Sudden Death

Judith Beheading Holofernes

Judith Beheading Holofernes measures about four and a half by six and a half feet. It’s a difficult painting to transport, but not unwieldy enough to warrant asking for help: gripping it by the lower upright edge and resting the central crosspiece on the shoulder, one should be able to carry it across the piazza of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome. After Caravaggio had painted it, he did just that: hoisting the painting onto his shoulder in his studio, he crossed the courtyard that separated the service quarters from the kitchen and walked from one side of the piazza to the other to deliver it to the mansion of the banker Vincenzo Giustiniani, who wanted it.

It was the last work Caravaggio painted before becoming Rome’s greatest art-world celebrity on the complicated cusp of the sixteenth century. He must have delivered it before the church of San Luigi dei Francesi opened its doors for the early mass; he was scandalously behind on the commission for the Calling and the Martyrdom, which would hang in the church’s Contarelli Chapel. The delivery date on the contract that he had signed with the congregation of San Luigi dei Francesi had twice been missed, and he was so late that Cardinal Matthieu Contarelli, who had planned the chapel in honor of his namesake apostle, had already died.

There were reasons for Caravaggio’s delay: the decoration of the Contarelli Chapel was his first commission for a place of worship and he wanted these two pieces of public art to be masterpieces — as they indisputably are. He also understood that the lucky star lighting his path was powered by the generosity of del Monte and Giustiniani, so he attended to the needs of his patrons before those of his clients.

The morning of August 14, 1599, when Caravaggio carried the painting from the Palazzo Madama to the banker’s palace, was surely hot, which means the artist probably wasn’t wearing the legendary black cloak in which he appears draped in absolutely all the descriptions — and there are many of them — of his arrests in the police precincts of Rome.

Merisi was a man of extremes, a desperate man. Between the summer and autumn of 1599 he had one of his most productive periods, which means he must have been nervously sober when he delivered the painting to the Palazzo Giustiniani — bruised circles under his eyes, dull skin, the glazed look of those who’ve worked for days on end without rest. Caravaggio didn’t draw: he painted directly in oil on canvas; and he didn’t trust the prodigious Mannerist capacity for imagination: he staged the scenes he painted in his studio, with real models. He did the work all at once, laboring by the millimeter for days on end, using sources of controlled light that he reproduced on the canvas just as they appeared to him.

The scene in which Judith cuts off the head of King Holofernes takes place at night, which means that the windows of the studio must have been covered and the models painted by candlelight. Chances are that Caravaggio delivered the piece the moment he decided it was finished. He was in desperate need of money to buy the materials to finally embark on the monumental oils for San Luigi dei Francesi.

He must have crossed the plaza quickly, furtively, without a word to the loiterers who had missed his company during the nights it took him to finish the painting. He must have carried it uncovered, because he couldn’t even drape it with a cloth — an oil painting takes years to dry — and neither could he rest the painted surface on his shoulder. Once at the door of the Palazzo Giustiniani he must have lowered it and, propping it on the toes of his boots so that it wasn’t soiled by the dirty ground, banged the doorknocker with one hand as he balanced the painting on his feet with the other.

Giustiniani kept huntsman’s hours, which means that when Caravaggio arrived he must have been in his office, reviewing the end-of-day accounts from the previous afternoon. Or in the courtyard itself, brushing the manes of his horses before the grooms fed them. He would already have drunk his cup of chocolate, the only luxury he allowed himself. Someone must have been sent to ask him what to do with the madman who was outside with a horrible painting. If Giustiniani was in the courtyard, it would likely have been one of the cooks who reached him with the news: A dreadful sight. The painting or the madman? Both, but especially the painting. Give him something to eat; let him leave the thing in the kitchen. And he must have hurried to the studiolo to retrieve from his writing desk the rest of the money he owed the painter. The entry is set down in his books in his own hand: “Ago 14 / 60 scudi / Pitt Meritzio.” Maybe it was then that he began to turn over the possibility of hanging the painting here, where he would be the only one to see it.

For years it was thought that this eccentric behavior — commissioning a painting in order to be its only viewer — was due to the brutal violence displayed on the canvas: the heroine yanking the tyrant’s tangled hair with one hand while with the other she slits his throat like a pig’s, his head already twisted and about to come off, the streams of blood, the engorged nipples, the grotesque excitement of the serving woman who holds a cloth to receive the remains when the last tendon is severed. But this doesn’t explain the painting’s trajectory: at some point Giustiniani gave it — curtains and all — to Ottavio Costa, another Genovese banker, partner in the most substantial of Giustiniani’s Vatican investments, and a hunting companion.

There’s no record of the transfer of the painting, but it ended up in the collection that Costa left when he died, along with another work originally bought by Giustiniani, painted by Caravaggio and featuring the same woman.

In 1601, the celebrated prostitute Fillide Melandroni, who had served as model for Judith and also for Mary Magdalene in the painting Martha and Mary Magdalene, was arrested one night at one of the entrances to the Palazzo Giustiniani; she was in the company of her pimp, Ranuccio Tomassoni.

It’s likely that the whore was Giustiniani’s lover and that after the scandal of her being arrested at his very door — a tip-off, surely; the vengeance of a lesser moneylender hurt by the banker’s large-scale operations — he must have gotten rid of the two paintings in which she appeared.

The loss must also have been hard for Caravaggio: he didn’t paint Fillide Melandroni again after this arrest, and she was far and away his most spectacular model: not just a figure of exceptional beauty, but a collaborator with the gift of a unique dramatic sense — she is also Saint Catherine of Alexandria in the monumental work retained by del Monte, which today can be seen in the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection in Madrid.

Incidentally, Ranuccio Tomassoni was the man Caravaggio killed on the Campo Marzio tennis court a few years later. It was a murder long foreshadowed, with both men making frequent visits to the headquarters of the Roman police to report each other or to be arrested following those reports — all stemming from shouting matches and knife brandishings that grew gradually more severe. Surely the nights that Fillide spent at Merisi’s studio weren’t devoted solely to the glory of art, and their nearness wasn’t only professional, on either side: he didn’t just paint, and she didn’t just sleep with him for money.

At some level, Giustiniani and Caravaggio must have been conscious that they were sharing the same woman — who belonged to Tomassoni. In addition, the banker was a political ally and comrade in intellectual dissidence of Cardinal del Monte, known by all to occasionally offer his monumental cardinal’s ass to be buggered by Caravaggio with all the elemental hunger of the painter’s years of want. Never were the connections among politics, money, art, and semen so tight or so murky. Or so unashamedly happy, tolerant, and fluid. Giustiniani dispatched his Lombardy boars, Caravaggio dispatched his Venetian cardinal, Fillide dispatched both men. Everyone was happy.

These were also the years when Merisi discovered the chiaroscuro that forever changed the way a canvas can be inhabited: he did away with the foul Mannerist landscapes — the saints, virgins, and great men posing with intelligent gaze on a backdrop of fields, cities, sheep. He shifted the sacred scenes indoors to focus the spectators of his paintings on the humanity of the characters. Fillide was his vehicle for moving the machinery of art a step forward. Not a saint playing a saint, but a woman stripped of superior attributes, and in action; she was a poor woman, as she had to be for the Counter-Reformation credo to make sense. Before Caravaggio, biblical figures were portrayed as millionaires: the richness of their garments was the reflection of spiritual bounty.

An affluent saint in a landscape stands for a world touched by God. A saint in a room stands for humanity in the dark: a humanity distinguished by its ability to continue to believe, in a world in which faith is already impossible; a material humanity smelling of blood and saliva; a humanity that no longer watches from the sidelines, that does things.