<em>Melanie McDonagh previews The Last Caravaggio at the National Gallery</em>.
The National Gallery in London celebrates its 200th birthday in May and among the events to mark the anniversary is this little exhibition of two paintings in a single room, one of which is from its own collection. But as the exhibition title suggests, the other is the last picture Caravaggio ever painted: The Martyrdom of St Ursula.
Quite remarkably, both this picture and Salome Receives the Head of John the Baptist are very recent rediscoveries; Salome was only reattributed to Caravaggio in 1959 and St Ursula even later, in 1980. This was the culmination of the efforts of the literary historian Giorgio Fulco, who tipped off two art historians, Vicenzo Pacelli and Fernando Bologna, to the existence of letters by the agent of a Genoese nobleman, Marcantonio Doria, which referred to a picture by Caravaggio.
The trail led to a painting in the possession of the Intesa Sanpaolo bank in Naples, which had obtained the picture in 1973 as being by a follower of Caravaggio. The dates of the letters in May 1610 show that it was by Caravaggio – indeed his name is on the back, with a date after his death – and was in fact completed 10 weeks before his death, impoverished and alone in Porto Ercole.
There are then two very different women here: bad girl, good girl. There’s Salome, the daughter of Herodias, who is getting what she asked for after dancing for Herod and his guests at his birthday party: the head of John the Baptist. Then there’s Ursula, the Romano-British princess shot by an arrow by the pagan Hun whose proposal of marriage she had rejected.
The painting of St Ursula has suffered from the vicissitudes of time and circumstances: the deathly pallor of the skin may have been enhanced in one of the restorations the picture underwent. But the two young women are not wholly dissimilar: Salome is not a hussy or a dancing girl, but composed and respectably dressed, perhaps the same age as Ursula.
The difference is in their expression: Salome is looking sideways, away from the platter on which Herod’s executioner is setting down the head of the Baptist; her firm grip on the charger suggests the head will be heavy. Is there the shadow of a smile there – or at least a look of self-satisfaction? But why, then, is she looking away from her prize, held by the hair by the executioner, with his bare, foreshortened arm? Is she in fact registering disgust at the object she is about to hold?
Ursula is almost introspective, looking down wonderingly at the semi-invisible arrow that has pierced her breast, framing the wound with her fingers, her vivid red cloak suggesting the blood we cannot see. Both girls have agency: Salome in fulfilling her mother’s will for revenge; Ursula in accepting the consequence of refusing the king who would not become a Christian.
Both show the aftermath of violence. The headsman has completed his task and is now handing over the head as requested to the girl holding her platter and, with it, responsibility for the act. He has done his job; he’s impassive, a weather-beaten man, one hand holding the Baptist’s hair, the other still holding the sword, and his gaze straight at the viewer. He shows no signs of guilt or distress, but why should he? He is obeying orders.
At the centre of the picture, forming a junction where the eye travels from the arm of the headsman and from the white drapery of Salome, there is the victim: the Baptist. His eyes closed in death, his mouth partly open; he seems to be looking down. The picture shows that most characteristic element of Caravaggio’s work, what the curator, Dr Francesca Whitlum-Cooper, calls “his extreme fidelity to the world around him”.
In the case of Ursula, we see the barbarian king just after he has loosed the fatal arrow. He too shows no sign of remorse; the lower part of his face is in shadow but he seems dispassionate, his gaze still directed at his target, far too close to miss. The hand that has pulled the bowstring is still upraised; the other holds the grip of the bow. There seems something odd about the trajectory but the point is less precision than the dynamic of violence. The Hun king is strikingly old and ugly, unlike Ursula’s first suitor. He may be a pagan but he’s a brutish, wrinkled old man, his weather-beaten skin a striking contrast to Ursula’s pallor. Yet his armour is kingly, its sheen mirrored by that of a soldier on the other side bending towards the saint.
So, facing each other are two young women: one a murderer at one remove, the other a victim. Like so many of Caravaggio’s works, there is a single dramatic light source to illumine the figures emerging from the darkness in vivid theatricality, and a striking, dramatic compression of the action. The figures are cut off at three-quarter length, with the viewer brought inexorably into the action. The crowded canvases compress the story into a single vivid moment.
And behind Ursula there is the face of Caravaggio himself – he sometimes introduced himself into his work – raised to the light to see the king and the action, but too far away to intervene. There is no sign here of the vicious mutilation that he had been subjected to when his enemies ambushed him coming from a tavern, making his face unrecognisable. In Salome, the visual commentary on the horror of the head comes from the old maidservant who looks down, appalled, with hands clasped.
Both paintings suggest that Caravaggio’s palette in Naples was noticeably darker and more restricted than earlier, in Rome. Perhaps the sombre tone was dictated by the paint available there, or perhaps Naples, with its dark alleyways, coloured his choice. It intensifies the grimness of the scenes.
St Ursula is in fact rather a horrible picture, but it had a benevolent genesis. Marcantonio Doria seems to have commissioned the painting as a gift for his stepdaughter, Livia Grimaldi, who was entering a Neapolitan convent and taking the name of Ursula. The most tempting way of depicting the saint would have been to include some of the 11,000 virgins she was said to have brought with her from Britain to Rome on pilgrimage and then to Germany, but Caravaggio dismisses the virgins in favour of an intense focus on the moment of martyrdom. All who saw it, wrote Doria’s agent, were amazed by it, and even after the depredations of repeated restoration, we can see why.
Caravaggio was himself a violent man; there are several accounts of his hot temper and aggressive ways, and it may be because of his own familiarity with violence – given and received – that he has so little compunction in rendering it with vivid, earthy realism.
This little exhibition – the two pictures and a letter documenting the commissioning of St Ursula – is an admirable way to begin the National Gallery’s bicentenary. It is free, reinforcing the point that great art is for all. Go and see it for yourself if you can.
<em>The Last Caravaggio is at the National Gallery in London from April 18 until July 21</em>.
