Sometimes artists need to grow in fierce and tangled places. It is interesting that the painter Caravaggio hit his theme in Italy’s most impoverished and crowded city and that some three hundred years later the world’s greatest opera singer would hone his craft in those same streets.
In her brief biography Caravaggio: Painter of Miracles, novelist Francine Prose writes of the influence of Naples on the artist’s development:
“When autumn came, Caravaggio departed for Naples, which was then under Spanish rule, and which might as well have been a different country. Even today Naples can make you feel as if you have left Italy and been magically transported to North Africa or Asia. The streets of the old city are narrower and more mazelike than those in the capital, and they’re darker, shadowed by ancient dwellings that loom like skyscrapers, compared with the relatively low-rise buildings of Rome. The population was and is poorer and more likely to be unemployed, the prevailing atmosphere more volatile and anarchic.”
Immediately Caravaggio undertakes the painting of “The Seven Acts of Mercy” which Francine Prose describes this way:
“The Seven Acts of Mercy was a daunting assignment, but Caravaggio rose to the challenge, setting his nocturnal drama in a cramped piazza and crowding the lower half of his canvas with figures involved in scenarios corresponding to each of the seven good works. The most startling and most brightly lit of these illustrates the ancient Roman legend of Cimon and Pero, an exemplary tale of filial devotion concerning a woman who saved the life of her imprisoned and starving father by nourishing him with her breast milk. Here, in an astonishingly naturalistic touch, Pero has lifted the hem of her skirt as a sort of bib beneath the chin of her grizzled father, whose head protrudes between the prison bars as he suckles her bare breast. Half turning from him, Pero regards the spectacle around her: Samson drinking from the jawbone of an ass, Saint Martin dividing his cloak to clothe a naked beggar, an innkeeper directing pilgims to his establishment. Just behind Pero, a priest raises his torch to aid a man grasping the ankles of what appears to be a corpse. Above it all soars Mary, tenderly holding her radiant child, and from a tangle of angels, feathered wings, and swirling drapery, she surveys the world beneath her with perfect and absolute compassion.”
“Lacking a central emotional core, a vibrantly intimate interaction of the sort that allowed Caravaggio to achieve his most powerful effects, the painting seems chaotic, almost circuslike, and unfocused. It’s hard to know what we should look at first, or what impression we should take away from this jittery, hyperactive carnival of competing activity-that is, until we realize that what we are seeing is Naples itself. Even now the darkness, the light and shadow, the frenetic buzz of the crowd makes the altarpiece seem less like a biblical or mythical narrative than like a cityscape, like reportage.”
Ah but the artist takes Naples “inside” him and in your guts its transformed into poetry rather than newsprint.
**
In a novel I’m writing about Caruso I depict him working as a very young man with an autocratic teacher who sends him into the streets to practice his breathing techniques.
Here is a section:
Vergine.
Who makes the boy walk in circles. Tells him the notes are within each circle. Tells him to think of circles all his life. Tells him the mouth is circular. The tongue is simply homesick for the circle.
And the boy closes his eyes and sees three circles. Red, green, and white. He is instructed a bit more explicitly.
“The red circle is the stomach,” says the teacher. “The seat of all that’s warm, and also of everything that’s cold.”
The boy imagines the cavern of appetite and tries to think of sudden revulsion.
“Verdi spends much of his time in this circle,”Vergine says. The boy notices for the first time how round his teacher’s eyes are. They are like black marbles.
“The next circle is the diaphragm. You must learn every degree of this circle. You must know it so well that you dream about it.”
“And of course the third circle is the throat. Left to its own devices the throat merely howls like a street cat. But when you roll it into the other circles it can become a great instrument.”
Vergine sends the boy out into the streets to think about the circles.
In the harbor of Naples he watches sailors from Egypt unloading bolts of cloth. Ruby colored cottons and blue mysteries—the blues going to indigo, yards of cloth shaded like the night sky. He watches great rolls of fabric as they are hoisted by teams of longshoremen, immense, rose colored cannons coming slowly through dense crowds.
Red is for the stomach.
He sings without opening his mouth. The cotton comes through the press of people and he sings an old, Neapolitan love song. He sings with just his stomach and his throat. He appears to be talking to himself amid orient colors and the press of people.
He remembers a priest who said “the voice precedes the prayer.” The voice is always there. You find it with simplicity. With honesty. By desiring something larger than personal happiness.
The boy walks in circles among ten thousand people. The sun bears down in Naples. Ships are unloaded in a sunlight so dazzling that it is said there is no need for a customs inspector. The sun exposes everything.
He stands amid carpenters and pickpockets. He runs his fingers over his neck, pressing lightly at the y-crested collar bone. He strokes the soft flesh of his chin and kneeds the skin of his throat like bread dough.
The boy can sing with his throat. He is pure in the head registers. Vergine says he can become startling.
Ah but the diaphragm is the human portion of the prayer. The diaphragm is a cinctured scroll. Each singer must learn to open it without showing an outward sign.
And so the green circle will be the hardest one to master.
He walks in circles just as Vergine has instructed.
Walking in this way, with no destination, he decides that he will wear a piece of discarded metal by affixing it to his sternum. Something made of brass. An old faucet perhaps.
He will ask his father who repairs public fountains. His father will give him a spigot that was once inside a cherub. The boy will wear this affixed to his gut. He will heave it up and down beneath an oversized shirt.
And the boy’s father isn’t brutal. Neither does he possess curiosity. When asked for a broken faucet from a dry fountain he hands over a perfect,fluted curl of brass and his unusual singing boy carries it away.
Vergine tells the boy to practice his breathing in a public square.
The boy-Caruso picks a spot in the open air opposite the entrance to the Mercadente theater. It is a shaded spot and because the hour is just after the mezzo-giorno no one sees him though he stands in plain view in the southeast corner of the wide plaza.
He is aware that he is lucky. He is 16 years old and he is a pupil of the great Vergine.
Vergine. Who sang for Verdi. Whose eccentricities are sub-rosa.
Vergine. Who sleeps with a cat’s skin draped on his larynx.
Who claims to have received the skin from Chaliapin.
Who believes one should practice breathing in a public square.
He wears the faucet under his shirt having tied it with butcher’s twine.
The metal affixed to his ribs weighs one pound and seven ounces. It’s just heavy enough to transform ordinary breathing into a private wrestling match.
The boy’s job is to enunciate a single word and to breathe slowly in and out.
His word is lacrymosa and he must work this across the twin circles of the diaphragm and the throat
Lacrymosa.
“Breathe deeply without the appearance of taking breath
,” says Vergine,
“Ex
pel breath by pronouncingLa and cry. Inhale while saying mosa.
Exhale on a.”
Vergine.
Who tells the boy that his singing sounds like wind whistling through a window crack.
Lacrymosa…
The boy pushes against the metal with his stomach.
Lacrymosa…
Two men pass in front of him pushing a cart piled high with mattresses.
He sees two prostitutes laughing in the shadows by the Royal Hotel.
He hides the fact that he is breathing.
The metal pipe under his shirt moves in short spasms like a piece of furniture.
He sees a “mage”—a fortune teller, a woman with a turquoise colored scarf and voluminous skirts. She has joined the prostitutes for the shared laughter. He knows they haven’t seen him.
He knows he is perfecting the art of breathing and lifting without being seen.
**
Poets and painters are the eavesdroppers who effectively hide their breathing.
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 