Fiction Review
The Artist and the Assassin
by Mark Frutkin
Erin, ON: Porcupine’s Quill, 2021
213 pp. $19.95
The Wordsmith and the Half-Fallen Angel
In The Artist and the Assassin, Mark Frutkin has penned a page turner of lyrical imagination and historical recreation driven by the fictional hit-man Luca Passarelli and the turbulent genius, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. Like Caravaggio’s canvasses, Frutkin’s novel highlights and contrasts contradictory characters and their starkly different perspectives in a novel that reads like a bestselling mystery. Chapters alternate between the first-person voice of the dissolute, often destitute Passarelli as “The Assassin,” and third person accounts of “The Artist” Caravaggio, a revolutionary painter with a volatile temper and rapier at the ready. In the opening epigraph, the assassin embraces his violent nature as the artist’s alter-ego: “I am the cloud over your shoulder…I carry lightly the thoughts, the belief of a man who has never known doubt, while you, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, are the shadow of the cloud on the earth…”
In the opening year of the 17th century, we first encounter the down-and-out Passarelli in Rome, sitting in a dark cellar serving as the model for St. Matthew in Caravaggio’s first public commission, The Calling of Saint Matthew. Through various encounters and adroit dialogue, Frutkin reveals how Caravaggio scandalizes and captivates both detractors and patrons by employing commoners, prostitutes, and villains from the city’s backstreets as models for sacred figures in his theatrical compositions. His singular vision and innovative technique so dazzle his Vatican benefactor, Cardinal Del Monte, that he dubs him a “half-angel, half fallen angel,” who “paints miracles and not always the religious sort.
The novel reconstructs Caravaggio’s bereft childhood, his early apprenticeship and arrival in Rome at the age of sixteen with rebellious ideas winging his brush. We witness his evolution as he eschews the High Renaissance ideal of painting “senza errori,” and devises his dramatic rendering of chiaroscuro while preoccupying himself with a search for truth more secular than celestial. In a trance-like state, Caravaggio wanders about the Eternal City enchanted by the play of sun and shadow, the fluctuating rhythms, and palette of street faces. Via internal monologues and conversations, we witness how the artist chooses to represent reality through mundane objects and Rome’s everyday people. Accentuating both by means of light, seeing no need for background scenery, he leaves all else in darkness. His contemporaries deemed his earthly aesthetic as highly unorthodox since the natural, mortal world is the source of corruption and sin. In conversation with Del Monte, Caravaggio rejects the imitation of nature and the mannered sacred paintings of the past: “I believe that Nature is my teacher, not the Old Masters,” and privately, he views Rome as offering “the endless display of humanity and life; a city throbbing with activity, with beauty and pain and suffering and anger and hatred and violence and love.” From this tableau vivant, he drew his too-human faces of religious figures, preferring—over the pious figures of stereotyped holiness—saints wearing torn clothing or unkempt disciples displaying vulnerable states of astonishment or dread. Del Monte’s nemesis, the conservative, poker-faced Cardinal Borromeo judges Caravaggio’s still life as appearing, “far too real. The peach has a spot of rot starting…the vine leaves are speckled with stains…Fruit is the work of God; it must therefore, be perfect.” It remains a testament to his prodigious talent that Caravaggio succeeded in using his prostitute inamorata—his great love—as a model for the Madonna.
Frutkin renders Rome as a city in the thick of the Counter-Reformation, incandescent with religious ardor. Thus, we witness the burning at the stake of Giordano Bruno, listen in on rumours of Pope Clement VIII walking about barefoot while issuing decrees to make “life difficult for artists, as well as prostitutes and especially sodomites” (an accusation that haunted Caravaggio, given his sensuous depiction of young men in his painting). Keeping to his theme, Frutkin juxtaposes the lavish luxury of the Vatican elite against the bleak misery of the masses.
Continuously plagued by his demons, Caravaggio’s violent streak culminates in his murder of a young man from a prominent family and banishment from Rome. Again, the artist and the assassin become intertwined as Passarelli is hired to execute a revenge killing. The novel follows both men to Frutkin’s skillfully scaffolded Naples, Malta and Sicily, all populated with pertinent historical actors and enlivened by vivid events. While the author’s painstaking research is evident in historical accuracy, biography, and true-to-life characters, his poetic prose and meaningful metaphors effortlessly paint a riveting portrait of Caravaggio as “the light that still falls on the world.”
