often pondered the cause of this defect and it seems to me that we
may conclude that the very soul which rules and governs each body
directs our judgment before it is our own. Therefore it has
completed the figure of a man in a way that it has judged looks
good, be it long, short, or snub-nosed. And in this way its height
and shape are determined, and this judgment is powerful enough to
move the arm of the painter and makes him repeat himself and it
seems to this soul that this is the true way of representing a man
and that those who do not do as it does commit an error. If it
finds someone who resem- bles the body it has composed, it delights
in it and often falls in love with it. And for this reason many
fall in love with and marry women who resemble them, and often the
children that are born to such people look like their
parents.96
His explanation, derived from Dante's theory of love that "we
love those who look like us," operates within the arena of
narcissistic love without, however, explicitly mentioning it by
name. At the time when Baldinucci applied the proverb to
Caravaggio, seicento art writers had used it to describe invol-
untary self-portraiture both of the artist's physical and psy-
chological selves.97 It was always regarded as a personal or
artistic failure, with the interesting exception of women art-
ists: "Do not wonder that she [Lavinia Fontana] paints so
beautifully because she paints herself being herself so beau-
tiful."98 Baldinucci suggests, however, that Caravaggio's auto-
mimesis was not so much an autonomic reflex as a self- fashioned
artistic persona that played on his infamous public misdeeds: "he
wanted to confirm in himself the proverb that says that every
painter paints himself...."9 Whereas other painters may paint
themselves in a failure of recognition and will, Baldinucci's
Caravaggio, "driven by his own nature" as Bellori noted, chose his
course of action.
Falcone called Narciso alfonte a book on "a modern plague of
narcissism." His theme was simple and insistent: by indulg- ing in
self-contemplation and an absorption with material things, mankind
overlooks the spiritual and is unprepared for death when it arrives
swiftly and inevitably. What we take to be reality-the sensory,
material world-is nothing more than "a self-admiration in the clear
and transparent spring."100 Natural historians like Pliny died,
according to Falcone, because they were so absorbed in nature that
they did not recognize their own looming mortality, and poets like
Torquato Tasso were so enraptured with their own verses that they
disregarded the world around them and stumbled upon
8 Attributed to Caravaggio, Narcissus. Rome, Galleria Nazionale
d'Arte Antica (photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY)
death.101 For painters, naturalism was the greatest signifier of
mortality, and Caravaggio was the greatest naturalist.102 Re-
calling Leon Battista Alberti's story of painting's origins, with
Narcissus as the first painter ("What is painting other than a
similar embrace, with art, of the pool's surface?"), he calls
Narcissus the "great painter" who "portrayed himself in an instant
so naturally in the spring."'03 Narcissus failed to dis- tinguish
between a surface image and reality, just as (I might add)
Caravaggio was thought to have mistaken himself for a nobleman once
he had the Cross of Malta pinned to his cloak. Caravaggio's
failure, according to Falcone, was a denial of anything that he
could not see:
When Michelangelo da Caravaggio was asked to depict a group of
angels in the large space occupying the upper portion of that
famous painting [Burial of Saint Lucy, S. Lucia al Sepolcro,
Syracuse; Fig. 7] where people are crying and gazing at the funeral
of Saint Lucy, he re- sponded that he didn't want to depict angels,
saying: "I've never seen them and so I don't know how to portray
them."104
With the blank wall looming above Saint Lucy and her mourners,
they seem entombed. No angels and, as Bellori observed of
Caravaggio in general, no heavens: "He never used clear blue air in
his pictures.. . .105
Narcissus and Caravaggio also represented for Falcone the
failure of humanity to recognize spirituality because both
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462 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 2002 VOLUME LXXXIV NUMBER 3
I(ll)CU/ /)rda/t uC/U( Il C/ ( /tL1 C. c-lalMeau
~pc if par leu ,e., c.ti? /e CAla ,/Ct ..I(ot?1rctozcu/ c' ;
.)/r c ) 'jOr,/t,c .
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CARAVAGGIO'S DEATHS 463
see through the artifice of the pool, though to do so you have
only to nod your head or change your expression or slightly move
your hand, instead of staying in the same attitude.
This is how Caravaggio envisioned his Narcissus (Fig. 8), frozen
in symmetry, fixated on the image of himself that, in Alberti's
words, he "embraces." For Falcone, neither Narcis- sus nor
Caravaggio could grasp the intangible or compre- hend time. Both
were tainted figures, deluded by superficial appearances. The
narcissistic rage that gripped Caravaggio in his fatal chase after
his property illuminates the proximity of naturalism and mortality
in his painting. According to the seicento literary critic Tommaso
Stigliani, the myth of Nar- cissus "clearly demonstrates the
unhappy end of those who love their things too much."'07
"Thomassin" arrived at similar conclusions about narcis- sism
and death as primary attributes of Caravaggio's natural- ism. His
engraved Portrait of Caravaggio (Fig. 9), with its mirror and
skull, can be read at least two ways. A Falcone- based reading
would see Caravaggio narcissistically engaged in his own reflection
and hence negligent of the skull's reminder of death. Caravaggio
ignores his books, piled under the skull, and instead gazes deeply
at himself. A second reading, not inconsistent with the first in
that it also draws on the iconography of vanitas, would see
"Thomassin" construct- ing Caravaggio from Caravaggesque painted
Mary Mag- dalens, such as one by Georges de La Tour (National
Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Fig. 10). This is a more
optimistic version of Caravaggio, one that sees him as a repentant
sinner who reflects on himself with Christian knowledge. It is not
Mancini's Caravaggio, who, by denying his brother, rejects the
Church and its doctrine. Nor is it Sussino's Caravaggio, who feigns
ignorance of or need for holy water and who "went about questioning
our holy religion, for which he was accused of being a
disbeliever."108 Nor is it Falcone's Cara- vaggio, who denies the
existence of angels. Rather, it is the Caravaggio who, having
killed Ranuccio Tomassoni, "fled Rome and... went to Palestrina
where he painted a Mary Magdalen."109 In their accounts of
Caravaggio's murder of Tomassoni, Mancini, Baglione, and Bellori
present a narra- tive sequence of destruction-creation,
sin-repentance that im- plies a causality and intentionality on
Caravaggio's part, an act of contrition similar in type to his
self-portrayal as the decapitated Goliath.11l
"Thomassin's" Caravaggio can be seen as a softening of the
artist's character during the eighteenth century, when the dangers
of Caravaggism had long ago receded. This softening can be observed
in the subtle corrections made to Bellori's portrait of Caravaggio
(Fig. 4) when it was reissued in 1728 as part of an expanded
edition of the Vite (Fig. 11). The more sinister elements of his
1672 self have been edited out: the sneer on his mouth; his arched
eyebrows; his shifty, baggy eyes; and his furrowed brow. In 1728
his character is carried mostly by a natty coiffure that almost
looks bewigged-a more enlightened Caravaggio.
Philip Sohm has written books and articles on Italian art,
architec- ture, criticism, and theory, 1500-1800. This article
explores some of
10 Georges de La Tour, The Repentant Magdalen. Washington, D.C.,
National Gallery of Art, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund (photo ? 2001
Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington)
the applications of style criticism to art biography that
emerged from the writing of his book Style in the Art Theory of
Early Modern Italy (Cambridge University Press, 2001) [Department
of Fine Art, University of Toronto, Toronto M5S 3G3 Canada].
Frequently Cited Sources
Baglione, Giovanni, Vite de'pittori, scultori, et architetti dal
Pontificato di Gregorio XIII del 1572fino a' tempi di Papa Urbano
VIII nel 1642 (Rome: Andrea Fei, 1642).
Baldinucci, Filippo, Notizie de'professori del disegno dal
Cimabue in qua, ed. Paola Barocchi, vol. 3 (Florence: SPES,
1975).
Bellori, Giovan Pietro, Le vite de'pittori, scultori e
architetti modemi, ed. E. Borea (Turin: Einaudi, 1976).
Falcone, Ippolito, Narciso alfonte, cio l'uomo che si specchia
nella propria miseria (1672), 4th ed. (Venice, 1702).
Malvasia, Carlo Cesare, Felsina pittrice: Vite de'pittori
bolognesi (1678), ed. G. P. Zanotti, 2 vols. (Bologna: Guidi
all'Ancora, 1841).
Sussino, Francesco, Le vite de' pittori messinesi, ed. V.
Martinelli (Florence: Le Monnier, 1960).
Vasari, Giorgio, Le vite de' piu eccellenti pittori scultori e
architettori nelle redazioni del 1550 e 1568, ed. Paola Barocchi
and Rosanna Bettarini, 6 vols. (Flor- ence: SPES, 1966-84).
Notes This article was first given as a lecture at the College
Art Association Confer- ence, New York, 2000, in a session
organized by Perry Chapman and Mariet Westermann titled "Biography
as Art Criticism." I am grateful to them for their helpful
suggestions and for the use of "Biography as Art Criticism" as a
title for the first section of this article. I am especially
endebted to Richard
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464 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 2002 VOLUME LXXXIV NUMBER 3
11 Portrait of Caravaggio, from Bellori, Le vite, Rome:
Mascardi, 1728, woodcut (photo: Getty Research Institute)
Spear, David Stone, and Marc Gotlieb for their careful, critical
reading of the text. Charles Dempsey, Catherine Puglisi, Kathleen
Weil-Garris Brandt, Mar- tenJan Bok, Wendy Walgate, and my son
Matthew also contributed important material and observations.
1. Derek Jarman, Derek Jarman's Caravaggio: The Complete Film
Script and Commentaries by DerekJarman (London: Thames and Hudson,
1986), 7.
2. Enzo Siciliano, "Morte di Caravaggio," in Cuore e fantasmi
(Milan: Ar- noldo Mondadori, 1990), 165-74. I am endebted to
Matthew Sohm for finding this story.
3. Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz, Die Legende vom Kfunstler: Ein
geschichtlicher Versuch (Vienna: Krystall, 1934); and with
emendations by Kurz and an introduction by E. H. Gombrich,
translated as Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist: A
Historical Experiment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979). For
a discussion of this seminal work, see Catherine Soussloff, The
Absolute Artist: The Historiography of a Concept (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 94-111.
4. Paul Barolsky, Why Mona Lisa Smiles and Other Tales by Vasari
(University Park, Pa.: Penn State University Press, 1991), 4; see
also idem, Michelangelo's Nose: A Myth and Its Maker (University
Park, Pa.: Penn State University Press, 1990).
5. Kris and Kurz, 1979 (as in n. 3), 119, note that biographers
sometimes "attempt to draw conclusions about the circumstances of
the artist's life from his works," but they set this hypothesis
aside as "exceeding the scope of our investigation." After I
completed this article, David Stone shared with me a fascinating
study that tries, successfully, to bridge the gap between the
artist's real life and biographical fictions by suggesting that
Caravaggio was the inventor of his own myth; Stone, "In Figura
Diaboli: Self and Myth in Caravag- gio's David and Goliath," in
From Rome to Eternity: Catholicism and the Arts in Italy, ca.
1550-1650, ed. P. M. Jones and T. Worcester (Leiden: Brill, 2002).
The reader should turn to this excellent work for a review of the
scholarly literature on Caravaggio's character and its relation to
seicento biographies.
6. Hayden White, "Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory,"
in The Content of Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical
Representation (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 45. White's earlier work
in Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in 19th Century Europe
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973) and Tropics of
Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1978) have proven influential with relatively few
art historians, as Michael Ann Holly noted in Past Looking:
Historical Imagination and the Rhetoric of the Image (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell Uni- versity Press, 1996), 65-67.
7. The primary work on this question for seicento artists is an
article by Irving Lavin, who has shown that "Bernini's death was in
more than the usual sense like his life; it was a kind of artwork,
diligently prepared and carefully executed to achieve the desired
effect"; Lavin, "Bernini's Death," Art Bulletin 54 (1972): 159.
This, however, is an exceptional case, since artistic intention-
ality rarely plays into death stories. Bernini not only hoped to
project a flattering artistic and spiritual persona to those
present, but also, it might be added, he attempted a posthumous
autobiography by providing biographers with a tidy conclusion and
summation of his art. Anton Raphael Mengs modeled his death on
Raphael's just as he did his art: [Gian Lodovico Bianconi], Elogio
storico del cavaliere Anton Raffaele Mengs con un catalogo delle
opere da esso fatte (Milan: Nell'imperial monistero di S. Ambrogio,
1780), 74-78.
8. Vasari, vol. 2, 287. 9. Vasari, vol. 5, 333. 10. Lucretius,
De rerum natura 3.58. 11. Denis Mahon, "Caravaggio's Death: A New
Document," Burlington Mag-
azine 93 (1951): 202-4; Maurizio Calvesi, "Nascita e morte del
Caravaggio," in L'ultimo Caravaggio e la cultura artistica a Napoli
in Sicilia e a Malta (Siracusa: Ediprint, 1987); idem, Le realta di
Caravaggio (Turin: Einaudi, 1990); Vincenzo Pacelli, "La morte di
Caravaggio e alcuni suoi dipinti da documenti inediti," Studi di
Storia dell'Arte 2 (1991): 167-88; idem, L'ultimo Caravaggio:
Dalla
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CARAVAGGIO'S DEATHS 465
Maddalena a mezzafigura ai due San Giovanni, 1606-1610 (Todi:
Ediart, 1994); and idem, "Una nuova ipotesi sulla morte di
Michelangelo Merisi da Cara- vaggio," in Michelangelo Merisi da
Caravaggio: La vita e le opere attraverso i documenti; Atti del
convegno internazionale di studi, ed. Stefania Macioce (Rome:
Logart, [1996]), 184-94; and for Calvesi's response to Pacelli's
new-found documents, see his "Michelangelo da Caravaggio: Il suo
rapporto con i Mattei e con altri collezionisti a Roma," in
Caravaggio e la collezione Mattei (Milan: Electa, 1995), 17-28.
12. G. B. Marino, Galeria (Milan: Gio. Battista Bidelli, 1620),
28, quoted in Bellori, 229: "Fecer crudel congiura/Michele, a danni
tuoi Morte, e Natura./ Questa restar temea/de la tua mano in ogni
immagin vinta,/ch'era da te creata, e non dipinta./Quelle di sdegno
ardea,/perche con larga usura/ quante la falce sua genti
struggea/tante il pennello tuo ne rifacea." In contrast, the
epitaph for Raffaelle Motta (1551-1578) claims that his art could
not vanquish nature and so he succumbed to death: "Raphael alter
cras: cum, ne succumberet Arti/Natura, immitis MorsJuvenem rapuit";
quoted in Carlo Valli, Breve trattato della vita di Raffaele Mota
reggiano pittorefamosissimo (Reggio Emilia, 1657); reprint, ed. G.
Adorni (Parma, 1850), 28. Both refer back to Pietro Bembo's epitaph
for Raphael: "Ille hic est Raphael timuit quo sospite vinci/rerum
magna parens et moriente mori." Falcone, 89, might have had
Marino's epitaph in mind when he listed Caravaggio among artists
killed by nature because of their proclivity: "Forse l'uccise morte
adirata, perche eglino co'l pennello rifacevan tant'uomini,
quant'ella colla falce ne distruggeva?" For Marino on Caravaggio,
see Elizabeth Cropper, "The Petrifying Art: Mari- no's Poetry and
Caravaggio," Metropolitan Museum Journal 26 (1991): 193-212. For a
summary of seicento sources that discuss Caravaggio's naturalism,
see Ferdinando Bologna, L'incredulita del Caravaggio e l'esperienza
delle "cose natu- rali" (Turin: Einaudi, 1992), esp. 144-54.
13. For Milesi's epitaph, see Giorgio Fulco, "'Ammirate
l'altissimo pittore': Caravaggio nelle rime inedite di Marzio
Milesi," Ricerche di Storia dell'Arte 10 (1980): 65-89.
14. Roger de Piles, Abrege de la vie despeintres (Paris: Charles
de Sercy, 1699), 341-42.
15. F. Pyat, "La mort de Michel-Ange de Caravage," L'Artiste 4
(1832): 111-14. I am grateful to Marc Gotlieb for calling this
story to my attention.
16. Baglione, 138-39 (translations of Baglione and Bellori are
based on those in Howard Hibbard, Caravaggio [New York: Harper and
Row, 1983], app. 2): "Arrivato ch'egli fu nella spiaggia, fu in
cambio fatto prigione, e posto dentro le carceri, ove per due
giorni Leone a veder, se poteva in mare rawisare il ritenuto, e poi
rilassato, piu la felluca non ritrovava si, che postosi in furia,
come disperato andava per quella spiaggia sotto la sferza del Sol
vascello, che le sue robe portava. Ultimamente arrivato in un luogo
della spiaggia misesi in letto con febre maligna; e senza aiuto
humano tra pochi giorni mori malamente, come appunto male havea
vivuto."
17. The first rumor actually predates his death by almost a
year: an avviso sent on October 24, 1609, from Rome to the duke of
Urbino announces Caravaggio's murder. The documentation concerning
Caravaggio's journey from Naples to Rome and his death in
Port'Ercole is too extensive to detail here. For the dominant
theories, see the work by Mahon, Calvesi, and Pacelli cited in n.
11 above. For recent summaries, see Macioce (as in n. 11); Helen
Langdon, Caravaggio (London: Chatto and Windus, 1998); and
Catherine Puglisi, Caravaggio (London: Phaidon, 1998). For
subsequent additions to the literature, see Michele Maccherini,
"Caravaggio nel carteggio familiare di Giulio Mancini," Prospettiva
86 (Apr. 1997): 71-92; and Stefania Macioce, "Precisazioni sulla
biografia del Caravaggio a Malta," in Sulle orme di Caravaggio tra
Roma e Sicilia, ed. Vincenzo Abbate et al. (Venice: Marsilio,
2001), 25-37.
18. Calvesi, 1987 (as in n. 11), 27: "E' morto Michiel Angelo da
Caravaggio pittore cellebre a Port'Hercole mentre da Napoli veniva
a Roma p(er) la gratia da S(ua) S(anti)ta fattali del bando
capitale che haveva."
19. Pacelli, 1994 (as in n. 11), letter ofJuly 29, 1610; and
idem, 1996 (as in n. 11), 184-85: "Caravaggio non e morto in
Procida, ma a port'hercole, perche esendo capitato con la felluca,
in q(u)ale andava: a palo, ivi da quel Capitano fu carcerato, e la
felluca in q(u)el romore tiratasi in alto mare se ne ritorno a
Napoli, il Caravaggio restato in pregione, si liber6 con un'sborso
grosso di denari, e per la terra e forse a piedi si ridusse sino a
porthercole, ove ammalatosi ha lasciato la vita."
20. Baglione, 27. The "Sol Leone" does not refer to the zodiac
Leo (July 23-August 22), since Motta died in May and Caravaggio on
July 18.
21. For Leoni's portraits as Vasarian headers to Gigli's planned
biographies of artists who were overlooked or underrated by Vasari,
see the introduction by Barbara Agosti and Silvia Ginzburg to their
critical edition of Giulio Cesare Gigli, La pittura trionfante
(Porretta Terme: I Quaderni del Battello Ebbro, 1996), 7. Gigli's
Pittura was originally published in Venice, 1615. For further
discussion of Gigli, see M. Spagnolo, "Appunti per Giulio Gigli:
Pittori e poeti nel primo seicento," Ricerche di Storia dell'Arte
59 (1996): 56-74; and Philip Sohm, "La critica d'arte del seicento:
Carlo Ridolfi e Marco Boschini," in La pittura nel Veneto: II
Seicento, vol. 2, ed. Mauro Lucco (Milan: Electa, 2001), 173-204.
For further discussion of Leoni's portraits, not in the context of
Gigli's Gareggio pittorico, see H. W. Kruft, "Ein Album mit
Portratzeichnungen Ottavio Leonis," Storia dell'Arte4 (1969):
449-58; and Luigi Ficacci, ed., Claude Mellan, gli anni romani: Un
incisore tra Vouet e Bernini (Rome: Multigrafica, 1989),
144-53.
22. "Luca the barber," quoted in Sandro Corradini and Maurizio
Marini,
"The Earliest Account of Caravaggio in Rome," Burlington
Magazine 138 (1998): 25-28.
23. Gigli (as in n. 21), 53. 24. Bellori, 232: "Tali modi del
Caravaggio acconsentivano alla sua fiso-
nomia ed aspetto: era egli di color fosco, ed aveva foschi gli
occhi, nere le ciglia ed i capelli; e tale riusci ancora
naturalmente nel suo dipingere. La prima maniera dolce e pura di
colorire fu la megliore, essendosi avanzato in essa al supremo
merito e mostratosi con gran lode ottimo coloritore lom- bardo. Ma
egli trascorse poi nell'altra oscura, tiratovi dal proprio tempera-
mento, come ne' costumi ancora era torbido e contenzioso; gli
convenne per6 lasciar prima Milano e la patria; dopo fu costretto
fuggir di Roma e di Malta, ascondersi per la Sicilia, pericolare in
Napoli, e morire disgraziata- mente in una spiaggia."
25. Giovanni Ingegneri, Fisionomia naturale (Milan: Girolamo
Bordoni e Pietromartire Locarni, 1607), 350; and Cornelio
Ghirardelli, introduction to Cefalogiafisonomica (Bologna:
Evangelista Dossi, 1630). Ghirardelli's treatise is particularly
interesting for art historians because he includes nearly one
hundred engravings of heads, each illustrating a different
physiognomic aspect discussed in the text.
26. Ingegneri (as in n. 25), 350. 27. Camillo Baldi, Trattato
come da una lettera missiva si conoscano la natura e
qualita dello scrivere (Milan: Gio. Batt. Bidelli, 1625). For a
discussion of Baldi, see the preface by Armando Petrucci to his
edition of Baldi's Lettera (Porde- none: Studio Tesi, 1992); and
for a discussion of Baldi in relation to Giulio Mancini, see Philip
Sohm, Pittoresco: Marco Boschini, His Critics and Their Critiques
of Painterly Brushwork in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Italy
(Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 76-77.
28. Baldi, 1625 (as in n. 27), chap. xii, 44-46. 29. Ingegneri
(as in n. 25), 14; and Ghirardelli (as in n. 25), 27, 29, 149. 30.
Baglione (147) gives this information in a comic version of
imitation
where Caravaggio's follower Carlo Saraceni mimics him in life.
31. Gigli (as in n. 21), 53: ". . . di fantistico umor, certo
bizzarro,/pallido in
viso, e di capillatura/assai grande, arricciato,/gli occhi
vivaci, si, ma incaver- niti,/ch'un aureo baston portava in
mano/per allentar, per stringer, per condurre,/come piaceva a lui,
dietro alla Donna l'onorata gente."
32.Julia Lupton, "Typological Designs: Creation, Iconoclasm, and
Nature in Vasari's Lives of the Saints," in Afterlives of the
Saints: Hagiography, Typology, and Renaissance Literature
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).
33. Giovanna Perini, "I1 Poussin di Bellori," in Poussin et
Rome: Actes du colloque a 1'Academie de France a Rome, ed. Olivier
Bonfait et al. (Paris: Reunion des Musees Nationaux, 1996),
294.
34. Although Bellori admits the beneficial effects of poison,
especially at the turn of the century when painting needed a bit of
poisoning, he concentrates on its undesirable effects (Le vite de'
pittori, scultori e architetti moderni [Rome: Per il succeso al
Mascardi, 1672], 231): "Si come dunque alcune erbe produ- cono
medicamenti salutiferi e veleni perniciosissimi, cosi il
Caravaggio, se bene giov6 in parte, fu nondimeno molto dannoso e
mise sottosopra ogni ornamento e buon costume della pittura."
35. Mia Cinotti, "Appendice," in Gian Alberto Dell'Acqua, II
Caravaggio e le sue grandi opere da San Luigi deiFrancesi (Milan:
Rizzoli, 1971), 151 (F 31 [Nov. 19, 1600]).
36. Andre Felibien, Entretiens sur les vies et sur les ouvrages
des plus excellents peintres anciens et modernes, 5 vols. (Paris:
Jean-Baptiste Coignard, 1679), vol. 3, 203-5: "M. Poussin... ne
pouvoit rien souffrir du Caravage, et disoit qu'il estoit venu au
monde pour destruire la Peinture." Baglione, 138: "Moreover, some
people thought that he had destroyed the art of painting [Anzi
presso alcuni si stima, haver' esso rovinata la pittura]." Albani
to Bononi, quoted in Malvasia, vol. 2, 163: "Non pote mai
tollerare, che si seguitasse il Caravaggio, scorgendo essere quel
modo il precipizio e la totale ruina della nobilissima e
compitissima virtu della pittura .. ." For alternative views, see
Louis Marin, To Destroy Painting, trans. Mette Hjort (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1995).
37. Federico Borromeo, Della pittura sacra, ed. Barbara Agosti
(Pisa: Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, 1994), 97 (Milan,
Biblioteca Ambrosiana, ms F 31 inf., fol. 130v): "Narra a simile de
Michel Angelo Caravagij: in illo apparebat l'osteria, la crapula,
nihil venusti: per lo contrario Rafaelo."
38. Vincenzo Carducho, Dialogos de la pintura (Madrid: Fr.
Martinez, 1633); reprint, ed. F. Calvo Serraller (Madrid: Turner,
1977), 270.
39. Bellori, 214, 230. For Raphael's death, see Barolsky, 1991
(as in n. 4), 38-39. The divine Raphael died, as he was born, on
Good Friday, just like Petrarch, and wasjust finishing Christ's
face in the Transfiguration (Pinacoteca Vaticana, Rome) when
overtaken by death. Giampietro Zanotti, Nuovofregio di gloria a
Felsina sempre pittrice nella vita di Lorenzo Pasinelli, pittore
bolognese (Bologna, 1703), 98. Giulio Mancini, Considerazioni sulla
pittura, ed. Adriana Marucchi (Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei
Lincei, 1956), vol. 1, 225-26.
40. Vasari, vol. 3, 360 (with reference to Castagno's frescoes
at S. Maria Nuova, now lost): "Parimente vi ritrasse M. Bernardo di
Domenico della Volta, spedalingo di quel luogo, inginocchioni, che
par vivo; et in un tondo nel principio dell'opere se stesso, con
viso di Giuda Scarioto, come egl'era nella presenza e ne'
fatti."
41. Baldinucci's six-volume work was published in Florence by
Santi Fran- chi in 1686, Piero Martini in 1688, Giuseppe Manni in
1702, and G. G. Tartini in 1728. Baldinucci, 687.
42. Bellori, 228-29. Francois-Bernard Lepicie, Catalogue
raisonne des tableaux
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466 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 2002 VOLUME LXXXIV NUMBER 3
du roi avec un abrege de la vie des peintres (Paris:
L'Imprimerie Royale, 1752), vol. 1, 93. A.J. Dezallier
d'Argenville, Abrege de la vie des plus fameux peintres (Paris: De
Bure, 1762), vol. 2, 286.
43. Bellori, 228-29: "Ond'egli, quanto prima gli fu possibile
montato sopra una feluca, pieno d'acerbissimo dolore s'invio a
Roma, avendo gia con l'intercessione del card. Gonzaga ottenuto dal
papa la sua liberazione. Per- venuto alla spiaggia, la guardia
spagnuola, che attendeva un altro cavaliere, l'arrest6 in cambio e
lo ritenne prigione. E se bene fu egli tosto rilasciato in liberta,
non per6 rividde pii la sua feluca che con le robbe lo conduceva.
Onde agitato miseramente da affanno e da cordoglio, scorrendo il
lido al piu caldo del sole estivo, giunto a Porto Ercole si
abbandon6, e sorpreso da febbre maligna mori in pochi giorni, circa
gli anni quaranta di sua vita, nel 1609, anno funesto per la
pittura, avendoci tolto insieme Annibale Carracci e Federico
Zuccheri. Cosi il Caravaggio si ridusse a chiuder la vita e l'ossa
in una spiaggia deserta."
44. Dante, Inferno, canto 1, Purgatorio, lines 24-78. See also
Petrarch, Can- zoniere (3.1.part.l) and (7.4.part.1): "Consumando
mi vo di piaggia in piag- gia,/Il di pensoso, poi piango la notte."
Leon Battista Alberti, Intercoenales, quoted in Eugenio Garin, ed.,
Prosatori latini del quattrocento (Milan: Ricciardi, 1952), 648,
Alberti compared life to a flowing river and death to the immobile
shores: "Is fluvius latine Vita aetasque mortalium dicitur; eius
ripa Mors...." Giacomo Zane, Rime (Venice: D. e G. B. Guerra,
1562), 151; and Annibale Caro, Rime (Venice: Bernardo Giunti,
1584), 68. Both used the poetic expres- sion "mortal piaggia" to
signify earth as a place of transition, suffering, and death.
Gabriel Fiamma, Rime spirituali (Venice: Francesco de' Franceschi,
1570; reprint, Treviso,