The Cerasi Chapel (July 6)
July 6
Already a huge group looking at the paintings when I arrive. Nuns in gray habits, fanning themselves. A confusion of tourists standing in the afternoon gloom. I pay two euro for us all. The paintings spring into light. A sense that they leap out of the walls, feline, pouncing. I go to the left to study Paul/Saul, though I’m quite sure again that he is neither Paul nor Saul. I think he’s no one. We’re seeing him in between, hence the name of the painting, CONVERSION OF ST. PAUL, which is confusing. St. Paul was not the one who was converted. Saul was. So what we’re seeing is the moment when a man has let fall one identity and is about to take up another.
His arms are raised as if to both welcome and to hold off something above him. The light on the helmet and sword is the same light I saw on the shovel in CRUCIFIXION yesterday. A Deer Tick lyric I love: “The sad sun shining down on the day…” The sun is sad, with no choice but to shine on beauty and horror — to illuminate both. I prefer to think of the relationship between the two paintings via what they share, rather than the somewhat easy reading that Peter is looking over at Paul/Saul. Simone Weil writes of how, by taking hold of two different things, we can hold what they share in common. Imagine lifting the head of a cabbage with two sticks — by holding the sticks, you hold the cabbage (what they share in common) without actually touching it. Thus, by the light on the shovel in CRUCIFIXION and the helmet and sword in CONVERSION, we can read God’s presence in both. And to stand between the two paintings is to be held by them. We are what they have in common.
Back to Saul/Paul. A single letter in his name has changed. That is all. And it is everything. The name he was given him by the world; the name he was given by God. Of course we know about the importance of a name change — Robert Zimmerman to Bob Dylan. Different, of course - Dylan gave himself the name. But the change in name suggests a change in identity. Being called by a different name suggests being called. It is superficial, but suggests something much deeper.
He raises his arms. Between them, the white leg of the horse. How could this not have been a deliberate decision on Caravaggio’s part? Of course there was a horse. How else would Saul have gotten to Damascus? But what color horse? What kind? That was up to Caravaggio. He had to decide to make a horse this horse in particular. There is light streaming down from the top right corner. But, white, the horse’s leg is also the light. What seems to threaten us, that hoof, is also pure, innocent. That hoof is power. It deigns to descend. It could but won’t. It could strike a mortal blow. But we know the end of the story. The Bible spoiled it.
What did Vallejo say?
There are in life such hard blows...I don't know! Blows seemingly from God's wrath; as if before them the undertow of all our sufferings is embedded in our souls...I don't know!
But such a blow would be redundant. He has already received the greatest blow of his life.
There is white in the mane, also. The horse is chosen, too, chosen to be the height that he needs to fall from in order to rise. The hoof is like a funnel cloud — terrifying, beautiful. It both descends and lifts. This is the weird mathematics of grace that Caravaggio seems always to be exploring, and that Weil, in GRAVITY AND GRACE, especially, is obsessed with. We are somehow INSIDE Caravaggio’s paintings, and therefor feel at risk. The other paintings, in the other chapels, are too flat, too removed, like poems that have no effect upon us. Caravaggio’s paintings refuse us our accustomed role as mere spectator. We become participants. We’re on the ground with Saul/Paul, fearing that hoof. We’re on the ground beneath Peter, such that we feel we may as well lend a hand in his crucifixion.
Also, this thing about how they face one another. I’m hard-pressed to think of two great paintings that face one another, but that one cannot actually stand and face. We can face the Mona Lisa. We can face any number of Picassos or Van Goghs. But here, we can’t quite. If they moved the rope out of the way we could. But to really see either painting we’d have to have our back up against the other one. We couldn’t really take in one of these paintings without blinding ourselves to the other. Of course, one is not expected to kneel to the paintings, but to the altar between them, at which point they become peripheral, fuzzy forces acting upon one obliquely, pincers in which one is precariously held.
It seems to me that Caravaggio’s subject, regardless of what scene he is painting, is people tottering on the knife’s edge between the old life and the new. And because he doesn’t quite paint saints, nor quite paint men, these paintings cannot help but show contraries, indeed, to revel in them. Yesterday, I saw another Caravaggio, St. Francis holding a skull, the thinnest golden halo ringing his head astronomically. It must have excited him, St. Francis contemplating a skull while, unknown to him, his own was haloed. Or, in another painting, Narcissus peering into the pool — the delicate way his real hand almost touches his reflected hand, the darkness of his face in the water a symbol, perhaps, of vanity. Or Judith’s face as she beheads Holofernes, how she is both fascinated and horrified.
In these moments Caravaggio loved to dramatize, of course there will need to be laborers, torturers, shovels, swords, rocks, nipples, woodgrain, a skittish horse. There could not not be. In other paintings I’ve only been able to rouse the weakest interest in, there are no bodies. The figures are like cartoons, like poorly written characters. Caravaggios characters are as real as characters in Chekhov and Tolstoy. He was a great painter not so much because he was a great painter but because those contraries of dark and light, sin and grace, powerlessness and power, life and death, all depend on finding that perfect knife’s edge in which a precarious (and yet oddly stable) balance is struck. He knew which scenes to paint, and in which precise moment. Saul not falling, but fallen, and yet fallen so recently the horse is still reacting. Peter being crucified upside-down, but not yet upside-down. He practices better than any painter I know that quality of negative capability espoused by Keats — an ability to remain in a state of unknowing without any irritable reaching after fact or reason. His paintings are unresolved — the cross will forever be in the process of being tipped upright, the horse’s hoof forever raised. He arrests these figures not in moments of triumph, but in moments of becoming who he knew we’d already know them as — the father of the church and the church’s most eloquent spokesman. What interested him, it seems, was the worldliness of the mystical life.
These paintings are not paintings, they’re films before film was invented. Films that just happen to be only one frame.