It is phenomenal that a man so often prone to brutishness and self-destruction nonetheless successfully cultivated links with elite patronage, maintained a considerable work rate, and was responsible for one of the great transformations of European painting before dying under the age of forty. The discordant life of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610) came to an end within weeks of his completing The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula (1610). Said to be his last painting, it serves as the centerpiece of a concentrated and free-admission exhibition at London’s National Gallery.
The painting of Saint Ursula was confidently attributed to Caravaggio following a discovery in the Naples state archives, where two letters from 1610 revealed the work as a commission for Marcantonio Doria, a Genoese nobleman. Conditions the artist experienced in the run-up to producing the painting were characteristically extreme.
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After fleeing Rome for killing a pimp, Caravaggio went to Naples and then Malta, where he forged links with the ruling Knights of the Order of Saint John. He hoped these connections would elevate his status and support his appeal for a pardon from Rome. Despite his joining the order, however, an argument with a knight resulted in Caravaggio’s imprisonment. He escaped but forfeited the advantages of belonging to this group.
In Caravaggio’s later works the subject matter of Dionysian boys, cardsharps, and lute players is discarded. In their place something of a pronounced Catholic severity combines with a handling of light and shade that has come to exemplify so much of his work. For Caravaggio, times became crueler. On leaving a tavern in 1609, he was attacked, his face supposedly severely disfigured. In The Martyrdom, he appears behind Ursula, with no sign of the assault. For an artist so often bound to forms of realism, the omission is a curious one; this was a man who had depicted his own face on the severed head of Goliath. Perhaps he sensed that the special kind of violence he had made his own in art would soon overpower him in life.
Ursula herself had suffered a brutal end. Having rejected a proposal of marriage from a Hun king, she was killed, along with her companions. Caravaggio paints her martyrdom up close; this is in sharp contrast to other depictions of Ursula together with her followers, such as Vittore Carpaccio’s conception of a large-scale slaughter in open air.
The martyr peers down at her death sentence, blood squirting from the arrow wound. The Hun looks on, his hand still raised from having made his shot at short-range. Appearing above Ursula’s left shoulder is Caravaggio’s face, probably his final self-portrait, gazing toward the light and outside of the picture, away from the focus of others in the scene. The composition is crowded and enclosed; dark hangings seal the figures, all men except for Ursula, in a claustrophobic space. A light source entering from the left illuminates part of the scene, focusing attention on the enigmatic expressions of the group.
The painting has endured much. Doria’s business agent, Lanfranco Massa, wrote that he took the liberty of leaving the painting outdoors in the sun to dry it; a softening of the varnish was the unintended consequence. The work then suffered damage during transport and crude “restorations.” But the harsh pale appearance of Ursula’s skin that appears in reproductions is not so pronounced when viewing the painting in person.
Centuries old and poorly handled—still, not a bare patch of canvas shows through today. This raises the question whether it is really that important to “restore” all areas of damage in a painting. The acceptance and even celebration of damaged sculpture has never translated to oil paintings. It led this writer to wonder whether the loosely feathered-in arrow penetrating the saint and the accompanying blood spurt were from the artist’s own hand.
Decapitation seemed to fascinate Caravaggio, and as a companion piece to the Ursula painting hangs the National Gallery’s Salome Receives the Head of John the Baptist (ca. 1609–10). An account of the tale states that on Salome’s command King Herod ordered the execution of the baptist and requested his head on a platter. A savage scene results, with the figure of Salome caught looking away from the result of her vengeful order.
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Both works have invited psychological interpretations, but these may say more about the interpreter than the work itself. With Ursula, the Hun has barely let loose his arrow, and we may be tempted to read a note of regret in his expression, the mouth perhaps indicating a change from a grimace of rage to guilt. In Salome, a tuft of the baptist’s hair is still gripped by the executioner as the princess takes delivery of the decapitated head. She is pictured looking away while her white drapery leads the viewer’s eye back to the salver and its grim offering. Next to her, an aged attendant appears to offer prayers with clasped hands.
Nicolas Poussin abhorred the Italian artist’s work and claimed that Caravaggio had been sent forth “to destroy painting.” This may have been what he did: the powerful forging of new forms is at times a prerequisite for becoming a major artist. There is nothing of Arcadia in this show; when so much material from the street is assimilated in the way it was by Caravaggio, this absence is fitting.
Caravaggio cast a novel paradigm of beauty, allowing new representations of savagery, labor, calloused palms, and feet ingrained with dirt. He found aesthetic qualities in places where people had not thought or ventured to look. In the seventeenth century, this scheme must have had a revolutionary quality about it, almost Baudelairean. A tragic view of life is on full display here, focused on women in two diverging ways: one, Salome, turns her gaze from the death of another; the other, Ursula, experiences her own demise. If the timelessness of art is a myth, then with his paintings Caravaggio resisted this assertion as far as anyone can.