Sohm, P., Caravaggios Deaths

Caravaggio's DeathsAuthor(s): Philip SohmSource: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 84, No. 3 (Sep., 2002), pp. 449-468Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3177308 .Accessed: 01/09/2014 16:59

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Caravaggio's Deaths

Philip Sohm

Derek Jarman opens his claustrophobic, skyless Caravaggio (1986) with the feverish artist on his shadowy deathbed (Fig. 1). The film pieces together Michelangelo da Caravaggio's life retrospectively, from the vantage point of the dying artist. Death gives structure and meaning to Caravaggio's life. Mor- tality, for Jarman, explained the essence of his art. When asked why he made the film, Jarman responded obliquely by paraphrasing two early biographies of the artist, by Giovanni Baglione (1642) and Giovan Pietro Bellori (1672):

The beach at Porto Ercole stretches lazily into the heat haze; a crescent dune walling up stagnant and dank un- dergrowth, dense, infested with midges that brush you like nettles. It was on this beach that Michele ran, in a fury, to retrieve the souvenirs of his life, disappearing over the horizon in a fishing boat in lieu of his failure to pay his passage. He collapsed in the sun and was carried by fish- ermen to the Spanish garrison high up on the cliff face, to die the next day.'

The beach as a scene of desperation and death, the loss of "souvenirs," and the subsequent collapse in the sun were key elements in the seicento biographies thatJarman had read in Howard Hibbard's sexualized Caravaggio (1983). Although he never used the beach scene in the film (too bright, too furious, too Hollywood), a voice-over by "Caravaggio" at the beginning of the film tells us how he arrived at his deathbed:

Malta, Syracuse, Messina, Naples-four years on the run, so many labels on the luggage and hardly a friendly face, always on the move, running into the poisonous blue sea, running under the July sun,July 18 of 1610, adrift.... The boats are on the beach, the nets hung out to dry, the dog star creeps out to bark the raging sun into the west, Sole da Leone, the Lion sun, hunted into the dark.

Throughout most of Caravaggio, Jarman flouted historical objectivity by introducing motorbikes and typewriters, but a strict historicity marks the deathbed scene. The story that Baglione and Bellori narrated remains intact: Caravaggio runs on the beach, desperate to retrieve his luggage, while the hot summer sun-the Sole da Leone-beams down. The wounded, dirty, dark painter struggling under a bleaching summer sun survives in other modern fictional accounts, as, for example, when Enzo Siciliano evokes the sun to create an alien environment for the dying Caravaggio:

The fortress [at Port'Ercole] bathed in the last burning rays of the sun. The heat of thatJuly day was dying on the surface of the clear water.... There was too much light, so

clear that it hurt your eyes... and made him wish with passionate, urgent longing for the torch hanging from the roof... for the closed room, the nocturnal atmosphere.... 2

Caravaggio's seicento biographers might have appreciated the narrative poignancy of the scene in similar ways, just as they probably believed in its historical veracity, but the per- sistence of the story can be explained in other ways. My thesis is that Caravaggio's biographers adjusted their stories of his death in order to characterize his life and personal style. His death reveals for them the essence of his art. Art imitates life, certainly, but so, too, does life imitate art, especially in biography, where fictional verisimilitude is used to attain the higher goal of truth. An artist's biography can be documented and factual, and indeed some seicento art biographers pushed archival research much deeper into their writing than had previously been the norm. But biography is also an artful construction of embellished or even invented "facts" that explains why paintings look the way they do. In various stories of Caravaggio's death, biography can be read as art criticism.

Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz introduced to art history the notion that early modern biographies elide the boundaries between fact and fiction in order to conceptualize the category of artist and to mythologize individual artists.3 However, just because a "narrative cell," to use Kris and Kurz's term for the elemental building blocks of anecdote, borrows from a fictional tradition does not necessarily mean that it, too, is fictional. Paul Barolsky embraced their lesson, perhaps too heartily, in his conviction that Giorgio Vasari's Le vite de' pii eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori is "a masterpiece of Renais- sance fiction," and extended the typological reading of Vasa- ri's biographies as a higher form of truth: "Vasari's tales are never mere fiction, because such fictions tell us a great deal about how Vasari imagined 'reality,' which is part of the historical record. Knowing how to read Vasari, we come to see just how much history is poetically embedded in his tall tales."4 Kris and Kurz and Barolsky read biography primarily as mythmaking where the literal truth is supplanted by a higher, poetic truth about art and the artist as hero or, in Caravaggio's case, antihero.

The stories of Caravaggio's death offer two corrective cor- ollaries to their accounts: first, that historical truth can coex- ist with mythologized biography, and second, that biography can shape interpretations of paintings and, inversely, that paintings can shape biography.5 I am interested in the bor- derlands where fiction bleeds into fact in the afterlives of his death, where the literary forms start to shape the biographical content. Scholars who aspire to document the singularity of historical events often turn to biographies as reasonable substitutes for more unbiased evidence. To say that they


450 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 2002 VOLUME LXXXIV NUMBER 3

1 Still from Caravaggio, written and directed by DerekJarman, British Film Institute in association with Channel Four Television, U.K., 1986 (photo: British Film Institute)

extrapolate plausible narratives from incomplete data and hence are complicit in accepting an early mythologizing mode of artist biography sounds like a condemnation of current practice. Actually, my intention is only to suggest that the migration of fact into fiction is a necessary and even desirable precondition of writing history, that all biography constructs a text from other texts. Biographers produce com- plex and allusive texts by importing such storytelling tech- niques as irony and narrative closure. Art history, as a relatively new literary genre in the seicento, needed to borrow from other dominant forms like hagiography, biography, poetry, and novelle. Because language is not a neutral medium but a densely allusive and subliminal one, writers can tell their readers many things at once. Historical narratives, as Hayden White argues, are effective not so much as a literary structure to convey information as a means to

test the capacity of a culture's fictions to endow real events with the kinds of meaning that literature displays to con- sciousness through its fashioning of patterns of "imagi- nary" events. Precisely insofar as the historical narrative endows sets of real events with the kinds of meaning found otherwise only in myth and literature, we are justified in regarding it as a product of allegoresis. Therefore, rather than regard every historical narrative as mythic or ideo- logical in nature, we should regard it as allegorical, that is, as saying one thing and meaning another. Thus envisaged, the narrative figurates the body of events that serves as its primary referent and transforms these events into intima- tions of patterns of meaning that any literal representation of them as facts could never produce.6

Of White's four tropes of historiography (metaphor, synec- doche, metonymy, and irony), the lives of Caravaggio, or more exactly the "deaths" of Caravaggio, lend themselves to analysis primarily by means of irony and metaphor.

Biography as Art Criticism Because Caravaggio was a murderer, and because he often stabbed, battered, and molested, and because he populated his painted world with a high incidence, per capita, of be- headings and decapitated heads, biographers have seen vio- lence and death as the central conceit of his life and art. Beginnings and endings, the dual portals of narrative, are often charged with portent and revelation. Most artists died inconspicuously of old age or unspecified causes. Some devoutly prepared themselves for death (Michelangelo and Bernini) or died in pious acts (Bandinelli); others worked themselves to death. There are also status deaths, such as Leonardo expiring in the arms of Francis I. However, a few artists died artistically in ways that bind the mode of dying to the style of painting, where death imitates life.7 Spinello Aretino, ever timorous (like his figures) after being mugged, painted a bestial Satan so terrifyingly real that it escaped from the painting and appeared to Spinello in his sleep, a night- mare Pygmalion scenario.8 He awakened "half mad with star- ing eyes" and a few days later "he slipped into the grave," having frightened himself to death, killed by his own artistic success. Other artists died in the embrace of women or in hot pursuit-Giorgione, Raphael, and Domenico Puligo-and consistently these were artists whose styles were given femi- nine attributes: softness, grace, delicacy, and tenderness. Pon- tormo died of dropsy, a disease that deformed his body, making it look like the figures in his late, failed work, "without proportion," with a large torso and small arms and legs.9

Death, in other words, is the final act that reveals the ultimate truth about an artist's work. "Look at a man in the midst of trouble and danger facing death," wrote Lucretius, "and you will learn in his hour of adversity what he really is.... The mask is torn off and reality remains."'? Death provides an explanatory mirror of artistic practice or, in Caravaggio's case, malpractice. What distinguishes Caravag- gio's death from those in other early modern art biographies is the number of stories told and the variety of their signifi- cation. Every seventeenth-century poem and biography that mentions his death gives it meaning-in each case a different meaning-with evidence manipulated, sometimes wildly and fancifully, in order to prove a particular point. Baglione concluded that "he died as miserably as he lived"; its corollary might be that "he died as badly as he painted."

Various articles and books, notably by Denis Mahon, Mau- rizio Calvesi, and Vincenzo Pacelli, have been devoted to Caravaggio's death." The results of their remarkable archival studies have extended our factual knowledge about Caravag- gio's last few months of life far beyond what we knew from seicento biographers. Because these documents generally confirm the accuracy of Baglione, Bellori, and Filippo Baldinucci, and because they supplement the biographies with new information, they seem to have rendered the biographies redundant. This may be true if the biographies are read only for factual information. However, considering the literary fabric of the biographies provides new insight. The titles of the articles by Mahon, Calvesi, and Pacelli, "Caravag- gio's Death" or "The Death of Caravaggio," make the obvious clear-that Caravaggio died in only one way-and espouse a more problematic objective: that as historians they aspire to document the singularity of historical events. I propose in-


CARAVAGGIO'S DEATHS 451

stead to look at the literary forms of biographical content- the container instead of its contents-and to examine "Cara- vaggio's Deaths" as one (among many) means to illuminate seicento understanding of his art.

Fictionalizing artists' lives can also make them conform to and explain the visual evidence of their art. Artists may be the creators of their work, in which "every painter paints himself," but biographers sometimes inverted the process and created artists in the image of their work, as Vasari did with the cowering Spinello and the murderous Andrea del Ca- stagno. Vasari wants us to believe that art imitates life-that because Spinello was mugged he therefore painted figures shying away-but actually he often made life conform to art. Castagno never murdered Domenico Veneziano, but as a story it allowed Vasari to polemicize the artistic contest between Florence and Venice, to trace the genealogy of oil painting, and to explain why Castagno painted in a "crude and harsh" style.

The accounts of Caravaggio's death can be divided into two categories: mythologizing poems and stories with little or no claim to truth telling, and biographies whose authors believed (or wanted us to believe) in their historical accuracy. The first category of texts, being obviously fictional, can be more easily read as interpretations of art. Giambattista Marino, writing at the time of Caravaggio's death, imagined "Nature" and "Death" conspiring in "a cruel plot" against Caravaggio because "Nature feared being surpassed by your hand in every image" and Death resented how "your brush returned to life... as many men as his scythe could cut down."12 In other words, Caravaggio died because of his artistic success as a naturalist. Caravaggio's friend and the author of his epitaph, Marzio Milesi, wrote a sonnet likening him to Icarus because both flew too high and were struck down.13 Milesi might have had Icarus's hubris in mind, a fitting model for Caravaggio's sometimes overbearing arrogance, but, given his intention to extol "this great genius," he probably means Caravaggio's flight as one of artistic talent and imagination. Without the high-flying wings of genius, he would not have perished. Again, the same moral pertains: artistic success leads to death. Caravaggio challenges Nature and is, in turn, killed by her.

Joachim von Sandrart's story, published in 1675 but possibly recalling stories he heard in Rome from 1629 to 1635, turns Caravaggio's death into a generational rite of passage and artistic progress. One day Caravaggio challenged his former employer to a duel in order to settle "an old quarrel." The Cavaliere Giuseppe Cesare d'Arpino refused on the grounds that it would be undignified for a nobleman to fight someone beneath his station, a response that cut Caravaggio deeper than any sword could. He sold his belongings and set out for Malta in order to become a knight: "As soon as Caravaggio was knighted, he hurried back to Rome with the intention of settling his quarrel with d'Arpino. This haste, however, resulted in a high fever and he arrived in Arpino (the very birthplace of his adversary) as a sick man and died." Sandrart's version of Caravaggio's death took root only in France. Roger de Piles has Caravaggio murder Ranuccio Tomassoni as a surrogate for the Cavaliere d'Arpino before challenging d'Arpino directly to a duel.14 And in 1832 Felix

Pyat elaborated the account with invented dialogue that transforms Caravaggio into a proto-Romantic hero.15

Sandrart's story of Caravaggio's death is easily interpreted as an apologue rather than as biography because there is so little ground to confuse moral and factual truths. The allegorical content is too close to the surface, and its applicability as art criticism too obvious, to be confusing. It is really concerned with the life of art more than the life of artists. Sandrart has Caravaggio act oedipally in desiring the death of his former boss and capo of the old guard in order to drama- tize a generational passage from late Mannerism to Baroque naturalism.

In biographies with truth claims Caravaggio's death be- comes murkier and more interesting, where the space between art and life is more permeable. The ur-text for most later biographies was published in 1642 by Giovanni Bagli- one, Caravaggio's erstwhile follower and later a plaintiff in court against him:

When Caravaggio went ashore he was mistakenly arrested. He was held for two days in prison and when he was released, the felucca was no longer to be found. This made him furious and in his desperation he started out along the beach under the merciless rays of the sun trying to catch sight of the vessel that was carrying his belongings [le sue robe]. Finally he reached a village on the shore and was put to bed with a malignant fever. He was completely abandoned and within a few days he died as miserably as he lived.16

In writing this account, Baglione adhered to various notices that began to circulate just days after Caravaggio's death.17 An announcement addressed to the duke of Urbino, for example, tells him that "Michelangelo da Caravaggio, the famous painter, died at Port'Ercole, while he was on the way from Naples to Rome because a pardon had been granted him by His Holiness from the sentence of banishment which he was under for the capital crime [of murder]."18 And a letter from the bishop of Caserta to Scipione Borghese spec- ifies Caravaggio's itinerary, his mode of transport, and the sequence ofjail and release:

Caravaggio did not die at Procida, but at Port'Ercole, because, having arrived by felucca at Palo, forced to port by high seas, he was imprisoned by that captain and the felucca returned to Naples. Caravaggio remained jailed until he was released following payment of a large sum of money. By land, and possibly by foot, he made his way to Port'Ercole where, sick, he died.'9

From these and similar reports, Baglione learned the means of transport (a felucca, an all-purpose shipping tub), the episode of imprisonment and release, and the final trek on foot to Port'Ercole, where Caravaggio died. This, however, does not stop them from being meaningful. Whatever factual basis they might have, and despite their primary intention to transmit information reliably, the seeds of narrative are planted by these reports that would later blossom into fiction in the biographies.



2 Portrait of Nicolas Poussin, from Bellori, Le vite, Rome: Mascardi, 1672, woodcut (photo: Florence, Kunsthistorisches Institut)

The reports to Scipione Borghese and the duke of Urbino present motive and causality with a succinct irony. Caravaggio died on his way home after the death sentence had been lifted. Absolution by the pope precipitates death, which provides closure to murder. The death sentence is executed not by law but by nature. Reprieve and retribution stand side by side. Intended or not, the reports embed irony into the facts, and it was this literary trope that Baglione most conspicuously developed in his biography. Because the biographies by Bagli- one and Bellori conform so closely to documentary sources, it is easy to overlook their embellishments to the story: the disembarkation in the midday sun; the summer sun as a dramatic persona ("il Sol Leone" also appears in Baglione's story of Raffaelle Motta's death),20 and the desperate beach trek. Given the circumstances and time of year, these elements are entirely possible, but then so is an evening disembarkation or a cloudy day. With the moralizing epithet "he died as miserably as he lived," Baglione (who personally contributed to that misery) tells us that Caravaggio's death is a fitting conclusion to his life, not only the final chapter of a violent life but also a just retribution for the damage that he had inflicted on art, causing "the very ruination of painting."

Caravaggio Iscariot Who was this Caravaggio who could destroy painting and deserved to die miserably? Many different Caravaggios have been proposed by art historians, and I do not plan to add another one; instead, I would like to introduce you briefly to

3 Portrait of Agostino Carracci, from Bellori, Le vite, 1672, woodcut (photo: Florence, Kunsthistorisches Institut)

Bellori's Caravaggio, someone we might call Caravaggio Is- cariot. When Bellori chose portraits for his Lives, by a still unidentified artist, he or his amanuensis decided to include such props as a book for Nicolas Poussin and a burin for Agostino Carracci (Figs. 2, 3). Caravaggio's tool is a sword, whose hilt he grasps (Fig. 4). It introduces readers to his status as murderer and repeat offender attacking and threatening rivals, police, a notary, and many others, and to his status as knight (and then excommunicant) of the order of Malta. His furrowed brow, thicket of dark hair, bushy arched eyebrows, and coarsened features, as well as the sidelong shift of his eyes and their accusatory glare, give him a sinister air. By comparison, the eleven other artists portrayed in the Lives look positively friendly, or at least pensive and adherent to codes of polite behavior. Bellori's suspicious and threatening Caravaggio removes any vestige of innocence found in Otta- vio Leoni's portrait of his friend (Biblioteca Marucelliana, Florence; Fig. 5) designed, possibly, for a suspended series of biographies, Gareggio pittorico, that Giulio Cesare Gigli was writing in 1614-15.21 Leoni defined Caravaggio primarily through his dark curly hair, beard, and eyebrows, much as "Luca the barber" did when he described Caravaggio in court as "a large young man, around twenty or twenty-five years, with a thin black beard, black eyes with bushy eyebrows, dressed in black, in a state of disarray, with threadbare black hose, and a mass of black hair, long over his forehead."22 Unruly curly hair defined Caravaggio's appearance for Gigli as well.23



4 Portrait of Caravaggio, from Bellori, Le vite, 1672, woodcut (photo: Florence, Kunsthistorisches Institut)

By manipulating Caravaggio's face in this way, Bellori's portraitist helped him to justify the conclusion that physiognomy is destiny, both in art and in life:

Caravaggio's style corresponded to his physiognomy and appearance. He had a dark complexion and dark eyes, black hair and eyebrows, and this appears again, even naturally, in his painting.... Later, driven by his peculiar temperament, he gave himself up to the dark style, and to the expression of his turbulent and contentious nature. Because of his temperament, Caravaggio was forced to leave Milan and his homeland and then to flee from Rome and from Malta, to go into hiding in Sicily, to live in danger in Naples and to die wretchedly on a deserted beach.24

Physiognomics interprets the structure of nature-"the faces and order of the whole world"-in order to divine the "invis- ible world" from the visible.25 It thus functioned in the seicento as a semiotic system that structurally resembled style

analysis: if inner realities of character are projected outward-"all animate bodies are material portraits of their souls"26-then the process must work in reverse, and the inner reality therefore can be adduced by examining external form. According to Camillo Baldi, inventor of graphology and translator of the pseudo-Aristotelian Physiognomica (Bo- logna, 1621), physiognomy and style were closely related.27 Styles of handwriting are like faces, he tells us: each is different and yet beautiful; those differences are easier to observe than to describe and explain; both express many things at once.28 Physiognomic interpretations often suit the needs of their inventors, but in Bellori's case the attributes and signi- fications conform to contemporary stereotypes: men with thick, dark, curly hair and arched eyebrows are disposed toward anger.29

Dark in aspect, character, dress, and style, Caravaggio completed his public persona with his faithful companion, a black dog named Crow (a bird that brings bad tidings).30 By comparison, Gigli's Caravaggio lacks the consistency of Bellori's



5 Ottavio Leoni, Portrait of Caravaggio. Florence, Biblioteca Marucelliana (photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY)

caricature: his face is described as pale instead of darkly complected, his sunken eyes are lively, and instead of a sword, Gigli gives him a golden baton, which can be used to "loosen, tighten and direct as it pleases him."31 Caravaggio's portrait in the Vite thus exaggerates his dark side: coarser in feature, untrustworthy in expression, and darkly complected, he re- semblesJudas. Somewhere between 1615 and 1673, Caravag- gio became an archetype. Mythologized, Caravaggio lost some of his humanity but gained a signifying power as a morally and artistically bad artist. Ethics and aesthetics wove biography and art criticism together in Vasari's Vite, but nowhere are they fused together so thoroughly as in the

seicento lives of Caravaggio. Great Renaissance artists (Michel- angelo, Raphael, Leonardo, and Titian) were deemed to be divine, saintly, and even Christ-like; Caravaggio, to the contrary, was dangerous and evil in both life and art. If Renais- sance art historiography is an adaptation of hagiography, wherein a new literary genre finds its themes in an ancient form,32 then might there not be a place for a Judas figure?

When Bellori called the twelve artists of his Vite eleven saints (santi) or venerables (venerabili) and one bad man (cat- tivo), it is clear that among these twelve apostles Caravaggio played the role of Judas.33 He was also, to use another of Bellori's metaphors, a "pernicious poison" who caused "great

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damage" and "havoc" to painting.34 In life he was a traitor to friends and admirers, turning against Guido Reni, Giovanni Baglione, and supposedly Guercino. Even before the famous murder, Mariano da Pasqualone called him "an excommunicant and cursed man." According to police records, the painter Girolamo Stampa called him a "traitor" as he was fending off Caravaggio's blows one night, just before some butchers rushed in with lanterns to illuminate the crime scene. Christ's betrayal (John 18.1-9) seeped into Stampa's description (a nocturnal surprise; a group with lanterns en- circling an innocent), where Stampa performs the role of Christ and Caravaggio of Judas.35

Poussin thought that Caravaggio had betrayed art, accusing him of having "destroyed painting," and according to Bagli- one, he was not alone in this view. Francesco Albani blamed Caravaggio for "the decline and total ruin" of painting.36 Federico Borromeo thought that Caravaggio's "taverns and debauchery" lacked beauty and that this made him the "op- posite" of Raphael.37 Vincenzo Carducho called Caravaggio the "anti-Christ" and the "anti-Michelangelo" because he led followers away from the truth.38 If Raphael can be identified with Christ, a notion popularized by Vasari's story of his death, then Caravaggio, who "despises" and "disdains" Ra- phael, is assigned an analogous relationship as Judas to Christ. Just as he rejected artistic authorities (antiquity and Raphael), so, too, did he deny Church and family, according to a reliable story told by Giulio Mancini. Lorenzo Pasinelli called Caravaggio's tenebrism one of two "new heresies" (nuove eresie). Caravaggio's death was not a suicide, but like Judas he died "alone and friendless" in a "deserted" place.39

Only one other Italian Renaissance or Baroque artist, to my knowledge, was presented as a Judas. According to Vasari, Andrea del Castagno "painted himself with the face of Judas Iscariot, whom he resembled both in appearance and in deed."40 Castagno's nefarious deeds, such as his alleged murder of Domenico Veneziano, are probably fictional, but their similarity to Caravaggio's life is striking. Both lost their fa- thers at an early age; both slashed and scratched the work of fellow artists; both were murderers and generally treated others belligerently; both loved the art of painting "violently" and abused artists and critics physically and verbally. Their dark and troubled characters permeate their styles. Casta- gno's figures acted with the "vehemence" of their maker; his coloring was "crude and harsh."

Lost Baggage I would now like to pose two questions: Why was Caravaggio running after his belongings when he died? And why did he die "under the merciless rays of the sun"? How can these narrative motifs serve analogically as symptoms of his paintings? By chasing his belongings and by succumbing to the sun, Caravaggio enacts his failures as an artist. Baldinucci (1688) and Francesco Sussino (ca. 1724) followed Baglione's version of the run in the sun: they mentioned the beach (twice each) and sunstroke.41 Bellori also adopted Baglione's version in most of its details, even borrowing key words and expressions, and established it as canonical for over a century:42

When he went ashore the Spanish guard arrested him by mistake, taking him for another Cavaliere, and held him prisoner. Although he was soon released, the felucca that was carrying him and his possessions was no longer to be found. Thus, in a state of anxiety and desperation he ran along the beach in the full heat of the summer sun, and when he reached Port'Ercole he collapsed and was seized by a malignant fever. He died within a few days at about forty years of age in 1609, a lamentable year for painting since it also took Annibale Carracci and Federico Zuccaro. Thus, Caravaggio was forced to end his life and was buried on a deserted beach.43

All four biographies specify the beach as the location of Caravaggio's final, fatal run. (Actually, the coastline between Palo and Port'Ercole is more often rocky and swampy than sandy.) From Dante's Inferno to Thomas Mann's Death in Venice and Paul Theroux's Mosquito Coast, the beach has been a place of death, isolation, loss, and punishment.44 Bellori added two elements to Baglione: first, he tidied up the un- even edges of history by having Caravaggio, Carracci, and Zuccaro all die in the same year, simultaneously closing a historical era and three artists' lives,45 and second, Bellori clarified the reason for Caravaggio's arrest as a case of mistaken identity. With Caravaggio's wrongful arrest, where "the Spanish guard arrested him by mistake, taking him for another Cavaliere," Bellori charges the episode with irony, at least when it is read in light of Caravaggio's frustrated ambi- tions to be recognized as a nobleman, an ambition fully documented by Roman police records. For Sandrart this misbegotten ambition initiated the sequence of events that supposedly led to his death.

Most artists died uneventfully at the hands of Baglione, usually being "delivered gratefully into the hands of God." Only seven artists died badly; all were naturalists of some kind, and four were devout caravaggisti who, like their men- tor, died young. Valentin de Boulogne, who went out drinking and smoking with his "gang" one summer night, became so "enflamed" that on returning home he found it in flames. After hours spent quelling the fire with cold water, "he succumbed to a fever so malign that in just a few days he expired in the icy embrace of death."46 Bartolomeo Manfredi, whose paintings were often mistaken for Caravaggio's, "died young, full of wickedness that consumed him in the end" and "at a young age filled with evil."47 Orazio Borgianni died from greed, "struck down even before knowing it." Matteo da Leccio brought death upon himself because, "seeking riches, he became impoverished and ended his life miserably in lands far away."48

By giving Caravaggio's death a materialist motive, running under the sun to retrieve his worldly possessions, Baglione implied that his goal in art was similarly mistaken: chasing nature's superficial appearance instead of its hidden ideals. Bellori attached Caravaggio's rejection of classical ideals (antiquity and Raphael) to a story of him choosing, randomly, a gypsy in the piazza as his model:

He not only ignored the most excellent marbles of the ancients and the famous paintings of Raphael, but he despised them, and nature alone became the object of his



brush. Thus, when the most famous statues of Phidias and Glycon were pointed out to him as models for his painting, he gave no other reply than to extend his hand toward a crowd of men, indicating that nature had provided him sufficiently with teachers. To prove his words he called a gypsy who happened to be passing in the street and, taking her to his lodgings, he drew her in the act of fortune- telling, as is the custom of these women of the Egyptian race.49

In this story, as with most concerning Caravaggio, he is de- prived of verbal language and has to resort to manual ges- tures. Wordless and implicitly unlearned, Caravaggio man- ages to quote Eupompus's famous gesture: "being asked which of the former Artificers a man had best to follow, answered pointing at a multitude of men that Nature itself was rather to be followed than any Artificer."50

Because Caravaggio's art depended entirely on the pres- ence of the physical object or model, "imitating only what appears before his eyes" according to Poussin, Bellori, and others, he was thought to be helpless without his models and props: "He claimed that he imitated his models so closely that he never made a single brushstroke that he called his own but said rather that it was nature's.... The moment the model was taken from him, his hand and his mind became empty." Or, according to Luigi Scaramuccia, "he did not know how to make anything without the actual thing in front of him." Malvasia tells the story of Leonello Spada posing for Caravag- gio's Death ofJohn the Baptist: afraid that Spada might flee and, in effect, escape with his art, Caravaggio imprisoned him in a room until he had finished.51 If things with physical pres- ence-models and props- capture the essence of Caravag- gio's art in the minds of his critics, then his lost possessions exact a terrible justice from a materialist painter.

Other artists than Borgianni, Leccio, and Caravaggio re- vealed their style by dying of cupidity. Pinturicchio, who in life had sprinkled so much gold over the walls of Siena and Rome, died of envy when some friars discovered a trove of gold hidden in the room where he had been sleeping: "he took it so much to heart, being unable to get it out of his mind, that it was the death of him." According to Giulio Mancini, Caravaggio's onetime physician, Caravaggio's death most resembled that of his compatriot Poliodoro da Caravag- gio, even though in life the virtuous Poliodoro could not have been more different: "It is worthy of reflection to see such similar ends of two paesani and artists, to see them die an almost identical death." Mancini is referring to Vasari's tale of a "strange" and "dreadful" death involving a covetous studio assistant who "bore greater love for his master's money than for his master" and decided to strangle Poliodoro as part of an elaborate, failed robbery. What Mancini seems to be saying is that Poliodoro and Michelangelo shared a birthplace and deaths driven by greed. Actually, the death that most resembles Caravaggio's, at least in my view, is Terence's as told by Suetonius. Frequently accused of plagiarism- "covetting the possessions of other writers"-the playwright died suitably "after falling ill from grief and annoyance at the loss of his baggage, which he had sent by ship [when he was returning to Rome] and with it all of the new plays that he

had written."52 Caravaggio stole from nature, or so his critics alleged, and finally nature stole from Caravaggio.

Baldinucci, like Sandrart, identified the originating motives of Caravaggio's death as social vanity. He captured Cara- vaggio's self-delusion by referring to the proverb 'You can deck out an ass with a fancy saddle and gold braids as if it were a noble horse, but once it brays you know it is just an ass."53 Baldinucci makes two points in citing this proverb: first, that the exterior sign of nobility (the medal itself of the Cross of Malta) did not change Caravaggio's brutish inner reality; according to Sussino, Caravaggio mistook the sign of nobility for reality and, after being knighted, he paraded his medal in front of everyone and became "blinded by the madness of thinking himself a nobleman born."54 Second, that the quest itself for the Cross of Malta signified Caravag- gio's failure as an artist to look beyond the surface of things. The higher artistic realm of beauty, like the higher social order of nobility, was beyond his grasp. "He abandoned," according to Giovanni Battista Agucchi, "the Idea of beauty, inclined instead to follow only similitude."55

Irony is the literary conceit that binds these stories together: Caravaggio seeks in life what is absent in his art, valuing material possessions and outward signs over life and inner reality. He is, in some way, an agent of his own death and dies enacting an essential characteristic of himself, much as the ever curious Pliny died in trying to get a closer look at the exploding Vesuvius. Diogenes subjected several of his philosophers to deaths that enacted voluntarily their ideas. The vegetarian Pythagorus, believer in reincarnation, chose death by fire rather than trampling through a field of beans, "either because beans are like genitals or because they are like the gates of Hades."56 Corporality triumphs over spirituality in Renaissance deaths of philosophers, perhaps nowhere more mordantly than in Piero Valeriano's biography of Gior- gio Valla, who, before going to lecture on the immortality of the spirit, died "while evacuating his excrement... [when] he expelled his spirit too."57 And according to Paolo Giovio, the physician and anatomist Gabriele Zerbi was dismembered by the Turks, a just punishment according to a former stu- dent for "cutting up cadavers incorrectly."58

By the seventeenth century this kind of black humor was codified in "Playful epitaphs," as Giovanni Francesco Lo- redano and Pietro Michiele called them in their Cimiterio (Venice, 1674), where they dispatch people with ironically suitable deaths.59 Irony also centers much of the art criticism itself. For example, when Bellori has Caravaggio reject art as a model for art by pointing to the piazza crowd as his models, he actually makes Caravaggio reenact Eupompus's famous gesture. Caravaggio may think of himself as a rebel, but really he is just another aspirant to ancient glory. Federico Zuccaro adopts a similar ironic ploy when he dismisses Caravaggio's allegedly "never-seen-before" style as just an atavistic recycling of Giorgione.

The Killing Sun Writers and artists whose flames burn brightly often die, like Caravaggio, exposed to the "merciless rays of the sun." Virgil, for example, visited Megara on his journey back to Rome "where, in a very hot sun, he was taken with a fever" and died shortly thereafter. Correggio also died when "placing the



6 Michelangelo da Caravaggio, Calling of Saint Matthew. Rome, S. Luigi dei Francesi (photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY)

money on his back, he set out to walk [to Correggio] on foot; but being smitten by the heat of the sun, which was very great, and drinking water to refresh himself, he was seized by pleu- risy and had to take to his bed in a raging fever, nor did he ever raise his head from it."60 Raffaelle Motta supposedly died of a "malign fever" after his return to Rome "in the hot weather of the Sol Leone."61 Transposed to Caravaggio, this pseudomedical mythologizing of genius takes on different meanings. In Milesi's poem, the sun kills the Icarus Caravag- gio, or, as Giambattista Marino put it, nature kills its emula- tor. For Baglione, Bellori, and Baldinucci, the sun conspires to kill the "dark" painter. Exposed to the sun in a "public place" and dying "alone and friendless in the open air," it seemed to Baldinucci a fitting end for the dark, secretive painter who placed his figures in "cellars... without much sunlight" (Fig. 6).62 He derived this conclusion after reading Bellori, who recorded a common complaint, one that he agreed with, that Caravaggio "did not know how to come out of the cellar" and that "he never brought his figures out into the daylight but placed them in the dark brown atmosphere of a closed room."63 Caravaggio deemed blue pigment to be "the poison of colors," and for this reason one never finds "the clear blue air," only black ground and black back- ground.64 Exposed to the sun on the beach, "alone and

friendless," Caravaggio thus found himself in a hostile environment, fatally different from the one that he created for himself in painting.

The membrane that loosely separates art and life in physiognomic and other psychobiographic theories of style is more permeable than ever here. It resembles in affect the death of Francesco Borromini, who, preceding his suicide, "twisted his mouth in a thousand horrible grimaces" and "rolled his eyes," becoming like his allegedly distorted buildings.65 Borromini in his death throes did not literally resemble his buildings, but the architect and his architecture are merged by means of an overlapping lexicon. Caravaggio criticism often drew on metaphors of abnormal psychology and unethical behavior in ways that loaded pictorial forms with biographical content. His provocative art helped to in- spire such art-world neologisms as shuttered (serrato), shatter (fracasso), and sly and malicious or in the lingo of thieves (furbesco), as if a new language had to be found to describe a new and challenging art form. Caravaggio's tenebrism was dangerous and subversive, an offensive weapon used to "destroy" art, to anticipate that powerful metaphor used by Pous- sin, Albani, and others against Caravaggio.

The leonine sun and the dark painter derive from Horace, Quintilian, and others who oppose public-private, bright-



dark, nature-art, outside-inside. Tacitus, for example, takes the side of an older educational system where students "carry on their studies in the light of open day" and contrasts it to the modern system of oratory where students practice only in the protective shade of academia.66 Annibale Carracci first applied this dialectic to Caravaggio, if we are to accept the veracity of a quote in Malvasia (there are doubts that Anni- bale actually spoke these words, but even if they were invented by Malvasia this does not affect my conclusions):

Is there anything so marvelous here? Did it seem to you that this was something new? I tell you that all those fellows with the never-seen-before style that they themselves invented will always have the same reception when they appear and will have no less praise. I know another way to make a big splash, in fact to beat and mortify that fellow [Caravaggio]; I would like to counterpose to that fierce [fiero] coloring one that is completely tender [tenero]. Does he use a falling, shuttered light? I would like it to be open and direct. Does he cover up the difficult parts of art in nighttime shadows? I, by the bright light of noon, would like to reveal the most learned and erudite of my studies.67

The competitive, almost combative, stance shown by Anni- bale-"I know another way... to beat and mortify that fellow"-may sound like Caravaggio himself, but actually it is a display of humanist erudition that plays against the popu- lar construction of Caravaggio as an unlearned painter. Francesco Algarotti, working from an adulterated version of Malvasia's quotation, recognized Cicero as one of Annibale's sources, and it is not too hard to find Federico Zuccaro's response to Caravaggio and Horace's call for oratory to be exposed to the full light of day lurking beneath his words as well.68 Like Tacitus, Annibale associates modernity with secrecy and shadows that hide artistic defects. When Annibale proposes to expose Caravaggio's shady ignorance to his "bright light of noon," he casts himself in the same role that Bellori, Malvasia, and others gave to him as the enlightener of art after years of Mannerist darkness; in the words of Sca- ramuccia, the Carracci were "bright, shining Suns who dis- pelled every turbid and shadowy (tenebroso) suspicion of ignorance."69

Annibale proposed to "beat and mortify" Caravaggio by means of painting, adopting a visual form of critique much as he did when he ended a learned dispute about the Laocoon by making a drawing. Annibale often used visual instead of verbal statements to argue with painters. To his cousin Lu- dovico he wrote, "Let us apply this beautiful style [of Correg- gio's] in order to one day mortify this beret-wearing rabble that attacks us." And later in Rome he faked some old masters in order to humiliate local painters who resented his intru- sion into their domain. Despite his comment on this occasion that "we painters ... have to speak with our hands," his initial foray into Caravaggio criticism rests on a cleverly deployed word.70

"Shuttered" (serrato) belongs to a subset of psychologically charged terms that attacks Caravaggio's tenebrism on the basis of biography.71 For example, Malvasia accused Caravag- gio of painting in a "dark and hunted [cacciata] style" that has a "violent" (violento) light and creates a great "clash" or "up-

roar" (fracasso) of light and shadow.72 Other critics called his tenebrism "cutting" (tagliente) and "gloomy," "savage," and "dirty" (in its many senses of turbid, troublesome, or ob- scene).73 Militaristic and physically aggressive metaphors en- liven the paintings with an artistic psychomachia that makes them appear more vivid and animated than a more neutral language would. According to Giovanni Battista Passeri, Cara- vaggio's "robust" style "charges ahead" and "attacks" contemporary painting.74 Not all artists lent themselves to this kind of linguistic fusion of art and life, but, at least in Malvasia's mind, the two were inextricably connected in Caravaggio's case. In recounting how Caravaggio, after meeting Leonello Spada, declared that he had found a man after his own heart, Malvasia had to admit that he did not know whether Cara- vaggio was attracted to Spada's art or his character. Both were equally "precipitous" and "dissolute."75

"Shuttered" refers most obviously to Caravaggio's cellar locations, alluding to both artistic quality and social rank, to his murky painted light and to his plebeian figures and sensibility.76 According to the painter-theorist Giovanni Bat- tista Volpato, the most conspicuous feature of Jacopo Bassa- no's late work was the serrated light that rakes across figures, picks out prominences such as the crown of a head, a shoul- der, or knee, and detaches them from the whole figure. Caravaggio shared with Bassano more than a lume serrato in its formal sense.77 Both were deemed to be base naturalists who did not (or could not) improve on the appearance of physical existence. Agucchi drew the two together syntactically and stylistically when he called Bassano the Peiraikos of modern painting and Caravaggio the new Demetrius.78

The socially based "shuttered" light of the basement also conveyed a sinister private world closed to the public forum of civilized behavior. It signaled a psychic space as much as a physical and social space, where, for example, Caravaggio could imprison Leonello to prevent his model from escaping. The word serrato recruits an interlocking set of associations including morbidity, danger, and secrecy, all connected to aspects of Caravaggio's psychobiography, so that in looking at his paintings we are reminded of the "shadows of the shuttered tomb."79

The "shuttered light" suggested seclusion and secrecy to several of Caravaggio's critics in other ways. For Pellegrino Antonio Orlandi, Caravaggio's cellar tenebrism fit the general category of "furtive painting" (un dipingerefurbesco), a style that was intended to conceal shortcomings by means of cloaking shadows.80 As the root furbo indicates, his style is a cheat because it enables him to avoid the difficulties of art (disegno, anatomy, and perspective). Like "shuttered," the "furtive style" refers simultaneously to biography and art criticism, packing into a single word Caravaggio's masking shadows, his fugitive life, his renditions of cheats in the Fortune-Tellerpaint- ings, and the ruffian flavor of his religious works all packed together into a word.81 Francesco Algarotti took his "shuttered light" to be a visible symptom of Caravaggio's "surly" (burbero) and "wild" (selvatico) character, thus bringing a serrated edge of menace and danger.

These cloaking, furtive, or shuttered shadows are variants of another aesthetically and morally defective style that was often attached to Caravaggio, the form-denying shadows known as macchia, defined by Baldinucci as "a dense and



frightfully dark forest... where brutes and thieves hide in the shadows [macchie] to engage in their malfeasance secretly, as one says, to make whatever it may be alla macchia, that is, to make it in hiding, secretly and furtively; thus of printers, counterfeiters, and forgers who print and make money without any authorization, one says to print or mint alla macchia."82

Annibale proposed to expose the dark secrets of this defective style to the sun of his painting. The painter who destroyed painting is himself destroyed when submitted to Annibale's "bright light of noon." Baglione, Bellori, and Baldinucci made him expire under the same consuming fire that ignites a deadly fever and unmasks the failure of his art. What might Caravaggio's response have been to Annibale's challenge? There is no direct evidence, and what follows is too contingent on a series of hypothetical suppositions to be convincing. Still, the case deserves airing if for no other reason than to encourage alternative readings. Just as Bagli- one, Bellori, and others mythologize Caravaggio as a "dark painter," so Caravaggio himself engaged in a related self- fashioning, as David Stone has recently shown.83 Caravaggio did so by inserting his portrait into his paintings and by adopting a style that would (in Baldinucci's words) "confirm in himself that proverb that says that every painter paints himself."84 If Annibale Carracci challenged Caravaggio's tenebrism with a truth-filled painting of light on first seeing Caravaggio's work, as Malvasia claimed for him, then we may assume that the occasion was the first public exhibition of Caravaggio's tenebrism, in the Contarelli Chapel paintings of 1600. When Annibale questions whether "this was something new" and groups Caravaggio's work with other "fellows with the never-seen-before style," he sounds very much like Fede- rico Zuccaro responding to the Contarelli paintings: "What is all the clamor about? ... I don't see anything here except the thought of Giorgione. .. ."85 Baglione claimed that this state- ment was made "while I was present." The Betrayal of Christ (National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin) was painted two years later in 1602.86 In it, according to Roberto Longhi, we find Caravaggio representing himself as the figure holding a lan- tern and illuminating the nighttime scene of Christ's betrayal.87 If this identification is correct, and scholars have ac- cepted it with an uncritical alacrity, then Caravaggio might be seen as casting himself in an opposing role as a latter-day Diogenes seeking redemption and casting light on a decep- tive and morally dark world.88 In this reading, however hypothetical it may be, Caravaggio presents himself not as the dark painter who came into the world to "destroy painting" but as another Carracci, savior of art, who shines the light of truth into Mannerist obscurity.

Narcissism, Naturalism, and Death I would like to conclude briefly with two overlooked seicento sources on Caravaggio that pathologize his pictorial naturalism and iconographic morbidity as signs of narcissism. The first is a book published in 1672 by a Theatine seminarian from Syracuse, Ippolito Falcone (1623-1695), Narciso alfonte, cioe l'uomo che si specchia nella propria miseria (Narcissus at the spring, that is, man who regards the reflection of his own wretchedness). The second is an engraved portrait of Cara- vaggio (Fig. 9) by Henri Simon Thomassin (1687-1741),

avowedly (but improbably) a copy after an original self-portrait. (Without further evidence, the designer will be called "Thomassin.") Even without Falcone identifying Caravaggio as a narcissistic painter or "Thomassin" depicting him absorbed in his mirror reflection, there is no lack of evidence for such a diagnosis. According to Bellori, "Caravaggio did not appreciate anyone but himself, calling himself a uniquely faithful imitator of nature."89 Baglione's libel suit was based, in part, on the belief that Caravaggio regarded his art as unique and inimitable. According to him, Caravaggio "spoke badly of the painters of the past, and also of the present, no matter how distinguished they were, because he thought that he alone had surpassed all the other artists in his profes- sion."90 Despite Caravaggio's denial in court to this charge, the evidence, both biographical and archival, supports Bagli- one. Narcissists were proud and arrogant, according to Tom- maso Stigliani, just those qualities Baglione found in his rival.91 When Caravaggio attacked Guido Reni for, allegedly, "stealing my style," or when he locked Leonello Spada ("a man after his own heart") in a room so that he could serve as his model, Caravaggio was acting narcissistically.

Because narcissism is a universal and inevitable condition that varies only in degree and kind, it cannot be limited to these symptoms, nor do these symptoms always signal narcissism. However, with style, subject, and character converging on morbidity, and with Caravaggio's repeated insertion of himself into his paintings, a narcissistic profile emerges. His habit of painting himself might have been motivated at first by exigency, but by the time he painted the Betrayal of Christ and David and Goliath (Galleria Borghese, Rome), he had more personal motives, whose psychological origins can only be guessed.92 One intriguing possibility proposed by Michael Fried is that Caravaggio was showing himself in the act of painting, simultaneously creating and regarding himself like Narcissus at the pond.93 Many other early modern painters engaged in automimesis, depicting themselves either as inci- dental observers of an event, as Caravaggio did in the Mar- tyrdom of Saint Matthew (S. Luigi dei Francesi, Rome) and in the Betrayal of Christ, or as principal characters, as in Sick Bacchus (Galleria Borghese) or as Goliath in David and Goli- ath. However, Caravaggio did so with greater frequency, to a degree that it personalized his art in ways that fascinate scholars, artists, and novelists today. His art was deeply personal and recalled for Baldinucci the proverb concerning automimesis:

One can pardon Caravaggio for his style. Whereas he wanted to confirm in himself that proverb that says that every painter paints himself since, if one observes the way that he talked, one finds something of that mentioned above. If we turn to the behavior of this person, we see there an over-the-top extravagance. It is not an understate- ment to say that, wanting to nourish his arrogance especially after being granted the dignity of knighthood, he dressed as a nobleman, but this did not change him since he still behaved like a brute and was negligent in hygiene and eating habits.94

Baldinucci's proverb that "every painter paints himself" began circulating in the circles of Cosimo de' Medici, Angelo



7 Caravaggio, Burial of Saint Lucy. Syracuse, S. Lucia al Sepolcro (photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY)

Poliziano, and Leonardo, serving different functions for different writers. For Cosimo and Poliziano, it was a psychological projection of one's character onto the surrounding world: "One would rather forget a hundred charities than one insult and that the offender never forgives and that every painter paints himself."95 Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary-one hundred acts of kindness versus one insult-an "offender" will form his worldview around the exceptional, rather than the usual, because it matches his na-

ture. The anticipatory attacks of Caravaggio, a frequent and ready offender, exemplify this cognitive aberration. Leo- nardo took the proverb in both its literal and psychological senses:

It is a fault in the extreme of painters to repeat the same movements, the same faces and the same style of drapery in one and the same narrative painting and to make most of the faces resemble their master, which is a thing I have



often wondered at, for I have known some who, in all their figures seem to have portrayed themselves from life, and in them one may recognize the attitudes and manners of their maker. If he is quick of speech and movement his figures are similar in their quickness, and if the master is devout his figures are the same with their necks bent, and if the master is a good-for-nothing his figures seem laziness itself portrayed from life. If the master is badly propor- tioned, his figures are the same. And if he is mad, his narrative will show irrational figures, not attending to what they are doing, who rather look about themselves, some this way and some that, as if in a dream. And thus each peculiarity in a painting has its prototype in the painter's own peculiarity. I have often pondered the cause of this defect and it seems to me that we may conclude that the very soul which rules and governs each body directs our judgment before it is our own. Therefore it has completed the figure of a man in a way that it has judged looks good, be it long, short, or snub-nosed. And in this way its height and shape are determined, and this judgment is powerful enough to move the arm of the painter and makes him repeat himself and it seems to this soul that this is the true way of representing a man and that those who do not do as it does commit an error. If it finds someone who resembles the body it has composed, it delights in it and often falls in love with it. And for this reason many fall in love with and marry women who resemble them, and often the children that are born to such people look like their parents.96

His explanation, derived from Dante's theory of love that "we love those who look like us," operates within the arena of narcissistic love without, however, explicitly mentioning it by name. At the time when Baldinucci applied the proverb to Caravaggio, seicento art writers had used it to describe invol- untary self-portraiture both of the artist's physical and psychological selves.97 It was always regarded as a personal or artistic failure, with the interesting exception of women artists: "Do not wonder that she [Lavinia Fontana] paints so beautifully because she paints herself being herself so beautiful."98 Baldinucci suggests, however, that Caravaggio's automimesis was not so much an autonomic reflex as a self- fashioned artistic persona that played on his infamous public misdeeds: "he wanted to confirm in himself the proverb that says that every painter paints himself...."9 Whereas other painters may paint themselves in a failure of recognition and will, Baldinucci's Caravaggio, "driven by his own nature" as Bellori noted, chose his course of action.

Falcone called Narciso alfonte a book on "a modern plague of narcissism." His theme was simple and insistent: by indulg- ing in self-contemplation and an absorption with material things, mankind overlooks the spiritual and is unprepared for death when it arrives swiftly and inevitably. What we take to be reality-the sensory, material world-is nothing more than "a self-admiration in the clear and transparent spring."100 Natural historians like Pliny died, according to Falcone, because they were so absorbed in nature that they did not recognize their own looming mortality, and poets like Torquato Tasso were so enraptured with their own verses that they disregarded the world around them and stumbled upon

8 Attributed to Caravaggio, Narcissus. Rome, Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica (photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY)

death.101 For painters, naturalism was the greatest signifier of mortality, and Caravaggio was the greatest naturalist.102 Re- calling Leon Battista Alberti's story of painting's origins, with Narcissus as the first painter ("What is painting other than a similar embrace, with art, of the pool's surface?"), he calls Narcissus the "great painter" who "portrayed himself in an instant so naturally in the spring."'03 Narcissus failed to dis- tinguish between a surface image and reality, just as (I might add) Caravaggio was thought to have mistaken himself for a nobleman once he had the Cross of Malta pinned to his cloak. Caravaggio's failure, according to Falcone, was a denial of anything that he could not see:

When Michelangelo da Caravaggio was asked to depict a group of angels in the large space occupying the upper portion of that famous painting [Burial of Saint Lucy, S. Lucia al Sepolcro, Syracuse; Fig. 7] where people are crying and gazing at the funeral of Saint Lucy, he responded that he didn't want to depict angels, saying: "I've never seen them and so I don't know how to portray them."104

With the blank wall looming above Saint Lucy and her mourners, they seem entombed. No angels and, as Bellori observed of Caravaggio in general, no heavens: "He never used clear blue air in his pictures.. . .105

Narcissus and Caravaggio also represented for Falcone the failure of humanity to recognize spirituality because both



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see through the artifice of the pool, though to do so you have only to nod your head or change your expression or slightly move your hand, instead of staying in the same attitude.

This is how Caravaggio envisioned his Narcissus (Fig. 8), frozen in symmetry, fixated on the image of himself that, in Alberti's words, he "embraces." For Falcone, neither Narcis- sus nor Caravaggio could grasp the intangible or compre- hend time. Both were tainted figures, deluded by superficial appearances. The narcissistic rage that gripped Caravaggio in his fatal chase after his property illuminates the proximity of naturalism and mortality in his painting. According to the seicento literary critic Tommaso Stigliani, the myth of Nar- cissus "clearly demonstrates the unhappy end of those who love their things too much."'07

"Thomassin" arrived at similar conclusions about narcissism and death as primary attributes of Caravaggio's naturalism. His engraved Portrait of Caravaggio (Fig. 9), with its mirror and skull, can be read at least two ways. A Falcone- based reading would see Caravaggio narcissistically engaged in his own reflection and hence negligent of the skull's reminder of death. Caravaggio ignores his books, piled under the skull, and instead gazes deeply at himself. A second reading, not inconsistent with the first in that it also draws on the iconography of vanitas, would see "Thomassin" construct- ing Caravaggio from Caravaggesque painted Mary Mag- dalens, such as one by Georges de La Tour (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Fig. 10). This is a more optimistic version of Caravaggio, one that sees him as a repentant sinner who reflects on himself with Christian knowledge. It is not Mancini's Caravaggio, who, by denying his brother, rejects the Church and its doctrine. Nor is it Sussino's Caravaggio, who feigns ignorance of or need for holy water and who "went about questioning our holy religion, for which he was accused of being a disbeliever."108 Nor is it Falcone's Cara- vaggio, who denies the existence of angels. Rather, it is the Caravaggio who, having killed Ranuccio Tomassoni, "fled Rome and... went to Palestrina where he painted a Mary Magdalen."109 In their accounts of Caravaggio's murder of Tomassoni, Mancini, Baglione, and Bellori present a narrative sequence of destruction-creation, sin-repentance that im- plies a causality and intentionality on Caravaggio's part, an act of contrition similar in type to his self-portrayal as the decapitated Goliath.11l

"Thomassin's" Caravaggio can be seen as a softening of the artist's character during the eighteenth century, when the dangers of Caravaggism had long ago receded. This softening can be observed in the subtle corrections made to Bellori's portrait of Caravaggio (Fig. 4) when it was reissued in 1728 as part of an expanded edition of the Vite (Fig. 11). The more sinister elements of his 1672 self have been edited out: the sneer on his mouth; his arched eyebrows; his shifty, baggy eyes; and his furrowed brow. In 1728 his character is carried mostly by a natty coiffure that almost looks bewigged-a more enlightened Caravaggio.

Philip Sohm has written books and articles on Italian art, architecture, criticism, and theory, 1500-1800. This article explores some of

10 Georges de La Tour, The Repentant Magdalen. Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund (photo ? 2001 Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington)

the applications of style criticism to art biography that emerged from the writing of his book Style in the Art Theory of Early Modern Italy (Cambridge University Press, 2001) [Department of Fine Art, University of Toronto, Toronto M5S 3G3 Canada].

Frequently Cited Sources

Baglione, Giovanni, Vite de'pittori, scultori, et architetti dal Pontificato di Gregorio XIII del 1572fino a' tempi di Papa Urbano VIII nel 1642 (Rome: Andrea Fei, 1642).

Baldinucci, Filippo, Notizie de'professori del disegno dal Cimabue in qua, ed. Paola Barocchi, vol. 3 (Florence: SPES, 1975).

Bellori, Giovan Pietro, Le vite de'pittori, scultori e architetti modemi, ed. E. Borea (Turin: Einaudi, 1976).

Falcone, Ippolito, Narciso alfonte, cio l'uomo che si specchia nella propria miseria (1672), 4th ed. (Venice, 1702).

Malvasia, Carlo Cesare, Felsina pittrice: Vite de'pittori bolognesi (1678), ed. G. P. Zanotti, 2 vols. (Bologna: Guidi all'Ancora, 1841).

Sussino, Francesco, Le vite de' pittori messinesi, ed. V. Martinelli (Florence: Le Monnier, 1960).

Vasari, Giorgio, Le vite de' piu eccellenti pittori scultori e architettori nelle redazioni del 1550 e 1568, ed. Paola Barocchi and Rosanna Bettarini, 6 vols. (Flor- ence: SPES, 1966-84).

Notes This article was first given as a lecture at the College Art Association Confer- ence, New York, 2000, in a session organized by Perry Chapman and Mariet Westermann titled "Biography as Art Criticism." I am grateful to them for their helpful suggestions and for the use of "Biography as Art Criticism" as a title for the first section of this article. I am especially endebted to Richard



11 Portrait of Caravaggio, from Bellori, Le vite, Rome: Mascardi, 1728, woodcut (photo: Getty Research Institute)

Spear, David Stone, and Marc Gotlieb for their careful, critical reading of the text. Charles Dempsey, Catherine Puglisi, Kathleen Weil-Garris Brandt, Mar- tenJan Bok, Wendy Walgate, and my son Matthew also contributed important material and observations.

1. Derek Jarman, Derek Jarman's Caravaggio: The Complete Film Script and Commentaries by DerekJarman (London: Thames and Hudson, 1986), 7.

2. Enzo Siciliano, "Morte di Caravaggio," in Cuore e fantasmi (Milan: Ar- noldo Mondadori, 1990), 165-74. I am endebted to Matthew Sohm for finding this story.

3. Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz, Die Legende vom Kfunstler: Ein geschichtlicher Versuch (Vienna: Krystall, 1934); and with emendations by Kurz and an introduction by E. H. Gombrich, translated as Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist: A Historical Experiment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979). For a discussion of this seminal work, see Catherine Soussloff, The Absolute Artist: The Historiography of a Concept (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 94-111.

4. Paul Barolsky, Why Mona Lisa Smiles and Other Tales by Vasari (University Park, Pa.: Penn State University Press, 1991), 4; see also idem, Michelangelo's Nose: A Myth and Its Maker (University Park, Pa.: Penn State University Press, 1990).

5. Kris and Kurz, 1979 (as in n. 3), 119, note that biographers sometimes "attempt to draw conclusions about the circumstances of the artist's life from his works," but they set this hypothesis aside as "exceeding the scope of our investigation." After I completed this article, David Stone shared with me a fascinating study that tries, successfully, to bridge the gap between the artist's real life and biographical fictions by suggesting that Caravaggio was the inventor of his own myth; Stone, "In Figura Diaboli: Self and Myth in Caravag- gio's David and Goliath," in From Rome to Eternity: Catholicism and the Arts in Italy, ca. 1550-1650, ed. P. M. Jones and T. Worcester (Leiden: Brill, 2002). The reader should turn to this excellent work for a review of the scholarly literature on Caravaggio's character and its relation to seicento biographies.

6. Hayden White, "Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory," in The Content of Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore:

Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 45. White's earlier work in Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in 19th Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973) and Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978) have proven influential with relatively few art historians, as Michael Ann Holly noted in Past Looking: Historical Imagination and the Rhetoric of the Image (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Uni- versity Press, 1996), 65-67.

7. The primary work on this question for seicento artists is an article by Irving Lavin, who has shown that "Bernini's death was in more than the usual sense like his life; it was a kind of artwork, diligently prepared and carefully executed to achieve the desired effect"; Lavin, "Bernini's Death," Art Bulletin 54 (1972): 159. This, however, is an exceptional case, since artistic intentionality rarely plays into death stories. Bernini not only hoped to project a flattering artistic and spiritual persona to those present, but also, it might be added, he attempted a posthumous autobiography by providing biographers with a tidy conclusion and summation of his art. Anton Raphael Mengs modeled his death on Raphael's just as he did his art: [Gian Lodovico Bianconi], Elogio storico del cavaliere Anton Raffaele Mengs con un catalogo delle opere da esso fatte (Milan: Nell'imperial monistero di S. Ambrogio, 1780), 74-78.

8. Vasari, vol. 2, 287. 9. Vasari, vol. 5, 333. 10. Lucretius, De rerum natura 3.58. 11. Denis Mahon, "Caravaggio's Death: A New Document," Burlington Mag-

azine 93 (1951): 202-4; Maurizio Calvesi, "Nascita e morte del Caravaggio," in L'ultimo Caravaggio e la cultura artistica a Napoli in Sicilia e a Malta (Siracusa: Ediprint, 1987); idem, Le realta di Caravaggio (Turin: Einaudi, 1990); Vincenzo Pacelli, "La morte di Caravaggio e alcuni suoi dipinti da documenti inediti," Studi di Storia dell'Arte 2 (1991): 167-88; idem, L'ultimo Caravaggio: Dalla



Maddalena a mezzafigura ai due San Giovanni, 1606-1610 (Todi: Ediart, 1994); and idem, "Una nuova ipotesi sulla morte di Michelangelo Merisi da Cara- vaggio," in Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio: La vita e le opere attraverso i documenti; Atti del convegno internazionale di studi, ed. Stefania Macioce (Rome: Logart, [1996]), 184-94; and for Calvesi's response to Pacelli's new-found documents, see his "Michelangelo da Caravaggio: Il suo rapporto con i Mattei e con altri collezionisti a Roma," in Caravaggio e la collezione Mattei (Milan: Electa, 1995), 17-28.

12. G. B. Marino, Galeria (Milan: Gio. Battista Bidelli, 1620), 28, quoted in Bellori, 229: "Fecer crudel congiura/Michele, a danni tuoi Morte, e Natura./ Questa restar temea/de la tua mano in ogni immagin vinta,/ch'era da te creata, e non dipinta./Quelle di sdegno ardea,/perche con larga usura/ quante la falce sua genti struggea/tante il pennello tuo ne rifacea." In contrast, the epitaph for Raffaelle Motta (1551-1578) claims that his art could not vanquish nature and so he succumbed to death: "Raphael alter cras: cum, ne succumberet Arti/Natura, immitis MorsJuvenem rapuit"; quoted in Carlo Valli, Breve trattato della vita di Raffaele Mota reggiano pittorefamosissimo (Reggio Emilia, 1657); reprint, ed. G. Adorni (Parma, 1850), 28. Both refer back to Pietro Bembo's epitaph for Raphael: "Ille hic est Raphael timuit quo sospite vinci/rerum magna parens et moriente mori." Falcone, 89, might have had Marino's epitaph in mind when he listed Caravaggio among artists killed by nature because of their proclivity: "Forse l'uccise morte adirata, perche eglino co'l pennello rifacevan tant'uomini, quant'ella colla falce ne distruggeva?" For Marino on Caravaggio, see Elizabeth Cropper, "The Petrifying Art: Mari- no's Poetry and Caravaggio," Metropolitan Museum Journal 26 (1991): 193-212. For a summary of seicento sources that discuss Caravaggio's naturalism, see Ferdinando Bologna, L'incredulita del Caravaggio e l'esperienza delle "cose natu- rali" (Turin: Einaudi, 1992), esp. 144-54.

13. For Milesi's epitaph, see Giorgio Fulco, "'Ammirate l'altissimo pittore': Caravaggio nelle rime inedite di Marzio Milesi," Ricerche di Storia dell'Arte 10 (1980): 65-89.

14. Roger de Piles, Abrege de la vie despeintres (Paris: Charles de Sercy, 1699), 341-42.

15. F. Pyat, "La mort de Michel-Ange de Caravage," L'Artiste 4 (1832): 111-14. I am grateful to Marc Gotlieb for calling this story to my attention.

16. Baglione, 138-39 (translations of Baglione and Bellori are based on those in Howard Hibbard, Caravaggio [New York: Harper and Row, 1983], app. 2): "Arrivato ch'egli fu nella spiaggia, fu in cambio fatto prigione, e posto dentro le carceri, ove per due giorni Leone a veder, se poteva in mare rawisare il ritenuto, e poi rilassato, piu la felluca non ritrovava si, che postosi in furia, come disperato andava per quella spiaggia sotto la sferza del Sol vascello, che le sue robe portava. Ultimamente arrivato in un luogo della spiaggia misesi in letto con febre maligna; e senza aiuto humano tra pochi giorni mori malamente, come appunto male havea vivuto."

17. The first rumor actually predates his death by almost a year: an avviso sent on October 24, 1609, from Rome to the duke of Urbino announces Caravaggio's murder. The documentation concerning Caravaggio's journey from Naples to Rome and his death in Port'Ercole is too extensive to detail here. For the dominant theories, see the work by Mahon, Calvesi, and Pacelli cited in n. 11 above. For recent summaries, see Macioce (as in n. 11); Helen Langdon, Caravaggio (London: Chatto and Windus, 1998); and Catherine Puglisi, Caravaggio (London: Phaidon, 1998). For subsequent additions to the literature, see Michele Maccherini, "Caravaggio nel carteggio familiare di Giulio Mancini," Prospettiva 86 (Apr. 1997): 71-92; and Stefania Macioce, "Precisazioni sulla biografia del Caravaggio a Malta," in Sulle orme di Caravaggio tra Roma e Sicilia, ed. Vincenzo Abbate et al. (Venice: Marsilio, 2001), 25-37.

18. Calvesi, 1987 (as in n. 11), 27: "E' morto Michiel Angelo da Caravaggio pittore cellebre a Port'Hercole mentre da Napoli veniva a Roma p(er) la gratia da S(ua) S(anti)ta fattali del bando capitale che haveva."

19. Pacelli, 1994 (as in n. 11), letter ofJuly 29, 1610; and idem, 1996 (as in n. 11), 184-85: "Caravaggio non e morto in Procida, ma a port'hercole, perche esendo capitato con la felluca, in q(u)ale andava: a palo, ivi da quel Capitano fu carcerato, e la felluca in q(u)el romore tiratasi in alto mare se ne ritorno a Napoli, il Caravaggio restato in pregione, si liber6 con un'sborso grosso di denari, e per la terra e forse a piedi si ridusse sino a porthercole, ove ammalatosi ha lasciato la vita."

20. Baglione, 27. The "Sol Leone" does not refer to the zodiac Leo (July 23-August 22), since Motta died in May and Caravaggio on July 18.

21. For Leoni's portraits as Vasarian headers to Gigli's planned biographies of artists who were overlooked or underrated by Vasari, see the introduction by Barbara Agosti and Silvia Ginzburg to their critical edition of Giulio Cesare Gigli, La pittura trionfante (Porretta Terme: I Quaderni del Battello Ebbro, 1996), 7. Gigli's Pittura was originally published in Venice, 1615. For further discussion of Gigli, see M. Spagnolo, "Appunti per Giulio Gigli: Pittori e poeti nel primo seicento," Ricerche di Storia dell'Arte 59 (1996): 56-74; and Philip Sohm, "La critica d'arte del seicento: Carlo Ridolfi e Marco Boschini," in La pittura nel Veneto: II Seicento, vol. 2, ed. Mauro Lucco (Milan: Electa, 2001), 173-204. For further discussion of Leoni's portraits, not in the context of Gigli's Gareggio pittorico, see H. W. Kruft, "Ein Album mit Portratzeichnungen Ottavio Leonis," Storia dell'Arte4 (1969): 449-58; and Luigi Ficacci, ed., Claude Mellan, gli anni romani: Un incisore tra Vouet e Bernini (Rome: Multigrafica, 1989), 144-53.

22. "Luca the barber," quoted in Sandro Corradini and Maurizio Marini,

"The Earliest Account of Caravaggio in Rome," Burlington Magazine 138 (1998): 25-28.

23. Gigli (as in n. 21), 53. 24. Bellori, 232: "Tali modi del Caravaggio acconsentivano alla sua fiso-

nomia ed aspetto: era egli di color fosco, ed aveva foschi gli occhi, nere le ciglia ed i capelli; e tale riusci ancora naturalmente nel suo dipingere. La prima maniera dolce e pura di colorire fu la megliore, essendosi avanzato in essa al supremo merito e mostratosi con gran lode ottimo coloritore lom- bardo. Ma egli trascorse poi nell'altra oscura, tiratovi dal proprio tempera- mento, come ne' costumi ancora era torbido e contenzioso; gli convenne per6 lasciar prima Milano e la patria; dopo fu costretto fuggir di Roma e di Malta, ascondersi per la Sicilia, pericolare in Napoli, e morire disgraziata- mente in una spiaggia."

25. Giovanni Ingegneri, Fisionomia naturale (Milan: Girolamo Bordoni e Pietromartire Locarni, 1607), 350; and Cornelio Ghirardelli, introduction to Cefalogiafisonomica (Bologna: Evangelista Dossi, 1630). Ghirardelli's treatise is particularly interesting for art historians because he includes nearly one hundred engravings of heads, each illustrating a different physiognomic aspect discussed in the text.

26. Ingegneri (as in n. 25), 350. 27. Camillo Baldi, Trattato come da una lettera missiva si conoscano la natura e

qualita dello scrivere (Milan: Gio. Batt. Bidelli, 1625). For a discussion of Baldi, see the preface by Armando Petrucci to his edition of Baldi's Lettera (Porde- none: Studio Tesi, 1992); and for a discussion of Baldi in relation to Giulio Mancini, see Philip Sohm, Pittoresco: Marco Boschini, His Critics and Their Critiques of Painterly Brushwork in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Italy (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 76-77.

28. Baldi, 1625 (as in n. 27), chap. xii, 44-46. 29. Ingegneri (as in n. 25), 14; and Ghirardelli (as in n. 25), 27, 29, 149. 30. Baglione (147) gives this information in a comic version of imitation

where Caravaggio's follower Carlo Saraceni mimics him in life. 31. Gigli (as in n. 21), 53: ". . . di fantistico umor, certo bizzarro,/pallido in

viso, e di capillatura/assai grande, arricciato,/gli occhi vivaci, si, ma incaver- niti,/ch'un aureo baston portava in mano/per allentar, per stringer, per condurre,/come piaceva a lui, dietro alla Donna l'onorata gente."

32.Julia Lupton, "Typological Designs: Creation, Iconoclasm, and Nature in Vasari's Lives of the Saints," in Afterlives of the Saints: Hagiography, Typology, and Renaissance Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).

33. Giovanna Perini, "I1 Poussin di Bellori," in Poussin et Rome: Actes du colloque a 1'Academie de France a Rome, ed. Olivier Bonfait et al. (Paris: Reunion des Musees Nationaux, 1996), 294.

34. Although Bellori admits the beneficial effects of poison, especially at the turn of the century when painting needed a bit of poisoning, he concentrates on its undesirable effects (Le vite de' pittori, scultori e architetti moderni [Rome: Per il succeso al Mascardi, 1672], 231): "Si come dunque alcune erbe produ- cono medicamenti salutiferi e veleni perniciosissimi, cosi il Caravaggio, se bene giov6 in parte, fu nondimeno molto dannoso e mise sottosopra ogni ornamento e buon costume della pittura."

35. Mia Cinotti, "Appendice," in Gian Alberto Dell'Acqua, II Caravaggio e le sue grandi opere da San Luigi deiFrancesi (Milan: Rizzoli, 1971), 151 (F 31 [Nov. 19, 1600]).

36. Andre Felibien, Entretiens sur les vies et sur les ouvrages des plus excellents peintres anciens et modernes, 5 vols. (Paris: Jean-Baptiste Coignard, 1679), vol. 3, 203-5: "M. Poussin... ne pouvoit rien souffrir du Caravage, et disoit qu'il estoit venu au monde pour destruire la Peinture." Baglione, 138: "Moreover, some people thought that he had destroyed the art of painting [Anzi presso alcuni si stima, haver' esso rovinata la pittura]." Albani to Bononi, quoted in Malvasia, vol. 2, 163: "Non pote mai tollerare, che si seguitasse il Caravaggio, scorgendo essere quel modo il precipizio e la totale ruina della nobilissima e compitissima virtu della pittura .. ." For alternative views, see Louis Marin, To Destroy Painting, trans. Mette Hjort (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

37. Federico Borromeo, Della pittura sacra, ed. Barbara Agosti (Pisa: Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, 1994), 97 (Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, ms F 31 inf., fol. 130v): "Narra a simile de Michel Angelo Caravagij: in illo apparebat l'osteria, la crapula, nihil venusti: per lo contrario Rafaelo."

38. Vincenzo Carducho, Dialogos de la pintura (Madrid: Fr. Martinez, 1633); reprint, ed. F. Calvo Serraller (Madrid: Turner, 1977), 270.

39. Bellori, 214, 230. For Raphael's death, see Barolsky, 1991 (as in n. 4), 38-39. The divine Raphael died, as he was born, on Good Friday, just like Petrarch, and wasjust finishing Christ's face in the Transfiguration (Pinacoteca Vaticana, Rome) when overtaken by death. Giampietro Zanotti, Nuovofregio di gloria a Felsina sempre pittrice nella vita di Lorenzo Pasinelli, pittore bolognese (Bologna, 1703), 98. Giulio Mancini, Considerazioni sulla pittura, ed. Adriana Marucchi (Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1956), vol. 1, 225-26.

40. Vasari, vol. 3, 360 (with reference to Castagno's frescoes at S. Maria Nuova, now lost): "Parimente vi ritrasse M. Bernardo di Domenico della Volta, spedalingo di quel luogo, inginocchioni, che par vivo; et in un tondo nel principio dell'opere se stesso, con viso di Giuda Scarioto, come egl'era nella presenza e ne' fatti."

41. Baldinucci's six-volume work was published in Florence by Santi Fran- chi in 1686, Piero Martini in 1688, Giuseppe Manni in 1702, and G. G. Tartini in 1728. Baldinucci, 687.

42. Bellori, 228-29. Francois-Bernard Lepicie, Catalogue raisonne des tableaux



du roi avec un abrege de la vie des peintres (Paris: L'Imprimerie Royale, 1752), vol. 1, 93. A.J. Dezallier d'Argenville, Abrege de la vie des plus fameux peintres (Paris: De Bure, 1762), vol. 2, 286.

43. Bellori, 228-29: "Ond'egli, quanto prima gli fu possibile montato sopra una feluca, pieno d'acerbissimo dolore s'invio a Roma, avendo gia con l'intercessione del card. Gonzaga ottenuto dal papa la sua liberazione. Per- venuto alla spiaggia, la guardia spagnuola, che attendeva un altro cavaliere, l'arrest6 in cambio e lo ritenne prigione. E se bene fu egli tosto rilasciato in liberta, non per6 rividde pii la sua feluca che con le robbe lo conduceva. Onde agitato miseramente da affanno e da cordoglio, scorrendo il lido al piu caldo del sole estivo, giunto a Porto Ercole si abbandon6, e sorpreso da febbre maligna mori in pochi giorni, circa gli anni quaranta di sua vita, nel 1609, anno funesto per la pittura, avendoci tolto insieme Annibale Carracci e Federico Zuccheri. Cosi il Caravaggio si ridusse a chiuder la vita e l'ossa in una spiaggia deserta."

44. Dante, Inferno, canto 1, Purgatorio, lines 24-78. See also Petrarch, Can- zoniere (3.1.part.l) and (7.4.part.1): "Consumando mi vo di piaggia in piaggia,/Il di pensoso, poi piango la notte." Leon Battista Alberti, Intercoenales, quoted in Eugenio Garin, ed., Prosatori latini del quattrocento (Milan: Ricciardi, 1952), 648, Alberti compared life to a flowing river and death to the immobile shores: "Is fluvius latine Vita aetasque mortalium dicitur; eius ripa Mors...." Giacomo Zane, Rime (Venice: D. e G. B. Guerra, 1562), 151; and Annibale Caro, Rime (Venice: Bernardo Giunti, 1584), 68. Both used the poetic expression "mortal piaggia" to signify earth as a place of transition, suffering, and death. Gabriel Fiamma, Rime spirituali (Venice: Francesco de' Franceschi, 1570; reprint, Treviso,

Documents

Sohm, P., Caravaggios Deaths