Free Caravaggio by Francine Prose Page A

compelling image.
    There’s a faintly distasteful sexuality in the general’s naked muscular writhings, the blade just slicing through the neck, the spurting blood that looks more like blood in a painting—indeed, like red paint—than like blood in “real life.” And the nipples visibly hardening under Judith’s white blouse do little to decrease our sense that we are being shown something far more unsavory than a mere murder. Judith seems to share this distaste, as—observed by a bronzed crone who evokes Leonardo’s sketches of geriatric grotesques—she performs her odious task at arm’s length and with the repelled determination of a schoolgirl dissecting a frog.
    Yet despite its shortcomings, Judith and Holofernes marks a major watershed, a sea change in its creator’s vision. His first study of sensational violence is also the first work in which a small and theatrically lit cast is posed against a nearly black, almost featureless background, empty but for the furled bloodred cloth that will keep reappearing in his work, above The Death of the Virgin , and half covering the dying Saint John in yet another beheading, this one in the Co-Cathedral of Saint John on the island of Malta.
    It may well be that poor Beatrice Cenci’s ghost hovered over the burly, struggling, partly decapitated Holofernes, though it’s just as likely that the success of Caravaggio’s Medusa inspired him to try his hand at another subject involving beheading, blood, homicide, and the instant of death. Surely the artist must have had plenty of opportunity to observe random killing and ceremonial execution, in art as well as life.
    For decades, decapitation—along with all manner of grisly and ingenious methods of achieving martyrdom and imposing it on others—had been a hugely popular and rich vein of creative inspiration, encouraged by the cult of martyrdom that swept through the church during the sixteenth century. Around the inside wall of Rome’s round church of Santo Stefano Rotondo is a kind of baroque cyclorama, a cylindrical fresco in sections, each depicting one or more saints in the process of being dismembered, boiled in oil, stabbed, beaten, burned, fed to the lions, and so forth—all painted with an ineptitude and cartoonlike childish glee that makes the effect of the whole all that much more loathsome and disturbing.
    However chilling we may find them, the sorry fates of the martyrs were among the inspiriting images that spiked the Jubilee fever of the pilgrims who converged on Rome in 1600 . During a Holy Year, which occurs every quarter century—the last was in 2000 —the faithful who reach Rome are rewarded by a chance to have every last sin washed away and to return home with souls as clean as those of freshly baptized babies. In solidarity with the three million travelers who arrived in Rome that year, Clement VIII wept copious tears as he made his weekly barefoot visits to the major basilicas, washed the feet of the pilgrims, and invited twelve of them to eat daily at his table. He was notably less generous to the Protestants, Jews, and assorted heretics who were publicly executed and tortured during his pontificate. Perhaps the most famous of these was Giordano Bruno, who—for the crime of refusing to recant his views on morality, cosmology, and the nature of the universe—was led out, naked and muzzled to prevent him from denouncing his tormentors, and burned at the stake, on February 17 , in the Campo de’ Fiori.
    This, then, was the society—violent and intemperate, suffused by the specter of disaster and the spectacle of merciless death, trafficking in empty promises of salvation without hope, of redemption without a sign of where redemption might be found, of dispensations reduced to the price of an arduous journey—in which Caravaggio lived. And this was the world he brought with him as he contemplated the bare walls of