Caravaggio's Mouths - Meanderings (VI)

 

Caravaggio, The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula (1610)

In his student days, the English poet Thom Gunn found himself in receipt of a travel grant and decided to spend some time in Rome. It was here, in a gloomy side-chapel of a church, the Santa Maria del Popolo, that he found himself facing Caravaggio’s Conversion on the Way to Damascus. Initially, he struggled to make out the details of the painting. Patience was required. Eventually he was rewarded. 

*

Waiting for when the sun an hour or less
Conveniently oblique makes visible
The painting on one wall of this recess
By Caravaggio, of the Roman School,
I see how shadow in the painting brims
With a real shadow, drowning all shapes out
But a dim horse’s haunch and various limbs,
Until the very subject is in doubt.
 
But evening gives the act, beneath the horse
And one indifferent groom, I see him sprawl,
Foreshortened from the head, with hidden face,
Where has fallen, Saul becoming Paul …   

*

About ten years ago, I too, stood in front of this incredible piece of art and, without the patience to spend the day in a church waiting for the sun to be ‘conveniently oblique’ - although it would have been a welcome relief from the torturous heat of a Roman August - wished that I could get closer and penetrate Caravaggio’s gloomy shadows.  

Conversion on the Way to Damascus (1601)

 

I love seeing a painting in a church, but there are, as Gunn’s lines make clear, drawbacks. Indeed, after that eminent Victorian John Ruskin declared Giovanni Bellini’s Altarpiece in the Church of San Zaccaria one of the two finest works of art in the world, I added it to my Venetian wishlist. Standing before it, some ten feet away beyond a roped barrier, hoping to be awestruck, I found myself peering into an underwhelming murkiness.  

Giovanni Bellini, The San Zaccaria Altarpiece (1505)

Caravaggios, in particular, are frequently found tucked away in the chapels of Italian churches; I saw seven of them on that trip to Rome, and certainly felt spoiled. Yet the news that Caravaggio’s final painting, The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, was to be loaned to the National Gallery from its permanent residence in Naples, was incredibly exciting. It meant that I’d be able to get up close in a room whose purpose was to bring out the best in the art, thus seeing the painting with clarity and precision. To the National Gallery then.

Entering a darkened and discreet room where it had been temporarily hung, I found myself holding my breath. A blaze of red, and then silvery grey and gold, radiated outwards. You almost approach with caution, dampening each footfall as if stumbling into a play mid-act. It is, indeed, the ongoingness of the scene that strikes you. Or to come at it from another way, imagine if you came across this situation in real life, and, anachronistically - and perhaps foolishly - decided to take a photograph of it with your phone. You would almost certainly take a step back and get the legs in, and a little bit of the foreground to ground the scale of the crowd. But here we don’t see the lower halves of any of the painting’s figures. And thus, there’s a claustrophobic immediacy about what is on show in front of us, as if we too are involved. That the action takes place in some kind of darkened space - a tent, a room perhaps - and that we are also in a softly lit and enclosed space, drags us right to the centre of the drama and the moment that the King of the Huns fires an arrow, point-blank, into the body of Ursula. 

Detail from The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula

The luxury of being able to dwell on the individual details, just a foot or two in front of you. Ursula’s silvery pallid skin, her head tilting forwards and looking with a studied, almost bemused curiosity at the arrow that has just pierced her chest. The King’s sweaty and gnarled nose, griddled forehead, grubby fingernails and - best of all - that black, empty maw. Over and over again, I found myself dwelling on the emptiness of the King's mouth, a tiny, terrifying abyss.  

Detail from The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula

The story that we are told opens up the irony. How this repulsive face, belonging to a man who has just put to death 11,000 virgins, contrasts with the glory of his gilded breast plate. The head of the lion at the centre has its eyes lidded, as if too ashamed to look on at the brutal and cowardly act.

Our eyes move away from the two main protagonists and survey the supporting cast. Initially, I thought there were only three extra figures in the painting, but it turns out there are another two, barely visible and only hinted at. Just to the right of the King’s head we see the outline of a face, and - even trickier to discern, almost like an extension of Ursula’s hairdo - the gleam of another soldier’s helmet. Apparently the work is damaged, the artist’s impatient agent hurrying the drying process along and leaving the painting out in the searing midday sun. How much more dazzling would it have been if a little more care had been taken? Or, maybe, the Neopolitan heat, by taking some of the sharpness of the five bystanders away, enhances the murky chaos of the scene. Whatever, it’s a stunning piece of work and a glorious summation of the genius of the artist. 

I’ve been rather spoiled with Caravaggios this year. Here was the painter again, cropping up in Ripley, an outstanding adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s first Thomas Ripley novel, offering an elegant insight into the psychopath’s character: that all of Tom’s artistic choices are merely the stolen sensibilities of those that he admires and then - more often than not – dispatches. His love of Caravaggio stems from the moment that Dickie Greenleaf, his first victim, takes him to a Neapolitan church, the Pio Monte della Misericordia, to gaze up at the Milanese painter’s The Seven Acts of Mercy. 

The Seven Acts of Mercy (1607)

 

As the pair gaze upwards at this glorious litany of good deeds, Dickie turns to Tom and tells him that the artist painted it only a year after he had murdered a man in Rome. Feed the hungry, visit the sick, bury the dead … I too smiled with Dickie as he flagged up the irony. What a masterstroke of Highsmith’s, I thought, to bring the Baroque genius into the ken of Tom, her violent psychopath. Except, Highsmith doesn’t let Tom see a Caravaggio, and it was only when I found myself flicking through the pages of the novel that I realised I’d been steered down different Italian streets.

Not to spare my blushes, I like to think that I know Highsmith’s ‘Ripliad’ well (the ‘Ripliad’ is the name that fans give to the five novels featuring Thomas Ripley). Clearly not! That said, I do endorse the director Steven Zaillian’s decision to bring Caravaggio into the equation. We sense something stirring in Tom as he looks up at these messy yet beautiful scenes. And the character and paradoxes of the artist fit perfectly into the psychopathology of the man.  

What, though, of another interesting directorial decision with the adaptation, to shoot every scene in black and white?  I’m torn here. The stunning vistas of Naples and Atrani, the streetscapes of Rome and the canals of Venice, and the gorgeous interiors of lavish hotels, all look razor sharp in black and white. Yet it seems almost criminal to wash away those vibrant and ravishing Italian colours. Returning to the art and Caravaggio, you’d think that this might be the greatest loss of all. But look at the shot of Tom gazing on The Seven Acts. 

Ripley contemplates mercy

The chiaroscuro, the delineation of darkness and light, is made utterly explicit when shot in black and white. The painting feels less cluttered, and we get a wonderful lesson in how the artist achieves his aims. Skin and faces, and that flame directly at the centre, draw our gaze into how the painting is lit. The sharpness of the contrast is glorious. Apply that thought to the cinematography as a whole, and perhaps we get a sense - I’m not entirely convinced by my argument - of the thinking behind the decision to use black and white. To let these glorious landscapes and cityscapes come out sharper, thus heightening the monstrosities that Tom carries out. As with all darker tales told though the prism of the evil-doer - think Hannibal Lector, think Tony Soprano - part of the deal is that you want the terrible protagonist to get away with his crimes. 

This somewhat makes sense when we look at a later scene that finds Tom at Rome’s Galleria Borghese looking on rapt at one of my favourite Caravaggios, David with the Head of Goliath. Incidentally, in the novel, Dickie does take Tom to the Galleria, but they just hang out in the cafe. 

David with the Head of Goliath (1610) 

In a character that must be consumed by a blaze of cognitive dissonance, this painting might well serve up balm to the soul. Tom is going to find it rather difficult to place himself on the positive side of the binary of good and evil in many of Caravaggio’s works, but this particular work allows him to see that binary differently, through the prism of the humble underdog versus the giant bully. He is David to the rich, spoiled American Goliaths. Here, Tom gets both to wield the sword and retain the position of the hero. 

Just an aside on this work, the utter boyishness of David in this painting, and the huge ghastly head of Goliath (again, look at the black, open maw that we encountered in the King of the Huns) is one of the most glorious and striking depictions of good and evil in Western art. 

Reengaging with an artist, not only fine tunes your sensibilities, but also recalibrates your cultural and biographical antennae. Whilst I clumsily misremembered Highsmith’s Tom Ripley, something else was bugging me about Gunn’s poem. After the ekphratic description of the painting, and Saul becoming Paul, the young poet brilliantly continues:

*

… O wily painter, limiting the scene
From a cacophony of dusty forms
To the one convulsion, what is it you mean
In that wide gesture of the lifting arms?
 
No Ananias croons a mystery yet,
Casting the pain out under name of sin.
The painter saw what was, an alternate
Candour and secrecy inside the skin.
He painted, elsewhere, that firm insolent
Young whore in Venus' clothes, those pudgy cheats,
Those sharpers; and was strangled, as things went,
For money, by one such picked off the streets.
 
I turn, hardly enlightened, from the chapel
To the dim interior of the church instead,
In which there kneel already several people,
Mostly old women: each head closeted
In tiny fists holds comfort as it can.
Their poor arms are too tired for more than this
- For the large gesture of solitary man,
Resisting, by embracing, nothingness.

 *

A poem should be slippery, and always slightly ahead of you. But conversely, we have a tendency to trust the poet with actual facts. Asides about Paul’s eventual healer, Annais of Damascus, a rundown of a few of Caravaggio’s most famous works, and those pious old women, incurious and too overwhelmed to gaze upon the glorious art in the tiny chapel, there is also that detail about Caravaggio’s death at the hands of a strangler. Hold on! Caravaggio, brawler and murderer that he was, was not murdered himself, dying instead from a fever that could have been brought on by malaria, infected wounds or even the lead from his own paint. However, his namesake from the same town of Caravaggio, Polidoro Caldara, did meet his death that way, strangled with a cloth by one of the casual workmen that he employed.

The Cardsharps (1594)

Truth be told, I actually love this error. It speaks of a relatively recent past, where you couldn’t check things on the internet and had to delve into biographies and encyclopaedias. Mistakes like that would be rather easy to make. It also accords with the faint air of didacticism that you can find in Gunn’s early work. Look at the slightly clunky epithet that he gives to the painter: ‘of the Roman School’. Plus, if I’m making mistakes with my memory, I’m rather pleased to be in the company of a great poet doing similar.  

Ten weeks after putting the finishing touches to The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, Caravaggio was dead. This intense, claustrophobic, and ultimately brutal painting makes for a fantastic swansong, one that serves as a brilliant full-stop to an incredible career. Much is written about ‘late-style’ - those works of art that come at the end of an artist’s career. Edward Said, Geoff Dyer and Christopher Neve have all written wonderful books on it. In particular, Neve’s Immortal Thoughts: Late Style in a Time of Plague - a book that has him pondering a selection of historical artists and their last paintings, at the height of the Covid pandemic - is well worth checking out. Just to shoehorn in a name-drop, the actor Bill Nighy caught me flicking through it in Foyles bookshop last year and said that he’d loved it. And glancing again through these books, I got to thinking about Caravaggio and his late-style. But of course, it doesn’t work. Caravaggio, dying at thirty-eight, and without the steady decline gifted to many an ageing artist, doesn’t really give him the chance to concentrate thoughts of imminent mortality into his later paintings. And yet looking again at The Martyrdom and David with the Head of Goliath, you do sense an awful foreboding. Both of these paintings, undertook and completed in his final months, feature that dreadful and empty maw. Taking up his brush, with his own features slashed and disfigured in a recent fight, perhaps there was a sense of ‘lateness’ entering his work. 

Detail from The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula

Famously, Caravaggio paints himself into The Martyrdom. Unscarred, with only the barest hint of middle-age upon his features, the artist tilts his head slightly back, eyes straining to see, mouth opening as if to gasp at the horror unfolding next to him. Like the severed head of Goliath, like that on the figure a few feet to his right, Caravaggio’s mouth echoes the black and empty abyss that is the mouth of the King of the Huns.