12 FEBRUARY 2000, Page 38

Dazzling art but dark artist

Jonathan Keates

M

by Peter Robb Bloomsbury, £25, pp. 569 If, as Nicholas Poussin once gloomily pronounced, Caravaggio came into the world to destroy painting, then painting simply couldn't wait to be destroyed. Histo- ry offers few more potent examples of an artist whose lifespan is inversely propor- tionate to his influence. Dead before he was 40, Caravaggio had forged a style which both flattered the sensibilities of the early Baroque and sent resonances through Western art which have lost none of their potency in the intervening centuries. Poussin's verdict, which tells us much about that painter's sensory handicaps as about the other man's supposed aesthetic vandal- ism, identifies Caravaggio as a major prob- lem for his contemporaries. Why should our own age find him so attractive precisely for qualities which seemed so intractable and eccentric to the world of the early 1600s?

He pulls the public as none of his fellow Baroque Italians, Gentileschi, Domenichi- no or the Caracci, for all their radiant intensity, can manage. The recent exhibi- tion in Florence of two pictures, a newly identified 'Taking of Christ in Gethsemane' from Dublin and the restored 'Execution of John the Baptist' from Palermo, crowded one of the large halls of Palazzo Vecchio, offering a heady distraction from exalted Pateresque musings in front of Giotto and Fra Angelico. The man whom Ruskin, no less, condemned for 'horror, ugliness and filthiness', barged in upon our chaster sen- sibilities, presenting, as an alternative to goldleaf haloes, blue-gowned Madonnas and flossy-pated angels, rawness of flesh, the smell of sweat and a darkness we might scoop up in our bare hands.

What attracts us as much as the physical- ity of the paintings themselves, conditioned by the artist's preoccupation with light as a palpable substance, is his own incurable delinquency as a man. He may not have been the first rude boy in the history of art — Vasari's Lives are littered with examples of painters behaving badly — but his is the most obvious prototype of that inspira- tional depravity with which artists continue to mesmerise or bore us to death. Tracey, Damien and the rest should light annual candles at his tomb — if only we knew where that was.

Peter Robb's M is the most elaborate response yet published to this criminal glamour, and if its approach reminds us on many occasions of Derek Jarman's film treatment of the artist's life, its reach after authenticating detail is a good deal more ambitious than the movie's, deliberately `Cheats, 1594 (Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas). sloppy and scornful in dealing with period contexts. The publishers appear uncertain, however, whether this book is fiction or biography, and so to some degree does the author. Yes, of course it's confusing for the non-specialist reader that Caravaggio, whose surname was Merisi, should have been christened Michelangelo, but to refer to him throughout the book as 'M' seems so precious as to undermine the credibility of Robb's serious intentions.

These, evidently, are to supply us with something more than the thoughtful, fas- tidiously prepared life record produced in 1998 by Helen Langdon, easily the best book written on the artist. Robb is not an art historian, and is clearly impatient with certain of the discipline's conventions. M's oeuvre, for example, is retitled in what seems to be an effort at making it more upfront and in-yer-face. The 'Supper at Emmaus' becomes 'A meal'. The 'Flagella- tion of Christ' is reduced to 'Whipping 1 & 2' and other paintings are snappily labelled `Grooms' Madonna', `Lucy's Burial' and `Fruit & Veg'.

This breeziness is typical of the book as a whole. Perhaps surprisingly, in a 500-page work marked by periodic attempts at over- compensating for the sparseness of bio- graphical evidence, the pace is far from leisurely. What Robb wants us to accept is the notion, made more flattering through hindsight, of Caravaggio as someone driven to create through instinctive awareness of the limited time available to him. The style, perhaps as a result, seems peculiarly fevered in its deliberately colloquial insou- ciance and Queen Victoria-like penchant for italics, Of the 'Martyrdom of St Ursula' (in Robbese 'Ursula Transfixed') for exam- ple:

The first people who saw M's version were probably more stunned by his radical take on the story than anything else. M'd done anoth- er Weegee, elbowed his way into the heart of the action. Even Weegee with his police radio couldn'fve arrived on the spot as soon as M.

Robb's involvement with his theme is doubtless impressive. On the vexed ques- tion of Caravaggio's sexuality he is surely correct in accepting the abundant pictorial evidence for the painter's erotic absorption with maleness, as against the lack of docu- mentary proof via which recent scholarship has sought to sanitise him. In many other respects, however, M appears nothing bet- ter than a massive interlacing of rhetorical conjectures, a biographic romancee in all its irresponsibility and self-indulgence. Its attempt at demolishing the accepted version of Caravaggio's death from fever on a south Tuscan beach in page after page of dark hints and 'what ifs?' screeches with tabloid sensationalism, The publisher's use, for a jacket illustration, of a swooning- ly gym-toned Christ suggests that this is the Caravaggio many of us will prefer. I'm all for six-packs and glistening nipples, but, thanks a lot, 1'11 stick with Helen Langdon.