Art's greatest sinner

It took someone as volatile and unpredictable as Caravaggio to truly capture the betrayal of Christ. His masterpiece continues to speak through the ages

THE PRISONER is submissive, sorrowful. His hands are joined together in a passive gesture of faith. He is making no attempt to defend himself, or even to push away his betrayer. As he endures the treacherous kiss, he looks downwards, too appalled to glance at the traitor. He does not wish to accuse or to question. The man who kisses him appears frenzied, sweat shines on his skin. His desperation is reflected in the brute paw of his hand as it grabs at its prey. The three soldiers of the Roman army stand close. One of them forces his gauntleted hand upwards, close to the captive’s throat.

Moonlight lingers on the burnished armour and on all the faces. To the right, stands a young man, gazing at the action; he seems fascinated, intrigued, though not involved. He is a bystander. His face could well be that of the man who painted the picture, Michelangelo Merisi, known to history as Caravaggio.

Although born in 1571, most probably in Milan, he would later take his name from the village in Lombardy where generations of his family had lived. When he was five years old, he was dispatched there, to Caravaggio, to escape the plague then threatening Milan.

The theme of the great painting, The Taking of Christ(1602) – currently on loan from the National Gallery of Ireland to the Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome – is betrayal, an emotion known all too well in Ireland and across the Catholic world in recent times. Innocence and trust have been violated, leaving the victims damaged, while those who were ignorant of the abuse feel angry; those who did nothing, ashamed, exposed and culpable.

Christ in the painting stands resigned to his fate; he knows this humiliation is the beginning of his suffering. The subject of Caravaggio's great work had inspired other artists. Almost a century earlier Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) captured the sordid violence of the episode in a dramatic woodcut, Passion(1509). Yet it was Caravaggio, volatile and unpredictable, an irresolute sinner himself – ultimately, a murderer because of an argument – who most magnificently captured the moment, articulating on canvas emotions that mere words could never express.

Good Friday remains both symbolic and ambivalent, history versus myth. A time of reflection, the day is traditionally dominated by some of the finest music ever composed: works by Bach, Palestrina, Victoria, Lotti and Tallis, as well as Allegri's enigmatic Miserere meiand Pergolesi's Stabat Mater.

It is odd, eerie, yet another example of injustice; an innocent man is nailed to a cross. The story of man is one of innocence exploited, corrupted, lost, lamented. We all share the guilt, the failure to protect. Caravaggio’s masterpiece speaks through the ages.

When it was painted, the artist was generously paid by his patron Ciriaco Mattei, for whose brother, Asdrubale, it was commissioned. Yet by the mid-18th century, the age of Baroque art had ended; patrons looked elsewhere and found a new fashion in Neoclassicism, inspired by the discoveries in Pompeii and Herculaneum. Caravaggio's work also lost favour and fell into obscurity. The Taking of Christwas sold cheaply and purchased in 1802 as one of six paintings from the Mattei collection by a wealthy Scot, William Hamilton Nisbet. He had several country houses to furnish and wanted old masters.

But, by then, The Taking of Christ had been attributed to one of Caravaggio’s followers, the Dutch artist Gerrit van Honthorst, whose name was recorded in Italian as Gherardo delle Notti, but was misspelt. Sergio Benedetti, art historian and hero of the Dublin rediscovery, noted the mistake: “Gherardo della Notte”. The painting remained in Scotland until 1921, when the last of Hamilton Nisbet’s descendants died, and was presented at auction, only to be withdrawn and returned to the dealer, Dowell’s in Edinburgh.

Some time later it was purchased by Dr Marie Lea-Wilson, a Dublin paediatrician who had idealised the death of her husband as comparable to that of Christ. A former British officer, he was murdered by men in Wexford who had never forgiven his humiliating treatment of them in 1916. In time, Wilson presented the painting to the Jesuit house of St Ignatius. Following Benedetti’s remarkable retracing of the painting’s history and his meticulous restoration of it, the Jesuit Community of Lesson Street entrusted it to the care of National Gallery on indefinite loan.

BUT WHAT OF CARAVAGGIO? This painter of some of the most profound religious art in western culture was, by the moral standards of any society, wayward. He died 400 years ago, on July 18th, 1610, of a fever, a few months short of his 39th birthday. He was a wild young man, who on arrival in Rome in late 1592 took to whatever excesses the city of “pilgrims and prostitutes” could offer.

His often violent behaviour contrasts with the sublime intelligence of his religious paintings. Caravaggio introduced a daring, graphic realism to subjects which had previously been idealised. He caught the sweaty, vulnerable reality. Rome was then the capital of world Catholicism and every aspiring painter, sculptor and architect knew it was exciting, cosmopolitan and the place to be. Many gifted artists sought out wealthy individuals and religious institutions for commissions. Caravaggio’s path towards genius began slowly. But he learnt fast.

Two of his earliest works – Boy with a Basket of Fruit(1593-94, Borghese Gallery, Rome) and The Little Bacchus(1593-94, same gallery) – illustrate exactly how quickly. The youth in the first picture is exactly that: a boy with a basket of fruit. He is handsome, and perhaps not quite innocent, but his sexuality is tentatively on display. However, there is no mistaking the wanton, knowing expression of the little bacchus. The face is already weary with experience. They are also the work of a professional artist and he would return to the subject of Bacchus in a painting dated 1597, in which the subject appears even more disturbingly erotic, confident of his allure, of his power.

In little over a year Caravaggio was at work on the first pictures he painted in Cardinal del Monte's household. The Musicians(1595-96, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) is an ambitious study of four figures, informally caught in contrasting moods. At the centre is a lute player. It is he who will reactivate the others once he begins to play.

Within months, Caravaggio had begun The Ecstasy of Saint Francis(circa 1596, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut), depicting the vision during which the saint received his stigmata. The painting was most likely undertaken as a gesture for Cardinal del Monte, whose given name was Francesco, or Francis. The psychological dimension, suggesting the artist has entered his subject's mind, hints at Caravaggio's sophisticated intelligence. The painting also marks the beginning of his engagement with religious themes.

In The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew(1599-1600, Contarelli Chapel, Church of San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome) Caravaggio focuses on the executioner standing over the helpless saint. The painting is violent and again – as in The Taking of Christ– the most distant figure in the painting is a self-portrait of the artist, seen as an onlooker. It is as if Caravaggio is emphasising: "Look, this event really happened."

The Crucifixion of Saint Peter(1600-1601, Cerasi Chapel, Rome) depicts the cross being raised from the ground, with Peter already nailed to it. Even more powerful is its companion painting, The Conversion of Saint Paul; again the influence of Dürer is there in the robust form of the horse. Paul lies on the ground as if in a trance, in a state of ecstasy. The earthy, bemused horse is brilliantly juxtaposed with the soldier in the process of transformation by a divine act.

Caravaggio dramatised another seminal moment in the New Testament with his The Incredulity of Saint Thomas(1601-1602, Neues Palais, Potsdam). In it Christ looks on while Thomas pokes his finger into the mouth-like wound. Thomas looks shocked, while the other two apostles look on, their curiosity blatant.

Many admired Caravaggio, more criticised him. His daring approach frequently shocked and irritated.

One painting that seemed to please everyone is another Easter work, The Entombment(1602-1604, Vatican Pinacoteca, Rome); there are at least 44 drawn, painted or engraved copies in existence. The dead Christ is gently laid to rest by St John and Nicodemus as his mother looks on.

Caravaggio never painted without a live model. He always began by drawing an outline. His feel for composition was physical, realistic and original. He also painted quickly. He did not use assistants; his paintings are his work. He may have left unfinished pictures because in his final, turbulent years he moved many times, invariably in a hurry.

No one used darkness to better effect, while light in his work is symbolic, as are hands. He understood violence. Of the many disputes he got himself into, a row over money proved one too many. On May 29th, 1606, he lost a wager on a game, a kind of tennis. He and his rival began beating each other. They decided to settle it formally. That evening the warring pair met with swords and a party of onlookers. Caravaggio killed his opponent. He was wounded and fled the scene.

He began a period of life on the run. Various reports declared him dying or dead. He always had support, but never enough. Just when it seemed he had secured a papal pardon, he was wrongly imprisoned and fell ill, possibly with malaria. Once freed, he ran on but was dead within days.

His reputation rests on a small body of authenticated paintings, possibly 40, with another 10 or so about which there are doubts. Caravaggio, the great sinner, the master psychologist, brought realism and insight into religious art as no other artist had, before or since.