St. John The Baptist by Caravaggio, 1602

 

 

The spirit of mischievousness running through the early works occurs again in two paintings of Caravaggio's mature period. In both cases the parody is at the expense of the greatest genius of the sixteenth century, Michelangelo Buonarroti. By the end of the century, the impact of his monumental works had considerably diminished. However, every young artist coming to Rome must still have found the art of the great master an object of tremendous awe, though not necessarily of love.

Caravaggio, evidently possessed of a curious but understandable desire to display his spiritual independence of the "terrible," vented his feelings in travesties of two of the master's great works: the ignudo above the Erythraean Sibyl on the Sistine Ceiling, and the sculptured Victory in the Palazzo Vecchio.

The first of these is a painting in the Doria Gallery generally called St. John the Baptist. Apart from deliberate changes dictated by his new conception of space and light, Caravaggio took the general posture from Michelangelo's ignudo. But he replaces the head of this awesome and passive figure with a head recalling in its smiling boyishness the previous images of himself, his constant protagonist. Is this painting really a Saint John? The young boy, confidently smiling, turns his broad face toward the spectator over his outstretched arm, affectionately embracing a large, gentle-eyed ram. I know no previous Saint John whose companion is a crumple-horned sheep rather than an innocent white lamb, the Agnus Dei.

Actually the ram is no more the invention of Caravaggio than is the posture of the naked boy; it too comes from the Sistine Ceiling. We find, in close proximity to the ignudo near the Erythraea, the scene of Noah's Sacrifice, where in the lower left corner a nude man holds a ram which is awaiting slaughter. Combining the ignudo with the sacrificial ram, Caravaggio arrived at a very unconventional composition.

At the start he perhaps had no other intention than to render the Michelangelesque figure as a youth seated on a rock with his pet animal, a kind of genre figure conceived in a vein similar to his Boy Bitten by a Lizard. Indeed, when in the 1620's Gaspare Cello saw the painting, together with other works by Caravaggio, in the Palazzo of Ciriaco Mattei, he saw the naked youth as a shepherd, identifying him in his Memoria as a "pastor friso." Frisus, or Phryxus, is a legendary figure, who, with his sister Helle, escapes a sacrificial death in Boeotia by flying to Colchis on the back of a miraculous ram with a golden fleece, which he later sacrifices on the altar of Zeus or Mars.

Since Frisus is invariably mentioned as a prince, not a shepherd, this learned interpretation of the painting by Cello is probably based on a rather vague association, evoked by the combination of the ram with the naked boy. But it shows that at that early time the painting was not always considered a Saint John.

On the other hand, the seated youth could very well be passed off as a young Saint John in the Desert, even though he lacks any other telling attributes, such as the cross, book or banderole. The isolated plant in the lower right corner, with its broad, hard green leaves, could conceivably have been designed as a desert plant; the small bird in the upper left corner, which is somewhat difficult to distinguish, may be a dove, although this holy apparition is usually associated with a later episode in the Saint's life, the Baptism of Christ.

Certainly the ram, so tenderly and protectively embraced by the boy, has a sacrificial connotation, although it is difficult to see in it a symbol of the sacrifice of Christ, replacing the Agnus Dei. It is true that none of these features, taken singly or together, could change a worldly nude shepherd boy into a holy young Saint in solitude.

Yet the fact that in Basel and in the Villa Borghese, we have several examples of similar style. Giovannini, from the immediate circle of Caravaggio, indicates that the interpretation of the naked boy with a ram as St. John in the Desert must have existed in Caravaggio's own time, probably with his approval. Baglione, who was certainly well informed about Caravaggio's works, unreservedly calls the Mattel painting a "San Giovanni Battista," and by the middle of the seventeenth century the composition of the Doria painting and its replicas were labeled Saint John the Baptist without question.

Caravaggio, moreover, was not the first or only artist to render an alleged Saint with such ambiguity. As in the case of the St. John The Baptist, Caravaggio could again have found a precedent in Leonardo.

The famous Leonardesque St. John in the Louvre shows a naked youth seated in a landscape, and the ambiguity which this figure must have displayed from the beginning probably explains why, shortly after it came to Fontainebleau, it was overpainted to represent a Bacchus. A similar situation persists in the Doria painting; one is startled by a most curious mixture of sculptural stylization, mocking Michelangelo, and the boy's extremely sensuous expression and gesture, which conveys a sharp and testy spirit of persiflage and equivocal mockery.

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Caravaggio "Beheading of John the Baptist" (1608) St. John's Co-Cathedral, Valletta

Caravaggio "St. John the Baptist in the Wilderness 1" (1607)

Caravaggio "St. John the Baptist" (1595) Offentliche Kunstsammlung, Basle

Caravaggio "St. John the Baptist in the Wilderness 2" (1607)

Art Newspaper	Alan Bennett once noted that some authors, such as TS Art Newspaper - 12 Feb 2010 at 5:38pm The fan club's patron saint is Derek Jarman, whose 1986 film, “Caravaggio”, combined the interests of both groups. Organised by the Azienda Speciale ...
Flavorwire (blog)	Hold Your Horses: Name That Painting Flavorwire (blog) - 2 Mar 2010 at 1:04pm Caravaggio, The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist (1608). The canvas is housed in St. John's Co-Cathedral of Valletta, Malta. ...
Times of Malta	Nadur church gets €51000 tabernacle Times of Malta - 19 Feb 2010 at 2:12am The tabernacle was made by the same silversmiths, Laga, that made a bas-relief of Caravaggio's The Beheading Of St John The Baptist, which was presented to ...

  

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