Caravaggio by Francine Prose Page B

feet, the beard, and the baldness carry over into the second, approved version. Now the haloed saint wears a flowing orange robe, beneath which is the tall, attenuated body—and the feet—of a man who seems more accustomed to intellectual activity than to physical labor. And the angel, who has backed off and ascended to the top of the painting, no longer seems to be teaching Matthew how to read.
    Describing Caravaggio’s response to the French priests’ lack of enthusiasm for the first Saint Matthew, Bellori twice uses the word despair and adds that the painter was extremely disturbed by the effect the rejection might have on his reputation and by this affront to his public work. As with the first version of The Conversion of Saint Paul , the day—and Caravaggio’s pride—was saved when the rejected work was acquired by a private collector, in this case Vincenzo Giustiniani.
    By now, the ecclesiastical authorities responsible for planning the decoration of the great churches of Rome would have had plenty of opportunity to form a reasonably accurate idea of the potential advantages and possible dangers of choosing Michelangelo Merisi. Doubtless they would have heard about other priests’ experiences and observed the results. And they would have been able to decide for themselves if the benefits of hiring a painter whose brilliant originality might increase both the exaltation of the faithful and the fame of their congregation would outweigh the problems that might ensue if his work turned out to be too original, too inconveniently daring.
    The Oratorian Fathers of the Church of Santa Maria in Vallicella, the so-called Chiesa Nuova, or “new church,” were willing to take the risk, perhaps because their order was so strongly committed to the virtues of humility, simplicity, and naturalness, the spiritual principles that Caravaggio had turned into an aesthetic. Sometime in 1601 or 1602, Caravaggio was asked to paint The Entombment of Christ for Santa Maria in Vallicella’s Chapel of the Pietà, thus forming a sort of narrative bridge between two adjacent chapels, one commemorating the Crucifixion, the other celebrating the Ascension.
    Until now the majority of Caravaggio’s religious paintings had fixed on the terror of revelation, on surprise and shock, brutality and violence, suffering and endurance. But the mood of The Entombment of Christ is one of tenderness and compassion, and the moment we see is transpiring after the agony of the body has ended and the mourners’ grief is about to be relieved by a glimmer of the light that awaits on the far side of sorrow and pain.
    The painting is still sometimes referred to as The Deposition of Christ , as both Bellori and Mancini call it. But in fact it’s not the traditional image of the awkward, dolorous labor of lifting the lifeless Savior down from the cross. One can imagine that Caravaggio, with his passionate interest in the physical effort required for a miracle to occur, might have been tempted to picture that scene. But perhaps inspired by the sympathies of the Oratorian Fathers, he so thoroughly resisted this impulse that the cross—the instrument of cruelty, torture, and death—does not even appear in this redemptive and compassionate painting.
    Five ordinary, humble people, three women and two men, have gathered to carry, and lament over, the body of Christ. The barefoot, burly Nicodemus, his face strikingly similar to Michelangelo Buonarroti’s, gazes out of the painting. But sadness has turned him inward, and he doesn’t engage with the viewer as he bends to hold Jesus’s knees. He’s the kindhearted equivalent of the laborer in The Crucifixion of Saint Peter , the one who impassively holds the saint’s shins while the cross is being raised. Weightless enough so that Saint John needs only one arm beneath his back, Christ can no longer be hurt, not even when his disciple’s fingertips