Art by Simon Schama

Author:Simon Schama [Schama, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473570887
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2019-10-03T00:00:00+00:00

VI

IT WAS CARAVAGGIO’S moment and Rome’s, the two of them fitting like a hand in a glove. Pope Clement VIII’s Holy Year of 1600 was fast approaching: a year of fervour, pilgrimage and grace, when absolution would be extended, indulgently, to sinners who normally would have been denied salvation – sinners like Caravaggio. But the Holy City itself needed respite. Caravaggio was a palazzo boarder, but he knew, every day and in every pore of his skin, the other Rome, the city of a hundred thousand dirt-poor, ravaged by plague, burdened by taxes to pay for the Pope’s sorry little wars, bellies never full, watching the harvest and praying for a good one to make bread and pasta affordable. When the Tiber flooded in 1598, smashing the Ponte Santa Maria, later nicknamed the Ponte Rotto (Broken Bridge), it seemed as though Rome was in need of wonders.

And it was about to get them. The chapel whose walls had been assigned to Caravaggio was in the French church of San Luigi. The history to be painted was that of St Matthew because a French cardinal, Mathieu Cointrel, had made a bequest for his saintly namesake to be venerated, and had left elaborate, detailed instructions on how the scenes – of martyrdom and the calling of the tax collector by Jesus – should be handled: how many figures, the setting, and so on. The ceiling vault had been done in 1593 by Giulio Cesari, now known grandly as the Cavaliere d’Arpino, quite possibly with the young Caravaggio’s help. But as Rome’s favourite history painter, d’Arpino had been in constant demand and had failed to finish the rest of the chapel. The Superintendence of St Peter’s had taken over responsibility for its completion and had handed the task to del Monte, who had nodded in Caravaggio’s direction.

The opportunity must have been both exhilarating and terrifying. The Matthews would be by far the biggest paintings he had ever done, both in physical size and in public visibility. Everything he had painted up till now had been under his control, even when, like the Medusa, it had been for a special commission. Those works had been easel paintings, done directly from nature in his studio under strong light; pictures for which he determined the number of figures and their disposition within the space. Now, though, he had to conform to Cointrel’s specifications and even perhaps to d’Arpino’s precedent on the ceiling: a crowd of figures, saintly radiance, grandiose architecture, deep space. And he also knew that he might have done genre scenes and still-lifes and tarts dressed as saints to perfection, but this job would be the making or breaking of him.

So Caravaggio set to work on The Martyrdom of St Matthew slaughtered beside his altar on the instructions of the Ethiopian king. He tried to fulfil the requirements of the deep architectural space of the church in which the murder had been committed: the massed extras, the translation of the martyr at the moment of death – and, perhaps for the first time in his life, he seized up.

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