The Blackness Behind the Light

by Tom Goff

You, Caravaggio, David Starkey, Pine Row Press, Ft. Mitchell, Kentucky, 2024, 96 pages, $20.00.

THE BAROQUE ARTIST Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio lived a life so tumultuous, in a frenzy of talent so uncontainable, that grandeur and controversy still swirl around him and his famously dusk-shadowed, alley-shadowed paintings: of a Bacchus that could be his young self; of a randy, baby-faced Eros who seems to proposition the viewer; of a furrow-browed Joseph who wearily holds up a music manuscript for a viol-playing angel serenading Mary during a rest stop enroute to Egypt; and of beheadings (Holofernes, John the Baptist, Medusa) whose severed necks issue tongues of blood like so many red streamers in a staging of Titus Andronicus.

Enticed by the dark glamor—or, perhaps, by Caravaggio's reputation for agonistic sexuality and white-hot rages—poets enjoy giving imaginative glimpses of Caravaggio at work or of his work itself: Thom Gunn, in "In Santa Maria del Popolo," gives a memorable ekphrastic depiction of "The Conversion of Saint Paul," which contains the lines:

He painted, elsewhere, that firm insolent

Young whore in Venus' clothes, those pudgy cheats,

Those sharpers. He was strangled, as things went,

For money, by one such picked off the streets.

Vivid words—then, in an endnote to his collected poems, Gunn admits modern authorities have discredited this account of Caravaggio's death. But he keeps his poem as is. Print the legend, as the saying in a famous Western has it.

Now poet David Starkey, braving the stockpile of legend and conjecture, plus the multiple revisionist biographies, has written a captivating book-length sequence of poems that evoke Caravaggio's tormented life and scrutinize the artworks. Starkey has what we may call an informed imagination, pinpointing moments in the artist's career that invite reasoned speculation, supplementing guesswork with history and knowledge of Caravaggio's Italy. He also becomes our surrogate, our eyes with which to see masterworks more closely and accurately. I'll start by quoting a complete poem on one of the master's bloody visions:

Medusa

—1597

A skin of linen stretched on a rim

of poplar wood, this shield

would succumb to the thrust

of any pointed instrument,

yet you have charmed it

against destruction with a potion

of beeswax, oil and turpentine.

The gorgon's face is your own,

an emblem of self-loathing and self-

love. Even clean-shaven, you make

an ugly woman: thick eyebrows,

thin-lipped mouth agape, eyes

popping with surprise at the blood

pouring from your severed head.

So recent is the lethal stroke

from the swift blade of Perseus

that the mass of serpents sprouting

from your scalp still writhes. Tongues

flicker, cold eyes and gray scales

glimmer. One snake clenches

the body of another in its angry jaws.

This poem impresses with its refusal to plunge right into the gory portrayal or grasp for words of shock and awe at the Gorgon whose gaze could slay, now reduced to a trophy head mounted on a wall. First, Starkey does his homework, crisply detailing the materials of the painting—and shows how the artist has become one with the fabric. When we see photos of the painting, Caravaggio's actual presence in the piece makes one think the painter was part actor, with mobile features that almost reshape themselves from picture to picture. It was wise of Starkey to proceed from medium to model to state of mental mayhem: when one of Medusa's snakes lashes out at the next snake over, it's as if Medusa isn't dead, but Undead, and the serpentine tangle bristles like Caravaggio's volatile outbursts or inner conflicts.

Now for an overview of the collection. In "Michelangelo Merisi," Starkey invokes Caravaggio's unquiet spirit in place of the traditional Muse. As the poem opens, he addresses the infant:

You, Caravaggio,

baptized Michelangelo

Merisi, born on the feast day

of the archangel, wawling

in candlelit darkness, as the blood

dries on your cradle cap.

Late September

1571, Christendom

battling Suleiman the Magnificent,

the world, as always, in turmoil,

though your petite bourgeoise family

is more concerned with scudi

and distinction than the fate of man.

The poet can speak with authority across centuries to the baby painter-to-be and the grown artist, simultaneously, updating Caravaggio on what we know—in a way better than he—about his lifespan and legacy.

Two clever moves illustrate how subtly Starkey can layer direct, simple phrases with added meaning. First, poets of a certain generation will notice "You, Caravaggio" and relate the title to Archibald MacLeish's "You, Andrew Marvell." If we remember the fatefully oncoming shadows in MacLeish's poem, we'll recall the ominous chiaroscuros in Caravaggio's mature work with an extra jolt. Second, though the blood seeps from a "cradle cap," a scalp infection common among infants, the term connotes an opposite concept, the superstition of being "born with a caul," a fragment of amniotic membrane draped over the baby's head, signifying good luck. The divine blessing and the blood curse may coexist in the troubled genius from birth.

We get glimpses of the future artist's childhood in "Lombardy," where the boy Michelangelo, son of a fairly prosperous mason, lives comfortably near Milan, just outside the town of Caravaggio (his birth on the saint's day, rather than the fame of the other Michelangelo, accounts for the boy's given name). But fate has a terrible event in store:

What little you learn in your first six years

about friendship, hope and love

is smashed, like a skull against a rock,

one October night, when the plague takes

your beloved father.

(From "Lombardy," page 4)

The biographical record often consists more of gaps than detail, but when Starkey adds,

No priest

comes to bless the dead, only two hired men

and a boy carrying a torch. You recall

that blackness behind the light thenceforth,

the historical consensus pretty well justifies the dark imagery.

Much of the collection is ekphrastic, taking inspiration fresh from the paintings, but some of the life-and-times items are quite striking. Take this ingenious little number:

Small Latine, and Less Greeke

Your widowed mother has just enough

credit and honored friends to send you off

for a brief spin around the classics.

You read Livy, Cicero and The Aeneid,

Aristotle and a few pages of The Republic.

Your teacher's unimpressed. Nothing sticks.

For you, it's the raucous stories of the Bible,

translated into the bella lingua, that alert you

to the possibilities of spectacle and incident.

Meanwhile, in England, another half-

educated lad of less than gentle birth

is just beginning to imagine his own variety

of drama, wicked with words—unlike the silent

scenes you'll someday set—though also spanning

the abyss separating darkness and light.

As we identify the great dramatist Starkey refers to, we can appreciate the similarities and differences between him and Caravaggio. With young Merisi, "nothing" sticks—nothing of the Greek and Roman classics—while with young Shakespeare, everything sticks, all available modes of verbal expression enter his toolkit. Yet the silent painter is also a dramatist; he grasps the turning point in a Biblical narrative or a saint's life and invests that moment with theatrical lighting and shading. (Andrew Graham-Dixon's Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane, one of Starkey's sources, is instructive here.)

Certain vignettes alert us to the adult Caravaggio's keen sexual appetites:

A Glimpse Down the Alley

You're hurrying home

after dark

when a scene down the alley

arrests you:

a young man bent over

a woman's bare breasts.

Your fingertips tremble,

your tongue

and loins swell.

She laughs when she sees you.

He turns his leering face

in your direction.

You're not sure

which of them

excites you more.

I read poems like this and think again of Thom Gunn, also a prowler of streets and alleys and bathhouses in search of sexual bonanzas, though without Caravaggio's violent combustibility. Though he will be sponsored by an aesthetically astute cardinal, the dark-cloaked Caravaggio pads the nocturnal streets of Milan or Rome, starting quarrels or finishing brawls, or (in early years) fuming under apprenticeship to a mediocre fresco painter. He graduates from assignments to paint only fruit and flowers; he soon labors at his first figure paintings, allegories with dramatic potential but flawed draftsmanship. Slowly, the dividends accrue, as in this poem's opening:

Sick Bacchus

—1593

Perhaps your first great work—self-

portrait as the avatar of excess

and ecstasy—was inevitable

after painting so many befuddled faces

and baskets of peaches and grapes.

But it's a nauseous kind of beauty

you've rendered.

The next lines benefit from Starkey's close reading of the biographies:

Possibly your cheeks,

nose and lips are ashen

from your recent stay in the Hospital

of Consolation, or maybe the pallor's

only moonlight.

But is that pallor mere moonshine (in either sense) or illness? The trick with Caravaggio is to embrace the equal likelihoods, and submit to contradictions and oxymorons, as we see in the conclusion:

A jaundiced soul,

speculate your detractors—half of Rome

it sometimes seems—though that crown

of ivy insists on a kind of godhood,

one scented with tuberose, muscadine

and fresh vomitus.

(From "Sick Bacchus," page 9)

Soon enough, the great tenebrific masterpieces come, and the successive Biblical portraits and other church commissions accumulate, with interruptions and suspensions as the rebel inside the artist lashes out at circumstance. We read poems on "The Penitent Magdalen" (the sitter was a prostitute as well as a sometime mistress of Caravaggio), "Saint Catherine of Alexandria" (same artist's model), arresting depictions of Saint Peter's crucifixion, and Paul's conversion, all richly detailed; yet some of the most enticing poems exist for the sake of the poetry. "Painting as an Act of Violence" must be the painter's unspoken apologia pro arte sua, while "Villanelle" is, well, a fine villanelle:

They say you treat whores like madonnas.

Swaggering your way through the nighttime streets,

You spend half your life in the Tor di Nona.

Brandishing your sword to save their honor,

You serenade them with lyrics salty and sweet.

They say you treat whores like madonnas.

Fidelle, Leonora and Donata—

Damnation if one of them should cheat!

You spend half your life in the Tor di Nona.

Stumbling into the brothel with a hard-on,

You beg for their forgiveness on stained sheets.

They say you treat whores like madonnas.

You strike some calumniator in the breastbone,

Then start a dust-up with the police.

You spend half your life in the Tor di Nona.

Your days are surely numbered here in Rome;

This city can't absorb all your latent heat.

They say you treat whores like madonnas

And spend half your life in the Tor di Nona.

(The Tor di Nona was a papal prison in Rome, infamous for its dungeons and tortures.)

Such distillations of Caravaggio's life jostle against the ostensibly—or actually—pious religious paintings. One might suppose the master artist kept his private disputes and vendettas in separate compartments from his commissioned canvases, but the record says otherwise. The salutary aspects of Caravaggio's painted saints and madonnas, portrayed as humble, impoverished, but dignified people, may run counter to the vices of the actual models: Fidelle Melandroni, mentioned in the villanelle, modeled for Mary Magdalene, Saint Catherine, and other portrayals, but was actually a prostitute (cohabiting with Caravaggio) who may have combined occasional sweetness with a violent temper, that last trait clear from legal documents.

The extreme piety the works would celebrate can seem remarkably at odds with the realism that leaps from the Caravaggian shadows, as Starkey knows. His poem on one of the landmark canvases, "Supper at Emmaus—1601," epitomizes the encounter between the risen Christ and the unseeing (willfully blind?) disciples over a supper table. Starkey begins:

Perhaps you, Caravaggio,

sympathize with the risen Christ,

who walks through the world

unrecognized even by his disciples.

(We may be reliving Caravaggio's sense of being neglected—and he had "disciples" of a kind, if we mean talented imitators like his friend Orazio Gentileschi and the friend's remarkable daughter Artemisia: how might their adulation have seemed insufficient?)

The conclusion vividly depicts the caliber of innkeepers (and clientele) the painter would have known, yet it also enshrines the uncanny aspects of the Biblical story:

Yes, two of the three men finally see you—

Luke with his coat out at the elbows

and astonished, red-nosed Cleopas—

but the innkeeper only glares

at a man he's certain is about to vanish

without settling his bill.

(From "Supper at Emmaus—1601," page 29)

About to vanish, indeed.

Eventually, the quarrelsome painter, ever on a nocturnal prowl with a sword at his side, commits his most luridly remembered act, the killing of Ranuccio Tomassini in a swordfight on Roman streets. Though the fight took place on or near tennis courts in front of a ducal palace, this was no dispute over missed calls on faults or aces, but a duel with four men to a side. As Andrew Graham-Dixon tells it, the two men had been bitter enemies for some time, and the causus belli was prostitution: Tomassini was definitely a pimp, and Caravaggio may have been a pimping poacher on Tomassini's territory. Fidelle, too, was one of the persons involved in the dispute.

Oddly, Starkey may miss an opportunity here; "The Death of Ranuccio Tomassini" is crisply worded yet awfully terse in recounting the murder. Yet perhaps the idea was to illustrate how disastrously brief our misdeeds may be, and how lasting the consequences. After this, Caravaggio flees the scene, pursuing his career as best he can on the move from the Alban Hills to Naples, Malta, Sicily, Naples again, and then Porto Ercole, still creating but trailing sulfur and brimstone to the end.

The poems continue at a generally high level, with interesting experiments: "The Seven Works of Mercy" integrates the artwork and its urban ambiance, with margin notes added, each italicized gloss an instruction to perform a particular mercy. This poem is very well observed: Starkey accepts that the painter had genuine Christian beliefs, however often he violated them.

I have just a couple of reservations about this very fine collection. We repeatedly hear the voice of the poet, speculating about Caravaggio's inner life, admonishing or empathizing with the tormented artist (is quite all that empathy justifiable?). The aim, to understand the environmental forces that shaped the maladjusted creator, is laudable. But could we not have the odd dramatic monologue, a confession from the man himself, or a disturbing "actual" contact with his inner turbulences? That being said, the poems hold the man almost at a "safe" distance—and Caravaggio's worst must have been quite off-putting.

Also, I would never suggest that the poet emulate Robert Browning, that super-Italianate Englishman, but would a few added touches of genuine local color make the already quite good even more brilliant? I'm thinking of Browning's "Fra Lippo Lippi," where his Renaissance artist enlivens his monologue with bits of sung stornelli, or Italian (nineteenth century!?) folksongs. But this request, if that's what it is, may be too much like that of the toper who begs for "My Melancholy Baby." In any case, David Starkey's You, Caravaggio is an ambitious, accomplished encounter with the primal force that was Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, and it will heighten the reader's interest in the art, as it does mine.

Tom Goff is an instructional assistant in the Reading and Writing Center at Folsom Lake College. He's written five poetry chapbooks. His first full-length poetry collection, Twelve-Tone Row: Music in Words, was published in 2018. He won the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize for Poetry, 2021.

— posted September 2025