2. Derek Jarman’s queer histories: Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio

Alexandra Parsons

Queer icon Derek Jarman (1942–94) was an interdisciplinary luminary best known for his films. He was also highly influential across his wider practice, which ranged from painting, set design and gardening to political activistm and writing, all of which are currently attracting renewed interest and analysis.

This chapter focuses on his writing, and on one lesser-known text in particular, Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio, published alongside the release of the film Caravaggio in February 1986. Jarman wrote and published voraciously, creating a diverse body of unusual, hybrid books, many of them echoing the scrapbook form he used in his working sketchbooks.¹ He wrote the majority of these following his diagnosis as HIV-positive in December 1986, from which point on he urgently deployed his extraordinary creative energies to speak out against the resurgence of state-sanctioned homophobia in the 1980s after the HIV/Aids crisis began, and the reintroduction in Britain of legislative initiative ‘Clause 28’ in December 1987 (passed into law as Section 28 in May 1988). Jarman’s own diagnosis has been widely viewed as the catalyst for his politicisation and the moment from which he became politically active. Yet his fascination with queer figures from the past, which far predates his diagnosis, demonstrates an existing political commitment to queer history as a means of making a claim for the strength and perseverance of queer identities. He repeatedly foregrounds queer identities from Western cultural history alongside his own personal history in his artistic practice, a preoccupation that would only become yet more critical during a period of enormous uncertainty, grief and suffering as the 1980s and ’90s drew on.

Jarman’s approach to the past was always provisional and always collage-based: he quickly gathered together different materials and subject matters and, by doing so, created polyvalent, multilayered works aimed at understanding and expanding the relationship between the past and present, and in particular articulating new ways of understanding how, in Jim Ellis’s words, ‘history inhabits and informs the present’.² Jarman, in his earliest feature films Jubilee and The Tempest, uses the moment of the English Renaissance in order to interrogate and satirise contemporary ideas of Englishness and the nation. Yet to understand his later sharply focused political engagement with our queer past, it is of benefit to return instead to his work on the life of the Baroque artist Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, a project that had its genesis at the end of the 1970s. Jarman had immense difficulties obtaining the financing necessary for this, his next planned feature film, and he struggled over a period of years to attain the funding required while writing and rewriting scripts with a number of collaborators. He eventually made Caravaggio in 1985, and it was released early the following year. Characterised by its spare set (a warehouse in Limehouse), the film uses the framing device of the dying Michele Caravaggio being tended to by his mute assistant, as scenes from his life are recounted via a series of flashbacks. A number of these are formed from tableaux vivants: restagings both of Caravaggio’s paintings and of other artists’ work, including, for example, Jacques-Louis David’s Marat Assassiné (1793).

The lavishly illustrated book Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio emerged alongside the release of the film. It was the first of the books he published to accompany the release of a film – a practice he was to continue for the rest of his life. Like the later books, War Requiem (1989) and Wittgenstein: The Terry Eagleton Script, the Derek Jarman Film (1993), it contains a version of the film script, yet unlike those titles, it includes different kinds of text. The script itself is interspersed with Jarman’s reflections on the violence and intensity of Caravaggio’s life and art, information about the making of the film, and a series of autobiographical fragments about Jarman’s life and work.³ The text of Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio acts as a complement to Caravaggio by expanding on its contents, laying out Jarman’s approach to the biography of the painter, whereby Jarman recreated Caravaggio’s paintings as a means of creating a narrative of his life. In Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio, Jarman takes a queer figure from history as his starting point and intermingles the records of the past with the contemporary. At times, the technique works overtly to tie Jarman’s own life to that of the Renaissance painter. In other instances, Jarman uses more oblique methods to comment on Caravaggio’s paintings and, in particular, Caravaggio’s self-representations.

The book is an artefact, distinct from the film that prompted its production, and echoes the beautiful large sketchbooks that Jarman kept throughout his working life. It operates as an activist text that excavates queer histories and acts as a means of protest in an unexpected form. At first glance Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio seems an unlikely protest document. The book is slightly short of A4 in size, and comprises 136 pages. It is full of photographs by Tunisian-American artist Gerald Incandela, mostly in black and white, with some full-colour plates of film stills. Yet like Jarman’s films, it contains an array of rich imagery that has been hastily put together. It is a less expensive production than an art monograph, and the scrapbook-like form enables its experiments in representation and self-representation to shine.

This chapter analyses several elements of the Caravaggio project, beginning with Jarman’s deeply personal use of the past as a way of finding and linking queer forebears to his own experience. He uses the text to advance what would become a refrain throughout the rest of his career: by intermingling alternative queer histories with the contemporary, he produces political contestation. Jarman placed his historical project in productive relation to Caravaggio’s own iconoclastic historical project, in which the painter overlaid biblical and classical scenes with private meaning from his own life. Critically, Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio highlights self-representational acts that are fleeting in the film – Caravaggio’s self-portraits, as well as Jarman’s self-conscious reflection on his role as painter and director during a brief cameo – allowing readers time to engage with them. He playfully interacts with Caravaggio’s dismembered self-portraits in Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio, speculating about the autobiographical meanings found within these grisly images. Jarman revisits the self-portraits as a means to claim them – and the choreographed staging of Caravaggio’s personal life that they depict – for his own constructed queer history and, by extension, that of others in 1980s Britain. Most importantly, Jarman uses collage as a technique throughout the book to emphasise the way the film, like any other version of the painter’s life, is just one possible construction or reading.

In the book, Jarman uses the opportunity that the film release presented to expand upon the connections between his life as a queer man in the present and that of Caravaggio, whose biographies often excised the queer elements of his life. He revises some of the autobiographical meanings presented by Caravaggio in order to make the historical figure’s dramatic work speak to issues of queer representation in the early 1980s, including using the trope of queer martyrdom to highlight contemporary suffering and persecution. By insisting upon the connections between his life in the then present and Caravaggio’s, one of a lineage of famous queer men, and by producing narratives that entangle his own past with those of that lineage, he attempted to counter some of the harm he suffered growing up in a Britain where sex acts between men were illegal, prejudice was rife, and information hard to come by.

Jarman was always invested in what Carolyn Dinshaw has summarised as ‘a queer desire for history’: he was driven to insist upon a queer past (using the terms of the present) and thereby forge community across time.⁴ Yet he also, in doing this, displays a desire to enable different kinds of connections across time and different – or queer – conceptions of time that permit ways of being historical which exceed linear time. For Elizabeth Freeman, engaging with queer temporalities involves ‘mining the present for signs of undetonated energy from past revolutions’, and it is this drive, as seen in Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio, that this chapter unpacks.⁵

Jarman’s use of the past: Caravaggio

Although it was not Jarman who originally chose Caravaggio as a subject but his producer, Nicholas Ward-Jackson, the artist was an appropriate choice for him. In his 1992 memoir At Your Own Risk, Jarman describes the deeply personal path always taken by his queer history project. Speaking of his self-education in the early 1960s while at King’s College London, he comments: ‘I began to read between the lines of history. The hunt was on for forebears who validated my existence.’⁶ Caravaggio was just one of a list of queer forebears from this period in Europe who, throughout his career, Jarman explored and drew on. He asks, ‘Was Western civilization Queer? The Renaissance certainly was. Lorenzo di Medici, Michelangelo, Leonardo, Botticelli, Rosso, Pontormo, Caravaggio, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Bacon.’⁷ Jarman claims these prominent artists, writers and polymaths for a queer tradition. ‘The point’, as Pascale Aebischer summarises, ‘is not historical accuracy, but a politically motivated need to insist on the contribution formulations of same-sex desire have made to Western civilisation’.⁸

Caravaggio holds a reputation as a troublemaker, a man said by his contemporaries to be ‘a quarrelsome individual’, and ‘a pernicious poison who did a little good but much harm’.⁹ Indeed, prominent queer theorist Leo Bersani makes purposefully anachronistic use of 20th-century enfant terribleJean Genet, branding Caravaggio ‘that Genet-type outlaw’, in an essay that, in its investment in queering temporality, could be said to continue Jarman’s own queer history project.¹⁰ Jarman makes plain his interest in the painter in Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio: ‘Caravaggio was the first to take a bottle of paint-stripper to the Renaissance. He burnt away decorum and the ideal, splattered the clear clean colours of Mannerism with his lamp-blacks, knocked the saints out of the sky and onto the streets, stole and smelted their haloes.’¹¹ Jarman names a technique here that also became his own: he too ‘take[s] a bottle of paint-stripper’ to his subject matter, paring it back to its base components in order to make something direct and useful in his contemporary moment. Genevieve Warwick explains that Caravaggio ‘conceived of his subject as a performance of history staged in the present. […] Caravaggio demonstrated the relevance of the past to his contemporaries by enacting it within the framework of the present.’¹² Jarman shares his approach to the past with the painter. Jim Ellis links Jarman’s technique to the artist’s: ‘Jarman figures Caravaggio in the same way that Caravaggio remakes his historical subjects, making them embody the relation between two historical moments.’¹³ When Jarman writes ‘I am obsessed by the interpretation of the past’, in Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio, he is pointing to his preoccupation not with the past itself, but with its ‘interpretation’ or, in other words, it is the past as seen through the lens of the present that provides illumination through its combination.¹⁴

Caravaggio’s self-representations: Bacchino Malato

As well as finding in Caravaggio a way of working with the past that he admired and at times emulated, Jarman was preoccupied with Caravaggio’s self-representations. The artist’s self-portraits often use mythmaking strategies that bear further analysis because they were taken up by Jarman in his own work. Caravaggio’s work was often highly self-referential: he would sometimes give his own features to a character in the religious or classical scenes and, like Jarman, would generally work with a group of collaborators who modelled for him and were involved in his own life. These methods ensured his painting acted as a kind of autobiographical practice or, as David Stone contends, show him to have created a ‘mythical self […] which critics have often mistaken for autobiography’.¹⁵ Like Jarman, Caravaggio demands acknowledgement of the inseparability of life and art.

Figure 2.1. Spread from Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio showing the young Caravaggio (Dexter Fletcher) in a hospital bed, with the Bacchino Malato resting on the wall behind him (verso). The script relating to the production shot is reproduced, along with a quotation from Giulio Mancini (1559–1630), whose Considerazione is one of the earliest sources for biographical information about Caravaggio. Caravaggio’s Bacchino Malato (c. 1593–4) is also reproduced in black and white (recto). Photograph by Gerald Incandela (24–5).

In an early self-portrait, Caravaggio uses his own boy-like features for his Bacchino Malato, or Young Sick Bacchus (c. 1593–4), the god of unrestrained consumption and ritual madness, sick with surfeit. Bersani reads the self-portrait as an ‘erotic tease’ which provides a ‘come-on’ tempered by ambiguity.¹⁶ The young Caravaggio poses coyly: he wears an open expression on his face and his bare shoulder is enticingly angled towards the painting’s viewers, yet his body is shrouded loosely in material and is facing away from viewers, in a gesture that ‘is at once exhibitionist and self-concealing’.¹⁷ The boy is also depicted with greenish skin, demonstrating his sickness, adding what Bersani and Dutoit describe as ‘a repellent and repelling note to the provocation’.¹⁸ The intriguing pose that Caravaggio takes on in this early painting offers viewers the opportunity to interpret it in tendentious ways: he becomes the vision of the onlooker’s downfall, simultaneously revealing the initial attraction and ensuing catastrophe that will result if one gives in to one’s urges. Yet he is an ambiguous character in another way: he trades on an androgynous gender presentation to attract his disciples, providing an opportunity for a contemporary viewer to read the pose as a commentary on gender and sexuality. However, the Bacchus is a choreographed pose, which complicates the autobiographical significance of this work.

Jarman uses the painting as a plot device in Caravaggio, which he expands upon in Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio (see figure 2.1). Early in Jarman’s film, the older Michele states in a voiceover that ‘I painted myself as Bacchus and took on his fate, a wild orgiastic dismemberment’.¹⁹ Although the older man comments on the self-representation as being a role he took on, the younger Caravaggio is depicted as being fully invested in that role. In the same scene, a reproduction of Bacchino Malato, created by Christopher Hobbs, is shown leaning against a wall, prompting a discussion of the painting between the Cardinal Del Monte and the young Michele:

Jarman here guides us to a particular interpretation of the self-portrait: while enacting the role of Bacchus as he poses for his own painting, the young artist becomes Bacchus. Or rather, Bacchus becomes the young artist: the real subject becomes indistinguishable from the mythic origins that inspired the painting. Although sources from this period are inconclusive, they agree that at one point as a young man, Caravaggio fell extremely ill and spent six months in the hospital of Santa Maria della Consolazione. This painting is, in part, an autobiographical record of the physical effects of the sickness. The scene is repeated in Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio, though with Michele’s last line altered to ‘It doesn’t pretend to be art,’ rather than the simpler ‘It isn’t art’ of the film.²¹ Jarman has Michele declare the painting’s lack of ‘preten[ce]’, focusing on his interest in depicting life without regard for aesthetics, and his scorn for the practice of elevating life to art.²² Of course, this could also be a pose, but it gives a good indication of how Jarman wishes us to understand Caravaggio’s self-representational gesture here.

Figure 2.2. Cover image: Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio. The young Caravaggio (Dexter Fletcher) here grasps the severed head of the older Caravaggio (Nigel Terry) in Jarman’s tableau. Photograph by Gerald Incandela.

Caravaggio’s self-representations: David with the Head of Goliath

In a second major self-portrait, Caravaggio uses his own features to disquieting effect in a graphic depiction of the David and Goliath story. In one of his engagements with the biblical story, entitled David with the Head of Goliath (c. 1605–10) and held in the Galleria Borghese, Caravaggio paints his own features onto the dismembered head of the vanquished giant.²³ The intense drama of the scene in the painting is aided by the young David’s stance: he holds Goliath’s severed head by its hair, its blood pours from the torn flesh at its neck. There is a scholarly consensus that Goliath’s features belong to Caravaggio, derived from a comparison of the painting with the famous portrait of Caravaggio by Ottavio Leoni (c. 1621). To a contemporary viewer, this self-depiction seems striking. Why would Caravaggio have used his own features on Goliath? To understand this pose, one might consider who he is depicting himself as being vanquished by. There are two competing readings that comment on the identity of David. In the first, David, whose expression contains more sadness than delight in conquering his adversary, betrays ‘an unusual psychological bond’ between the two.²⁴ The figure is thought to have the features of a former studio boy, Cecco del Caravaggio, ‘il suo Caravaggino’, who had been his lover.²⁵ In this version, one can read the painting as Caravaggio’s statement of being slain by desire for the younger man. In the second interpretation of David’s identity, his features are thought in fact to be Caravaggio’s own, as a younger man. In this version, the double self-portrait of ‘self-mutilation’ perhaps indicates Caravaggio’s acceptance that the behaviour of his youthful self has curtailed his life as a man.²⁶ In both versions, Caravaggio uses a familiar religious subject to reflect on his own life (and perhaps relationships).²⁷

David Stone describes Caravaggio’s self-portraits as ‘demonstrations of the artist’s fierce competitiveness and quest for originality’.²⁸ Yet his painting of his severed head in this instance has a curious parallel with the self-portraits of Michelangelo, who is also included in Jarman’s list of queer Renaissance figures in At Your Own Risk. These are found in the Sistine Chapel frescoes which were made up to a century earlier (ceiling: 1508–12; The Last Judgment: 1536–41). Strikingly, Michelangelo uses his own features on the decapitated head of Holofernes in the Judith and Holofernes lunette on the Sistine ceiling, placing himself in the role of the lecherous Assyrian general whose desire for Judith was the weakness that led to his death: he allowed her to enter his tent while he was unguarded, whereupon she killed him before he could destroy the city of Bethulia, her home. In this role, Michelangelo becomes the warmonger destroyed by his own (heterosexual) lust. In a second, later self-portrait within the Last Judgment, Michelangelo again depicts himself in a mutilated form, this time as St Bartholemew’s flayed skin, held by the saint as the symbol of his martyrdom in a pose Laura Camille Agoston describes as ’simultaneously self-aggrandizing and self-annihilating’.²⁹

In the context of these examples from Michelangelo’s work, Caravaggio’s own grisly self-representational pose as Goliath does not seem extraordinary but, instead, an example of how he borrowed techniques not only from distant spiritual narratives and classical myth, but also from his more recent cultural history. Agoston has written at length about the convention in Italian Renaissance and Baroque painting of artists making self-portraits where their features are placed onto the severed heads of Holofernes, Goliath or John the Baptist. She observes that ‘the biblical narrative is coded with private, autobiographical significance, while the faces of Judith, David, or Salome also take on a specificity known only to the artist and his circle as portraits of former lovers’.³⁰ These narratives of inversion, where the weaker person (the smaller David, the female Judith or Salome) subdues the stronger, seem to depict the artist as the rightly defeated victim. Yet they are always ambiguous: they demonstrate the artist’s power to transform myth and biblical narrative into personal history. By preserving references to one’s life in paint, one can enact ‘durable commemoration and oblique revenge’.³¹

Jarman takes up the ambiguous backstory to David with the Head of Goliath (1605–10) most visibly in the book Caravaggio, rather than the film. On the front cover of Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio, a hybrid photograph with hand-painted areas shows Jarman’s tableau recreation of the setting for Caravaggio’s David with the Head of Goliath (see figure 2.2). In this version, Goliath has the features of Nigel Terry, the actor who plays Michele Caravaggio in the film. The teenager holding the head of the vanquished Goliath aloft is Dexter Fletcher, the actor who plays the young Caravaggio in the film. His younger self holds the older self’s decapitated head aloft, as it drips blood. By placing a double self-portrait on the front cover of the book, Jarman frames the Caravaggio project with an image that explores Caravaggio’s biography through the painter’s own autobiographical project. In this case, Jarman privileges a reading where the painter depicts the actions of his younger self annihilating the older man.

Yet Jarman includes another version of the scene in the book. On a spread that focuses on Caravaggio’s self-portraits, Jarman includes one of Gerald Incandela’s photographs – this one another full-size photograph of David with the Head of Goliath, recreated as a tableau vivant (see figure 2.3).³² In this version, the image captured is different from that of the cover. This time the young boy is not the young Caravaggio (played by Dexter Fletcher), but another adolescent boy. The photograph has, like the front cover, been partly painted over, the black watercolour paint giving the piece a dreamlike quality. Jarman’s text on the opposite page is ambiguous: ‘Six years before, when he painted The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew, he included his own self-portrait, staring wistfully over his shoulder at a beautiful naked youth. […] This painting and David with the Head of Goliath – another self-portrait, in which a tough street boy holds Caravaggio’s severed head – show martyrdom at the hands of youth.’³³

Gerald Incandela explains of the second photograph that, in the making of the film, it had preceded the image of Dexter Fletcher. One of the extras had caught his eye because he looked so much like a Caravaggio model, so Incandela photographed him in the role of David in Caravaggio’s painting. Jarman loved the photograph, so he added a potential scene to the film, which Incandela photographed, but of course using Dexter Fletcher.³⁴

In a way, it doesn’t matter whether the ‘youth’ Jarman here refers to is the painter’s younger self, or another young man. Both versions of the painting’s sitters’ identities coexist: Caravaggio’s posed self-destruction, as well as his demise at the hands of a young lover. The variant tableaux provide a lens through which to understand not necessarily the events in the film but Jarman’s understanding and engagement with Caravaggio’s autobiographical play. Of course, here the variation has been suggested by Incandela, yet Jarman chose to include the initial photograph in the book. The effect is to show that Jarman engaged with multiple versions of Caravaggio’s life: those readings encouraged by Caravaggio himself, his contemporaries in Italy, and his afterlives in cultural history.³⁵ His own reading allowed for multiple versions to coexist.

The inexact match between the contents of the film and those of the book shows us one way to understand Jarman’s working practice. This example demonstrates that the book is not simply a printed illustration of the contents of the film. Instead, it is an extension of its subject matter that shows far more than stills from the set. It reveals other possibilities and roads not travelled, and the collaborative working processes that informed the film’s direction. The project is not simply about the finished result when the film was released, although that was a huge relief after so many years’ hiatus, but about the collaborative process of exploring, then reenacting, the painter’s history.

Caravaggio, Christ and Jarman taking things further

Jarman engages with a further example of Caravaggio’s self-portraiture. On the double-page spread dedicated to self-portraits in Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio, he comments on another self-portrait, which is subtly featured in The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew (1599–1600), installed in the church of San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome. The famous painting features the saint being murdered by a soldier the king of Ethopia has sent, repayment for having rebuked the king for lusting after his own niece, a nun. The young soldier, or murderer, is situated at the centre of the image, his muscles made more prominent by the direction of the light on his unclothed body. As Jarman describes him, ‘A murderer, who [Caravaggio] has painted triumphantly’.³⁶ A face, again recognisable from the Ottavio Leoni portrait of Caravaggio, looks askance at the scene from the background, perhaps ‘a saddened bystander’ or, given a queer reading, a portrait of the artist throwing a backwards glance at the beautiful soldier, perhaps claiming a relation of unrequited desire.³⁷ Jarman gives a queer reading to the painting in his earlier autobiography, Dancing Ledge. He includes the following commentary on the painting: ‘Michele gazes wistfully at the hero slaying the saint. It is a look no one can understand unless he has stood till 5 a.m. in a gay bar hoping to be fucked by that hero. The gaze of the passive homosexual at the object of his desire, he waits to be chosen, he cannot make the choice.’³⁸ The passage demonstrates the direct way Jarman makes a reading of the past in the terms of the present: the mention of the gay bar helps contextualise the onlooker’s gaze, yet, once again, there is a hint of darker impulses than hedonism. Jarman recognises that ‘it’s difficult to know how the seventeenth century understood physical homosexuality’, but the point is not historical accuracy but instead recognising and drawing out a lineage of queer forebears.³⁹ In Jarman’s film, Ranuccio (Sean Bean) poses as Saint Matthew’s killer in the tableau for the painting. Jarman thereby invites us to understand the painting in terms of Michele’s unrequited passion for Ranuccio.

In Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio, Jarman makes explicit his techniques in using Caravaggio’s paintings as a framing device through which to construct a narrative of Caravaggio’s life in his film. In the above example, Jarman makes clear his intent to use The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew to highlight the unequal desire between Caravaggio and Ranuccio. He names the implied relation in the tableau shown in the film. But in another spread in Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio (60–1), Jarman goes further still by using Nigel Terry, the actor playing Caravaggio in the film, to extend the legend of the historical Caravaggio in a playful way. A grainy reproduction of Caravaggio’s intense, voyeuristic The Incredulity of Saint Thomas (1601–2) depicts a religious scene following Christ’s resurrection. According to the Gospel of St John, Christ appears to his disciples after his resurrection, and shows them his wounds to prove that he has truly risen from the dead. Saint Thomas was absent, yet when the others tell him they have seen Christ, he will not believe them. Saint Thomas is reported as saying, ‘Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe.’⁴⁰ Caravaggio’s painting depicts the risen Christ forcing Saint Thomas to penetrate the wound on his side with a finger, as two other apostles look on.⁴¹ On the opposite page, a production shot from the film shows Caravaggio drawing Davide’s hand towards him (Garry Cooper) to touch the wound on his side, the result of a knife fight with Ranuccio (Sean Bean), with whom he is in love (see figure 2.4).

Figure 2.3. Jarman includes another full-size photograph of David with the Head of Goliath in Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio in which the severed head of the older Caravaggio (Nigel Terry) is held aloft by a youth (49). Photograph by Gerald Incandela.

Through this arrangement, Jarman places his reimagining of Caravaggio into a new self-representational role within one of his paintings. Jarman uses Caravaggio’s painting as a framing device that helps him structure a film that looks to the art to provide a creative biography of the life. In this instance, Jarman provides a reading that extends Caravaggio’s own self-myth-making: the character of Caravaggio in the film becomes a living enactment of the historical Caravaggio’s painting. Jarman thereby places even more weight on a reading of Caravaggio’s paintings as an autobiographical practice than Caravaggio did. But he is also simultaneously doing something else: as well as commentating on practising life as art, Jarman is creating a symbolically resonant image. By depicting Caravaggio in a choreographed pose as the risen Christ, Jarman is depicting the painter in the role of queer martyr. Indeed, Jarman makes use of Christ at other moments in his work: this particular moment in Christ’s Passion is a motif that is reprised in The Garden (1990), in which the older Christ figure (played by Roger Cook) opens his garments to display his wound to the camera, pointing to a history of gay suffering at the hands of homophobic persecution. The Incredulity of Saint Thomas is a painting that particularly lends itself to reappropriation by a gay audience: the original work is a startling erotic scene depicting an intense exchange involving penetration between men. By recreating the painting as a tableau in both Caravaggio and Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio, Jarman, in Ellis’s words, ‘claims Caravaggio for a gay historical tradition, putting his sexuality at the center of his artistic genius’.⁴²

Figure 2.4. Spread from Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio showing a black-and-white reproduction of Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, the relevant section from the script, and a quotation from Carel van Mander (1548–1606), art theoretician (verso). Jarman’s recreation of The Incredulity of Saint Thomas is printed on the recto, in which Caravaggio (Nigel Terry) forces Davide’s (Garry Cooper) hand into the wound on his side ( Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio, 60–1). Photograph by Gerald Incandela.

Figure 2.5. Jarman in a cameo role as a cardinal in Caravaggio. Production photograph by Gerald Incandela ( Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio, 72).

Jarman in Caravaggio

Another method Jarman uses to align himself with Caravaggio is the creation of an oblique self-portrait in the film, which is carefully documented in two richly coloured plates printed in Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio (see figure 2.5). In what is Jarman’s first physical appearance in one of his own feature-length films, he has a cameo role as a cardinal towards the end of Caravaggio, dressed in incarnadine robes. He is present and silent throughout the scene where a camp Pope Paul V (Jack Birkett) gives an audience to Michele Caravaggio.⁴³ They negotiate the painting of a portrait in exchange for the release of Ranuccio, who had been erroneously jailed for murdering the prostitute Lena (the real culprit was the pope’s nephew, Scipione Borghese). The scene cuts to Jarman, who dips an aspergillum into a golden bowl full of water, then sprinkles it over some objects on a table. In the script, Jarman is mentioned in the scene’s directions as follows: ‘A cardinal takes a holy water sprinkler and silently blesses the immaculate paints and blank white canvas that have been prepared for the portrait sitting.’⁴⁴ Jarman never looks at the camera or at the other characters but takes on a quiet and ritualistic role. The cameo in Caravaggio is brief and unobtrusive. An audience might not notice his appearance, taking place as it does in a tense scene between Michele and the pope. However, the fact that Incandela’s images of Jarman posing as the silent cardinal are reproduced in Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio in rich colour plates is a signal that Jarman wanted the self-representation to be remembered.

Jarman playfully demonstrates his own identification with Caravaggio through this indirect means: he uses the painter’s own methods, mimicking the way Caravaggio used other figures to symbolise certain aspects of himself, rather than being more direct. By posing as a cardinal in the film, Jarman may have been gesturing towards his role as film director. The audience watches the cardinal undertake the almost spiritual preparation that underpins the making of a painting. Jarman ritualistically blesses the tools that will be used by the artist rather than seeking to show control of exactly what occurs. This mirrors Jarman’s approach to filmmaking, in which the actors are encouraged to bring their own interpretation and autonomy onto the set. He places himself as an oblique observer who doesn’t even look directly at the events taking place, rather than as part of the action, perhaps overdoing the sense of himself being at one remove from the action of the film.

Curiously, Jarman places himself in a role that notably does not involve a preoccupation with looking: Caravaggio’s self-portraits always involve significant glances, as detailed above, and Jarman appears in other films in roles that always prioritise his ways of looking at his surroundings. For example, he frames his own role as director in The Last of England through repeated appearances wielding a movie camera, looking at the world within his film through the remove of the recording equipment. In the earlier film Nighthawks (dir. Ron Peck, 1978), Jarman has an extended cameo role in the background of a gay disco scene, where he leans languidly against a wall, casually smoking, handsome, observing the scene – in his own words, he makes ‘a very creditable cruiser’.⁴⁵ In the cameo role in Nighthawks, Jarman remains at a distance from the action of the film: by looking, however, he is able to choose how and when to act, and with whom. Similarly, Jarman also has a cameo role in Prick Up Your Ears (1987), Stephen Frears’s biographical film about the life and violent death of Joe Orton and his relationship with Kenneth Halliwell, filmed not long after the release of Caravaggio. In it, Jarman briefly plays the part of his university friend, the artist Patrick Procktor, whom he knew from their time at the Slade School of Fine Art. As Procktor, Jarman paints a portrait of the naked Joe Orton for a commission undertaken in 1967 that would appear as a Royal Court programme insert. Again, he features in an observer’s role: similar to the cardinal in Caravaggio, he is present during the film’s action yet is not truly a part of it. As a painter in Prick Up Your Ears, he creates something new by looking carefully at his subject, but he tries to avoid being a subject himself.

In the cameos in Ron Peck’s and Stephen Frears’s films, Jarman is called on to represent an aspect of London’s gay scene. In the first, he enacts an aspect of his own character: a hallmark of London’s gay nightlife during a certain period, comfortably passing the time in bars, which the film’s protagonist struggles to do. In the second, he is called on to represent London’s gay art scene in late 1960s Islington by taking on the role of his friend Procktor. Yet in the Caravaggio cameo, a different kind of self-representation is seen: he is physically present for the exchange between the painter and the pope but demurs his role as witness to the scene. He appears to be presenting a quieter, more serious aspect of himself, perhaps reminiscent of his personality during his time as a student at King’s College London. Here he makes a commentary on his roles as both painter and film director, and his identification with Caravaggio, as he blesses the means of artistic production. Yet more urgently, the role draws attention to Jarman’s interest in temporal displacements, where several temporalities coexist at any given time. In this light, the self-representation shows Jarman in costume as part of the institution of the Catholic church, which has been so influential in justifying intolerance of and violence against queer people throughout history.

Jarman uses his cameos to point towards how the artist’s body can act as witness, or as a reminder of the relation between subjects or even between temporalities. In a reading of Caravaggio’s self-portraits, Bersani draws out the artist’s use of his body as a ‘relational term’ in his art: ‘The activity of Caravaggio’s body in the work of his painting is figured in his painting by his occasional presence as a witness. […] In this art, the communication of forms takes place, ultimately, as the artist’s painted recognition of himself.’⁴⁶ Bersani focuses primarily on the work acting as a kind of mirror, bearing ‘witness’ to the events depicted in the paintings Caravaggio appears in, and to the act of painting itself. The movement of Caravaggio’s body is recorded in the traces of paint he places on the canvas, but to ensure these traces cannot be misunderstood as somehow removed from the acts of the body that has made them, his body’s presence is made yet more visible through the depiction of its likeness. Jarman echoes Caravaggio’s interest in the ‘communication of forms’ Bersani highlights by making his own body present in the events of the film, though at a remove from the action, underlining his identification with the painter.

Derek Jarman’s project

Overall, Caravaggio shows himself to be a ‘deft mythologiser of his own life’ in the self-portraits I have detailed above, a description that Tony Peake uses of Jarman.⁴⁷ He takes on choreographed poses in his self-representations that mean they acquire myth-like properties. In Bacchino Malato, he makes a playful commentary on desire. In his self-portrait as Goliath, and perhaps as David too, he raises the events of his own life to the status of the biblical story, when posing as the vanquished lover. In The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew he becomes a bystander rather than a subject, perhaps making a playful comment on the purported role of the painter as an observer in translating ideas or events into art. Jarman demonstrates enthusiasm for Caravaggio’s willingness to depict the body as fragmented, multiple, mutilated or sickening. In The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew, he even flirts with the body becoming irrelevant: an inconspicuous observer not tied to the action. Jarman borrows the technique of playing with ambiguity and inverted or perhaps unexpected power structures from the artist as a means of taking on historical narratives to speak to the present.

In an article subtitled ‘Why Caravaggio’s painting is even more exciting than his biography’, Keith Christiansen, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s chairman of European painting, doesn’t find much to love in Jarman’s film. He states that Jarman has simply provided a useful introduction to some of the ‘common assumptions’ about the artist, whose ‘impetuous, defiant, and often violent life has created a fascinating but distorting lens for the understanding of his works’.⁴⁸ He considers Jarman’s portrayal to be a ‘cliché’ – ‘Caravaggio as an archetype of the modern artist’ – and understands the film as staging a clash between temporalities in its treatment of the interrelated nature of love (same-sex), violence and art: ‘Rome circa 1595 meets New York circa 1985’.⁴⁹ His criticisms are valid only if one expects historically accurate instruction from viewing Jarman’s treatment of Caravaggio. Likewise, Jarman’s focus on Caravaggio’s general reception makes him vulnerable to Christiansen’s charge that the film is ‘cliché[d]’. However, such judgmental terms are wide of the mark here: Christiansen’s criticisms don’t engage with Jarman’s queer history-making as a means of intervening in the political debates of the early 1980s and the vital need to create a queer past at a time when the future was anything but certain during the growing HIV/Aids crisis.

Jarman’s engagement with the Caravaggio project is clear on this front. The book Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio is a montage that emphasises the degree to which the film, like any other version of Caravaggio’s life, is a construction. For Jarman, claiming a stake in Caravaggio’s history by creating a portrait of the artist through his paintings in the film, then chronicling the interchangeable nature of Caravaggio’s art and life in Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio, is a means of claiming the painter for a queer lineage. Questions of historical accuracy may count to some extent, yet Jarman might respond that the queer content of much of the official record has been excised, so cannot be relied upon to provide a faithful account. He isn’t seeking to provide a biographical film in Caravaggio per se, but instead to do queer work by laying claim to his sexuality through an engagement with his chaotic, violent life. As a result, his interest does focus on his homosexuality, and events in his life where his sexuality is closest to the surface. He uses Caravaggio very much from the standpoint of the then present: his interest lies in the interpretation of Caravaggio’s life – and associated self-representations, not necessarily in the life itself. Where Keith Christiansen states that he sees 1985 New York in the film, his reading is surely far more of a compliment than he had intended. Ellis, whose work on Jarman focuses on his ‘ongoing and shifting engagement with historical material’, primarily from the early modern period, conceives of Jarman’s entire oeuvre as a ‘project of responding to the challenges of his own time’. He summarises an important point that I return to in this chapter: Jarman felt that by ‘remaking the past, he was remaking the present, and allowing for the invention of new possibilities for living’.⁵⁰ Here, any differentiation or sequencing of the past and the present becomes less clear – making way instead for a queerer notion of time which relies less upon ideas of linearity or progress.

Although revisiting the past was a preoccupation for Jarman throughout his career, to do so did not always mean the same thing. Between the release of his first feature film Sebastiane and the release of Caravaggio and Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio, the terrain had shifted. The making of Caravaggio came at a time when mainstream society’s thinking about sexual minorities was rapidly changing in response to increasingly hysterical and homophobic media portrayals of HIV/Aids. A project conceived during a period of relative positivity finally came into being at a stark turning point. Although scholarly consensus is, as Ellis notes, that ‘Caravaggio was his last work of art not to be marked in some way by the epidemic’, this is not true to its contexts.⁵¹ Its origins predate the epidemic, as do some of the script versions produced before its final form. However, it was filmed in 1985, so it is impossible to consider the work unmarked by its contexts simply because Jarman had delayed his own testing ‘for as long as was decently possible’ – until the end of the year of Caravaggio’s release.⁵²

Instead, the double release of Caravaggio and Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio marks a turning point in Jarman’s career. For the first time, he made his working processes visible to his publics by publishing Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio alongside the film, a technique he would use again to great effect in the later Queer Edward II.⁵³ The visibility includes making use of the traces of the process recorded in the large black sketchbooks Jarman kept throughout his career to produce this montage book. The newly visible approach makes clear his engagement in the process of making a particular work, rather than its finished product. Jarman privileges the energy and delight that come from the working process, claiming the process – the project – as the main point. I consider that Jarman’s work here sees the process as indistinguishable from the final product, which includes the self-consciously visible marks of its creation. Jarman insists on Caravaggio as a model for what Dominique Viart calls ‘the surrealist determination not to separate life from art, but to treat life as a work of art and vice versa’.⁵⁴ His detailed, recurrent engagement with Caravaggio’s self-representations, and associated ‘self-implication’, marks the beginning of a new chapter in Jarman’s investigation of queer histories in conversation with material from his own life. He insisted on the possibilities and uncertainties of queer temporalities as a means to unsettle and contest the politics of the contemporary that both threatened and circumscribed queer existence with increasing urgency as the 1980s wore on.

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1 See Derek Jarman’s Sketchbooks, eds. Stephen Farthing and Edward Webb-Ingall (London: Thames & Hudson, 2013).

2 Jim Ellis, Derek Jarman’s Angelic Conversations (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), viii.

3 This is a technique Jarman returns to in his later book, Queer Edward II (London: British Film Institute, 1991), published alongside the release of Edward II.

4 Carolyn Dinshaw et al., ‘Theorizing queer temporalities roundtable’, GLQ: Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 13.2–3 (2007): 177–95 (178).

5 Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2010), xvi.

6 Derek Jarman, At Your Own Risk: A Saint’s Testament (London: Vintage, 1992), 46.

7 At Your Own Risk, 46. For an account of the history of reclaiming the queer past through lists of queer forebears, see Gregory Woods, A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 3–6. Woods traces the approach back to around 1870, to ‘bookish homosexuals’ (3) who were, for example, students of Walter Pater at Oxford. For a summary of scholarly interpretations of Caravaggio’s sexuality, see Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Caravaggio’s Secrets (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 9–11. Bersani and Dutoit point out the tendentious nature of some of the early criticism advocating for Caravaggio’s homosexuality, especially Donald Posner’s essay, ‘Caravaggio’s homo-erotic early works’, Art Quarterly, 34 (1971): 301–24; and Michael Kitson, The Complete Paintings of Caravaggio (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1967). They note that ‘distinguished scholar Howard Hibbard remains sensibly neutral on the subject’ (Bersani and Dutoit, Caravaggio’s Secrets, 10). Further accounts can be found in Ellis, Derek Jarman’s Angelic Conversations, 114; Andrew Graham-Dixon, Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (London: Penguin, 2011), 4.

8 Pascale Aebischer, Screening Early Modern Drama: Beyond Shakespeare (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 30–1.

9 Quoted in Jarman, Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio: The Complete Film Script and Commentaries (London: Thames & Hudson, 1986), 44 (Baglione), 58 (unattributed).

10 Leo Bersani, ‘Is there a gay art?’, in Is the Rectum a Grave?: And Other Essays (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 31–5 (35).

11 Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio, 44.

12 ‘Introduction’, Caravaggio: Realism, Rebellion, Reception, ed. Genevieve Warwick (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2006), 13–22 (19).

13 Ellis, Derek Jarman’s Angelic Conversations, 117.

14 Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio, 44.

15 David Stone, ‘Self and myth in Caravaggio’s “David and Goliath”’, in Caravaggio: Realism, Rebellion, Reception, ed. Warwick, 36–46 (36).

16 Bersani, ‘Is there a gay art?’ 35, Bersani and Dutoit, Caravaggio’s Secrets, 3.

17 Bersani and Dutoit, Caravaggio’s Secrets, 3.

18 Ibid.

19 Derek Jarman, dir., Caravaggio, 1986, 00:10:42; script: Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio, 21.

20 Caravaggio, 00:11:45–00:12:02.

21 Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio, 25.

22 Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio, 25.

23 I refer to the version held in the Galleria Borghese, Rome, formerly in the collection of Scipione Borghese. Caravaggio also painted two other versions: David with the Head of Goliath (1607) held in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, and the early David and Goliath (c. 1599) held in the Prado, Madrid. Neither of these versions are self-portraits.

24 Catherine Puglisi, Caravaggio (London: Phaidon Press, 2000), 363.

25 Quoted in Puglisi, Caravaggio, 363. For an account of the gossip circulating throughout the 17th century and various unverifiable accounts, see Puglisi, Caravaggio, 363.

26 Stone, ‘Self and myth’, 41.

27 For an analysis of the painting as self-mutilation, see Stone, ‘Self and myth’, 41; Alfred Moir, Caravaggio (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989), 116.

28 Stone, ‘Self and myth’, 43.

29 Laura Camille Agoston, ‘Sonnet, sculpture, death: the mediums of Michaelangelo’s self-imaging’, Art History, 20.4 (1997): 534–55 (546).

30 Agoston, ‘Sonnet, sculpture, death’, 546.

31 Ibid., 548.

32 Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio, 49.

33 Ibid., 48.

34 Gerald Incandela in private correspondence with the author.

35 Psychological analyses from the 1970s of Caravaggio’s self-portrait as Goliath (rather than as a double self-portrait) and as Medusa (both 1597) read a castration complex into the self-representations that involve decapitation. See, e.g., L. Schneider, ‘Donatello and Caravaggio: the iconography of decapitation’, American Imago, 33 (1976): 77–91.

36 Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio, 48.

37 Stone, ‘Self and myth’, 43.

38 Derek Jarman, Dancing Ledge (London: Quartet Books, 1984), 22.

39 Ibid., 21.

40 John 20. 25.

41 Reproduced in Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio, 60.

42 Ellis, Derek Jarman’s Angelic Conversations, 111.

43 Depicted in Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio, 120.

44 Ibid.

45 Dancing Ledge, 230. See Ron Peck, dir., Nighthawks, 1978, 00:27:25–00:29:15.

46 Bersani, ‘A conversation with Leo Bersani’, in Is the Rectum a Grave?, 171–86 (186, 185–6).

47 Tony Peake, Derek Jarman (London: Little, Brown, 1999), 535. Matt Cook also explores the phrase in relation to Jarman in ‘Wilde lives: Derek Jarman and the queer eighties’, Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture: The Making of a Legend, ed. Joseph Bristow (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2008), 285–304 (291).

48 Keith Christiansen, ‘Low life, high art’, The New Republic, 8 Dec. 2010, online <https://newrepublic.com/article/79749/life-art-paintings-carvaggio> [sic].

49 Ibid.

50 Ellis, Derek Jarman’s Angelic Conversations, x, x–xi.

51 Ibid., 133.

52 Derek Jarman, Kicking the Pricks (London: Vintage, 1996), 16.

53 For an analysis of the queer politics of Queer Edward II, see Alexandra Parsons, ‘History, activism, and the queer child in Derek Jarman’s Queer Edward II (1991)’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 32.3 (2014): 413–28.

54 Dominique Viart, ‘Programmes and projects in the contemporary literary field’, The Art of the Project: Projects and Experiments in Modern French Culture, eds. Michael Sheringham and Johnnie Gratton (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005), 172–87 (177).