M
by Peter Robb
Bloomsbury, £25 567pp
Anyone wondering how you might write in a partisan, pugnacious, useful way about the Old Masters - enlivening those Dead White European males in their gilt frames - could do much worse than read Peter Robb's M . Here we have a story about a painter who gives a culture that has gone numb a new throb of life; one who opens up previously unrepresented areas of feeling with a pictorial approach of revolutionary directness.
The main character in this narrative is a stirrer, a bag of trouble, a visual intelligence at odds with a deranged, but infinitely resourceful, big city. In the end, the city wins. This is a story that flatters painting, telling how the world can be changed by brushstrokes; it's also a tale about a killer and how he himself comes to be killed.
M (you will gather) is a hopelessly uncool, vulgarian performance by most art-historical lights, and will dismay all those who hope that, by now, the myth of the macho, self- willed genius might have been deconstructed out of court. But it's a great read: it grabs, it kicks, it lives.
The hero of this story may, or may not, be the same painter who last year was given a distinguished biographical treatment by the art historian Helen Langdon in her (far better produced) volume Caravaggio . "Caravaggio" was the north Italian home town of a painter who was known in the Rome of 1600 by many names: Peter Robb opts to shorten them all to a one-letter cipher. The manoeuvre - which goes with his adoption of a remorselessly punchy, street-talking style - leaves open the possibility that his "M" may not be the quantity known to art history at all. His "working hypothesis" may be no more than the figment of an imagination reading over-vigorously between the lines of the same 17th-century sources and paintings that Langdon treats with judicious scholarly prudence.
But what a driving, resourceful, shrewd imagination is at work here. Robb has gazed long in the galleries and dim-lit churches where the primary evidence for the painter's life remains; has then spread his writing desk with the earliest memoirs of Caravaggio and with a haul of four-century-old Roman police records brought to light by recent scholarship. He shuttles furiously between the images and the transcripts, stitching faces to names, weaving together a whole lost world of loves and hatreds and the jostly, shouty street-life of which Caravaggio's paintings are the still-astonishing trace.
The pretty boys mooching around behind the fruit-baskets of the 1590s, with their ripe-to-bursting sensual immediacy, are located among the retinue of Cardinal del Monte, the first patron to recognise the qualities of the young painter from the north. The labourers and toughs and whores who loom out of the dark from the turn of 1600, when Caravaggio's church work makes him the most talked-about painter in Rome, find their seats in the taverns abutting del Monte's palazzo, where drinking companions penned obscene satires on his artistic enemies. And the grim 1606 canvas of a sorrowing David holding the dripping, severed head of Goliath - Caravaggio's own likeness - is made to witness the predicament of a man who has killed an adversary in a street-fight and who will be on the run (through Naples, Malta and Sicily) for his four remaining years of life.
The sources Robb brings to bear on a life of run-ins with the law are a gift in one way. They open out a scruffy, smelly Italy jagged with drawn swords, hurled tiles and insults - the pages clang with "fucking pricks" and "dickheads"; they also give some savour of the intensely difficult, fiercely intelligent man at the heart of the action. But naturally people talking to the police (or writing memoirs of their rivals) are tight-fisted with the important truths; and here Robb, an Australian whose previous book, Midnight in Sicily , tangled with today's Mafia, makes it his business to nose out the conspiracies - including the one that he believes led to Caravaggio's death.
It's a strong story, and plausibly told, but the best reason to trust Robb is that he puts his chief trust in the paintings, writing them up with fervour. For their figures still lunge dazzlingly out of the dark of Counter-Reformation Rome, kicking against its oppressive orthodoxies and its slick and chilly art scene. Their hot, palpable, vulnerable flesh continues to stimulate and challenge today as it did in 17th-century Europe. As Robb says, the paintings seem "to have nothing to do with art at all. They seem to go straight to shocking and delightful life itself."
Which was Caravaggio's intent: "He did not take credit for even one brushstroke, but said that it was the work of nature," as an early source puts it. Seemingly painted straight onto the canvas without intermediary sketching, his Roman work breaks with Renaissance practices and paradigms to claim the status of photography - received fact, rather than constructed illusion. Robb notes how the pictorial "window" of, say, a Raphael gives way to the jut and swell of the paint surface in this new realism; he also traces Caravaggio's connections with the rise of science. Police records note an incident when he was found with a pair of compasses which were assumed to be offensive weapon; Robb takes them rather to be a trace of his connection with the world of Galileo, also working for del Monte, and with his innovative optics. You are put in context so as to feel the force of Caravaggio's cutting edge.
Is Robb, then, entirely to be trusted? I don't think so. He may have a fine ear for omerta - for the half-truths of suspects and memoirists - and a keen eye for artistic quality, but it doesn't feel as if he's ever actually held a paintbrush, let alone worked with models. To read him, you'd think that some elderly workman was being paid to lie upside-down with his arms outstretched and his head craning upwards, while his mate knelt down to hoist up the plank beneath him, until Caravaggio had finished painting "The Crucifixion of St Peter". More than three minutes of those poses and anyone would be done for - and no one could render things to this canvas's degree of finish that quickly. Caravaggio would have been working up the figures largely from a well-trained imagination, even if it suited his agenda to claim it was all straight from life. Maybe he burned his sketches. Don't trust what painters say, either.
Robb accepts that after his flight from Rome, Caravaggio worked mostly from imagination, and he's fascinating about the flashlit, visionary shorthand of the paintings left in obscure Sicilian churches in the fugitive's wake. His own efforts, you might say, amount to a bright flarelight of the imagination, whatever their factual status. One aspect, however, of the resulting book is inexcusable. Whoever decided that eight colour and 16 black-and-white plates would keep the readers happy through a detailed discussion of some 80 paintings short-changed them disgracefully. It amounts to a new suppression of evidence, especially when much of the argument is highly contentious. Bloomsbury should upgrade the format with the next printing. Right or wrong, the writing deserves it.
