M, p.23
M, page 23
and the angel was nothing beside M’s new Matthew. Unlike the astute businessman of Matthew called, or the elderly priest he became for Matthew killed, the Matthew who went up over the altar was a puzzled barefoot peasant taking an adult literacy lesson from God’s smirking pubescent messenger.
This wasn’t funny the way a lot of current religious art was. M’s art wasn’t kitsch – the joke belonged to his own way of seeing the transmission of holy writ and this was why it had consequences. Kitsch was altogether different. The counter reformation was art’s first great age of kitsch – never before had such terrible intensity of feeling found expression in such insanely constricted imagery, but it took a certain kind of observing intelligence to enjoy it, and without your own contribution the art stayed simply dire. Kitsch was Cesari’s Santa Barbara. When Cesari was commissioned by Pietro Aldobrandini to paint the patron saint of the bombardiers of the castel Sant’ Angelo, about five years before M’s Matthew commission, he produced a santa Barbara that garrisoned soldiers would appreciate, a santa Barbara with a touch of Betty Grable, on the tacit understanding that the cardinal’s uncle Clement VIII wouldn’t be invited to the unveiling ceremony in the church of the castel Sant’ Angelo in 1597, or ever hear about the painting. The pope wasn’t, and didn’t. He would’ve been deeply shocked. Santa Barbara, a tad plump and with a face like the one on Annibale Carracci’s virgin, only with her hair unbraided and falling wantonly, was rolling her eyes up toward an angel who was wrapping her in a bolt of ultralight fabric. Except that one plump breast had flopped free of the drapery. It was the breast, and his own nephew’s complicity with his favourite painter in its exposure, that his beatitude wasn’t to know about, though it was a very small concession in an otherwise highly decorous painting. The breast survived, suspended between what was acceptable and what not, until catholic zealotry draped it in the nineteenth century and restorers bared it again in the twentieth.
M was now a rival of Cesari’s. That he might’ve found his old employer’s santa Barbara funny was suggested by the way he worked her into his own new painting. In the insolent and androgynously pubescent boy angel he now mimicked Barbara’s drapes and plumply sinuous posture, known in the mannerist trade as the serpentina, particularly the way the flimsy fabric sat on the soft belly and slightly raised thigh, and the tumbling hair. Barbara’s serpentine stance was merely formal, an antecedent of the cocked thigh bathing beauty pose, but M’s angel took advantage of his own sinuousness to wrap himself around the seated saint, breathing out the words and guiding Matthew’s horny hand across the open book with soft fingers, as Matthew wrinkled his brow and stared in amazement at the elegant Hebrew he found himself writing.
M had promised in his contract to have the painting ready by pentecost, which came on May 23 that year. The contract had been very insistent on that point.
M must have finished it with all perfection and with the utmost possible excellence of workmanship and deliver and install it thus finished and perfected in the above named place, which was in place of the white marble statue.
That gave him three and a half months and he delivered on time. The delivery date mattered because pentecost was a major fixture on the French calendar in Rome. Every year the community held a special service in San Luigi attended by the ambassador of France and all the cardinals professing loyalty to the French crown. The celebrations of 1602 were particularly significant as the first attended by France’s new ambassador. Philippe de Béthune had arrived in Rome the previous October to lead Henri IV’s new diplomatic counter offensive against the Spanish dominance in Rome. After his absolution by the pope and his remarriage to Maria de’ Medici, Henri IV was determined to seize the initiative from Spain and rebuild the French party inside the college of cardinals. What wasn’t yet part of Béthune’s brief was his imminent intervention in M’s turbulent personal life. The presence of Béthune and his retinue from the embassy of France and of the fourteen proFrench cardinals who’d accepted the invitation to the service and of the French and proFrench community in Rome were meanwhile why the priests of San Luigi were anxious to have M’s altarpiece ready that day.
It was the priests, Bellori emphasized, who rejected Matthew & angel. Whether it was the august occasion itself that made them lose their nerve, and whether they knocked it back before or after the pentecost service – whether the painting was seen in place by the ambassador and the cardinals – the drama and publicity surrounding the rejection made the experience a burning humiliation for M, and left him, in Bellori’s account despairing … desperate. It was the peasant Matthew who really upset people. He was sitting in the Savonarola chair previously used by the young money counter in Matthew called, dressed in a shortie tunic like asylum inmates’ issue, bare armed, bare legged, barefoot, his cloak or blanket slung across the chair, toenails blackened and remaining hair ruffled, being patronized by this cheeky kid with a pair of swan’s wings on his back. The gospel he was writing was supposed to be arriving as dictation directly from God in the original Hebrew, the angel serving as intermediary. This was the story but it supposed some sort of active participation, not this polite puzzlement as of a labourer grandparent being taught to surf the net. The saint’s uncouthness projected itself forcefully into the chapel. The job of replacing a third rate sculpture invited M to enhance the relief like illusionism of his image, so that the dirty foot at the end of Matthew’s crossed leg was jutting out over the altar, its black nailed big toe poking into the face of any celebrant priest.
M’s aggression was frontal and inescapable, but it was mild after the big horse’s rump obliquely facing the heavenward soaring virgin Mary in the Cerasi job he’d just finished, or the labourer’s arse thrust in your own face when you looked at Peter. Yet this time people were really upset. Nobody liked it, said Baglione bluntly and Bellori later elaborated the reasons.
When he finished the middle painting of Matthew and it was placed over the altar, it was removed by the priests who said that that figure had no decorum, nor did he look like a saint, sitting there with his legs crossed and his feet rudely exposed to the people.
People seemed not to mind the rather sexy adolescent angel, pressing up against the middle aged saint in a quite earthly way, or else they overlooked him in outrage at the barefoot illiterate Matthew. M had drastically misjudged prevailing orthodoxy and the strength of institutional feeling. He’d shown none of Cesari’s skill at matching product with client, or Carracci’s brilliance at generalizing problems out of existence. M’s extraordinary public successes, and what he’d lately got away with in the Cerasi paintings, had encouraged a certain obliviousness of other people’s values, or a feeling that the power of his art made him immune from them. M was shattered by the reaction to Matthew & angel. Bellori wrote that the rejection – evidently very different from what’d happened over the first versions of Peter and Saul –
greatly upset M and left him almost despairing for his reputation … [he] was desperate over this affront …
His distress was ingenuous though hardly surprizing. His Matthew & angel wittily and beautifully played over the space that separated the church’s mannerist artifice, in the joke of the preteen angel, from the reality of an illiterate working man’s effort to grasp the message of the Book, in this case his own. The drama of Matthew’s calloused foot invading the space between canvas and viewer, more daring than any optical bravura he’d ever shown before, also made sculptural fun of the dreary rejected statue in white marble lately carted off. It was a deeply benign canvas, filled with the serene and sanguine enjoyment in human incongruities he’d last shown in the Rest on the flight into Egypt, but now more inward, more deeply real in its empathy with Matthew’s human bafflement. Humour, however, was the enemy of decorum and nothing mattered more than decorum. Matthew & angel had to go. The affront to his new reputation was a shocking rebuff on his home turf at the French church, a few yards from Del Monte’s and Giustiniani’s and a worrying turn in his new life as a public painter. It was much worse now than with the first transitional versions of Peter and Paul. Matthew & angel was a mature and wholly realized painting. If the priests didn’t like his work in San Luigi, between the acclaimed Matthew paintings of less than two years earlier, where could he hope to succeed? In the face of M’s and the art academy’s cardinal protector, the rejection was a sobering display of ecclesiastical clout. Vincenzo Giustiniani saved the day.
Intervening with those priests, he took the picture for himself and got him to do another different one,
whisking it over the road into his gallery to hang with the Lute player and more recent work. Bellori said he hung it in a place of honour. Baglione claimed Giustiniani was so infatuated with M’s work that he took it simply because it was a painting by M. M did another Matthew & angel for San Luigi that was deemed decorous and stayed in place over the Contarelli altar. He received his final payment from Francesco Contarelli, acting for Crescenzi, on September 22. This was four months after the original delivery date, but in just seven and a half months he’d painted not one but two full paintings.
M’s resilience was his strength as a painter. He was able to rethink his art in the process of creating it – resolving the imaginative dilemmas with a wholly new conception of the subject. On life painting he was intransigent. On his imagining he was best when goaded into seeing that compromise was useless. Pressures on his imagination from outside had produced his most original work. When Matthew & angel was rejected things were different. He’d already given the subject his best shot and now he demonstrated a more prosaic inner resource, a different kind of impressiveness that in the long run he needed no less. He showed now that he was able to control his own exuberance and respond to other demands in a way that didn’t compromise his art. M now drew on resources Annibale Carracci would’ve envied and that maybe Carracci’s own painting had made M aware of. The discipline even seemed to strengthen his painterly technique. The second Matthew & angel was a strong, simple, austere, even fine painting, and terribly controlled. The playfulness of the first version had evaporated and left a stony residue of form and brilliant mineral colour. It was impeccably decorous. Or seemed to be. A longer look revealed some discreetly subversive reminders of his own autonomy.
The second painting showed in its absences what’d offended in the first. The new Matthew was no longer a vigorous amiable peasant but a gaunt old greybearded man, the model from Matthew killed recalled to duty, bare feet no longer in your face but away from it, covered from neck to ankle in a dun coloured tunic and an orange cloak, holding the pen unaided and even quite expertly in his hand. The angel was older and tougher looking – even loutish – and no longer standing pressed against him but hovering overhead in a totally non-physical manner that allowed room for no misinterpretations. Any potentially disturbing former sense that the two might’ve been enjoying their proximity was replaced now by a distinct vertical gap of black space between them, and a startled or anxious look on Matthew’s face. The new angel was held up or weighed down by a sinister pair of dark wings – almost invisible in the dead black space that surrounded and separated the two figures and took up half the canvas – and a turbine of freshly washed bed linen. The smallness and apartness of the two figures, brightly suspended in a lot of darkness, was unlike M and looked like a willed breaking up of the powerful and unsettling synergy of his earlier locked double composition. In a very Roman and slightly thuggish manner the angel ticked off items on red adolescent hands with black rimmed fingernails – not Del Monte’s type of dreamy beauty at all, though the lively earlier angel might’ve passed. M was answering his priestly critics by throwing Matthew’s relation with the angel into reverse. The subversiveness of his new treatment lay now in the unlikeliness that this particular angel would have much enlightenment for the intellectual old saint, who indeed looked a bit startled, frightened even, at the flying street kid who’d disturbed him at work. But the incongruity was now muted, generalized and controlled, put beyond the reach of hostile critics.
M made every effort to succeed in this second picture, wrote Bellori – no doubt truly. What gave strict decorum the lie was the old saint’s uneasy stance and M’s newly playful use of forward three dimensionality in his pictorial space. The angle of Matthew’s vision propelled the angel out in front of the picture plane. That Matthew was standing right on the plane was shown by the bench. He was resting his knee on the same wooden bench the bravo had sat on in Matthew called, whose front corner had now lost its solid footing in the painting, and he was about to topple out arse over tip into the space above the real altar. Bringing Matthew crashing down with it, if not the angel who’d put the disconcerted Matthew into this precarious stance. In soothing the guardians of orthodoxy, M had supplied them with a visual booby trap. They wanted decorum and he gave them counter reformation slapstick.
* * *
NOBODY LIKED IT, claimed Baglione, but Vincenzo Giustiniani snapped up Matthew & angel, straight away simply because it was a work by M. The marchese, wrote Baglione, was the dupe of a public relations job,
persuaded by the great fuss about M that Prosperino of the grotesques was making everywhere.
Prospero Orsi was playing promoter of M’s art, he claimed, because he had it in for Giuseppe Cesari. Mancini remembered it the other way round, that Cesari resented Prospero Orsi as a troublemaker for leaving the Cesari art factory and taking the young M with him seven years earlier. Prospero apparently did a good job on M’s behalf, because Giustiniani wasn’t the only wealthy private collector to fall for his pitch.
In fact he got signor Ciriaco Mattei to fall for his noise too, and M … got many hundreds of scudi out of that gentleman.
Bellori, who never knew him and gave no reason, later said Prospero was acting out of self interest in making M known. Mancini, who did know him, said Prospero was the kind of person who always went out of his way to help younger artists get started. M himself remained close to Prospero Orsi for over ten years of daily life, from the time they met until M left Rome. Prospero went bail to get M out of jail in 1605, and showed himself a friend when M was a wanted man and there was nothing to gain except recognition of M’s art and maybe M’s freedom. In 1602 M’s art no longer needed advertizing. Del Monte commissioned no new paintings after M left the palazzo Madama but Vincenzo Giustiniani, Ciriaco Mattei and Ottavio Costa were now pressing to buy M’s work. Del Monte was likely pleased that his protégé had made it into the wider world and felt his work was done. There was no sign of a break between them. Whatever his personal living arrangements, M continued for years to invoke Del Monte’s magic name when he was in trouble with the authorities, and Del Monte was always ready to intervene discreetly when needed. He understood M was difficult and he knew M was the greatest painter of his time.
The large public drama of M’s history paintings for Contarelli and Cerasi was matched by the intensity if not the scale of the private excitements aroused by the work he was now doing for the wealthy. Outsiders had to imagine what privileged access to the galleries of the powerful might let them see, and the art world’s eager talk soon amplified its new sensations. The unseen and the merely heard about afforded a special kind of frisson and the complicated play of double standards made art a minefield for the client. Daringness of treatment was even more likely to get mixed up in second hand reports with scandalousness of theme. If the trouble in the churches was mostly the doctrinal correctness and decorum of the images, the problem rearing its head in private collections was mainly erotic, and there the problems of decorum took on a whole other sense.
Clement VIII probably heard about Carracci’s erotica on the Farnese ceiling from his nephew Pietro. What mattered was that he shouldn’t clap eyes on it personally. The palazzo Farnese on the campo de’ Fiori with its gallery of pagan nudes was safe from a papal visit, protected by Aldobrandini jealousy of Farnese wealth and power. Even so, young cardinal Odoardo, who’d conceived the whole project largely as an assertion of autonomy and a smack in the eye to the canting pope, lost his nerve as work proceeded – especially now the two dynasties were linked by the marriage of Ranuccio Farnese of Parma with Margherita Aldobrandini. Both sides were hoping to gain from this union and nobody wanted trouble. Annibale Carracci’s later paintings on the walls were a lot more demure than the erotic riot on the ceiling and some of them verged on the moralistic. None of the many female nudes in the Farnese collection of classical sculpture was installed as planned in the gallery niches. Delicate white veils, as the frescos were applied to the wet plaster, were hastily inserted between grasping male hands and plump female pudenda. There was talk, years later, of Agostino Carracci’s having left town in a hurry just ahead of Clement VIII’s punitive wrath. Agostino was also a painter and the rumour may have been connected with the hand he was giving his brother Annibale on the frescos. Agostino’s two contributions had been the most erotically daring of all and had to be censored. When cardinal Bellarmino called at palazzo Farnese, he urbanely suggested cardinal Odoardo clothe some of the naked wretches he’d seen on entering, as winter was coming on and they’d feel the cold. Odoardo Farnese quickly said he would, but anxiously explained he couldn’t actually remove them because they were done in fresco in the wall. The constraint bound everyone. Twenty years later Mancini could venture that erotic art was fine if it remained concealed in marital bedrooms where it could stimulate the making of vigorous babies, but nobody was saying even that in 1600.
The most violent sexual anathemata of the counter reformation were cast against the sexuality of women, and it was displays of female sensuousness that the church most abhorred in art as in life. Only the female nudes were banned from the Farnese sculpture gallery when the ideological screws were tightened. The male nudes were allowed to stay. And when M’s first altar painting of Matthew & angel was found unacceptable at San Luigi dei Francesi, the priests’ objections were all about the unseemly representation of Matthew as uncouth and illiterate and unmindful of his big dirty feet. Not a word at the time of anyone’s worries about the very earthly prepubescent seminude angel voluptuously invading Matthew’s personal space. The church’s real sexual war in the counter reformation was with female sexuality. Even the unspeakable sin of intragender sex was a lesser problem, and it had to be flaunted before the torturers and executioners went to work. If sexual interest was displaced toward boys in a time like this, as it naturally was, since boys were neither women nor men, then that sorted well enough with the benign lack of interest in the polymorphic perversity of younger males that had always prevailed around the Mediterranean. Neither the old testament nor the new testament nor the fathers of the church had had a great deal to say on the specific matter of sex with boys. None of it was new. Pederasty was old as the hills. Only the furious sexual policing was new in life and art, and its counterpart in the way women’s bodies were put to sexual work in Rome’s biggest and practically its only industry. The issue in both cases was control. When suddenly everything was fraught with ideology, boys had the unusual freedom of being ignored. It suited M, though it was unlikely he ever worked things through as a matter of strategic choice. It meant he could treat his own erotic feelings in art with a freedom he’d never have been allowed if those feelings had been for women. Boys were a window of opportunity.
