The few canvases from my own incomparably modest
life as a painter, which I would like to see again, are those I
painted in the late 40s of the streets of Livorno. This city was
then war-scarred and poor, and it was there that I first began to
learn something about the ingenuity of the dispossessed. It was
there too that I discovered that I wanted as little as possible
to do in this world with those who wield power. This has turned
out to be a life-long aversion.
The complicity I feel with Caravaggio began,
I think, during that time in Livorno. He was the first painter of
life as experienced by the popolaccio, the people of the back streets,
les sans-culottes, the lumpenproletariat, the lower orders, those
of the lower depths, the underworld. Interestingly enough, there
is no word in any traditional European language which does not either
denigrate or patronise the urban poor it is naming. That is power.
Following Caravaggio up to the present day,
other painters - Brower, Ostade, Hogarth, Goya, Gericault, Gultuso
- have painted pictures of the same social milieu. But all of them
- however great - were genre pictures, painted in order to show
others how the less fortunate or the more dangerous lived. With
Caravaggio, however, it was not a question of presenting scenes
but of seeing itself. He does not depict the underworld for others:
his vision is one that he shares with it.
In art-historical books Caravaggio is listed
as one of the great innovating masters of chiaroscuro and a forerunner
of the light and shade later used by Rembrandt and others. His vision
can of course be considered art-historically as a step in the evolution
of European art. Within such a perspective a Caravaggio was almost
inevitable, as a link between the high art of the counter-reformation
and the domestic art of the emerging Dutch bourgeoisie, the form
of this link being that of a new kind of space, defined by darkness
as well as by light. (For Rome and for Amsterdam damnation had become
an everyday affair).
For the Caravaggio who actually existed - for
the boy called Michelangelo born in a village near Bergamo, not
far from whence come my friends, the Italian woodcutters - light
and shade, as he imagined and saw them, had a deeply personal meaning,
inextricably entwined with his desires and his instinct for survival.
And it is by this, not by any art-historical logic, that his art
is linked with the underworld.
His chiaroscuro allowed him to banish daylight.
Shadows, he felt, offered shelter as can four walls and a roof.
Whatever and wherever he painted he really painted interiors. Sometimes
- for 'The Flight into Egypt' or one of his beloved John the Baptists
- he was obliged to include a landscape in the background. But these
landscapes are like rugs or drapes hung up on a line across an inner
courtyard. He only felt at home - no, that he felt nowhere - he
only felt relatively at ease inside.
His darkness smells of candles, over-ripe melons,
damp washing waiting to be hung out the next day: it is the darkness
of stairwells, gambling corners, cheap lodgings, sudden encounters.
And the promise is not in what will flare against it, but in the
darkness itself. The shelter it offers is only relative, for the
chiaroscuro reveals violence, suffering, longing, mortality, but
at least it reveals them intimately. What has been banished, along
with the daylight, are distance and solitude - and both these are
feared by the underworld.
Those who live precariously and are habitually
crowded together develop a phobia about open spaces which transforms
their frustrating lack of space and privacy into something reassuring.
He shared those fears.
'The Calling of St. Matthew' depicts five men
sitting round their usual table, telling stories, gossiping, boasting
of what one day they will do, counting money. The room is dimly
lit. Suddenly the door is flung open. The two figures who enter
are still part of the violent noise and light of the invasion. (Berenson
wrote that Christ comes in like a police inspector to make an arrest.)
Two of Matthew's colleagues refuse to look up,
the other two younger ones stare at the strangers with a mixture
of curiosity and condescension. Why is he proposing something so
mad? Who's protecting him, the thin one who does all the talking?
And Matthew, the tax-collector with a shifty conscience which has
made him more unreasonable than most of his colleagues, points at
himself and asks: is it really I who must go? Is it really I?
How many thousands of decisions to leave have
resembled Christ's hand here! The hand is hold out towards the one
who has to decide, yet it is ungraspable because so fluid. It orders
the way, yet offers no direct support. Matthew will get up and follow
the thin stranger from the room, down the narrow streets, out of
the district. He will write his gospel, he will travel to Ethiopia
and the South Caspian and Persia. Probably he will be murdered.
And behind the drama of this moment of decision
is a window, giving onto the outside world. In painting, up to then,
windows were treated either as sources of light, or as frames framing
nature or an exemplary event outside. Not so this window. No light
enters. The window is opaque. We see nothing. Mercifully we see
nothing because what is outside is threatening. It is a window through
which only the worst news can come; distance and solitude.
Caravaggio was a heretical painter: his works
were rejected or criticised by the church because of their subject-matter,
although there were church figures who defended him. His heresy
consisted of transposing religious themes into popular tragedies.
The fact that for 'The Death of the Virgin' he reputedly took as
a model a drowned prostitute is only half the story: the more important
half is that the dead woman is laid out as the poor lay out their
dead, and the mourners mourn as the poor mourn. As the poor still
mourn.
'There's no cemetery at Marinella or Selinunte,
so when somebody dies we take him to the station and send him to
Castelventrano. Then us fishermen stick together. We pay our respects
to the stricken family. "He was a good man. It's a real loss, he
had lots of good years ahead of him." Then we go off to tend to
our business in the port, but we never stop talking about the deceased
and for three whole days we don't go out to fish. And close relatives
or friends feed the mourners' families for at least a week.'
(Sicilian Lives by Danilo Dolci. Writers and
Readers. London, 1982. p. 209.)
Other Mannerist painters of the period produced
turbulent crowd-scenes but their spirit was very different; a crowd
was seen as a sign of calamity - like fire or flood - and the mood
was of terrestrial damnation. The spectator observed, from a privileged
position, a cosmic theatre. By contrast, Caravaggio's congested
canvases are simply made up of individuals living cheek by jowl,
co-existing in a confined space.
The underworld is full of theatre, but one that
has nothing to do with either cosmic effects or ruling class entertainment.
In the daily theatre of the underworld everything is close-to and
emphatic. What is being 'played' may any moment become 'for real'.
There is no protective space and no hierarchical focus of interest.
Caravaggio was continually being criticised for exactly this - the
lack of discrimination in his paintings, their overall intensity,
their lack of a proper distance.
The underworld displays itself in hiding. This
is the paradox of its social atmosphere and the expression of one
of its deepest needs. It has its own heroes and villains, its own
honour and dishonour, and these are celebrated by legends, stories,
daily performances. The latter are often somewhat like rehearsals
for real exploits. They are scenes, created on the spur of the moment,
in which people play themselves, pushed to the limit. If these 'performances'
did not take place, the alternative moral code and honour of the
underworld would be in danger of being forgotten - or, to put it
better, the negative judgement, the opprobrium of the surrounding
society would advance apace.
The underworld's survival (and pride) depends
upon theatre, a theatre where everyone is flamboyantly playing and
proving himself, and yet where an individual's survival may well
depend on his lying low or his not being seen. The consequent tension
produces a special kind of expressive urgency in which gestures
fill all the space available, in which a gesture may be expressed
by a glance. This amounts to another kind of overcrowding, another
kind of density.
Caravaggio is the painter of the underworld,
and he is also the exceptional and profound painter of sexual desire.
Some critic somewhere accused me of impertinence towards Caravaggio's
homosexuality. Whoever he was, he was very mistaken. It is precisely
there that my admiration for Caravaggio begins. Beside him most
heterosexual painters look like pimps undressing their 'ideals'
for the spectator. He, though, had eyes only for the desired.
Desire may change its character by 180 degrees.
Often, when first around, it is felt as the desire to have. The
desire to touch is, partly, the desire to lay hands on, to take.
Later, transformed, the same desire becomes a desire to be taken,
to lose oneself within the desired. From these two opposed moments
come one of the dialectics of desire; both moments apply to both
sexes and they occilate. Clearly the second moment, the desire to
lose oneself within, is the most abandoned, the most desperate,
and it is the one that Caravaggio chose (or was compelled) to reveal
in many of his paintings.
The gestures of his figures are sometimes -
given the nominal subject matter - ambiguously sexual. A six year
old child fingers the Madonna's bodice; the Madonna's hand invisibly
caresses his thigh under his shirt. An angel strokes the back of
St. Matthew's evangelical hand like a prostitute with an elderly
client. A young St. John the Baptist holds the foreleg of a sheep
between his legs as if it were a penis.
Almost every act of touching which Caravaggio
painted has a sexual charge. Even when two different substances
(fur and skin, rags and hair, metal and blood) come into contact
with one another, their contact becomes an act of touching. In his
painting of a young boy as Cupid, the feather of one of the boy's
wing-tips touches his own upper thigh with a lover's precision.
That the boy can control his reaction, that he does not allow himself
to quiver in response, is part of his deliberate elusiveness, of
his half-mocking, half-acknowledging practice as a seducer. I think
of the marvellous Greek poet - Carafy:
'For a month we loved each other
Then we went away, I think to Smyrna,
To work there' we never saw each other again.
The grey eyes - if he lives - have lost their
beauty;
The beautiful face will have been spoiled.
O Memory, preserve them as they were
And, Memory, all you can of this love of mine
Whatever you con bring back to me tonight.'
There is a special facial expression which,
painted, exists only in Caravaggio. It is the expression on Judith's
face in Judith and Holfermes, on the boy's face in the Boy Being
Bitten by a Lizard, on Narcissus's face as he gazes into the water,
on David's as he holds up the head of Goliath by the giant's hair.
It is an expression of closed concentration and openness, of force
and vulnerability, of determination and pity. Yet all those words
are too ethical. I have seen a not dissimilar expression on the
face of animals - before mating and before a kill.
To think of it in sado-masochistic terms would
be absurd. It goes deeper than any personal predilection. If it
vacillates, this expression, between pleasure and pain, passion
and reluctance, it is because such a dichotomy is inherent in sexual
experience itself. Sexuality is the result of an original unity
being destroyed, of separation, And, in this world as it is, sexuality
promises, as nothing else can, momentary completion. It touches
a love to oppose the original cruelty.
The faces he painted are illuminated by that
knowledge, deep as a wound. They are the faces of the fallen - and
they offer themselves to desire with a truthfulness which only the
fallen know to exist.
In Caravaggio's art, as you would expect, there
is no property. A few tools and recipients, chairs and a table.
And so around his figures there is little of interest. A body flares
with light in an interior of darkness. The surroundings - the world
outside the window - can be forgotten. Only the worst news can come
from there. The desired body disclosed in the darkness - which is
not a question of the time of day or night but of life as it is
on this planet - the desired body, disclosed like an apparition,
beckons beyond, not by provocative gesture but by the undisguised
fact of its own sentience, promising the universe lying on the far
side of that skin, calling you to leave.
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