An Essay on Caravaggio
1. Because of These Trifles
The nearest things are the feet. A man kneels with his back turned three-quarters toward whoever stands at the altar, and the soles of his feet, which have carried him here, are presented at about the height of that person’s face. They are dirty. The dirt is the dirt of a road, dried to a crust at the heel and worked into the creases of the skin, and it has been painted with the same attention as the flesh of the child above it. Beyond the feet, higher and a little to the left, a young woman stands in a doorway with a heavy naked boy in her arms. She has come to the threshold the way a woman comes to a door when someone has knocked. She looks down.
That is the whole event. Two people have arrived at a house and knelt; the woman of the house has come out to them with her child; the child lifts a hand. No angels carry the building through the air, no cloud supports it, no hill of Loreto rises in the distance. There is a plain stone doorframe, a step, a wall from which the plaster has fallen in one patch so that the brick shows through, and the darkness of an interior behind the woman’s shoulder. The canvas is about two hundred and sixty centimeters high and a hundred and fifty wide, which means that the woman on her step is roughly the size of a tall woman on a step, and the kneeling pilgrims are the size of kneeling people. It hangs where it was made to hang, over the altar of the first chapel on the left in the church of Sant’Agostino in Rome, a few minutes’ walk from Piazza Navona. A coin dropped into the box by the chapel rail turns on a lamp for a few minutes. Then the lamp goes out and the painting recedes into the ordinary dimness of the aisle, where it has been for something over four hundred years.¹
The light inside the picture comes from the upper left, from somewhere outside the frame on the side of the nave, and it does not come from the woman. In the usual arrangement of a Madonna appearing to her devotees, the holy figure is the source of whatever radiance there is and the worshippers are lit by her. Here one daylight falls on everyone. It touches the Virgin’s face and throat, the child’s back and thigh, the old woman’s forehead, the man’s cheek where he turns it upward, and it leaves the doorway behind the Virgin black. She is lit as they are lit. Whatever has come to the door is standing in the same weather as the people who knocked.
Her feet are bare. They cross at the ankle on the edge of the step, and the crossing gives her a balance that is momentary rather than monumental: she is poised, not planted, as though she had just stepped forward onto the sill and might step back. The boy she holds is no infant. He is a child of perhaps two, long-limbed, and his weight is real; she supports him with both arms, and he leans away from her body toward the kneeling pair with his right hand raised in the gesture of blessing. Their faces are turned up to the two of them. The man’s hands are joined around a staff that rests against his shoulder. Behind him an old woman in a white cloth cap presses her palms together; her face is creased, her mouth slightly open. Sixty-odd years later Giovanni Pietro Bellori, describing the picture for readers who might never see it, itemized a poor man with bare feet and legs, a short leather cape, a staff on the shoulder, and an old woman with a cap on her head. He had looked carefully. He did not mention that the only mark of sanctity anywhere in the painting is a halo drawn as a thin bright line above the Virgin’s head, so thin that the lamp has to be on before it can be seen at all.²
What the picture shows, then, is an arrival. Everything in it has the temperature of something that has just happened: the staff not yet laid down, the hands only just pressed together, the woman arrested on the sill, the child’s arm in the middle of its movement. The conventional image of the Madonna of Loreto shows a small house flying through the sky with the Virgin and Child seated on its roof and angels at its corners, and the point of the convention is that the miracle floats above time. The house in Sant’Agostino does not float. It has a step worn at the edge and a patch of broken plaster, and it is, in every particular, a doorway on a Roman street. The miracle has been reduced to the fact that a door has opened.
The story that the chapel was built to honor is a story about a building. According to the legend that had grown up around the shrine at Loreto in the Marche, the house in Nazareth where the Annunciation took place was lifted by angels in the last years of the thirteenth century and set down, after one intermediate stop on the Dalmatian coast, ...
