Caravaggio and Alchemy: Cardinal Del Monte's Ceiling
Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto in Rome's Casino Ludovisi: Caravaggio's only known mural, painted for Cardinal Del Monte's alchemical laboratory.
In the heart of Rome, in a small surviving building of the villa that once belonged to the Ludovisi family, is the only known mural painting by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. It is neither a sacred scene nor a street episode, but a mythological allegory painted on the vault of a room that Cardinal Francesco Maria Del Monte used as a distilling laboratory. It is the most direct evidence of the painter's contact with the world of alchemy.
The cardinal and his laboratory
Del Monte, the Grand Duke of Tuscany's representative in Rome, was Caravaggio's first great patron, housing him in his residence at Palazzo Madama in the mid-1590s. A man of refined taste, he collected paintings, musical instruments and scientific objects, and was interested in medicine, pharmacy and alchemy. His brother Guidobaldo was a distinguished mathematician who corresponded with the young Galileo Galilei.
In 1596 the cardinal bought a vineyard with a small villa near Porta Pinciana and installed a distillery there for preparing medicines and alchemical substances. It was probably for the vault of this small room that Caravaggio produced, around 1597, a painting in oil directly on the plaster, an unusual and risky technique that partly explains why the work remained unique in his output.
Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto
The composition shows three deities seen from below in a daring foreshortening: Jupiter with the eagle, Neptune with the trident and Pluto accompanied by Cerberus. At the centre, a transparent sphere bears the signs of the zodiac. The three figures have been associated with air, water and earth, while fire would be evoked by the light of the sphere; the whole would thus represent the elements the alchemist sought to separate and recombine in his alembics.
Some scholars have proposed a more precise reading, linked to the Paracelsian doctrine of the three principles: Jupiter would allude to sulphur, Neptune to mercury and Pluto to salt. According to a widespread tradition, moreover, Caravaggio lent his own face to all three gods, portraying himself in a mirror. It is a detail that is hard to verify, but consistent with his frequent use of models taken from real life.
The gypsy and the hand
Caravaggio's interest in the divinatory arts also emerges in a secular subject painted a few years earlier, The Fortune Teller, which exists in two versions, in the Capitoline Museums and the Louvre. A young gypsy woman reads the palm of a well-dressed youth and, while looking him in the eye, gently slips the ring from his finger. Giovanni Pietro Bellori, in the seventeenth century, recounted that the painter had stopped a gypsy in the street to have her pose.
The picture does not illustrate a magical practice but stages it as a comedy of manners: palmistry becomes the pretext for a refined deception. Del Monte himself bought The Cardsharps, a scene of cheating at cards from the same period, a sign that such subjects appealed to cultivated collectors, drawn at once by curiosity about the occult sciences and by irony towards those who naively relied on them.
The ceiling, in a building now called the Casino dell'Aurora after Guercino's fresco in another room, long remained little known to the wider public. Yet it offers an image of Caravaggio different from that of the painter of taverns and martyrs: an artist at home in a milieu where emerging science, alchemy and collecting coexisted, and able to translate into painting the speculations of an experimenting cardinal.