CARAVAGGIO IN PICCADILLY.

THE only dull thing about The Genius of Rome, 1592-1623, the current exhibition at the Royal Academy, is its title. It is a stupendous and, on a first visit, stupifying display of over 140 pictures by fifty artists. After two visits one's thoughts begin to clarify. One is reminded of Gibbon's account of his arrival in the city of Rome: several days were lost in initial intoxication 'before I could descend to a cool and minute investigation'. The exhibition brings together the followers of two painters who did much to determine the course of seventeenth-century art: the evolutionary classicist Annibale Carracci, inventive and whimsical; and the revolutionary naturalist Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, with his humourless swagger and voluble truthfulness. One can make part of Gibbon's grand tour, at no great cost, without leaving Burlington House; overwhelmed and awed by the multiplicity of the pictures assembled with such persuasive diplomacy, many of them from usually unwilling sources, including the Vatica n itself.

On arrival in Rome at the age of twenty-one, Caravaggio, akeady expert in painting still-life, was employed by Pope Clement VIII's most favoured artist, Il Cavaliere d'Arpino, to paint decorative swags of fruit and flowers. Always exhilarated by the life of the streets, Caravaggio progressed from fruit-pieces to pictures of disreputable youths with heaps of fruit, minions half-clad in slipping or gaping silk shirts, dusky as the pomegranates, figs and black grapes they pretend to sell, and as saleable; doubtlessly a desirable equation in the eyes of Caravaggio and the late-Renaissance Cardinals who solicited his pictures. Caravaggio's work for these early patrons is a celebration of dubious ripeness. Caravaggio and his followers lovingly painted the fruit on which they let their floridly dark-skinned urchins loose: torn pomegranates prodigally spilling their transparent capsules, dimpled split peaches, cut water-melons, their seeds dangling loose in a drench of sweetness and refreshment.

Bacchus and a Wine-Tippler (Palazzo Barberini, Rome) is the work of Bartolomeo Manfredi, a Caravaggist who may have worked as Caravaggio's assistant in the early years of the seventeenth century. Vine-capped and beaming with frenetic radiance, Bacchus drains a fistful of grapes into a bumper which, by some bright alchemy suddenly full of wine, his worshipper receives. Manfredi's Four Seasons (Dayton Art Institute) is a Caravaggio-like piece which Caravaggio would yet have scorned for its artificiality. Spring breathes a kiss into Summer's mouth, at the same time stretching an arm round the shoulders of Autumn, who spreads her harvest before the viewer, so completing the circle dreamily contemplated by furred and muffled Winter.

Like courtiers elsewhere, members of the Curia were expected to be accomplished in music. Cardinal Francesco del Monte, who enrolled Caravaggio in his household, was a skilful musician and collected old instruments. For del Monte's picture gallery Caravaggio, catering for the Cardinal's inclinations, painted a Concert performed by loosely clad adolescents whose grey-ringed eyes give them the air of dissipated cupids. Aptly, they are joined by Eros in person, with wings and quiver, who ransacks a bunch of grapes (Metropolitan Museum, New York). The Lute Player, on loan to the Metropolitan Museum, is most likely to be a portrait of the Spanish castrato whom Cardinal del Monte lodged in his palace: pallid but with the widely arched heavy eyebrows common in Caravaggio's work. His hair is tied back into a mantilla more customarily worn by the women of the singer's native land. His red hair and full lips remind one of Eros in the New York Concert. Caravaggio painted a near-replica (now in the Hermitage, St Petersb urg) for Cardinal Guistiniani, another gifted musician whose palace faced del Monte's.

These youths reappear in Caravaggio's religious paintings. In a moment of distress St Francis slumps in the solicitous embrace of the twin brother of Caravaggio's Boy Peeling Fruit (Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, and Ishizuka Collection, Tokyo). Caravaggio's master, d'Arpino, presents his more amply clad angel merely at the door of St Francis's cell (La Chartreuse, Douai). Guido Reni introduces his angel, intent on his music, in suave and silken flight across the dreams of the sleeping saint (Mahon Collection). Caravaggio, who used grimy street arabs and wastrels for both sacred and secular figures, paints St John the Baptist (Kansas Museum) as no more than a magnificently drawn adolescent brooding about his discontents.

When Caravaggio came to Rome, according to his biographer Bellori, he shunned its classical past and preferred to paint a gypsy he met begging in the street. Caravaggio had arrived in the wake of the Aldobrandini Pope Clement VIII to find a city thronged with artists and craftsmen hoping to profit from the Jubilee which Clement had declared for 1600; and, also seeking gain, a rabble of cheats, thieves and bravos. Amongst these Caravaggio directed his attention in particular to cardsharps and fortune-tellers. In the always menacing suburbs of Rome Caravaggio chose for himself the lowest haunts of imposture and knavery.

The overplayed staginess of The Cardsharps (Art Museum, Fort Worth) was no doubt intended for comic effect, since laughter is incompatible with emotions such as scorn for rogues or pity for their gulls. A well-bred innocent, dressed in elegant sober clothes and perhaps from the provinces, falls victim to a couple of cockaded predators, preposterous in their ragged finery. The older cheat, whose appearance suggests a disbanded mercenary akin to Shakespeare's Bardolph or Pistol, aspires to gentility by wearing gloves, split and tattered though they are. This braggart soldier, with exaggerated stare and gesture, betrays the young novice's hand of cards to his fellow sharper, a glib-looking street boy, who at once pulls a trump card from his dagger-belt. The theatricality of the scene, although masterly as a pictorial arrangement, does not rise to the drama of the French Caravaggist Nicolas Regnier's gambling scene (Budapest Museum), in which the despairing-faced victim counts the last of his money, only to be d efrauded once more.

Caravaggio regarded trickery as the best of jokes. As The Gypsy Fortune-Teller (Pinoteca Capitolina, Rome) lures a young dupe with her mendacious eyes, she slides his ring into her palm whilst pressing and pretending to read his. Manfredi perpetuated the theme of the thieving fortune-teller, but the story was changed by Simon Vouet, who later, having abandoned the Caravaggism of his Roman period, became pre-eminent among the Parisian painters of his time, numbering Charles Lebrun and Pierre Mignard amidst his pupils. In his Gypsy Fortune-Teller at the National Gallery, Ottawa, Vouet's gypsy is herself bilked, as an elderly chuckling reprobate, his finger pressed to the side of his nose, steals the earnings from her satchel. In two pictures by the painter known only as Pensionante del Saraceni ('Carlo Saracini's Lodger') market traders eye their dupes, with the same malicious glee shown by the thieves and cardsharps, as they overcharge them (Detroit Institute and Museo del Prado). There is good reason to assu me, on stylistic grounds, that Saraceni's mysterious lodger was the French painter Guy Francois.

Carlo Saraceni himself was a Venetian painter whose sumptuous deep anemone-like colours are set off by the tenebrous backgrounds suggested to him in Rome by the example of Caravaggio. The effect is particularly noticeable in Saraceni's two canvases of St Cecilia. The discovery in Rome in 1599 of an embalmed body, supposedly of St Cecilia, the tutelary saint of music, elicited papal approval for the airs and madrigals of the age of Monteverdi. In Saraceni's first painting of St Cecilia, a swan-winged angel pauses, whilst playing a bassviol, to suggest a new harmonisation to the docile-eyed Cecilia, who is trying out a note on a theorbo, or large lute, almost too heavy for her to hold up (Palazzo Barberini, Rome). What follows in the second picture is grimmer but curiously sedate. In spite of her appeal to her guardian angel, who only points heavenwards, St Cecilia is about to be beheaded. The face of the executioner, an ugly villain straight out of Caravaggio, is in part naturalistically hidden by the swing o f his arm. The garment of the angel is less naturalistic. It could be held up, in its exuberant uncoiling swirl, only by preternatural means (Los Angeles Museum).

Still less naturalistic is Saraceni's Mars and Venus (Thyssen Collection), an ingenuous piece of eroticism. Mars and Venus both lie on their backs, so that Venus displays her small pot-belly. Their liaison takes place, strangely and indiscreetly, on a bed in a vast open gallery. The statues in the niches which decorate the walls, seemingly coming to life, signal them warnings of the approach of the other gods and their consequent humiliation. With unintended profanity, Venus is painted from the same model as Saraceni's St Cecilia and his Madonna in his Rest on the Flight to Egypt (Eremo dei Camaldolesi, Frascati).

St Francis Supported by an Angel (Prado) is Orazio Gentileschi's most Caravaggio-like canvas, painted in brown and grey with touches of dull rose, and dating from his comradeship with Caravaggio, from whom he borrowed the capuchin habit of the saint and the studio wings of the angel. Piteously tired by the ordeal of the stigmatisation, marked on his drooping right hand, St Francis is held up by a burly watchful angel against whom he rests his half-comatose, half-ecstatic face. In Orazia's David Contemplating Goliath's Head (Galleria Spada, Rome), David is no longer the jaunty stripling of the Dublin picture (described in the Contemporary Review in May, 1999) but a thickset and muscular young man, his retrieved pebble in his hand, who broods over his surprising victory. The simple proposition (first made in that article in the Contemporary Review), that the bloodthirstiness of the horrifying Judith and Holofernes (Capodimonte Museum, Naples) by Orazio's daughter Artemisia was a vicarious revenge on her rapist Agostino Tassi and the male judges who subjected her to a cruel trial, has now been taken up elsewhere. The matronly Judith, unable to hack off Holofernes's head, carves through it with businesslike concentration, pinioning him to the blood-weltering bed with the help of her equally brutish maidservant. The appalling zest of this picture differs from the relative humanity of Caravaggio's version from the Palazzo Barberini, in which Judith looks dismayed by the act she has committed herself to; and more radically still from Adam Elsheimer's delicate and stylised rendering which reduces the event to the level of a fairy-tale.

After looking at Artemisia Gentileschi's picture, one is glad that the curators, before the next bout of Caravaggism, have inserted three rooms devoted to the circle of Annibale Carracci and its foreign disciples.

Here one sees Annibale himself in his self-portrait (Hermitage, St Petersburg). Always innovative, he painted his self-portrait as a picture of his self-portrait on an easel guarded by his pet griffin terrier. Plumper than one would have imagined from his boundless activity, Annibale sharply but pouchily appraises himself across his long cocked chin. His most imposing work in this exhibition, in my view, is Domine Quo Vadis? from no further away than the London National Gallery. Christ is stoutly marching towards Rome, where he will be recrucified in the person of His representative St Peter. On meeting St Peter in flight on the Appian Way, that is His reply to St Peter's question. Aghast and shocked, Peter faces his own Gethsemane. The sound of the cock-crow echoing in his memory, he turns back to go with Christ.

Annibale's tiny Coronation of St Stephen (Weiner Collection, New York) is a cerulean hymn of praise, as etherial as the miniatures by Elsheimer nearby. His ordeal complete, St Stephen in tears receives his martyr's crown from cloudfuls of eager seraphim. This piece, hardly larger than an illumination in a Book of Hours, yet painted whilst Annibale was covering the walls of the Farnese Gallery with the triumphs of the classical gods, amply and scantly proves the diversity of his genius. Tears less joyful than those of St Stephen are shed in Annibale's Penitent Magdalen (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge). In a gaunt and craggy landscape the soft, well-rounded Magdalen weeps over her past. The skill with which Annibale has painted the transparent swell of tears that floods the shining eyes underneath, and the shaped liquifaction, both of the teardrop and of the wet skin seen through it at the side of the nose, is almost magic. The Carraccis and their followers perpetuated classical mythology, despised by Caravaggi o except as an occasional trapping for his street-boys. In Annibale's Hercules at the Crossroads (Capodimonte, Naples) Hercules is vexed in his notoriously dim mind by a contention between virago-like personifications of Pleasure and Duty, and makes a lumbering choice of Duty. That entails climbing a steep hill surmounted by Pegasus, the family crest of Cardinal Odoardo Farnese, who commissioned the picture but does not seem to have made the same choice.

Another mythological piece, here attributed to Annibale, is without doubt the work of Francesco Albani: The Toilet of Venus (Pinacoteca di Bologna). Albani was trained by the Carraccis, then in 1601 moved to Rome with Guido Reni, another apprentice journeyman of the Carraccis, to decorate the palace of Caravaggio's patron, Cardinal Guistiniani. His small meticulous cabinet pictures, with their svelte figures and tones of silver and pearl, are among the delights of the Louvre and the Chateau de Fontainebleau. His nacreous sylphs in The Toilet of Venus (where even Venus's doves have an alabaster gloss) are too delicate to be the work of Annibale, as a comparison with Annibale's statuesque Sleeping Venus at Chantilly shows. Annibale also preferred buttermilk flesh-tones with bluish shadows. He seldom painted on so small a scale with such a large stretch of wooded landscape. Albini's picture coheres with his History of Venus in the Louvre. The task force of busily helpful amorini on their diminutive wings (suppo sedly based on Albani's twelve children), fetching scents and jewels to beautify their lady, is as good as his signature. One notices the same pearly shine on the faces and hands of the Madonna and the angels and the amorino-like form of the infant Jesus in Albini's nearby Holy Family (Pelham Collection).

Far more portly variants of Albani's elfin busybodies are the cupidons whose gambols curiously fail to disturb the sleep of Annibale's Venus, and the putti who throng the aquamarine dusk of Guercino's cellulite-laden Toilet of Venus, just across the room from Albani's version. Their playful company is so rare in Annibale and Guercino, that one assumes that they are fattened-up derivatives from Albani. That opens the question of whether Poussin's more gnome-like, ubiquitous, ever-solicitous putti were suggested to him by the Carraccis' most graceful pupil.

Their merriest pupil was Domenichino, whose Rest on the Flight to Egypt (Musee de Riom) is rich in his usual mirthful eye-catching details. Mary smiles in pleased wonder at the miraculous spring which splashes into her shallow cruse. The child Jesus chuckles at the fruit brought to him by little St John, who is dressed in an infant's version of his future camel-skin. The whole party enjoys the benefits brought to them, according to medieval legend, by divine intervention. Even the donkey exults, its head held high as it savours the hay piled in a manger improvised by a hale St Joseph. Around them spreads not a desert but an opulent terrain.

Diana and her Nymphs (Galleria Borghese) is one of Domenichino's more packed landscapes. Two rascally boys, dressed in seventeenth-century costume, hide in a thicket to spy on Diana's maiden band at their austere recreations: archery, footraces, wrestling, sitting in a stream. The nymphs and their mastiff are quicker to spot the boys than, perhaps, the viewer of the picture; certainly more alert than their majestic protectress Diana, who is distracted by an archery contest. It is left to her mischievous understrappers to deal with the boys, who seem likely to receive some sharp nips from the dog, in this updated and good-humoured version of the story of Actaeon. Cardinal Scipio Borghese was so enamoured with this picture, so determined to have it although it had been commissioned by another Cardinal, that he carried it off without permission from Domenichino's studio.

Domenichino's portrait of his fellow student Guido Reni (formerly in the Coriolano Collection, Bologna) is not of the magisterial greybeard to be seen in Reni's self-portrait in the Uffizi Gallery, but of a self-assured dark dandy, pensive but volatile and potentially quarrelsome, probably already addicted to the gambling which would impoverish his old age. The portrait, not wholly sympathetic, may be affected by Domenichino's annoyance over his disturbed sleep in Rome, where his room-mates, Albani and Reni, played cards all night long.

Giovanni Lanfranco must be given the sad title of the least-known pupil of the Carraccis, greatly accomplished though he was. The dexterity of his drawing and his faultless apportionment of light and shade, may be seen in his St Peter Healing St Agatha (Galleria di Parma). An angel holds a torch aloft to augment the light from the grille of the dungeon where, without human solace, St Agatha endured her ghastly wounds before the legendary intermediation of St Peter. The light, as if advancing her succour, falls successively on St Peter's bald pate and thickset shoulders, on his knuckly fingers, on the angel's peach-textured hand, and on the primrose virginal breast of St Agatha with its bleeding wound. Against the bright pristine forms of St Agatha and the angel, St Peter looms in bulky nearsilhouette. The chaperoning angel encourages St Peter to draw St Agatha's bodice further aside so that he can anoint her whole bosom. In spite of the humiliating public torture she has undergone, she casts her eyes shyly d own.

The same impeccable draughtsmanship and composition enhance Lanfranco's Ascent of the Magdalen (Capodimonte). Airy and wraithlike as a sunshot cloud, her slender arms and feet outstretched, the Magdalen seems to be swimming in the sky, although she is lifted in a harness by earnest-faced cherubim. The decorum of the naked hermit-saint is preserved by the dawn-suffused tresses of her hair stippling her torso, and by the angels' harness of pale silk, which faintly trails into the first fringe of daylight. The viewer is assumed to witness the scene at a level slightly lower than the Magdalen's, so that one looks down on mountain tarns and herdsmen diminished by distance.

During his Wanderjahre Rubens spent long periods in Rome. Among his Roman works is his sketch of The Judgment of Paris (Academie, Vienna). Its fresh, lithe goddesses are by far more attractive than their heavyweight counterparts in the London National Gallery. His carefully finished Susanna (Galleria Borghese) was bought by Cardinal Scipio Borghese and remains in the Galleria Borghese. The redhead Susanna, scarlet-lipped, rose-flushed, overblown, flabby of abdomen and wrinkle-necked, contrasts with the starveling look of the foremost elder. There are also precipitate sketches -- energetic, heaped-up scrumbles of colour in which verisimilitude is flouted -- of The Lamentation (Jacksonville Museum) and a Michelangelesque St Sebastian (Galleria Corsini, Rome). They make one wish that Rubens had trusted his first impulses better.

In spite of one's awe at the extent of this exhibition, one wonders why a whole long wall is devoted to proving, three times over, that the unarresting Utrecht painter Gerrit Honthorst imitated Caravaggio to excess. There are more interesting (and readily accessible) Dutch Italianisers such as Wtewael, who took the Seicento back to Holland. At least the hilarious Cornelis van Poelenburgh is represented. In one corner of his Landscape with Nymphs (Cologne Museum) three chubby nymphs bathe, one stooping with her back to the viewer. Across the picture a satyr unveils, with her approbation, another chubby nymph. The picture commemorates no special incident, unless it is Jupiter and Antiope (and indeed Poelenburgh was giddy-headed enough to take on both Titian and Correggio). It is more likely to be an allegory of Poelenburgh's artistic aspirations, akin to Courbet's The Artist's Studio. Poelenburgh's nickname among his compatriots in Italy was 'Satyr' Poelenburgh, and the satyr in the painting may be a self-port rait. The satyr's face is not unlike the admittedly more stately portrait of Poelenburgh engraved in Van Dyck's Iconographie of 1636.

Mercury and Herse (Mauritshuis, The Hague), recently attributed to Poelenburgh, is too tasteful to be his work, with too brilliant an aerial perspective and too varied a scene. Poelenburgh seldom painted a specific myth, and this recondite myth was probably outside his range. In spite of the signature C.P., it may be wholly or mostly the work of Paul Bril, with whom Poelenburgh sometimes collaborated. Bril himself introduces satyrs and other mythical creatures into his coldly splendid Italianate landscapes of lakes, tree-clad fells and dawn-streaked skies (Galleria Sabauda, Turin, and Oberlin College, Ohio).

Refreshed and charmed by these paintings by the followers of the Carraccis, we return to Caravaggio who, in his sombre vigour, had no intention whatever to refresh or to charm. Caravaggio's secular scenes are usually brightly lit. The shadows fall on his religious works, aptly, since he seldom chose any but gloomy subjects. St Francis in a ragged capuchin hood stares into the hollow eyeholes of a skull (Santa Maria, Rome). Christ's cadaver is eased into the tomb in dismay and a hectic meridional swirl of hands (Pinacoteca Vaticana). This breaker of most of the Ten Commandments was undevoutly zealous.

Cheerfulness almost breaks through in The Madonna of Loreto (Sant' Agostino, Rome). The ardour of the pilgrims, an old couple, is attested by their stiff limbs and the man's calloused bare feet as they kneel before the apparition of the Madonna at the door of the shrine. A dark-browed beauty from the south, she stands with her head askew and her legs awkwardly crossed as she struggles to support her well-grown infant on her arm and hip. Jesus raises a hand bangled with baby-fat in blessing. The old lady, no doubt herself a mother, looks at Him with more affection than awe.

The Betrayal of Christ (National Gallery, Dublin) is set in darkness tumultuous with the flicker of flambeaux on steel. Judas, with troubled eyes, claws Christ into his embrace, as if clinging to Him whilst cheating Him. Christ wrings His hands for Judas's sake, but cannot lend Himself to the imposture by looking at Judas. In Caravaggio's supremely moving work, Ecce Homo (Palazzo Bianco, Genoa), Christ, drooping over His corded hands, submits to cruel ribaldry. His eyes are closed, not to see the malignant rabble for whom He is about to sacrifice Himself. He is presented by Pilate, an embodiment of expedient officialdom, as Caravaggio saw it: a paltry bilking greybeard who has slunk in from the card-sharping pictures, with evil trenched in every wrinkle of his mendacious face. Thus Caravaggio, the honest criminal, exposes the duplicitous judge who abandoned mankind's saviour to the savagery of mankind.