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Home , Caravaggio, Ecce Homo (Caravaggio)

CHAPTER 9

Fig. 121 Merisi da , The Supper at Emmaus, , London, oil on canvas, 141 x 196.2 cm.

Even for such a convinced defender of sacred images as John of Damascus, visualizing God was undoubtedly a matter of the “utmost foolishness and impiety.”3 In his Treatise on Divine Images, composed shortly after 726, he concisely explained the point by means of a metaphysical argument: “one would certainly be wrong, if one tried to make the image of God, since it is impossible to represent what is devoid of body and invisible to human eyes, what cannot be circumscribed and is shapeless.”4 Relying specifically on John’s authority, Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti underscored centuries later in his Discorso intorno alle immagini sacre (1582) that divinity in itself is not to be reproduced. Yet since the Bible metaphorically visualizes the divine, describing its presence and actions in perceptible figures, divinity “can and must be represented through likenesses proportionate to our senses, [especially] on account of their weakness, so that we ascend to the contemplation of the invisible by comprehending and imitating the visible that is known to us.”5 Thus, when it comes to representing divinity, the ecclesiastical tradition going back to John of

3 John of Damascus a, 4.17. 5 Paleotti, 89-90: “E di questa maniera è stato sempre dalla antichità giudicato che si possano e si debbano con tali 4 John of Damascus b, 730: “Erraremus profecto si vel somiglianze proporzionate a’ sensi nostri, per la debolezza Dei, qui cerni non potest, imaginem faceremus, cum id, di quelli, rappresentare le cose celesti, accioché dalla quod est corporis expers, quodque nec oculis videtur, nec significazione ed imitazione di queste cose visibili a noi note, circumscribitur, nec figuram habeat, effingi nequeat.” See also ascendessimo alla meditazione delle invisibili.” See John of Paleotti, 89. For the debates about the invisibility of God and Damascus b, 704. the use of images in early Christianity, see Finney 1997.

266 BLIND AND DEAF ACTIONS

Fig. 273 (Francesco Boneri), The Resurrection, Art Institute, Chicago, oil on canvas, 339 x 199.5 cm., detail. picture aware of Christ’s epiphany above, and in this case he seemingly rushes to combat the miraculous fugitive. But he more probably cannot pinpoint the origin of the rumble or blaze that has unexpectedly awakened him. I am inclined to interpret his gaze as directed not to Christ, but to the upper off-scene. The narrative context corroborates this interpretation. Nearby an old soldier skulks away with circumspection, ready to grab his sword should he be attacked. Hunched forward as he gazes backward, this guard looks rather like the parody of an Eve just chased from Eden, as represented by Lucas van Leyden in a 1529 engraving (Figs. 271, 272).27 It is also possible that Cecco had in mind one of the woodcuts of Hans Holbein’s 1538 The Dance of Death series: Death and the Count.28 The orientation of the old guard’s head and the cautiousness of his motion clearly express his blindness to both the angel just behind him and Christ above. Whatever caught him off guard, thunder or lightning, has momentarily vanished, and in the meantime he leaves the sepulcher as if anticipating ambush by an invisible or inaudible presence. If one takes a glimpse at the right background, where the “bravo” with the feathered beret and the helmeted guard cluster together, it becomes clear that neither of these figures understand where the menace comes from. Turned leftward, the “bravo” glances to the sepulcher’s entrance, his beret’s feather hindering him from discovering Christ above. The other guard’s gaze, illuminated by a breach of light, expresses clueless confusion and awe (Fig. 273). Everywhere around the angel and beneath Christ, soldiers are fighting the invisible and the inaudible, separately and with uncoordinated reactions.

27 See Kok et al. 1996, 35, no. 4. 28 See Müller 1997, 283, no. 105.32.

509 CHAPTER 13

Fig. 221 Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, The Death of the Virgin, Musée du , , oil on canvas, 369 x 245 cm., detail. those two laborers, and by opening a majestic archway to the left, Caravaggio not only retrieved his own previous material through self-elaboration, but also expanded upon Altdorfer’s ideas as expressed in the two woodcuts of the Beheading. In the Burial, in fact, much more than in the picture, the opposition of scale between the huddled bystanders—so close to one another as to lose, with a few exceptions, their individuality—and the overhanging architecture becomes a vital matter of the narrative: the expressive means by which the theme of the hero’s or heroine’s death is depersonalized and, in a sense, dehumanized.33 That Caravaggio relied on compositional patterns and figures taken from his Beheading of Saint John is also clear from the kneeling old woman beside Lucy’s corpse, who is the exact replica of the elderly lady standing to the left of the Valletta picture. More importantly, the figure of the martyred Lucy recalls, in reverse, the scandalous dead Mary that Caravaggio had depicted years before in his 1605-1606 Death of the Virgin (Louvre, Paris).34 The damage suffered by the Syracuse inevitably conditions my reading of Lucy’s figure. In my view, the saint’s corpse in the Burial is not only a quotation from The Death of the Virgin—the even disposition of Mary’s and the martyr’s bodies, paralleling the painting’s surface, with one arm stretched, the other hidden and a hand resting on their wombs, as well as the women’s tilted heads lit from below, confirm this assumption—but originally Lucy must have looked like an “unfinished,” or summarily sketched,

33 Longhi 1999-2000, 1:282: “Nel dipinto che fra quelli di grandiose nature morte, e faceva altri passi avanti nel processo Sicilia è il più antico, ma anche il più guasto (…), la ‘Sepoltura di trasformazione di ‘questi stanzoni simili a vasti magazzini di Santa Lucia’ nella chiesa eponima siracusana, il Caravaggio sgomberati’ (riadopero le parole scritte ad altro proposito dal ha il nuovo grande pensiero di diminuire nello spazio, giovane Longhi) in ‘vaso luminoso e in fondo come superficie rapidamente, la misura degli uomini sovrastati dalle mura coloristica’.” gigantesche: un rapporto inedito nella tradizione italiana e già pronto per il incisore”; and Bologna 1992, 427: 34 Longhi 1999-2000, 1:282: “Quanto ai primi piani, vi stanno “Ma torniamo al Seppellimento di santa Lucia. S’è detto delle la Santa a luce riversa come nella Vergine morta del 1606 o mura scortecciate; dell’interno di un rudere archeologico nella ‘’ dipinta nella Campagna Romana”; Hibbard vuoto; dell’arcone cieco, di allure già rembrandtiana, dentro il 1983, 237-8: “The pitiful saint with her throat cut so discreetly quale—per come si riesce a intravedere da una vecchia copia— may owe something to Caravaggio’s memory of the famous si schiudeva un’anta di porta sgangherata, non dissimile da recovery of the body of St. Cecilia in in 1599 and the quella che mena al cortile interno della Decollazione di . commemorative statue by Stefano Maderno, produced in Con queste scelte, il Caravaggio invertiva il rapporto fra figure 1600, which is similar to Lucy in its simplicity.” e ambiente, scopriva anche il vuoto delle muraglie come

432 NARRATIVES OF THE NON-FINITO dramatic impact, but also a pictorial feat in its own right. If, for comparison, one turns to the servant’s face, the divergence of the technique is immediately apparent to the viewer. Despite the evident abrasions in this specific portion of the canvas, it is evident that here Caravaggio applied fewer layers of liquid flesh-white as if simply drafting the woman’s head, delicately bringing out the penumbra cast by the shadow upon her face’s lower part, and blending the shades upon the cheek with pink pigment to contrast the brightness of her forehead and the zone around her eyes. Somewhat like Donatello in his cantoria, Caravaggio left his servant’s figure summarily “drafted,” and the thick ribs of her veil’s white folds, especially atop her head, truly react to light like the initial outcrops of a sketchily carved relief. Different again is the treatment of the soldier’s face, whose few highlights are tinged in , and in which the pupil and eyelashes, colored with the same pigment as that of this figure’s pointed beard, come to the fore only through a stronger graduation of dark tint by forming a hint of an eye. Caravaggio constantly varied the density of the pictorial textures in his execution of the Metropolitan Denial, although these variations Fig. 211 essentially subsist in a context dominated by vast Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Denial of , Metropolitan tracts of translucent colors that impart coherence Museum of Art, New York, oil on canvas, 94 x 125.5 cm., detail. to the entire composition. This opalescence (to use a term already employed in Chapter 9 with regard to the Brera Supper at Emmaus) not only animates the picture through the interplay and dialectic of light and darkness in a shallow space, but also constitutes the neutral ground onto which Caravaggio succeeded in grafting multiple, yet confined and select textural inflections: the sweeps of the brush upon the mantelpiece or in the chimney’s fire; the thick bright stretches of the folds’ peaks or the ribs of the woman’s veil; the sprinkles of ruby that simulate the fire’s incandescence; the smooth filaments of golden pigment on the back of the soldier’s cuirass, and above all the huge, jagged splotch (“macchia”) of Peter’s face. The coexistence of diluted pictorial swaths and occasional protrusions of dense pigment doubtless denotes Caravaggio’s pictorial technique as an equivalent of the non-finito. However, to my knowledge, the effect of “unfinishedness” obtained by Caravaggio here and in almost all of his late narratives does not compare to any other non-finito as practiced by previous masters. In describing Peter’s face, I have in mind the picturesque brushwork of, for example, Tintoretto or Jacopo Bassano. Perhaps, to be more precise, I should say that Caravaggio’s rendition of Peter’s face reminds me of Paolo Veronese’s drawing practice, as seen in a drawing by Veronese now in the Louvre, Paris: the c.1550 Temptation of Saint Anthony executed in pen, ink, and wash, heightened with white on grey prepared paper (Fig. 212).16 Though Veronese uses the pen to circumscribe his figures

16 See Cocke 1984, 107, no. 36.

421 CHAPTER 12

ordeal of the painter’s final year.”2 As it turned out, the was indeed an early copy after what would prove to be the original many years later. In any case, trusting his intuition, Longhi requested the Messina painting for the 1951 Milanese retrospective on Caravaggio, labeling the picture once again as a copy after a lost Ecce Homo.3 Given his intimate conviction about the existence of an unidentified prototype, it is comprehensible that, as soon as he was alerted in 1953 to the recovery of a plausible original in the deposits of the former Musei Comunali at Genoa, Longhi immediately offered his expertise, intuited the painting’s superb quality, and had it restored and cleaned— the canvas, drastically resized, was at the time heavily overpainted and considerably damaged. Upon restoration, it became obvious to Longhi that he had finally come across Caravaggio’s longed-for Ecce Homo, and he proudly presented his discovery in his 1954 essay. Besides extolling his connoisseur’s hunch—with good reason—Longhi Fig. 189 rectified some of the opinions he had Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Ecce Homo, Galleria di Palazzo Rosso, Genoa, oil on canvas, 128 x 103 cm. expressed in 1943 on the basis of the Messina copy: first of all, his dating of the original to Caravaggio’s sojourn in around 1608-1609, which he now considered an “exaggeration.” To justify his error, Longhi confessed that he had been misled “not only by the location of the copies”—other derived from the Ecce Homo had been unearthed in the meantime, all in Sicily—“but also by the almost archaic simplicity of Christ’s torso, consummate and austere like an Antonello [da Messina]: almost an ideal, on-site homage (…) attributed to the great Sicilian ‘realist’ of the quattrocento.”4 Wisely and rightly, Longhi renounced his former idea

2 Longhi 1999-2000, 1:31, note 25 [1943]: “L’Ecce Homo da Messina.” The “tradition” to which Longhi alludes in this con Pilato e un manigoldo nel Museo di Messina: (…) a mio passage was already evoked by Saccà 1906-1907. Longhi’s avviso, cruda copia, ma abbastanza fedele, da un’opera tarda identification of Caravaggio’s self-portrait in theEcce Homo del maestro. E, per quanto sorprendente, anche la tradizione has been contested in particular by Czobor 1955. Marini 2005, che il Caravaggio abbia ritratto se stesso in figura di Pilato 499, believes that Caravaggio represented Galileo as Pilate in trova conferma precisa nei tratti somatici inconfondibili, e the Genoa Ecce Homo. tremendamente significativi del travaglio fisico e morale dell’ultimo anno di vita del maestro. Commuove poi, quasi 3 Ibidem, 1:91, no. 61. più che sorprenda, il rilevare come nel torso e nella testa del Cristo il pittore abbia insistentemente evocato in Messina, 4 Longhi 1999-2000, 2:123-4: “Il recuperato originale, uno dei dal buio dei secoli, un modulo di Antonello, sì, di Antonello più commoventi, ripeto, che ci siano pervenuti del maestro

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