Date: 30-11-1999
Owning Institution:
Publication: Sunday Telegraph Features    
Subject:   Renaissance  

Called before the Roman magistrates in March 1613 to give evidence at the trial of Agostino Tassi, fellow painter Artemisia Gentileschi left nothing to the imagination in describing how he raped her. She went on to relate how he foiled her attempts at revenge:

“After he had finished his business he got off me. Seeing myself free I went to the table drawer and took out a knife and moved towards Agostino saying, ‘I want to kill you with this knife because you have dishonoured me’. And he opened his tunic saying ‘Here I am’, and I threw the knife at him; he shielded himself otherwise I would have hurt him and might easily have killed him. The outcome was that I wounded him slightly on the chest and he bled little because I had scarcely pierced him with the point of the knife. Then the said Agostino fastened his tunic and I was weeping and lamenting the wrong done to me…”

As events turned out, Tassi got off lightly. Offered his choice of sentence, five years rowing in the papal galleys or banishment from Rome, he understandably chose the latter – and was in any case soon pardoned, much to the disgust of his victim. But Artemisia Gentileschi got her man in the end, so the story goes. Painting her bloodthirsty masterpiece Judith and Holofernes – done in the same year as the rape trial – she is said to have cast herself in the role of Judith and none other than Agostino Tassi in that of the hapless Holofernes. And so, in art at least, the tables were turned. Artemisia-as-Judith  has rolled up the sleeves of her blue silk dress the better to go about the messy and arduous job of decapitating her enemy with an evidently rather blunt sword. Rudely awoken from his post-coital slumber, Agostino-as-Holofernes rolls his eyes and struggles to rise, but in vain. His jugular vein has been severed. His bed has become his death-bed, its sheets already crimsoned with rivulets of gore. The maidservant helping to hold him down, cheeks ruddy from her exertions, looks down at the victim with a surprisingly mild look of curiosity on her face. Who would have thought the man had so much blood in him?

Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith and Holofernes, normally to be found in the Capodimonte Museum in Naples, is just one of the outstanding loans to have been secured by the Royal Academy for “The Genius of Rome: 1592-1623”, which promises to be one of the most compelling exhibitions of the year. It will also include rarely lent pictures by Rubens, Reni, Domenichino, Caracci, Adam Elsheimer and many other masters of the Roman seicento; together with no fewer than a dozen pictures by the greatest Italian seventeenth-century painter of them all, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. All this including copious amounts of sex, violence, gambling and prostitution (with visions of God and the saints thrown in for good measure): no wonder the Academy box office is readying itself for a siege, with queues expected to go around the block.

Rome circa 1600 was a dangerous, fascinating and vivid place. As the Catholic Church recovered its confidence after the shattering blow of the Reformation, so too did its leaders rediscover their belief in art, and its glorious illusions, as the way to dazzle the faithful out of their doubts. Throughout the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries artists were drawn there, like moths to a flame, by the burning ambitions and seemingly bottomless coffers of the Popes and their cardinals. At the height of this Counter-Reformation artistic resurgence, fuelled yet further by the foundation of new and reformed religious orders such as the Theatines, the Capuchins, the Oratorians and the Jesuits, no fewer than 2,000 painters, sculptors and architects were crammed into the artists’ quarter, between the Piazza del Popolo and the Piazza di Spagna.

The city’s artists were a notoriously unruly lot. Thanks to the bureaucratic thoroughness with which the Roman police and magistracy recorded their criminal investigations, we have many vivid glimpses of them in action: running around in gangs, getting into streetfights, quarrelling over their whores, lovers or mistresses. Artemisia Gentileschi’s testimony against Agostino Tassi is by no means an isolated example. Perhaps the most impressively varied criminal record is that of Caravaggio, who was arrested or questioned by police on numerous occasions during his turbulent life in Rome. Eventually forced to flee the city for killing one of his sworn enemies in a swordfight, he appears to have been more or less permanently in some kind of trouble. We hear of him cutting a waiter in the face for serving him artichokes cooked in butter instead of oil; prowling the streets throwing stones through the windows of a prostitute; circulating obscene poems about another painter, Baglione, whom he believed to have plagiarised his style (visitors to the Royal Academy can judge the justice of his claims for themselves, since the exhibition includes an example of Baglione’s anodyne Caravaggist manner); or brawling with the many other bravi who roamed the city streets at night. Caravaggio’s own words are recorded in some of the surviving Roman criminal archives. Before attacking the waiter over the artichokes, for example, a witness reported hearing him say,  “It seems to me, you fucking prick, that you think you’re serving some two-bit crook”. On a more defensive note, this was his taciturn response to a policeman, looking into a swordfight, who found Caravaggio at home with a badly slashed throat and ear: “I hurt myself with my own sword. I fell down the stairs. I can’t remember where exactly. There was nobody around. There’s nothing more I can say.”

Codes of behaviour among young men were much more violent than they are today, and the violence was all the more dangerous in an era when it was customary (albeit illegal) to carry a sword. The world of the artist in Italy had none of the preciousness associated with art now. Going back to the Italian Renaissance, we know for example that the Sienese master Duccio was arrested frequently for violence and affray; while the very first reference to the celebrated Florentine sculptor Donatello finds him under arrest, in Pisa, for attacking a German apprentice with a stick and “drawing blood”. It is tempting to suppose that the greatness of those artists’ work, so much of which has to do with observation and storytelling, is in fact related to the blunt vigour with which they conducted their lives. The fact that they moved so freely, not only among the well-to-do but among people from all walks of existence, is certainly reflected in their work. This is particularly true of Caravaggio.

It seems appropriate that we should know so much about Caravaggio’s flawed and passionate nature, because it was through the intensity of his passions and sympathies that he renewed and reinvented the art of his time. His art thrilled and shocked his contemporaries – as it still shocks today – because of the disconcerting truth with which it speaks of authentic lived experience. Caravaggio’s saints have dirt under their fingernails and real suffering in their eyes. His musicians have the dissipated air of hungover rent-boys. His swarthy cardsharp gulling a milk-white innocent is a feral and hungry being, straight off the streets.

Caravaggio painted the truth and nothing but the truth. He depicted The Entombment of Christ with the startling documentary honesty of someone who has observed the lifting and disposal of dead or unconscious bodies (how hard it is, he notes, to manhandle a corpse, heavy and bluing, as the rigor mortis sets in). He depicted the martyrdom of saints, or the execution of villains, with the practical expertise of one who has attended Roman executions. Having seen the public beheading of almost the entire Cenci family in September 1599, Caravaggio was well equipped to create his own image of  Judith and Holofernes (the ruthlessly observed prototype for Artemisia Gentileschi’s later, vengeful version of the same subject). Even the fruit in his still lives is real fruit, often overripe or blighted, its skin split. Insects crawl over it.

Turning away from the various weak and enervated styles of late mannerist painting still current in the early 1590s, Caravaggio brought painting back to life. He was nothing less than a second, one-man Renaissance. In accordance with Counter-Reformation theology, he rejected the balletic contortions of academic art and concentrated on making his audiences experience the stories of the Bible as if they were tangible (almost smellable) dramas. He put the human body – the real human body, spotlit and isolated – back at the centre of Western art. His pitiless realism was as likely to disconcert the Church as to delight it, so while he was greatly admired for his depictions of St Francis as a truly ragged and poor friar, the same degree of realism brought to the depiction of Christ and the saints was often seen as verging on impiety. Using people he knew as models – people whom others might recognise, in his finished works, as whores or coal-heavers – there was the danger that he might make the holy seem almost too familiar. His work, as one cardinal observed, uneasily, seems to be “somewhere, I know not where exactly, between the sacred and the profane”.

No exhibition of loaned works of art, removed as they have been from their original, vibrant context, could ever entirely capture the spirit of Rome at the dawn of the Baroque era. But what this exhibition can and should do is convey at least a sense of the feverish and competitive artistic climate of the city – and demonstrate, with renewed force, just what a giant and genius Caravaggio truly was. It is right that “The Genius of Rome” should contain more works by him than by any other painter of the time, because he was the greatest catalyst for change at this extraordinary moment for change in art. Without his example, it is difficult to imagine the work of any of the other great artists included in this exhibition, from Reni to Rubens, having turned out quite as it did. As the Italian scholar Roberto Longhi once memorably put it, “There were artists before Caravaggio, and there were artists after Caravaggio – but they were not the same.”