caravaggio the barbarian (uncorrected proof)

9

Caravaggio the Barbarian

Philip Sohm

At the 2010 College Art Association annual meeting in the session “Caravaggio Today,” I presented some fragmentary thoughts on “Why Caravaggio?,”1 that is, why does Caravaggio seem to be everywhere today? As an opening gambit of quantitative proof for what could be dismissed as merely an impression, I showed two graphs tracking the number of publications on Michelangelo and Caravaggio from 1960 to 2008. “The Two Michelangelos” (Figs. 9.1 and 9.2) tracks the linked fortunes of two stars in the old-master firmament: Michelangelo Buonarroti descended unsteadily in popularity while Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio rose, overtaking Buonarroti in the mid-1980s at the time of Howard Hibbard’s Caravaggio (1983), the Metropolitan Museum blockbuster exhibition The Age of Caravaggio (1985), and Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio (1986).2 The graphs made the point without much commentary that indeed we have experienced a culture shift in the world of old masters. The simple eloquence of numbers, however, does not answer any of the more important questions. Why Caravaggio? How does he serve our needs? What does “Caravaggiomania” tell us about ourselves? Richard Spear has published an article that addresses these questions.3 My explanation touched on the Baroque as postmodernity or the so-called “neo-Baroque;” the rehabilitation of naturalism in painting today; an insatiable quest for a new genius to celebrate; Caravaggio as an anti-hero for a lapsed age; and his appeal to our celebrity culture and our tabloid hunger for stars misbehaving. I will return to some of these issues in the final section, but the body of this chapter looks at some early modern origins for the modern sensationalism of “Caravaggiomania.” Although the two Michelangelos shared a name and generated a hoard of devoted followers, their art and characters were easily represented as antithetical: one was idealistic, transcendent, and heroic; the other materialistic, flawed, and paradoxical. This is what Vicente Carducho had in mind when in 1633 he described Caravaggio as the “Anti-Michelangelo” (AnteMichael-Angelo).4 Thinking of Caravaggio in terms of opposition to tradition and rebellion against authority underpins his popularity today

CARAVAGGIO.indb 177 1/28/2014 2:32:51 PM

9.1 “The Two Michelangelos,” number of journal articles

9.2 “The Two Michelangelos,” number of books and exhibition catalogues


philipsohm

Sticky Note

Insert corrected chart

philipsohm

Sticky Note

Insert corrected chart

Philip Sohm 179

amongst the cultured classes. Scholars who want to situate him as a man of his times, not ours, as a Lombard naturalist, a Counter-Reformation painter, and so on, may find his seventeenth-century reputation as a rebel to be mostly misleading mythologizing. To some extent this is true, yet myths have their own meta-truths, and because they still influence the writing of history, their history merits consideration.

The Anti-Michelangelo

More than any artist before him, Caravaggio’s posthumous reputation rested on his alterity. A swath of early modern art writers (Borromeo, Carducho, Bellori, Malvasia, Félibien, Coypel, Susinno, Gabburri, Algarotti, and Orlandi) took him to be the opposite (opposto; opposée; oppostissimo; contrario; ante-) of Raphael, Michelangelo, Poussin, Annibale Carracci, Guido Reni, and Giovanni Domenico Catalano, a follower of Barocci.5 His alterity is linguistically explicit and unequivocal: “completely the opposite of Poussin,”6 and “totally the opposite [of Reni’s] style.”7 This is almost caricatural in its extremity, flattening him into a stereotype. Indeed Caravaggio may be art history’s first formally constituted “Other.” Once stated in these bald terms, this may seem obvious, even banal. The consistency of the alterity trope in Caravaggio’s early critical fortune continues to provide fertile ground for refashioning him, today, as an early modern Dadaist, as a Francis Bacon and Damien Hirst, and as a Judas of the art world, a traitor and bounder quarantined to the opposite side of the supper table. In other words, the trope gives his public image an attractive drama and a mutability that sustains ever-new projections onto a historical figure.

Federico Borromeo, writing in De delectu ingeniorum (1623), called Caravaggio the opposite (“lo contrario”) of Raphael, a life and art filled with taverns and debauchery (“la crapula”) without beauty (“nihil venusti”).8 The pairing of painters in the seventeenth century usually involved some form of metempsychosis from one dead artist to a living one, either in actual spirit or more often as a figure of speech. Raphael most famously performed the role of a “new Apelles” and in this way helped to shape art’s history of decay and rebirth. By the same token, Raphael became a classic who anchored “good” painters such as Taddeo and Federico Zuccari, Annibale Carracci, Guido Reni, and Nicolas Poussin. Borromeo inverted the trope of a “new Raphael” by making Caravaggio into his opposite, a performative linguistic demonstration of Caravaggio’s alterity. In an ironic twist of history, Caravaggio was made to perform a Raphaelesque role as new Caravaggios began to be acclaimed.9

Opposition and paradox are embedded in later Caravaggio tropes. Giovan Pietro Bellori held up Caravaggio as a purgative poison that can be beneficial in small amounts, but otherwise a “most pernicious poison … [that] was very harmful [“dannoso”] and overturned every embellishment and good usage of painting.”10 Caravaggio’s poison was nature or, at least, the uncritical


caravaggio180

representation of it that produced an “extreme” (“estremo”) style whose opposite was Mannerist fantasy. These extremes occupy an odd dialectical place where, according to Bellori, “it is easy to flee one extreme to go to the other.” The idea of applying poison to art criticism in this way ultimately derives from Alberti’s warning against the excessive use of white pigment. In Bellori’s case, however, it can be supposed that Marco Boschini’s criticism of the naturalist painter (naturalista) inspired him. Bellori had read La Carta del navegar pitoresco closely and with irritation, provoking a rare ad hominem attack on a fellow art writer.11 Where Boschini generalized that the natural style (“natural”) should be used as if it were a poison (“velen”)—beneficial at the right time and in the right measure but otherwise fatal12—Bellori applied it to the most famous of naturalists, Caravaggio. The paradox of beneficial poisons resembles Caravaggio’s equivocal status. Despite his assigned role as opposite, he still earned the admiration of those critics who cast him out of a charmed circle of new Apelles and new Raphaels. Borromeo collected Caravaggios. Bellori assigned him a pivotal role in reviving art after its post-Raphael decline.

Caravaggio’s oppositional status is expressed by antonymy, an extreme form of relational semantics that adheres to much stylistic criticism. For example, Filippo Baldinucci particularized his definition of maniera by citing fourteen different types of artistic style; six are formally introduced as antonyms, and two others are implicitly so.13 One of Baldinucci’s antonymic pairs, risentita and languida, represents a large group of energetic/enervated, strong/weak, tenebrist/pasteled, masculine/feminine polarities. This is the lexical field that Caravaggio’s critics put into play and moralized about.14 According to Carlo Cesare Malvasia, Caravaggio’s macchia or “shadowy” (and hence morally shady) style was fiero and serrato in contrast to the light of noon that Annibale Carracci reportedly proposed to shine on it with a tenero and aperto lighting.15 Francesco Susinno opposed (“un altro stile oppostissimo”) Caravaggio’s harsh and fierce style (“aspro e fiero”) to Barrocci’s delicate and sweet one.16 Although the language of criticism lent itself naturally to antonymy, its application to individual painters was uncommon. For an artist of “extremes,” however, antonymy was an obvious rhetorical choice.

The most radical stereotyping of Caravaggio by antithesis was published by Carducho soon after Borromeo’s De delectu ingeniorum:

In our times, Michelangelo da Caravaggio arose in Rome with a new dish, prepared with such a rich, succulent sauce that it has made gluttons of some painters, who I fear will suffer apoplexy in the true doctrine. They don’t even stop stuffing themselves long enough to see that the fire of his talent is too powerful … that they may not be able to digest the impetuous, unheard-of, and outrageous technique of painting without preparation. Has anyone else [other than Caravaggio] managed to paint as successfully as this monstrous genius (“monstruo de ingenio”), who worked naturally, almost without precepts, without doctrine, without study, but only with the strength of his talent, with nothing but nature before him, which he simply copied in his amazing way? I heard a devoted follower of our profession say that the coming (“venida”) of this man to the world was an omen of the ruin and end of


philipsohm

Sticky Note

Barocci

Philip Sohm 181

painting (“presagio de ruina y fin de la pintura”), and compare it to how at the end of this world the Anti-Christ (“Antecristo”), with false miracles and strange deeds (“al fin deste mundo visible, el Antecristo con falsos y portentosos milagros”), will lead great numbers of people to perdition (“perdicion”), who will be moved by seeing his works—apparently so admirable but actually deceiving, false, and transitory—to say that he is the true Christ (“el verdadero Christo”). Thus this Anti-Michelangelo (“AnteMichael-Angel”), with his showy and superficial imitation (“con su afectada exterior imitacion”), his stunning technique and liveliness, has been able to persuade such a great number and variety of people that his is good painting, and his method and doctrine the true ones, that they have turned their backs on the true way of achieving eternity (“eternizarse”), and of knowing the certainty and truth of this matter.”17

Trained by his older brother Bartolomé, who worked for Zuccari in Rome and Madrid, Carducho as a painter, theorist, and critic was oriented toward what we might call late Roman Mannerism. He owned a copy of Zuccari’s Idea de’ scultori, pittori e architetti, and its idealist presence is evident in Carducho’s Diálogos de la pintura (Madrid, 1633), particularly in its aesthetic agenda of transcendent beauty.18 As a painter, he absorbed Zuccari’s style both directly in Madrid and through Bartolomé’s example, eventually becoming a leading member of the conservative Italianate painters in Madrid.19 Hence, even though Caravaggio is not mentioned in the Idea, Carducho most likely owed to Zuccari the definition of Caravaggio as the heretical Messiah of the Apocalypse, all the more so in that Zuccari was one of Caravaggio’s first public critics. At least he was the first, in 1600, to have his disapproval recorded: “What is all the fuss (“rumore”) about? … I do not see anything here other than the style of Giorgione,” he said, sneering (“sogghignando”), in the Contarelli Chapel. There is some truth in Zuccari’s claim about a Giorgionesque influence in Caravaggio’s Calling of Saint Matthew. The question of Caravaggio’s relationship to Michelangelo, however, is more problematic. Few scholars doubt that he had “an animated discussion” with the other Michelangelo, but whether it was one of emulative admiration or satire has yet to be resolved.20

Carducho’s master trope of sin (Caravaggio) and salvation (Michelangelo) is embedded in his figurative language. Caravaggio and his followers are materialists who use only their senses and attend only to fleeting and superficial appearances (“ni permanencia;” “engañosas;” “exterior imitacion”).21 Carducho introduces them comically as gluttons, devouring food “glotonicamente,” with a taste for sauces, sweets, and other culinary delicacies (“golosina”): in other words, those parts of our diet that delight the senses but do not sustain the body or soul.22 From the sin of gluttony, Carducho turns to apostasy and the worship of false gods. Later in the century, the Bolognese painter Lorenzo Pasinelli called Caravaggio’s “tenebrism” one of two “new heresies” (“nuove eresie”),23 but Carducho’s account is cast in more cataclysmic terms, what might be called an eschatology of art. Caravaggio was the beginning of the end. Poised between first (“venida”) and last things (“fin”), he was an omen (“presagio”) that prefigured the end of this world. He was the Antichrist who, like Simon Magus and other


caravaggio182

false gods, played tricks so that people believed what they saw, mistaking false miracles (“con falsos y portentosos milagros”) for real ones, and taking the Antichrist as the true Christ (“el verdadero Christo”). If gluttony produces unhealthy gorging and apoplexy, the apocalyptic consequences of Caravaggio’s appeal are much more serious, no less than perdition (“perdicion”) and the ruin and end of the world (“al fin deste mundo”). In this polarized nexus of good and evil, the divine Buonarroti plays his traditional role of Christ, the one who brings the true way to salvation and eternity (“al verdadero modo de eternizarse”).

The only other early modern writer to directly compare the two Michelangelos was Francesco Susinno. Le vite de’ pittori messinesi, dated 1728, is a richly mythologized source of Caravaggio’s violence. Amongst the narrative cells that he adapted to fit Caravaggio’s life and art, one involved two instances of studios as torture chambers:

It should be understood that before Caravaggio began to work for the Lazzari [The Resurrection of Lazarus] this crazy artist requested from them a room in the hospital. In order to support his capricious wish and to please him Caravaggio was given the best room … In order to give the central figure of Lazarus a naturalistic flavor he asked to have a corpse dug up that was already in a state of decomposition and had it placed in the arms of the workmen who however were unable to stand the foul odor and wanted to give up their work. Caravaggio with his usual fury (“colla solita ira”) raised his dagger and jumped on them, and as a result those unlucky men were forced to continue their job and nearly die like those miserable creatures who were condemned by the impious Maxentius to die tied to corpses. Likewise Caravaggio’s picturesque room could in some fashion be called the slaughterhouse (“carnificina”) of the same tyrant. Such barbarism (“una tale barbarie”) would not appear likely if I had not encountered it already in the ethical Seneca … It is also said that Michelangelo Buonarroti (I myself think it is only a fable) nailed a poor man to a wooden board and then pierced his heart with a lance, in order to paint a Crucifixion.24

As Susinno recognized, the barbaric practice of studio torture for the noble ends of art was known in antiquity. Seneca debated the question: “Does the end justify the means?” at length but without resolution.25 Susinno was less concerned with the ethics of aesthetics than the sensationalized intersection of art and life. He acknowledged that the story sounded “unlikely,” but granted it historical truth on the basis of Seneca. The similar story of Michelangelo crucifying his model for the sake of realism, however, is demoted to a world of fable (“favola”). In 1667, Carlo Dati also drew a parallel between Parrhasius’s slave and Michelangelo’s crucified model, but found both stories to be rhetorical exercises and demonstrably specious (he “doubts” the first and declares the second to be “absolutely” false).26 Whereas the torture motif most obviously linked Parrhasius and Caravaggio in Susinno’s mind, the artistic motivation behind such gruesome literalism needs to be noted. Seneca and Dati portrayed Parrhasius as an extreme naturalist who could only represent what stood before his eyes. Just like Caravaggio: “The moment the model was taken from him, his hand and his mind became empty.”27 Reliance on the


Philip Sohm 183

model resulted in compositional failure: “What are we to do if you decide to paint a war? Are we to arrange opposing ranks of men, and put weapons in their hands to wound each other?”28

Susinno and Dati were certainly correct in their assessments of Richard Carpenter’s 1642 invention of Michelangelo the torturer.29 And what a fabulous narrative vein these stories are!30 Leonardo and Pontormo were two other art experimenters whose studios stank from rotting bodies, a pestilential stench that tortured everyone but the artist.31 Gentile Bellini and Sante Peranda, like Caravaggio and Michelangelo, employed torture to attain pictorial naturalism. Several contemporary sources document Bellini’s visit to Constantinople in 1479, and a few even involve detailed stories of his naturalist painting that feature Sultan Mehmed as interlocutor.32 Carlo Ridolfi, however, invented his own.33 When the Sultan questioned the accuracy of a Head of the Baptist that Bellini had painted, he proposed to resolve a question about the placement of necks on decapitated heads by having a slave beheaded. Bellini was “frightened by this barbarity,” imagining that he might be the subject of a similar experiment in the future, thus playing the role of civilized Italian to the stereotypical bloodthirsty Turk. A more recent (and slightly more plausible) episode in Mirandola could have inspired Ridolfi’s invention: to help Peranda accurately depict a Beheading of the Baptist, the Duke offered to have a condemned man decapitated in front of him so that he could more accurately paint a Beheading of the Baptist.34 Peranda demurred. And finally we have Bernini deliberately grilling his leg in order to observe his reaction in a mirror and thus make his Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence (his namesake) more realistic.35 Here the sources may be more reliable, but the act is just as unbelievable given its impracticability and the lack of pain on Saint Lawrence’s face in Bernini’s sculpture. That these studio torture stories originated in the seventeenth century is not coincidental. It is not that artists were thought to be more sadistic or masochistic then, but because the torture motif was an effective apologue denoting the mistaken literalism of naturalistic agendas and (in Bernini’s case) the folly of youth.

Even though no one else compared the two Michelangelos directly, Buonarroti shadowed Merisi in art criticism in other ways. What strikes me is how much Merisi adopted a Buonarroti persona. Paul Barolsky has written eloquently on Michelangelo as “the first fully autobiographical artist in the modern world:”

He … encouraged his biographers, through what he said about himself, his work, and his manner of working, to exalt his works, as if the heroic grandeur or spiritual fervor of his subjects were his own, as if the majesty of his style or “maniera” were expressive of his person.36

Hence to imitate Michelangelo meant more than learning a language of form and movement; it meant imitating his life as well. The painter Giovan Battista Armenini, a mediocre follower of Michelangelo, made this point


caravaggio184

in 1587 shortly before Caravaggio entered the household of Cardinal del Monte. He complained about artists who gathered in the Sistine Chapel to argue ineffectually about anatomical subtleties in the Last Judgment, reporting the scene with the grittiness of bitter disappointment. Not only did these misguided youths want to emulate Michelangelo the artist, he noted, they also wanted to emulate him as a person. Thus an attendant danger of the Michelangelo cult was acting capriciously, dressing eccentrically, and thereby being taken as temperamental genius. If you act like a great artist, then you will be perceived as one:

An awful habit has developed among common folk and even among the educated, to whom it seems natural that a painter of the highest distinction must show signs of some ugly and nefarious vice allied with a capricious and eccentric temperament, springing from his abstruse mind. And the worst is that many ignorant artists believe themselves to be very exceptional by affecting melancholy and eccentricity … It is certain that this is the way for painters to become great and famous, and not by means of whims and oddities, as we have said. Artists are therefore well advised to keep away from the vices of madness, uncouthness, and extravagance, nor should they aim at originality by acting in a disorderly way and using nauseating language.37

No one can say how much of Caravaggio’s behavior was hard-wired genetically, learned during his formative years, and performed in maturity for a historically conditioned audience. Still it is fair to say that to some degree he cultivated “uncouthness … a disorderly way and … a nauseating language.” His rebel role was a perfect expression of his times and succeeded, in part, because others knew how to interpret it.

Baldinucci seems to be the first art writer to apply the proverb of “every painter paints himself” to explain Caravaggio’s artistic persona as a case of self-fashioning rather than as an autonomic reflex.38 That someone who “behaved like a brute and was negligent in hygiene and eating habits” would have practised a low-life naturalism and represented vile subject matter seemed to Baldinucci to be proverbially obvious. For Baldinucci it was Caravaggio’s choice. I will return to Caravaggio’s brutish and barbarian habits momentarily. For now, what should be noted is how much they are simultaneously and paradoxically barbarian and Michelangelesque. Michelangelo’s neglect of his material needs are famous: his tattered clothing, casual hygiene, humble furniture, and intermittent nourishment took on mythic status.39 He could afford better, but he just did not want the usual comforts that great wealth could bring him.40 Caravaggio made similar choices, especially in his manner of dressing (although with different motives). As for his followers, just as Michelangelo became a role model for a generation of self-fashioning artists, so too in turn did Caravaggio in both art and life. Leonello Spada became the “ape of Caravaggio.” And no one tried harder to emulate Caravaggio than Carlo Saraceni, at least before rebuffs from Caravaggio made him abandon that persona. According to Baglione (another one-time wannabe Caravaggio), Saraceni dressed like Caravaggio, bought an identical black dog, and gave it the same name, Cornacchia, playing Echo to Caravaggio’s Narcissus in a


Philip Sohm 185

real-life opera buffa.41 (However appealing the idea may be, it is unlikely that Caravaggio named his dog as a self-parodic homage to Michelangelo, who nicknamed a prostitute “Cornacchia,” meaning either or both a crone of ill-repute or a crow, a bird of bad tidings.42)

Barbarians

Caravaggio as the Anti-Michelangelo and Antichrist prefigures the roles assigned to him later by Poussin as the one who came into this world “to destroy painting.”43 His “aversion” to Caravaggio, added Félibien, was a consequence of their opposing styles (“completely the opposite”). Caravaggio’s destructive force as a painter (rather than his violent and murderous actions as a person) probably did not originate with Poussin, even though subsequently this view has been most closely identified with him. Giovanni Baglione noted that “some people thought that he had ruined painting.”44 And Francesco Albani described the consequence of Caravaggio’s many followers as “the decline and complete ruin [il precipizio e la totale ruina]” of painting.45 Carducho, Poussin, and Félibien implied that Caravaggio himself was the cause of this ruina or, at least, acted out a divine fate or historical imperative. Baglione’s and Albani’s statements, on the other hand, use a passive construction that appears to mask any intentionality or larger purpose. However, their use of “ruin” carries with it a sense of deliberate destruction such as that wrought by barbarians on Rome. This section will test out the extent to which barbarians stood behind the various claims that Caravaggio “destroyed” painting or caused its “ruin.”

No one ever explicitly labeled Caravaggio a new barbarian, at least not before the nineteenth century, although some came close: savage (“bestiale”) and barbaric (“Barbara”), Caravaggio acted with barbarism (“barbarie”).46 As an example of Caravaggio’s “barbaric” nature, Susinno relates how he vandalized his own work, the Resurrection of Lazarus, after hearing it criticized in public: “with his usual impatience, he drew his dagger, which he kept always at his side, and thrust many infuriated blows at that admirable painting so that it was cut up miserably.”47 He was barbaric in hygiene (“very negligent in washing himself”) and manner: “he used to dine on a slab of wood, and instead of a tablecloth he would eat on an old portrait canvas.”48 Bellori and Susinno do not say whose face he was eating off of. Violent and philistine, the Barbarians became a template to condemn Caravaggio, the man and his art. Even more than the short-lived and fugitive Caravaggio, it was his hoard of followers, as many from the foreign immigrant population of Rome as native-born Italians, who were seen as threatening. The invention of Caravaggio’s rebellion against antiquity was made famous by Bellori, tapping a fear of dissidents and outsiders with no understanding or respect of a glorious civilization: “once the majesty of art had been subjugated (“sottoposta”) in this way by Caravaggio, everyone assumed license, and the


caravaggio186

result was contempt (“dispregio”) for beautiful things and the antique and Raphael were deprived of all authority.”49

New barbarians did exist in the seventeenth century, most famously and suitably the Bamboccianti, a Flemish colony of low-life naturalists who shared some of Caravaggio’s artistic identity. They were nicknamed (or self-nominated) after “bambocci,” the puppet models used by some artists.50 One intention behind their name, whether pejorative or ironic, was to associate them with barbarian artists whose figures were thought to look like puppets. For Vasari, artists after the barbarian invasions of Rome made “those puppets (“fantocci”) and awkwardness that still appear in old works of art.”51 Armenini applied Vasari’s primitive fantocci to what awaits modern art should it decay into barbarism again, as he expected. Art, he thought, would “fall back into the simplicity and clumsiness” (“simplicità e goffezza”) that is found today in “strange paintings on the walls of many old churches with badly made puppets (fantozzi).”52 These fantozzi contained “the barbarism of the Goths, Vandals, Longobards, and other foreign nations.”

Andrea Sacchi complained to Francesco Albani that the Bamboccianti painted abject subjects involving excretions of blood, urine, and vomit (“li pidocchi … una donna che piscia … un Bacco che vomita”).53 In response to Sacchi’s letter, Albani added that they embodied “the things in decline in Rome.” They were barbaric and despoiled painting (“spogliando la pittura”).54 Sunk into their world of pigsties, filthy rags, and other execrable things (“porcili,” “lordi cenci,” “esecrandi sozzidumi”), they were unable to understand the angelic work of Raphael and Michelangelo (“d’Angeli, Michele e Rafaelle”):

I would swear that the Oltramontani spread abroad such harm to painting. The idea of such barbarity could only burrow into the hearts of these barbarians … But the gothic rage [la gottica rabbia] consumed itself so that, much to their vexation, art now revived like a beautiful Phoenix from the pyre of such scorn, with new tributes of famous statues disemboweled from the earth every day, the statues lining themselves with prodigal abundance in well ordered rows in courtyards, challenging the treachery of those barbarians and scorning the vanity of their fury.55

Just as art was resurrected from the ashes of the barbarian destruction of antiquity, so too would these foreign Bamboccianti (“questi perfidi … da rimoti paesi”) be sent to oblivion (“baratro”). Albani’s optimism about the inevitable defeat of the new barbarians was based on a historical template of cyclicity. The good art of antiquity would eventually be restored just as it had been in the Renaissance. This pattern of historical thinking also motivated Caravaggio’s critics in rendering him as the “Anti-Michelangelo” and “destroyer of art.” If Michelangelo revived the perfection of art after its long medieval slumber, then Caravaggio ushered back the shadows and presumably a new dark age. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, a pessimistic fin-de-siècle mentality gathered amongst painters and other art writers, including Gabriele Paleotti (1582), Giovan Paolo Lomazzo


Philip Sohm 187

(1584, 1589, and 1590), Raffaelle Borghini (1584), Giovan Battista Armenini (1587), Giovanni Paolo Gallucci (1591), and Federico Zuccari (1605).56 Drawing upon the intimation of cyclical collapse contained in Vasari’s famous apothegm that “the arts, like men themselves, are born, grow up, become old and die,” Armenini borrowed Vasari’s diction to express his “fear that [modern painting] will fall again.”57 If his own paintings were taken in evidence, his fear was a reasonable one. For Giovanni Battista Agucchi, art after Raphael and Michelangelo became “corrupt” even if it did not completely “fall into the dark shadows of the early barbarianism.”58 Other pessimists did not refer to a new barbarism as explicitly, but during these years any perceived decline of art would probably recall the great medieval collapse. As a champion of naturalism who poisoned Mannerism and destroyed Raphaelesque painting, Caravaggio straddled two antithetical historical roles: savior and foe of art, Christ and Antichrist. In balance, his critics placed him more often on the side of sin and evil, reserving the role of redeemer for the Carracci: “very soon they saw that it was necessary to restore art from the state it had fallen because of the corruption we had discussed.”59

In his reply to Sacchi, Albani referenced various commonplaces about the barbarians: they were foreign invaders who overwhelmed Italy by their sheer numbers; they plundered, ravaged, and destroyed the best of ancient civilization; they lived in squalor like animals; they were driven by anger and rage. Each of these attributes intersects with strands of Caravaggio’s personal and artistic identity in fairly obvious ways. His predisposition to anger and violence in life and art needs no further explanation at this point.60 Neither does his role in destroying civilization. However, the notion of marauding hoards does.

Many critics commented on the throng of imitators and admirers that Caravaggio’s art engendered. Mancini commented without prejudice that he was “much followed” (“assai seguita”) and that many “followed and embraced” (“è molto seguita et abbracciata”) his natural style.61 Baglione was once one of the “many young people [who] followed his example,” but in old age, when writing his Vite, he thought it was mostly hype generated by clamoring evil people (“rumore,” “maligni”) and by rabble who made a big fuss (“da popolani ne fu fatto estremo schiamazzo”).62 “The majority of painters (“mayor golpe de los Pintores”) followed him greedily,” wrote Carducho. According to Bellori, “he compelled some artists of more elevated creative powers … to follow him”63 Most of them, he noted, were young. Joachim von Sandrart was one such youth who soaked up Caravaggio during his stay in Rome. After his return to Germany, he wrote that “Caravaggio’s style was imitated by almost all the Italian painters, and now it is also imitated in southern and northern Germany.”64 Bernardo de Dominici also commented on Caravaggio’s following not just in Italy, “but even beyond the Alps.”65 Luigi Lanzi described Caravaggio’s followers as a band or troop or gang or hoard (“la schiera de’ suoi imitatori moltiplicatasi”).66 And Stefano Ticozzi likened Caravaggism to a “bad seed” that “infected” all painting.67


caravaggio188

My point here is that Caravaggio was defined as much by the sociology (or pathology) of crowd behavior as by his startling style. His paintings polarized. They attracted a devoted throng of younger painters and enflamed fear and loathing in other, mostly older, painters. Not only were his followers legion in numbers and international in scope, but they were passionate to the point of delusion as converts often are. Caravaggio “nursed and cherished” Leonello Spada, “the ape of Caravaggio,” who “never left the nest” even after Caravaggio imprisoned him in his studio “offering him food through a tiny window.”68 Saraceni was so devoted to Caravaggio that he copied his choice of dog breed, color (black, of course), and even name (Cornacchia) when it came to his own pet. And Prospero Orsi led a conspiracy or plot (“congiura”) to promote Caravaggio over the Cavaliere d’Arpino, “preaching at every street corner and in every piazza of this miracle of art.”69 Orsi had been a friend and follower of d’Arpino’s until, “after some time, I don’t know for what reason, he became less friendly or simply weary with d’Arpino and became one of the dragomans (‘turcimanni’) of Caravaggio, opposing the Cavaliere in every way.”70 Caravaggio, as an outsider culture unto himself, needed such “Turcimanni” to translate his new outsider idiom to the public just as the Turks needed their interpreters. Might we have here intimations of Caravaggio the Turk?71 Turks, like the barbarians, were typecast as violent, deceitful, foreign, and invasive.72 They were first labeled “barbarian” in the fifteenth century,73 an easy shift in ethnographic profiling since both were thought to be treacherous, fierce, and cruel.74

Marauding hoards roam. According to Ammianus Marcellinus, the Huns

are all without fixed abode, without hearth, or law, or settled mode of life, and wander about from place to place, like fugitives, accompanied by the wagons in which they live … and they are so fickle and prone to anger that they often quarrel with their allies without provocation.75

Like them, Caravaggio led an eventful life of fight and flight, of fugitive wandering. Susinno nicknamed him “the fugitive.”76 In 1605 he was described as homeless (“non habentem locum permanentem”).77 Lawless according to the police blotter, and attacking his friends and killing one of them, Caravaggio had a Hunnish hot temper. He preferred knives and swords but also wielded plates, stones, and lead weights as weapons against his enemies (and he had so many).

Why did Caravaggio have a foundation built on barbarians? First, as I have just argued, it helped to situate his art sociologically as a class, generational, and even civilizational clash. Second, it helped to explain his gritty, Northern naturalism that depicts nature not just as it is, but in its basest forms.78 In the early modern art world, German painters were deemed to be naturalists and hence in direct descent from those tribes described in Tacitus’s Germania who “worship Nerthus or Mother Earth.”79 And thirdly, Caravaggio was a barbarian because he “destroyed” painting. Barbarians in early modern art


Philip Sohm 189

history were known primarily for their destructive power, reducing Roman art and architecture to rubble and ruin, and wiping out paintings altogether:

The Goths and the other barbarian invaders who destroyed the fine arts of Italy, along with Italy itself … and this within a short time led not only to the humbling of their great empire but also to worldwide destruction, notably at Rome itself … [A] great many of these [buildings] were destroyed by savage and barbarian invaders, who indeed were human only in name and appearance.80

Because architectural ruins and fragmentary remains of statues stood metonymically for cultural collapse and reconstruction,81 they were easily transferred to symptoms of modern artistic decline. In Lomazzo’s “Lament on Modern Painting” of 1589, “unfortunate Painting” describes herself as “filthy, emaciated, dried up, and broken into pieces and disarrayed, with dislocated bones and almost half dead.”82 From Bellori to Lanzi, critics of Caravaggio used iconic images of ruin and degradation to capture Caravaggio’s abject subject matter: a “chipped and broken” (“sboccato e rotto”) vase, rusty (“rugginosa”) armor, arthritic fingers, diseased (“morbi”) and ruined (“guaste”) limbs, blemished skin along with other “vile things” (“cose vili”).83

Barbarians wore their clothing into a ruinous state:

They [the Huns] dress in linen cloth or in the skins of field-mice sewn together, and they wear the same clothing indoors and out. But when they have once put their necks into a faded tunic, it is not taken off or changed until by long wear and tear it has been reduced to rags and fallen from them bit by bit.84

Caravaggio was a shabby dresser in the Hunnish style. He too wore his clothes until they turned to rags: “once he had put on a suit of clothes he never would change it until it was falling off him in rags (“cenci”). He was extremely negligent about washing.”85 Luca the Barber testified in 1597 to the Criminal Tribunal that his clothes were disheveled (“non troppo bene in ordine”) and his shoes were a little ragged (“stracciate”).86 Borromeo, using synonyms for emphasis and writing in both Latin and Italian, described Caravaggio’s clothing as filthy and foul (“sozzo,” “lordi,” “foedisque,” and “sordida”), crushed and trampled (“stiacciati”) and always torn or ripped (“lacera semper”).87 “Stiacciati” is especially evocative, as if the clothes had been trampled like Italy by the barbarians, unless Borromeo meant “stracciati” (ragged), a neat reference to poor modern Painting that Lomazzo allegorized in similar disarray with ruined tattered clothing (“strapazzada”).

The divine Michelangelo was also a sloppy dresser, at least in old age, wearing his clothes until they peeled off his body along with his skin. He made himself (with Vasari’s help) into a Marsyas, suffering and ultimately dying for his art. Caravaggio’s ratty clothes resembled Michelangelo’s only in external appearance. Possibly he wanted to share the aura of genius, but Bellori read the signifier of rags differently as a sign of failure. In Vasari’s hands, Michelangelo’s rags showed his transcendence of material existence. Caravaggio’s rags, however, showed how much he had trapped himself into


caravaggio190

mundane realities of broken material things. Just as the two Michelangelos shared a name, it was in name only that they resembled each other. The name, like the clothes, was a multivalent external sign: same signifier but divergent signifieds. Signs are permeable and adaptable. They enabled Caravaggio’s critics to attribute moral and psychological dimensions to his “tenebrism:” it was shifty, dishonest, cutting and base, and hence available for comparison to another shady culture, the medieval “dark” ages.88 The web of visual form and psychological pathology in Caravaggio’s “tenebrism” supports the structure of opposition discussed in this chapter. Caravaggio was antagonistic, plotting friends against enemies, whether personal or artistic; his art was divisive, attracting many followers and repelling others; his shadows cut figures into fragments. The metaphorical implications of “tenebrism” allowed early modern art critics to find new ways to condemn a style that appeared to intimate violence and disfigurement. Therefore, Caravaggio’s style is cutting (“tagliente”) and butchered (“umbrarum carnificem”). When a focused shaft of light pierces an otherwise dark space, and when reflections are removed or dampened, the deep shadows obscure the continuity and coherence of figural form, fragmenting nature into luminous shards. Writing in Rome in the 1640s, Dufresnoy described the disjointed effect of chiaroscuro as unpleasant because joints and other bodily extremities are spotlit without any transitional or connective tissue between them.89 Malvasia called Caravaggio’s style violent (“violento”) and defined it as a clash (“fracasso”).90

“Caravaggiomania” Today

“The Two Michelangelos” (Figs. 9.1 and 9.2) track Caravaggio’s rising fortune in the worlds of scholarship and culture. Caravaggio is also seeping into popular consumer culture where he becomes a marketing tool for perfumes. In the same vein, a Florentine painting school for tourists promises to teach you to paint like Caravaggio, as Catherine Puglisi noted in her introduction as chair of the CAA session “Caravaggio Today.” I added a few examples of my own in that session including the December 2003 cover of Journal of Infectious Diseases (Fig. 9.3). At first sight, it seems like an ironic meta-commentary on “Caravaggiomania,” spreading across borders and dangerously infecting the world like some modern Ebola horror, a latter-day version of Ticozzi’s “bad seed” of Caravaggism “infecting” the world of painting. The accompanying article by Polyxeni Potter (Centers for Disease Control) revealed a more banal view. For him, Caravaggio’s Basket of Fruit only illustrates how weakened fruit peels allow “the invasion of pathogens” and promotes “decomposition.” My epidemiological record of “The Two Michelangelos” shows a cultural meme spreading contagiously where Merisi overruns and chokes out Buonarroti. If the reality of “Caravaggiomania” needed further proof, it came as a front-page article in The New York Times (10 March 2010) written by Michael Kimmelman that featured my CAA talk. It went viral overnight, picked up


9.3 Front cover of Emerging Infectious Diseases, issue of December 2003.


caravaggio192

and expanded with further interviews by La Repubblica, The Independent, El Mundo, Süddeutsche Zeitung, The Times of India, and La Stampa amongst others.

Despite the squirmy associations of viral transmission and infectious diseases, “Caravaggiomania” is not a bad thing. It helps motivate studies in the related areas of the history of collecting, Lombard painting, naturalism, and narrative. It infuses Caravaggio with modern perspectives and transforms him into a living artist engaged in contemporary art. “Caravaggio beckons Bacon” is how Anna Coliva put it in the catalogue to an odd exhibition in 2009, Caravaggio Bacon (Villa Borghese, Rome),91 as if Caravaggio were calling Bacon back into the past. From the viewpoint of many art historians, “Caravaggiomania” may threaten to de-historicize Caravaggio.92 However, it can also challenge historians to re-engage with some perennial questions: can art transcend history? What does art history contribute to aesthetic experience? How reliable are our modern sensibilities in judging visual evidence of historical paintings?

Paradox infuses “Caravaggiomania” much as it did in the early reception of Caravaggio, when critics struggled to understand a rebel who attracted acolytes, a sinner who saved art. Take, for example, the sensational unveiling of “Caravaggio’s bones.” Not long ago, a skull and bones were found in an underground ossuary at Porto Ercole, opening a high-tech hunt to confirm that they are the mortal remains of Caravaggio. Their DNA was accordingly tested. Media reporting this discovery usually introduced Caravaggio (and hence the importance of his bones) as “the Renaissance genius who was notorious for his hot temper, wild drinking, and tavern brawls” (The Telegraph, 15 December 2009). Thus, at a time when religion is being drained from Caravaggio’s portfolio, we have an event that renders him a cultic religious figure. Photos from Porto Ercole show local baroni reverentially holding a casket with bones as if they were holy relics. The bone-bearing baroni serve as high priests of an artist cult. Art historians today also stake a claim as guardians who officiate in the mysteries of Caravaggio. And mysteries predominate over clarity, especially with such a shortage of reliable sources: no letters, no drawings, no will or estate record, little beyond the distorting lens of police and court records. Caravaggio needs mediation today much as he needed “Turcimanni” in his lifetime. We fill Caravaggio’s biographical space with Caravaggios who resemble his shadowy pictorial spaces. Both are black boxes of arcana, mysterious and liminal, and available for imaginative projections.

How then does Caravaggio serve our needs as art historians today? Obviously in many ways, but consider in conclusion this possibility. If “every painter paints himself,” as the early modern proverb holds, then might not “every scholar write himself”? (I use the gendered form because what follows applies as much to me personally as to art historians generally). Many of us want to be, or at least want to be recognized as, rebels. It is certainly part of my generation’s ’68 persona. At one point during a recent brilliant discussion at the University of Cork (chaired by James Elkins and Robert Williams), the influential Renaissance art historians around the


Philip Sohm 193

table vied with each other to establish their credentials as “outliers.”93 I think they borrowed the term “outlier” from Malcolm Gladwell to signify those who succeed and innovate by standing outside social and intellectual power circles.94 Ironically, they were positioning themselves as outliers by relying on a best-seller concept. They each had good reasons to describe themselves as outliers (advocates of post-colonialism, post-structuralism, feminism, globalism, and more), even though they were sitting at the table as representatives of established thinking and as centers of power, not as a marginalized group. Many art historians, myself included, want to be outliers while, paradoxically, hoping to situate ourselves at the center, at the high table, as new authorities. Like Caravaggio, we identify a big-man target and take him down. (Actually I try to avoid using this aggressive “barbarian” strategy.) As conforming outliers, we want to rebel and become free and even contrarian, and yet we do so within institutionalized mass movements. We play out the artist’s role as rebel and avant-garde iconoclast that we work so hard to discredit. We strive to become the next Anti-Michelangelo and hence to occupy the position left vacant by our thoughtful attacks. From the perch of an early modern specialist, “Caravaggiomania” seems to be fueled by Caravaggio’s presentism, the illusion of immediacy, and the currency that he carries in modern culture. If I am typical in any way, however, the fact that Caravaggio beckons outliers, not just from popular culture but serious thinkers from other fields, is truly encouraging, especially when these insider outliers include Michael Fried, Mieke Bal, Leo Bersani, Ulysse Dutoit, Francine Prose, David Hockney, and Frank Stella.95 Their engagement with Caravaggio inserts Caravaggio into the mainstream, which in art history these days is modern, not pre-modern.

Notes

1 I want to thank the chair of this session, Catherine Puglisi, for inviting me to participate. At the same time that she was wondering about Caravaggiomania, Richard Spear was writing an article on the subject, now published in Art in America (Spear 2010). My contribution to this volume would not have taken its current form without their inspiration. The six sessions at the 2009 Renaissance Society of America annual meeting chaired by Lorenzo Pericolo and David Stone led Puglisi and Spear to wonder about this massing of scholarly troops. I have learned much from conversations with all four.

2 The publication numbers are based on the Bibliography of the History of Art, the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz catalogue, WorldCat, and the bibliography in Macioce 2010. I make no claims of exactitude, especially for the gray area of books written for the lay education public. Revised subsequent editions of books are included; reprints of “coffee table” books are not. The graphs are spiky, due to anniversary years or major exhibitions, but in general they support my claim that Michelangelo was losing market share at roughly the same rate that Caravaggio was gaining.

3 See Spear 2010b.


caravaggio194

4 Carducho, 270.

5 For Caravaggio and Reni as opposites, see Antoine Coypel’s 1708–22 Discours sur la peinture in Conférences, 395–520, esp. 412: “Ce que je reproche aussi de trop faible à la manière du Guide directement opposée à celle du Caravage n’empêche pas que je n’admire la beauté de son pinceau léger, facile et spirituel.” See also Francesco Maria Niccolò Gabburri, Vite dei pittori, Ms. BNF, IV, f. 1844, s.v. Michelagnolo da Caravaggio: “Fu uomo brigoso, la pigliò quasi con tutti i pittori, in particolare con Guido Reni, tutto opposto al di lui dipinto.” Also see Salvini, 152–53: “Sonoci più maniere e tutte, benché diversissime tra loro, pure posseggono le loro bellezze particolari. Dopo tanti e tanti pittori famosissimi si trovò un Guido che, abbandonando la maniera del suo maestro, si diede di fare le sue pitture come a sfolgorante lume di piazza. Altri, come un Caravaggio, mostrò maniera di forza.” Also see Orlandi, col. 937: “quel gran tignere di macchia e furbesco che non lasciava trovare conto del buon contorno; fu uomo brigoso, la pigliò quasi con tutti i pittori, in particolare con Guido Reni, tutto opposto al di lui dipinto. Uccise un suo rivale e fuggì bandito da Roma a Napoli.” For Annibale Carracci’s challenge to Caravaggio, reported by Malvasia, proposing to paint in “un altro modo” that will contrast (“contrapporne”) with Caravaggio, see Malvasia (a), 2:10; Perini 1990, 150; and Sohm 2002. See below for all others.

6 Félibien, II, 3:205.

7 Malvasia (a), 2:15: “Ma se non piacque ad Annibale, tanto più spiacque al Caravaggio, che temette assai di una nuova maniera totalmente alla sua opposta, ed altrettanto quanto la sua gradita.”

8 See Federico Borromeo, De delectu ingeniorum (Milan: Ambrosiana, 1623), quoted in Agosti 1997, 180, n. 13: “Narra a simile de Michel Angelo Caravaggio: in illo apparebat l’osteria, la crapula, nihil venusti; per lo contrario Rafaello. Etiam aspectus indicat scriptor: Titianus, Michael Angelus, Caietanus: e contrario Caravagius.”

9 For Velázquez as a “second Caravaggio,” see Palomino, 893–94; for Rembrandt as another Caravaggio, see Francesco Algarotti’s Saggio sopra la pittura (Venice, 1756) in Algarotti, 422.

10 Bellori, 231. For the English translation here and below, see Bellori-Wohl, 185.

11 Sohm 2001, 28–29, 32–33.

12 Boschini, 135–36: “El natural è giusto co’ e ’l velen. / Chi el tiol a tempo, e che ’l tiol a mesura, / Per zovamento el serve ala natura; / E muor chi el tiol come no se convien.”

13 Sohm 2001, 176–84.

14 See Sohm 2002.

15 Malvasia (a), 2:10; Sohm, 2002.

16 Susinno, 111–12 (manuscript dated 1728), as translated by Hibbard 1983, 383–84 (as are all subsequent Susinno translations).

17 Carducho, 89–90; translation is based on Jonathan Brown, in Enggass and Brown 1970, 173–74.

18 For the inventory of Carducho’s library, see Caturla 1968–69. For a thorough consideration of Zuccari’s influence on Carducho, see Volk 1977, ch. 3.


Philip Sohm 195

19 For Carducho, see Brown J. 1991, 92–97, 133–37; and Umberger 1993, 22–27, 31–35.

20 The phrase comes from Puglisi 1998, 207. For the two opposing views, see Friedlaender1955, 89–94; and Hibbard 1983, 154–59.

21 Umberger 1993, 21–43, makes an excellent case that Carducho was using Caravaggio as a stalking horse to criticize Velázquez.

22 For more on the dangers of spicing art, see Sohm 2001, 6–7, 165, 177.

23 Zanotti, 98.

24 Susinno, 112–13.

25 Seneca, 10.5–7.

26 Dati, 99–104.

27 Bellori, 229–30.

28 Seneca, 10.5–7.

29 It appears to be the invention of Carpenter, 234–35; quoted in Steinmann and Wittkower 1927, 78–79.

30 See Cropper 1996; and Morales 1996.

31 For Leonardo’s vivisection experiments in his Vatican studio as a paradigm of artistic illusion and a parody of classical composition, see Vasari, 4:20. Boschini, in retelling this story, dropped all references to the parodic function of monster-making and instead exaggerated the fetid smell (“fetor,” “spuzor”) in order to satirize Vasari’s foul taste: Sohm 2000, esp. 73–75. For Pontormo, see Cinelli, 517. Giovanni Gaetano Bottari, in his edition of Vasari’s Vite, ascribed this story to Vasari—incorrectly, since it was Cinelli’s invention—possibly mixing it with Michelangelo’s crucified laborer or possibly thinking that Vasari was vulnerable to such embellishments of truth: Vasari-Bottari, 2:668. For further discussion, see Sohm 2007, 125–26.

32 Quoted and discussed by Meyer zur Capellen 1985, 19–20, 109–10. For a recent edition of Giovan Maria Angiolello’s Memoir, see Angiolello.

33 Ridolfi, 1:57–58.

34 Ridolfi, 2:270; and Richard Symonds, “Secrete intorno la Pittura vedute & sentite della Prattica del Sig. Gio. Angelo Canini in Roma 1650, 1651, 1652 etc.,” published in Beal 1984, 287.

35 Baldinucci (b), 8; Bernini, 15–16. See further Damm 2006.

36 Barolsky 1990, 139 (see also 31–34, 139–41).

37 Armenini, 233.

38 Baldinucci (a), 3:690. For further discussion of this passage, see Sohm 2002; and Stone 2006. For other early modern associations of Caravaggio’s pictorial style with his behavior, see an undated letter to Cesarini, where Zuccari attributes Caravaggio’s “many fans and protectors” to the “extravagance of his character (‘carattere’) and of his painting (‘dipingere’):” Bottari and Ticozzi 1825, 7:515. See also Borromeo in Agosti 1997, 51: “qualis illi animus obtigerat, talia etiam opera artificis cernebantur;” and Piles, 342–43: “Les idées du Caravage ressemblent à son tempérament, elles étoient fort inégales et jamais fort élevées.”


philipsohm

Sticky Note

##

caravaggio196

39 On Michelangelo’s clothes, see Barolsky 1991, 26–29.

40 Vasari, 6:112.

41 Baglione, 147; according to Bellori, 234–35, Saraceni named his dog Barbone or “Poodle.”

42 Cellini, 123 (Vita, bk 1, ch. 30). The story concerns a Sienese sculptor named Michelangelo, but a confusion with Buonarroti would have been easy. Cellini, like Caravaggio, owned a cane barbone.

43 Félibien, II, 3:205: “M. Poussin … ne pouvoit rien souffrir du Caravage, et disoit qu’il estoit venu au monde pour destruire la peinture.” See also Malvasia (a), 2:244.

44 Baglione, 138: “Anzi presso alcuni si stima aver esso rovinata la pittura.”

45 See Malvasia (a), 2:244: “Non poté mai tollerare che si seguitasse il Caravaggio, scorgendo essere quel modo il precipizio e la totale ruina della nobilissima e compitissima virtù della pittura.”

46 Malvasia (a), 2:16; Susinno, 111–12.

47 Susinno, 111.

48 Susinno, 115, based on Bellori, 214. According to Vasari, 3:318, Griffone, another “stravagante cervello” and “bizzarra persona,” ate on a table covered with “suoi cartoni.”

49 Bellori, 230.

50 See Levine 1990; and Levine and Mai 1991.

51 Vasari, 2:22: “e così nacquero da le lor mani quei fantocci e quelle goffezze che nelle cose vecchie ancora oggi appariscono.” Being primitive schematics of real figures, fantocci were also associated with children and the visually illiterate. As a young boy, Fra Filippo Lippi scrawled fantocci in his notebooks: Vasari, 3:328. In a lesson on the difficulty of drawing badly, Vasari, 6:115, has friends admire a figure drawn by Michelangelo that was “similar to those fantocci that those who know nothing scrawl on the walls.”

52 Armenini, 9.

53 Malvasia (a), 2:267–68, quoting a letter of 28 October 1657 from Andrea Sacchi to Francesco Albani. For further discussion of this letter and Albani’s reply, see Puglisi 1999, 52.

54 Malvasia (a), 2:268–69, published Albani’s reply.

55 Albani in Malvasia (a), 2:268–69: “Io giurerei che gl’Oltramontani solo han disseminato per coteste scuole tanti pregiudici alla pittura. Il pensiero di tanta barbarie in altri petti che in quelli de’ barbari appunto non ha avuto il covile … Ma rodasi pur da se stessa la gottica rabbia ch’a suo dispetto, sul rogo di tanto sdegno, si ravviva oggimai più bella la fenice di quell’arte e la stessa terra ogni dì si sviscera per novi tributi di statue famose che, con prodigiosa abbondanza schierandosi in ordinate file per coteste vigne, sfidano la perfidia di que’ barbari e scherniscono la vanità del loro furore.”

56 For further discussion, see Sohm 2007, ch. 6 (“Life Cycles of Art”).

57 Armenini, 9. The wording (“salire,” “a temere,” “a basso,” “alto”/“altezza”) indicates Armenini’s source as Vasari 3:7.


Philip Sohm 197

58 Giovanni Battista Agucchi, in Mahon 1947, 247.

59 Ibidem.

60 For a wonderful rendition of Caravaggio’s documented violent behavior, see Langdon 1998, chs. 6 and 11.

61 Mancini, 1:225.

62 Baglione, 137–38.

63 Bellori, 230.

64 Sandrart as translated by Hibbard 1983, 376. For Sandrart’s painting, see Klemm 1986.

65 De Dominici, 2:275.

66 Lanzi, 1:359.

67 Ticozzi 1830, 1:49 (s.v. Amerighi (Michelangelo): “Questo mal seme di nuovo dipingere infettò tutte le scuole.”

68 Malvasia (a), 2:105.

69 Ibidem, 2:9.

70 Baglione, 300. The role as turcimanno was also mentioned by Malvasia (a), 2:9.

71 For examples of usage, see Meli 2009. Hibbard 1983, 353, translates turcimanno as “henchman,” and Gilbert 1995, 61, as “one who defrauds his clients as a ‘steerer’ to buy from his confederates.” Both are applicable to Baglione’s usage.

72 For an excellent review, see Meserve 2008.

73 Jones W.R. 1971, 392.

74 See D’Elia 2003.

75 Ammianus Marcellinus, XXXI, ii, 10.

76 Susinno, 110, 114.

77 Corradini 1993, 64–67.

78 For a summary of seicento sources that discuss Caravaggio’s naturalism, see Bologna 1992, 144–54.

79 Tacitus, Germania, 40.

80 Vasari, 2:14.

81 Barkan 1999, 119–208.

82 Lomazzo (a), 2:24.

83 Bellori, 213; and Lanzi, 1:358.

84 Ammianus Marcellinus, 3:381–87.

85 Bellori, 214.

86 See Corradini and Marini 1998.

87 See Borromeo, quoted in Agosti 1997, 177–78: “Dum Romae essemus, monstrabatur inter Pictores homo pravis moribus, foedisque, qui lacera semper, et sordida veste Principum coguinas sectabatur, atque ibi inter mediastinos


caravaggio198

agebat aevum. Is homo nihil unquam in arte illa sua dignum laude fecit, nisi cum ganeones, et ludiones, et aleatores pingeret. Aegyptiae divinatrices, et garruli, baiulique, et strata nocturnis horis ebriorum corpora per fora, et vias tabulae ipsius erant; triumphabatque mirifice quoties cauponam unam, et in ea comessantem aliquem fecisset. Nimirum indigni mores hominis manum huc, penicillumque trahebant, et qualis illi animus obtigerat, talia etiam opera artificis cernebantur.” The Italian version is somewhat abbreviated (Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan, ms. F 31 inf., ff. 118–119 [205v–206r]): “Nei miei di conobbi un dipintore in Roma, il quale era di sozzi costumi ed andava sempre mai con panni stiacciati e lordi a maraviglia, e si viveva del continuo fra i garzoni delle cucine dei signori della Corte. Questo dipintore non fece mai altro che buono fosse nella sua arte, salvo il rappresentare i tavernisti ed i giocatori, overo le cingare che guardano la mano, overo i baronci ed i fachini, e gli sgraziati, che si dormivano la notte per le piazze; ed era il più contento uomo del mondo, quando avea dipinto un’osteria, e colà entro chi mangiasse e bevesse. Questo procedeva dai suoi costumi, i quali erano simiglianti ai suoi lavori.” Marghetich 1998, 25, makes a convincing case that the painter in question was Caravaggio.

88 For a discussion of the ethical and psychological dimensions of Caravaggio’s “tenebrist” macchia, see Sohm 2002, 458–59. I did not, however, refer to the barbarian Dark Ages.

89 Dufresnoy, lines 162–63: “Praecipua extremis raro internodia membris / Abdita sinta; Sed summa pedum vestigia nunquam.”

90 Malvasia (a), 2:9, 13.

91 Coliva and Peppiat 2009.

92 In her review of Caravaggio: The Final Years (National Gallery, London), McTighe 2006, 583, states the dilemma in this way: “This slant to the show seemed a troubling gesture backward, reflecting a view of the artist that is increasingly hard to sustain: Caravaggio as the prototype of the modern painter, populist, heretical, at odds with authority, the proponent of erotic and violent rebellion.“

93 Transcript of discussion published in Elkins and Williams 2008.

94 Gladwell 2008; parts were published earlier in The New Yorker.

95 Stella 1986; Bersani and Dutoit 1998; Bal 1999; Prose 2005; Hockney 2006; and Fried 2010.


caravaggio the barbarian (uncorrected proof)

Documents