Caravaggio Read Online Free PDF Page B

his religious frescoes, Cesari turned out stylish canvases, quasi-erotic treatments of such mythological themes as Perseus rescuing a nude, provocatively posed Andromeda from the jaws of a predatory monster. These smaller works were sold, for respectable prices, to patrons and collectors. It’s possible that Caravaggio helped Cesari with his church commissions, but Bellori informs us that Caravaggio’s duties were more limited, that Cesari deployed Michelangelo Merisi’s talents solely in the decorative representation of flowers and fruit, an activity that was considered to be inferior to figure painting. As a consequence of this reluctant apprenticeship, Caravaggio became a skillful painter of still lifes, although he resented being “kept away from figure painting.”
    Ultimately, Caravaggio could not be prevented from using his masterful renderings of flowers and fruit as a decorative element in the kind of figure painting for which he was so temperamentally suited. Two of his earliest paintings—the so-called Sick Bacchus and Young Boy with a Basket of Fruit —were probably done when Caravaggio was still working in Cesari’s studio. Both works graced Cesari’s collection until, in 1607 , they were seized by Pope Paul V and given to the acquisitive Cardinal Scipione Borghese. Perhaps the impecunious young Michelangelo sold them to his employer, or perhaps Cesari appropriated them when Caravaggio left his studio under the shadow cast by his lengthy and mysterious stay in the Hospital of Santa Maria della Consolazione.
    This long, unexplained illness was described as resulting from a kick by a horse, though the so-called equine mishap may have been the era’s equivalent of running into a door. Rumors of violent crime linked Caravaggio, Giuseppe Cesari, and Giuseppe Cesari’s brother (and fellow painter) Bernardino Cesari, who was already a well-known felon. And there were hints of dark reasons why the brothers failed to visit their friend during his protracted recuperation.
    It could hardly be mere coincidence that Caravaggio’s enigmatic self portrait as the Sick Bacchus was painted at around the time of this serious illness. In the painting, a young man in a classical toga with an ivy wreath on his dark curls and a bunch of grapes in his hand regards us over his alluringly bare and muscular shoulder. Everything about his posture and his knowing, ironic ghost of a smile would suggest lasciviousness and sexual invitation, except for one little problem: Bacchus looks diseased, hollow-eyed, bilious. Green. What he offers is sex and death neatly combined in one simultaneously appealing and repellent package. His expression is unfathomable. Is he inviting the viewer to kiss him, or is he pleading to be rushed to a doctor? In the complicated art-historical debate about the painting’s symbolism, iconography, and meaning, few critics have bothered to point out the obvious: how deeply strange the painting is. It’s almost as if Caravaggio had discovered surrealism more than three centuries prematurely, and found himself unable to resist the impulse to produce something this outrageous and peculiar while employed in the studio of one of Rome’s most conventional painters.
    Sick Bacchus is the evil twin of Boy with a Basket of Fruit , which features another young man with bare shoulders, dark curls, and bunches of grapes. Here the straw basket is filled with the slightly overripe, imperfect fruit. Even at this early stage, Caravaggio was asserting his right to paint accurately, without idealization, a flawed and imperfect nature. It’s hard to imagine two more dissimilar figures than Bacchus and the fruit bearer. For this boy is as rosy, as luscious and healthy, as the ripe peach in his basket.
    Through the boy’s pink, half-parted lips, we can glimpse the tip of his tongue. His head is tipped back, his eyes sleepy and half lidded, as if he has just had sex or is just