Date: 02-06-2002
Owning Institution: Galleria Borghese
Publication:   Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”      
Subject: 17th Century        

I recently spent several months in Rome, Naples, Sicily and Malta, researching and presenting a television documentary about the eventful life of the seventeenth-century painter, and murderer,  Caravaggio. The resulting film will be shown next Saturday evening on BBC2. So in a shameless attempt to drum up advance publicity for it, I have chosen one of the artist’s most powerfully gruesome works as this week’s picture. A stark and spotlit depiction of David with the Head of Goliath, it is to be found in the Galleria Borghese in Rome.

Some scholars think this bloody scene of decapitation is Caravaggio’s last canvas, painted just before his death in 1610. Others place it four years earlier, when he was on the run from papal justice and under sentence of death for having arguably castrated and certainly killed a man named Ranuccio Tomassoni, in a swordfight that took place on a tennis court. I favour the earlier date, partly on grounds of style, partly because the message embodied in the painting with such plaintive vividness fits so closely with the artist’s desperate circumstances at the time.

The picture’s subject is David’s well-known act of giant-slaying, recounted in I Samuel, 48-51: a familiar story, but treated by Caravaggio in a strikingly unfamiliar way. His sombre young hero seems peculiarly unexultant in his moment of triumph. He holds his grisly prize at arm’s-length, staring down almost absently at the trails of blood still pouring from the severed neck of his vanquished foe. Mild disgust is mingled, in David’s complicated and contemplative expression, with an infinite sadness.  For his part Goliath seems still to be screaming, in an extension of his death agony. Light glints on his irregular row of front teeth and is reflected, too, in the wetness of his lower lip. The notoriously extreme tenebrism of Caravaggio’s technique isolates these few charged details, distilling the drama to a compelling vignette while casting everything extraneous into darkness.

Having reduced the story to an apparent bare minimum of incident, the painter deepens the meaning of his picture by deftly weaving other layers of association into its fabric. The immediate past has been folded into the present, in that David’s earlier act of hurling his shot at the giant’s head is subtly implied by the way his white shirt has been looped through his belt to shape a kind of sling. His vulnerably naked torso and softly compassionate, almost Jesus-like face hint at the larger perspective of theological meaning in which the slaying of Goliath was to be understood. It is perhaps no accident that David evokes the youthful Christ, because the story of David slaying Goliath was often seen as an Old Testament prefiguration of Christ subduing Satan. The almost indecipherable inscription on the blade of the sword held by David has been ingeniously interpreted as spelling out the letters “HOCS”, standing for “humilitas occidit superbiam”, “humility kills pride”, which would serve to strengthen this thread of associations.

But the most insistent of the picture’s subsidiary meanings is also the most blatant – and would most likely have been instantly grasped by the avid art collector for whom it was originally painted. He was Scipione Borghese, papal nephew, chief administrator of papal justice and, therefore, a man with the power of life and death over Caravaggio . He knew the painter and so would also have known that Goliath’s grisly death’s-head was, in fact, a self-portrait: a depiction of Caravaggio himself in extremis.

What might the artist have intended by this morbid act of impersonation? There is an element of artistic bravado in the dark flourish of the work. Caravaggio set out to impress his patron, to put the work of all his contemporaries – and, indeed, his predecessors – in the shade. A century earlier Leonardo da Vinci had painted a celebrated but lost Head of the Medusa. The picture shown here may have been Caravaggio’s attempt to outmatch the famous Leonardo; and he has, in a sense, gone one better, in making a Gorgon of his own features (the streams of blood recalling the Medusa’s snakes of hair) to transfix the admiring viewer.

But there is also something else, something more urgent, behind the fixed stare of Caravaggio-as-Goliath. He seems, horribly, half-dead and half-alive, his right eye glazed over and closing while his left eye is still bright with outrage and pain. He is like a damned soul suffering forever in the darkness of hell; and perhaps Caravaggio intended by this to convey his own, real and immediate fear of damnation in 1606. He had killed a man, sentence of death had been passed on him and a banda capitale issued. This meant that any bounty hunter could claim a reward by handing in his body or, if it were more convenient, just his head. If that happened before he had time to atone for his sins there would be no hope at all for Carvaggio’s immortal soul. Only Scipione Borghese had the power to revoke the sentence and open the way to a pardon. I think this picture, so eloquent in its despair, was Caravaggio’s plea to him: his way of saying that Borghese was welcome to have his head in a painting, if only he would let him keep it in real life.