ARTS
Meeting the Madonna and Child
Martin Gayford meditates on the emotional impact of Caravaggio's painting In a shadowy doorway, a woman holds a naked child. Though it is rather a grand opening, the place seems to have seen bet- ter days; the stone against which she leans is chipped, the stucco of the wall beside is peeling. In the street below the doorstep kneel two people, a bearded man, and an aging, wrinkled woman. From their clothes, and from the bare, dirty feet of the man one presumes that these are humble, ordi- nary folk. From the halo round the head of the woman in the doorway it is obvious that she is the Queen of Heaven.
This is 'Madonna di Loreto', by Michelangelo Merisi, better known as Car- avaggio. It is still to be found on the altar for which it was painted, to the left of the door of the church of S. Agostino, in the centre of Rome. A glance reveals that is not a picture of the Nativity, of course — for one thing the child is far too old, for another the cast of characters is wrong. The couple kneeling are not biblical herders of sheep but individuals from the time and place the picture was painted — in the very early 17th century, that is.
The painting is of a miraculous appari- tion of the Madonna and Child to a pair of contemporary pilgrims (hence the staves, hence the bare, penitential feet). But few images give such an urgent dramatisation of the central event of the Nativity — the Incarnation; few altarpieces provide such a feeling that the Madonna and Child might be encountered here and now, just round the corner. Indeed, just round the corner is exactly where Caravaggio has set his painting.
The subject he was given — the Madon- na of Loreto — is attached to one of the more pleasantly fantastic of miraculous sto- ries. The house of the Virgin Mary, it was believed, had flown supernaturally through the air from the Holy Land to alight at Loreto in eastern Italy on the night of 9 December 1294. This flight was painted by Tiepolo in the 18th century as an airily improbable ceiling for a Venetian church (sadly destroyed during the first world war). But Caravaggio has transported the house again, from Loreto to central Rome.
That dark wall, that shadowy doorway and crumbling travertine moulding, that antique and slightly sinister ambience could be anywhere in the streets around S. Agostino. The streets, that is, where Car- avaggio himself was living in this year, and where he committed one or two notable crimes.
In fact, one can probably go further in connecting this religious image with Car- avaggio's troubled personal life. There is reason to believe that the model for the Madonna was one Lena — short for Mad- dalena — who was, according to a criminal complaint, 'to be found standing in Piazza Navona', three minutes walk from S. Agostino, and 'who is Caravaggio's woman'. (This seems to belie or at least complicate the common assumption that Caravaggio was homosexual.) According to Helen Langdon in her excellent life of Caravaggio (Vintage, f6.99), Lena was not, as her presence in Piazza Navona might suggest, a prostitute. She came apparently from a poor but hon- ourable family and, perhaps to underline that status, her mother exacted a stiff fee from Caravaggio for posing. Perhaps it was her respectability which led to the difficulties.
Lena had rejected the advances of a 'Madonna di Loreto' by Caravaggio notary, Mariano da Pasqualone, on the grounds that his occupation endangered his soul. Pasqualone then complained to Lena's mother that she should not allow her daughter to associate with 'an excom- municant and cursed man', such as Car- avaggio. The affronted painter then violently assaulted the notary. Pasqualone, as he subsequently told the clerk of the criminal court, was `strolling in the Piazza Navona in front of the palace of the Span- ish Ambassador' when 'I suddenly felt a blow to the back of the head'. A man in a black cloak was seen making off with a short sword. It must, Pasqualone insisted, have been Caravaggio; and, guiltily, the painter fled to Genoa.
This wasn't quite the end of Caravaggio's Roman career (nor was it the first time he had ended up on the wrong side of the law). But the next year, 1606, Caravaggio was back in Rome and killed a man in a brawl. From then on he was a condemned man, a fugitive, pursued by mysterious ene- mies, but at the same time continuing to be successful and famous — the most cele- brated painter in Italy. He died four years later, 'as miserably', as an early biographer put it, 'as he had lived', while trying to return to Rome to receive a pardon.
What connection has all this squalid, if picturesque, biographical detail to do with the 'Madonna di Loreto'? Well, the seedi- ness, the darkness, the air of impending menace must all have been aspects of Car- avaggio's troubled consciousness. And there are still places and times when Rome looks like that, especially in some of the streets off the Piazza Navona.
He was a man whose inner turbulence, expressed in violent temper and compulsive quarrelsomeness, steadily destroyed him. He struck contemporaries as eccentric to the point of being unhinged, a person of surpassing oddity (stravagantissimo).
He was also recognised from early on as a man of surpassing gifts, able to give an urgency and immediacy to his paintings that made the works of others — in a phrase he used himself — 'look like playing cards'. In the last 50 years he has been recognised again as one of the greatest painters of all, and one, with so often an undercurrent of violence and tragedy, especially attractive to 20th-century sensibilities.
But the 'Madonna di Loreto' is not a vio- lent or tragic painting. It is one whose extraordinary emotional impact comes, in part at least, from its insistence on the here and now, the suggestion that a divine pres- ence — endowed with the stunning beauty of Lena from the Piazza Navona — might be found in an ordinary, dark and danger- ous alley just outside. It is a strength of feeling which may have been connected with the painter's own frail hopes and well-founded fears. If not when he was painting the 'Madonna di Loreto', then a few years later — like some Graham Greene character — Caravaggio seemed to have concluded that he was damned. In 1608 he ended up, still furiously quarrel- some, again committing assaults and flee- ing, in Messina.
There one day, tossed about by a spirit which, a Sicilian analyst wrote, was 'more disturbed than the sea of Messina with its raging currents that sometimes rise and sometimes fall', he entered the church of the Madonna del Pilero. A gentleman stepped forward in order to give him some holy water; Caravaggio asked him what was the purpose of it, and the answer was that it would erase any venial sin. 'It is not nec- essary,' Caravaggio replied, 'since all my sins are mortal.'
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