The Cerasi Chapel (July 7)
July 7
I come in out of the heat. The beggar who called me Professore seems to know me now, doesn’t bother begging, only mumbles something out of habit. I run holy water through my hair. Oops. Oh well. Four people there, the chapel already lit. A father talks to his daughter about the CRUCIFIXION. She knows she’s seeing something marvelous. One day, hopefully, her father will be an old man, dying. What else matters but that they once stood here, his arm around her shoulder, looking? Zuckerberg wants to build a metaverse so we can sit alone and walk around virtually together, talk to one another’s avatars. What a dumbass. What a pathetic, miserable, groveling creature. All the idiocy about Zuckerberg and Musk fighting in a cage match? How about we put him in a cage with Caravaggio?
I lived on Zuckerberg’s street in San Francisco once upon a time. His multimillion-dollar mansion was maybe two blocks from my dingy basement studio apartment. Stumbling up the hill drunk from some bar on Valencia, I’d ask the driver in the car parked perpetually outside if it was really Zuckerberg’s house, and he’d give me this look like, “I can’t really say but yeah.” Sometimes I’d tell them to shut the engine off, they were wasting gas, and they’d tell me they couldn’t. This doesn’t really have anything to do with Caravaggio.
Why have I and this man and his daughter come to this chapel this morning? Not to worship God, if we’re being honest. To worship a man’s ability to make us remember God. And Caravaggio himself? He was trying to make some money. But that’s not why he was this good. Elena Ferrante has made a lot of money. It has nothing to do with how good she is. In fact, they made a lot of money in spite of being good.
Today is the day to look at CRUCIFIXION. I want to think about my favorite detail in the painting — the shadow of the rope on the man’s back. Three things necessary for a shadow — light, the object that casts the shadow, and the field the shadow is cast upon. Here — sun, rope, man. Only in Caravaggio do I really remember a source of light beyond the painting. In other words, his paintings somehow never end at the frame. They aren’t lit from within but from without. The shadow of the rope reminds us of the sun somewhere above and beyond us, as do the glares on shovel, helmet, sword.
Weirdly, Caravaggio isn’t good with three-dimensional space — the horse in CONVERSION is flat, and in CRUCIFIXION there is an awkward attempt to render depth by putting the rope under the arm of the man working to lift the cross. From now on I’ll call him the second man, the first being the one lifting from below, the third the one with the rope. No, his genius is not so much in how he paints as in what he remembers to include. He takes the Bible literally. If three men crucified St. Peter upside-down, their feet would be filthy, and the sun would have shone that day “as it had to,” as Auden writes in “Musee des Beaux Arts,” on all that they did, no matter how horrible. It’s the sun’s nature to shine. It’s never done anything else.
What is a painting? Not the scene itself, but a representation of a scene. It need not actually have happened. I’ve never seen a clock sag like Dali’s clocks sag. But some painters trick us. The frame becomes a window. We watch rather than look. It’s not just about realism. For instance, with Gerhard Richter, I don’t believe the painting of the woman reading the paper is actually a woman reading the paper, not for a moment. But his candles make me nervous. I fear they might burn the very canvas they’re painted upon.
With Caravaggio, the dirty feet of the first man, the one in the football stance, don’t look like any dirty feet I’ve ever seen, but more so.
What we love in art is an excess that allows us to fall back gratefully into reality.
Again, I resist the reading that the paintings are calling across to one another. I notice, today, that Peter’s eyes are staring in such a way that they would fall upon someone kneeling at the altar. One would feel that one is being watched just outside their periphery. I don’t see Peter and Saul/Paul as connected here. Rather, Saul seems more connected to the three men crucifying Peter. The four of them are pawns of the state, obedient to worldly things — commands, work orders. They’re doing what they’re doing — crucifying a man upside-down, heading along the road to Damascus — because they’ve been told to. Any three of the men crucifying Peter could suddenly fall onto their back like Saul has. But they can’t because they didn’t.
Maybe the future isn’t inevitable, but the past certainly is. What happened happened. So why can we never seem to look away?