Caravaggio by Francine Prose

of a friend who was eventually executed. Doubtless because of the fact that Marino was not a painter—and therefore not a potential rival—he and Caravaggio appear to have had a friendship that inspired them both without the anxiety of the competition that so often soured Caravaggio’s associations with his fellow artists.
    Caravaggio painted Marino’s portrait, and the poet responded by composing a sonnet extolling the painting’s virtues. Marino wrote laments for Narcissus, the Greek youth who was so harshly punished for his excessive self-regard, and Caravaggio painted his sensitive study of Narcissus gazing at his reflection in the water.
    Unlike Caravaggio’s Cupid and his Saint John the Baptist, his Narcissus has no interest in us, or in anything but his own image. Likewise, the painter’s attention seems focused less on the work’s potential effect on the viewer than on the formal—the geometric—aspects of its composition. As Narcissus kneels at the edge of the pool with his head turned to one side, his body describes a sort of arch, the two columns of his arms traversed by the horizontal of his shoulders. That shape is repeated in his reflection, so that the mirror image and the reality join in an oval, its two halves linked at the points at which Narcissus appears to be holding hands with himself and thus forming his own one-man, off-center circle.
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    At some point between November 1600 and June of the following year, Caravaggio, for reasons that have never been explained, left Del Monte’s residence at the Palazzo Madama and moved into the palace of Del Monte’s friend Cardinal Girolamo Mattei, a member of an extremely wealthy and prominent Roman family. The cardinal’s brothers, Ciriaco and Asdrubale Mattei, both avid collectors of art, lived in the palace next door.
    Ciriaco Mattei was already, or would soon become, one of Caravaggio’s most supportive and eager patrons, acquiring his work for (by current standards) astronomical prices, sums equaling those the artist received for several of his church commissions and that were far beyond the relatively modest means of Del Monte. Baglione suggests that Ciriaco was duped by all the publicity and gossip surrounding Caravaggio; he adds that the artist relieved the gentleman of many hundreds of scudi . Duped or not, Ciriaco bought Saint John the Baptist as a gift for his son, again raising the question of whether the suggestive male nude would really have seemed as lubricious to Caravaggio’s contemporaries as it appears to us, which would have made it an odd present for a respected aristocrat to give his son.
    Ciriaco Mattei also purchased The Supper at Emmaus , a depiction of Luke’s account of the incident that occurred on the road to Emmaus, when Christ fell in with two disciples who had previously refused to believe reports that he had risen from the dead. Not until they shared a humble meal, and Christ broke bread and gave it to them, did they understand who it was that walked among them—and at that very instant Jesus disappeared.
    Typically, Caravaggio cuts straight to the dramatic climax, to the moment when realization is nearly rocketing the two pilgrims out of their seats. The old man on the right has thrown his arms open in the gesture that, in Caravaggio’s work, signals not only shock but the helpless and reflexive baring of the heart. And the pilgrim on the left grips the arms of his chair as if to prevent himself from levitating through the top of the painting. The innkeeper still hasn’t figured it out. Although he is in the presence of the resurrected Lord, he has not yet removed his hat.
    The use of light and shadow, and of perspective—the way the table recedes into space even as the elderly pilgrim’s hand leaps out of it—is masterful. Young, plump, beardless, his radiance undimmed by the agony he has just endured, Jesus gazes downward with a beneficent but