Caravaggio's Portraits: (Without) Warts and All

Here's another painting that's part of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston's #TrueCaravaggio exhibit.

So...all the stuff I posted in my last blog, about Caravaggio's trademarks? The stuff about the red drapery and the dirty feet and things falling off ledges? Yeah, throw that stuff out the window for this, because this is a portrait. Painting portraits must be a particularly challenging thing: yes, you get paid to make them, and that's obviously good, but you must also make a portrait realistic AND flattering if you want to get paid- which, I imagine, can be challenging when the subject of your portrait is a 74 year old military man. Caravaggio (this work is known to be by him) totally succeeded here. Here's the backstory I can scrabble together for this painting, which makes it all that much more interesting:

Caravaggio killed someone from a powerful family in Rome in 1606, possibly over a tennis game, possibly by accident. (It wasn't his first run-in with the Italian police either.) He spent the rest of his life on the run, in different cities, trying to rebuild his reputation and get back to Rome, where he had been famous and sought after for the best painting commissions in the city. One of the places he ran to was Malta, where he hoped to be made a knight. Why? It's thought that he assumed this would give him the stature he needed to be pardoned for his crime. Obviously, being made a knight is no easy feat, however. Caravaggio painted this portrait, and another similar one, to ingratiate himself with the knights in his new (albeit temporary) home.

First off, let's look at our portrait of Fra Antonio Martelli (above). In Michael Fried's The Moment of Caravaggio he says that x-rays that have been taken of Caravaggio's paintings often prove that he likely painted ears first when he painted someone, and that "in general, in his paintings, ears are given fully as much prominence as eyes." He wasn't talking of his particular portrait, but he certainly could have been; we don't see two eyes, but an ear and an eye - unusual for a portrait. Andrew Graham-Dixon says of this painting in his Caravaggio biography, A Life Sacred and Profane,that "Caravaggio has painted the hands so cursorily they seem unfinished. It was the sitter's face that fascinated him." Hmm. I'll be happy to see this in Boston and judge for myself - the hands seem pretty good to me! Imagine the intracacies of painting the hand holding the sword.

This Caravaggio painting of Alof de Wigancourt (which hangs in the Louvre in Paris) was done around the same time as the one above, which I'm showing here since, for many years, people thought they were of the same person, and in fact, the one mentioned above was at one time thought to be a practice version of this one. Again, we see the importance of the ear, and only one eye visible (well, basically). What I've read suggests that perhaps Caravaggio posed his subject this way because he wanted to flatter, and Alof de Wigancourt had a prominent wart on the side of his nose that's hidden in shadow. He also looks quite a bit thinner here than I've seen him in portraits by other painters...again, probably Caravaggio really wanting that to get on his good side (literally) to secure that papal pardon and a passage back to Rome.











And it speaks to Caravaggio's new humility (for lack of a better word), for him to hide flaws in painting someone. When painting Fillide Melandroni, a prostitute that was the subject of at least four of his paintings, he always kept her gimpy finger. Check it out below,in the upper hand, holding the sword:

and here, holding the mirror:

So...is the portrait of Fra Antonio Martelli a #TrueCaravaggio? Yes. But a humbled Caravaggio, who was on the run.