The best thing since Michelangelo?
Philip Hensher
CARAVAGGIO: A LIFE by Helen Langdon Chatto, £25, pp. 436 Caravaggio represents something of a problem to the majority of art historians. Their general instinct when presented with a painter is to ground him in his immediate context, and to explain the intellectual and aesthetic culture from which he came. The St Matthew and the Angel central enterprise of many art historians, in undertaking a study of a single artist such as this one, is to make us see the work of a painter as his contemporaries would have seen him; to make us see that what, in retrospect, seems familiar and obvious would have seemed outrageous, and what baffles us would often have appeared unremarkable, easy, and simple to the painting's first audience.
But while this approach works well with the sort of painter who is both learned and who expects learning from his audience, such as, say, Botticelli, one had thought that an artist whose contribution and value lie in an overwhelming originality would be less well served by this sort of historical study. An artist whose worth consists, quite simply, of his complete rejection of his pre- decessors and contemporaries may be a rare beast, but we cannot quite refuse the idea of the violent romantic genius; they are not that usual, but from time to time someone wholly out of kilter with the pre- vailing spirit of the times will emerge. Car- avaggio was that unusual figure, a painter who, through sheer originality, transformed the whole landscape.
This is not to deny the value and interest of Helen Langdon's book. It is very much an art historian's book, exploring with exemplary clarity and understanding Car- avaggio's society and ideas. And we must admit that we are unlikely to prefer the sort of book which just goes into raptures over Caravaggio's texture of paint, or what- ever. But it is certainly true that the more one looks at Caravaggio's contemporaries and his teachers, the more obvious it is that he burst upon a Rome much more remark- able for its artistic mediocrity than anything else, and from his first Roman paintings he was undeniably the most impressive thing to happen to Roman artoince Michelange- lo.
The fascination here is in reading Lang- don's establishment of this fact, and one is glad that someone else has gone to the trouble of looking at paintings and reading poetry which have gone deservedly undis- turbed since the 16th century, and patientlY demonstrating their more or less total irrel- evance to Caravaggio's achievement. Her book is consistently interesting, but it no more brings Caravaggio's context to life, in the favourite cliché of blurb-writers, than any other disinterment. Caravaggio's true context lies, in the end, in his influence.
He is surely the most influential painter in the whole history of European art, Zeux- is and Raphael included, and his influence has hardly ever been malign. School after school of painters made the pilgrimage to Rome, and found their horizons immensely enlarged by the revelation of an altarpiece, the unsuspected intelligence and energy which could reside in chiaroscuro.
Anyone who went to the National Gallery's recent show of 17th-centurY painting from Utrecht must have been struck by the way their painting was forced from a cramped and crabby awkwardness into light and movement and freedom by the simple, colossal revelation of Caravag- gio. And the miracle was repeated, and has gone on being repeated all over Europe ever since.
The selling point of Helen Langdon's biography is that, here, she gives wider cur- rency to some serious scholarly scepticisul about the painter's sex life. A post-war con- sensus, culminating in some very widelY read books of the 1970s, co-opted the painter into an early supporter of gaY rights, a heroic homosexual centuries before his time.
This view, expressed in both scholarlY and popular form — there is a rather grisly film by Derek Jarman which I don't think we need trouble with — dominated the debate for years. It's only quite recently that scholars have started to point out how flimsy the documentary evidence for Caravaggio's homosexuality is, and sugest- ed that the whole argument is directed by wish-fulfilment.
Well, perhaps, but the argument is now in danger of going too far in the opposite direction. If the culture did not produce homosexuals in the modern sense of the word, nor did it produce heterosexuals, and to assume that, because there is little firm evidence that Caravaggio was 'homosexu- al', he must therefore have been 'hetero- sexual' in our senses of the two words is to reject one anachronism in favour of anoth- er. Most of the evidence suggests that there was a substantial incidence of bisexuality in the culture. If a painter was embarrassingly keen on boys, then his contemporaries would comment on it, and call him 11 Sodoma'. But below that there were many people, of whom Shakespeare, Michelange- lo and Caravaggio are the best-known today, who weren't altogether averse to the idea. And it isn't quite true that there is no evidence for Caravaggio's taste; the note made after his death which refers to '11 checco di Caravaggio' may, as Helen Lang- don thinks, refer to someone called Francesco, but it is only fair to point out that `checco' is also vulgar Italian slang for a catamite. Beyond that, too, there are the paintings, which exhibit a luxuriant appreciation of a particular sort of highly available male beauty, and can still shock with the sumptuous frankness of their eroticism.
But that is only one part of Caravaggio, and though it is not entirely wrong to see him as a grand hedonist, that aspect is, somehow, not at the centre of his work. His subject is flesh, but even at the height of his Sybaritism, Caravaggio is always making the usual point of the transitory nature of the flesh, the brevity of desire. The juxtaposi- tion of heavy beautiful boys and fruit is not, or not only, there to demonstrate a particu- lar gorgeous vision of appetite and satiety, but to make a rather mournful argument about ars longa, vita brevis. It is worth not- ing, as Helen Langdon does, that Caravag- gio's fruit and flowers are not often the gorgeous array of exotica, incompatible in season and ostentatiously expensive, which his Dutch admirers would later make a spe- ciality of depicting; they are ordinary, as unremarkable as the pretty boy in semi- classical garb next to them, who an hour before might have been selling them in the camp° del fioti, and who, in not too many Years, will be dead. Caravaggio is endlessly fascinated by flesh, and loves it, but he knows what happens to it. And from time 10 time — most wonderfully in the great Conversion of Paul in Messina' — he seems to be saying that in the end it is cast down and borne away by a great mass of darkness. He is a black painter; and the miracle is that he is never depressing.
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