M
Peter Robb
Bloomsbury, £25, pp567
Buy it at BOL
Caravaggio disturbed all his contemporaries, and has gone on disturbing people ever since. Most people thought he was barking mad, and deeply dangerous. A word that recurs, in descriptions of him, is stravagantissimo, a term that implies extreme, lavish eccentricity. It's an idea that spilt over, in the way these things do, to affect the way people looked at his paintings.
We know a fair amount about him, since most of those who met him remembered him, and quite a lot of them wrote something down about his terrible behaviour. Still more helpfully, he often found himself in direct conflict with the law, and the meticulous records of the courts record his movements and the worst of his actions.
He was hauled up for writing satirical verses about a rival painter, throwing stones (twice), swearing at a policeman, carrying a sword without a licence, beating an acquaintance with a stick, stabbing someone with a sword and a hunting knife and, once, throwing a plate of artichokes at a waiter. These are just the offences recorded between 1600 and 1605.
The other thing about him that horrified and fascinated his contemporaries was what they saw as an embarrassing keenness on boys. Helen Langdon wrote an interesting book a couple of years ago, in which she said that the textual evidence for Caravaggio's homosexuality wasn't decisive, and it isn't; but to deny his tastes, you have to look away from the paintings, which show a consistent appreciation of a particular sort of lushly available male beauty.
The point of Caravaggio is that he is probably the single most influential painter in European history. His meaning is quite a simple one - the banal theme that youth and its bloom never lasts - and, in that, it is amazing that he is always a black painter, but never a depressing one. The greatness of him, though, is in his unprecedented, unprejudiced susceptibility to flesh and light, his utter mastery of it.
This is an absolutely awful book, just ghastly in every single respect. There is a certain amount of interesting material here, and Robb has done a great deal of homework. But the interesting nuggets are buried among speculation stated as solid fact. Robb blithely identifies, for instance, certain figures in Caravaggio's paintings with some names from the archive, with no sense of how controversial or even incredible this often is.
If you are struck by a quotation, and wonder where it is from, the footnotes frequently refer you to somebody else's biography rather than the original source, so everything is veiled in the most unnecessary mystery. Personally, I find it difficult to believe that a biography as long as this can reasonably be written about anybody who lived before the eighteenth century apart from kings and popes. Robb only manages it by drawing every last drop of meaning out of what may be a meagre source in the archives.
It is recorded, for instance, that when Caravaggio was arrested in 1598 for carrying a sword without a licence, he also had a pair of compasses on him. Robb remarks that they may have looked like an offensive weapon, which is fair enough. But then he completely loses the plot.
'The instrument... would've been unfamiliar to the police, though it was currently fascinating the literary minds of Europe.' He goes on to cite John Donne, who had likened his own and his lover's souls to 'a pair of stiff twin compasses'. Later that year, in Italy, he says, 'the poet Guarini had published a madrigal that turned on the same image of compasses for lovers' constancy'.
Robb surmises that Caravaggio's compasses 'probably came from Cardinal Del Monte's collection of scientific equipment'. What all this has to do with anything, God only knows.
The most infuriating thing about the book is how badly written it is. It has various whimsies, the worst of which is referring constantly to Caravaggio as 'M', giving the narrative the faint air of The Spy Who Loved Me. There's a recurrent breeziness about the tone which is maddeningly patronising. 'You'd've had to have quite a stake in [Caravaggio] to stay.' It is trying to be vivid and immediate, but it's noticeable that Robb is almost never concrete; his writing is both demotic and abstract, hardly ever managing to convey the physical appearance of a painting.
'Caravaggio was able to make art so breathtakingly objective only because he was peculiarly true to his own subjective way of seeing. His visual explorations laid bare his own psyche and his own susceptibilities with a touching frankness and courage.'
Maybe we will never fully understand Caravaggio - his contemporaries admitted they didn't, so I don't see why we should. But it's annoying to finish a biography and feel that you know less about its subject than you did when you started it.
