biography
Peter Craven
Peter Robb
M:
The Biography of Caravaggio
Duffy and Snellgrove $49.95hb, 564pp, 1 875989 420
PETER ROBB IS ONE of those slow starters who has turned out to
be a power in the land. There are reasons both encouraging and
bleak as to why this country should produce a generation of
writers (including Dessaix and Modjeska) who have produced a
variety of non-fiction fringed with the fire of art. Robb, who
produced in Midnight in Sicily, a book which managed to bring
together the Mafia and high Italian culture has elected to take
on that rough beast Caravaggio in a study which will become
required reading for anyone who cares about how the recreative
imagination can strike up a flare in the dark attic of the
history of art.
Well, we all think we know about Caravaggio. He's the bloke of
whom Robert Hughes said that his models were 'rough trade with
hair like black ice cream'. He's the great dark-cornered master
of the Counter-Reformation, the almost exact artistic
contemporary of Shakespeare and Donne and Monteverdi whose
paintings drip with sex and drama and which also have those
dazzling effects of 'stage' lighting which were to influence the
baroque but never with such litheness, or with such a tingling sense of the histrionic, as was the case with the wild man who invented this bag of tricks. Caravaggio who could give Bacchus the come to bed eyes of a drunk adolescent and St Peter at the point of crucifixion the mute wonderment of Lear saying, 'Pray you undo this button, sir.'
This last point is made by Peter Robb in M, which must be one of the most concertedly literary books ever written in order to conjure from a bare cryptic record a history that might tally with the writer's sense of the abundant life the art seems to unfold. It is, against the odds, a splendid, consistently moving book though Robb's sense of art and life cut both ways. He comes close to suggesting that Caravaggio is not simply a towering figure like Donne who came close to being shrouded by a shift in fashion or (to take in some ways an even closer figure tonally) a meteor like Marlowe; he wants to says that Caravaggio is one of the greatest painters of all time and that his greatness comes from the depth of life he gets onto the canvas.
It is bracing to see a naked and frontal embrace of Leavisism exhibited nearly naively in the face of a painter not only manifestly homoerotic in some of his detail but so blatantly gesticular in a way literary people think of as 'Jacobean', the quality that made Auden say that Donne was a prima donna.
None of which is to deny that Robb is good on the paintings. He is very good indeed but he is good the way Proust is good. He tends inevitably to substitute for the experience of looking because his urge to recreate them verbally (and to moralise the recreation) is so authoritative and overpowering. At times, to be sure, he can sound like John Berger pinning down the value in the precise moment of seeing but the sense of circumambient Jamesian moral rhetoric is never far off and sometimes it proves excitable.
Inevitably, perhaps, he is a better guide to the human feelings the paintings arouse than he is to the formal qualities that appear to trigger them and sometimes just a bit naive about the ways in which 'life' and 'seeing the world' can be considered ends in themselves. This is one of the very few critical biographies I have ever read that made me feel I wanted to know more about traditions of patronage and specifications for paintings -- allegorical, ideological, ideational, the full catastrophe. Robb is nearly best of all in that nearly impossibly crooked byway where the biographer allows his sense of the art and the nearly hypothetical life to interconnect. He says that he thinks the early paintings using Mario Minniti, the sixteen-year-old dreamboat Caravaggio painted from the time he was twenty-one are so full of longing that the relationship may not have been consummated or only in the way of friendship. This seems shrewd but the point is obviously unprovable. On the other hand he sees in Cecco-Francesco Boneri -- (the victorious twelve-year-old cherub who goes on to become the young David who seems to look into the enigma of the self without certitude as he holds the flabbergasted head of a Goliath modelled on Caravaggio) the lineaments of gratified desire. Again this is probable and makes as much sense as these judgments can in the absence of evidence. What we do know about this is that an English visitor Richard Symonds said many years later, in 1650, 'It was ye bodye and face of his own servant or boye that laide with him.' Of course masters and apprentices (Cecco was to go on to be painter himself) did a fair bit of sleeping together in those days.
These matters seem to burn a bit brighter for Peter Robb than they do for the average scholar. He concludes that M -- as he calls Caravaggio -- was able to treat his erotic feeling for boys with much greater freedom than if they had been for women. He's probably right though this does tend to beg the question of what is going on in Caravaggio's use of his prostitute girlfriends as models for Judith, the Magdalene and in the very great 'Morte della vergine' for Mary. More particularly as he was sometimes accused of using his girls (a practice almost inevitable in a society in which prostitution was one of the only industries). Robb's point is a bit self-fulfilling if Caravaggio was -- as one might imagine -- bisexual.
On the pomps and woes of Counter-Reformation Rome Robb is splendid, savage and moralising. The thread of Marxism that seems to remain in the author's sensibility is put to good use. He says that the Rome of the time was a bit like Cold War Manhattan and very like a pre-industrial Hollywood. He hates this world where humble sex workers could have their noses cut off (they were more frequently whipped), where there was an absolute ban on the faintest suggestion of concupiscence in an image but where cardinals in their twenties rammed it home whenever they felt like it. There is also the chilling moment (which appalled the Venetian ambassador) when the newly elected Paul V has the author of an unpublished biography of his predecessor Clement VIII publicly beheaded for even suggesting he could have been repressive.
Robb doesn't go to the trouble of pointing out that Reformation Europe, Counter and Pro, was a ghastly Stalinist world (at the court of Elizabeth I of England as of Phillip II of Spain). He loathes the Rome that burnt Bruno though he is fascinated by the fact that the war against women and the anathema against the unspeakable sin of (adult) homosexuality left things wide open for the boys and for the ancient Mediterranean tolerance of polymorphous perversity.
On the other hand one of Caravaggio's antagonists drops into a relatively minor courtcase about brawling some detail about what Robb translates as his 'fuckboy' which no-one wants to know about. (One assumes that the Italian is more like 'bumboy'. Robb has a habit of using slang at the drop of a hat and in otherwise decorous contexts that reminds one of the newly arrived immigrant who asked the president of the of the mothers' club: 'Please madam, could you kindly inform me where the lavatory is so I can get the fucking shits out of my fucking arse.') The brawling seems about the only thing we do know about the semi-private life of Caravaggio. He drew his sword on waiters who told him to taste the artichokes himself, he was involved in a turbulent criminal libel with another painter and at one point in a moment of extraordinary rashness he seems to have slashed the head of a papal legal functionary. Patrons like Cardinal De Monte of the Madama Palazzo were always getting him off the hook though he was forced to relinquish his weapons and suffer house arrest rather than do time in the galleys.
Then in 1606 he kills a man. Absurdly, grotesquely, he pricks a man's penis with his sword and he bleeds to death. He is sentenced to death and pronounced a bandit by Paul V, the pope whose portrait he has painted. This means he can be killed with impunity by anyone. He flees to the Colonnas, in Naples and then to Malta, continuing to create the kind of mature masterworks like 'The Seven Virtues' (which might confirm the old jibe that he wouldn't come up from the cellar but make it in its play of light and dark like a new heaven and earth). In Malta he was -- improbably -- made a Knight of St John. Robb also believes that he had sex with the pageboy of the great lord Alof de Wignacourt and that such 'unspeakable' impudence -- in getting into the pants of an aristocrat -- was the reason for his downfall. Certainly he rapidly found himself in prison. He escaped and was on his way back to Rome where Cardinal Scipio Borghese was (successfully) suing the Pope for his pardon, when he disappeared. Robb argues that the Maltese had him murdered (with the collusion of the Colonnas) for laying hands on the page.