M: the Caravaggio enigma by Peter Robb

Author:Peter Robb [Robb, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Duffy & Snellgrove
Published: 1998-08-31T21:00:00+00:00

ADOLESCENT JOHN WAS the ascetic and solitary precursor of Christ. He was the boy who spoke with the voice of one crying in the wilderness. The figure of John as a lonely brooding boy caught M’s imagination early and held it to the end of his life. He painted more versions of John in the wild than of any other figure – at least eight. The series was like an intimate running commentary on his life. M’s first John was one of the very last of his early idyllic paintings of boys. Around 1598, when he did his first version of Isaac & Abraham, he painted the same boy as a young John. It was also the time of the Basket of fruit, and this first John was surrounded by foliage, sunlight falling on different angled leaves and playing over their dimples, their veins, their ragged edges – John was awkwardly holding up his cane cross, and the sheep sitting at his feet had the pompous and hieratic look of an animal conscious of posing as a religious icon. The boy himself though, nearly nude – and here and as Isaac he was M’s first full length boy nude – was rendered in a complex and subtle play of intense light and deepening shadow that was already mapping out the contours of bodies to come. The boy’s downward looking face was in shadow, as in Isaac, and his intense, moody, lowered eyes and inwardly directed gaze caught, like the shifting intensities of light on his soft body, the changeability and uncertainty of adolescence. Fragile, withdrawn, vulnerable, he wasn’t much of an image of Christianity’s militant and uncompromising forerunner for a newly militant church.

Then again, neither was Cecco, laid back, grinning and totally nude. It was Cecco’s cheerful grin that gave that painting its peculiarly disconcerting look of a holiday snapshot. M gave his own intensely lighthearted sexual intimacy to the way he painted Cecco as John, but he certainly wasn’t the first painter to do John as an appealing boy more or less stripped of any ideological dress. Leonardo and Raphael had both done it before him. Though only M’s Cecco John frankly displayed his genitals, the most radical thing about this John was the way the painting registered its subject’s own amusement, the delightful charge of pleasure M set up for you to share.

By the middle of 1604 a lot had changed in M’s life. The nude Cecco had last been painted at the start of the year, twisted and yelling with a knife at his throat. M now went back to the figure of John, but using other models – the sexual electricity of the Cecco paintings was out of the series. It was in the two intensely inward paintings of John he did now in a time of trouble that M made this figure peculiarly his own. As the difficult year of 1604 went on, after he’d done Lena as the Madonna, maybe around the time of

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