Caravaggio by Francine Prose Page B

hard to overlook, even for those reluctant to mine art for its symbolic content. This association has followed the tiny reptile from Caravaggio’s time (when poems explicitly made the connection between the lizard and the male sexual organ) to our own, when boys sometimes refer to urinating as “draining the lizard.”
    The drapery and the sweet, exposed shoulder of the child in the painting recall the boys in The Musicians and the Boy with the Basket of Fruit , but this one is as distraught and disturbing as those youths are placid and appealing. Perhaps it’s because—with that little rose tucked behind his ear, with those delicate hands and wrists—he’s taken androgyny to the point of effeminacy, a quality that Caravaggio’s culture found less sympathetic and attractive. There is nothing manly in the terror with which he’s reacting to an injury which, however painful, most be minor. And there’s a staginess, a theatricality in his turning toward us. Why isn’t he looking down at the lizard, or at his hand?
    Regardless of the smooth, bare shoulder that so often telegraphs Caravaggio’s code for erotic attraction, the boy’s carnal appeal interests the painter far less than the electric intensity of his startled reaction. The boy could be a study for the terrified youth who, though no fault of his own, is forced to witness Saint Matthew’s brutal murder on the steps of the altar. The difference is that, unlike the lizard’s victim, the boy in The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew is responding to something momentous and life-changing.
    What’s striking about Caravaggio’s great religious paintings is that the contorted expressions he practiced in these earlier efforts were later reserved entirely for those who watch the horrors, rather than those who experience the torture and humiliation and who endure their sufferings with humility and stoic patience. Perhaps one of the things that Caravaggio learned from Boy Bitten by a Lizard was that fear and pain stir our sympathies less than courage and forbearance do.
    Like Boy Bitten by a Lizard , Caravaggio’s Medusa can be seen as an experiment in the representation of facial contortion. Feared for her ability to turn men into stone with a glance, the Gorgon with her headdress of living serpents was killed by Perseus, who realized that Medusa could be vanquished by tricking her into looking in a mirror and giving her, so to speak, a dose of her own medicine. Paralyzed by the sight of herself, the suddenly vulnerable Gorgon was swiftly beheaded by Perseus.
    The brilliance of the Greek hero’s approach would have appealed to Del Monte and his circle, who were fascinated by natural wonders, logical puzzles, scientific solutions—and also by mirrors. In one of Caravaggio’s paintings from around the same time, The Conversion of the Magdalene , the saint’s hand rests laightly on a dark convex mirror so large that, at first glance, it looks like a shield. Echoing this association between the mirror and the shield and compounding the paradox of the monster undone by her own monstrous apparition, Caravaggio painted the Gorgon’s head on canvas attached to a convex wooden shield. But the portrait is rendered in such a way that the image appears to be concave. Like Perseus, Caravaggio captured the Gorgon at the moment of defeat and death. Jagged spikes of blood stream from the base of her severed head. Her mouth forms an oval of fear and shock, her eyes bulge from their sockets, as the painter succeeds in conveying the impression of a paralysis that is only a few moments old. Even the knotted serpents seem to have newly ceased their twisting and writhing.
    This example of virtuosity, this show-offy tour de force was the perfect present for Del Monte to bring to Florence, for the Grand Duke Ferdinando de’ Medici—who shared the cardinal’s interest in science, optics, and alchemical