Caravaggio: A Passionate Life
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Authors: Desmond Seward
Caravaggio
A Passionate Life
Desmond Seward
Copyright © 2013, Desmond Seward
This edition first published in 2013 by:
36 Great Smith Street
London
SW1P 3BU
For Hervé and Chantal Hoppenot
O
n a hot July afternoon in 1610, while the enervating sirocco blew and most sensible people were in bed behind closed shutters, an unkempt little man was boarding a felucca from the beach below a great lady’s palace on the Chiaia at Naples. Thin and sickly, he was in his late thirties. Coarse features and uneasy brown eyes glared from a sallow face, even uglier than usual because of barely healed sword cuts, fringed by long, uncombed hair and a short, untrimmed beard. His black clothes were the latest Spanish fashion, but they looked as if he had slept in them, while on a gold chain around his neck he wore the enameled cross of a Knight of Malta. He seemed to be in constant pain. Every now and then his scowl turned into a sneer as he burst out with some jibe at the sailors.
Anyone watching must have wondered why he was not embarking on one of his order’s galleys, the fastest ships in the Mediterranean. A tiny felucca was the cheapest form of transport available, with two stumpy masts and four oars, without an awning for shelter from sun, wind, or rain.
He cursed the crew as they took his scanty baggage on board. They did what he wanted, not because of his threats but because he obviously had plenty of money and was paying for his passage in gold. The teenaged boy
carrying his sword in its velvet scabbard handed it to him over the gunwale. With a three-foot blade, a rapier was too long for such a short man to wear at his side, though he plainly knew how to use it. He also wore a large dagger, which he never took off, not even in bed.
While his bags were being stowed, together with some odd rolls of canvas, he kept glancing up nervously, scanning the deserted beach. Here clearly was someone who felt that pursuing enemies were closing in.
His felucca was bound for Rome, though en route she would put in at obscure havens. Whatever the weather, she would hug the coast, her crew camping ashore each night. They dared not put out into the open sea for fear of pirates. A distant white sail on the horizon could all too easily be a Barbary corsair, meaning death or slavery.
For years, the passenger had been on the run, after killing a man in a duel. A few months before, he had been imprisoned, in a dungeon called the “Birdcage,” for half killing another man, and only recently the latter’s hired assassins had barely failed to murder him. They were still hoping for a second chance, lurking outside the old lady’s palace on the Chiaia, where he had been hiding.
Despite the dangers and discomforts of the voyage ahead, he was feverishly impatient to set sail, and not merely because of his enemies. He wanted to reach Rome as fast as possible, since he had every reason to think that great things awaited him there. He did not know that he would be dead within little more than a week. He called himself “Fra’ Michelangelo da Caravaggio.”
Born in 1571, Caravaggio is one of the best known of all the great painters. Each year his pictures find new admirers from among an amazingly wide cross section of humanity. Many lavishly illustrated books on him have been published, and his paintings have become increasingly familiar, in particular
The Lute Player, Rest on the Flight into Egypt, Judith and Holofernes, The Supper at Emmaus
, and
The Beheading of St. John
.
This is a book about Caravaggio the man, rather than Caravaggio the
painter. Although man and painter are inseparable, too many studies by art historians have left important questions about him unanswered. They do not investigate his world and how it shaped him; nor do they stress sufficiently the inner conflict he suffered, or the sheer drama of his life. He soared from obscurity to international acclaim, and then, after his fatal duel, became an outlaw who eventually died friendless on a beach in the ironical knowledge that he was about to receive a full pardon. This biography is meant for the general reader, not the specialist. It does not attempt to analyze his paintings, nor to question attributions. It uses his pictures to peer into his mind.
Some years ago, an extremely successful film,
Amadeus
, contrasted Mozart’s music with his dingy private life. There could be no greater contrast than that between Caravaggio’s painting and
his
private life. On canvas he was a spiritual genius whose profound religious statements touch the hearts of unbelievers as well as believers. Yet, in Bernard Berenson’s words, he was “quick-tempered and bad-tempered, intolerant, devious, jealous, spiteful, quarrelsome, a street-brawler, a homicide, and perhaps a homosexual. He was endowed with innumerable gifts, but with none for decent living.” Even during his lifetime, Caravaggio’s long-suffering protector, Cardinal del Monte, credited him with “a wildly capricious brain.” Another patron thought that his brain was “twisted.” More than one prince of the Church was ready to overlook his sins for the sake of his genius, but they could not save him from himself.
To some extent, his violent streak can be attributed to the Italy into which he was born at the end of the Renaissance. It was a country that shocked foreigners, inspiring such plays as
The White Devil
and
The Duchess of Malfi
. Some historians argue that Jacobean England’s view of Italy was distorted by Protestant prejudice, but it was not so far from the truth; murders as terrible as anything in Webster’s tragedies took place. Although it was illegal to carry arms without a license, most Italian gentlemen wore a rapier and a dagger, partly for protection against the robbers swarming in the streets but also for fighting duels. Caravaggio fought in at least two duels,
probably more. What makes this so puzzling is his obvious sensitivity and compassion.
If he was one of the most wonderful painters who have ever lived, he was also one of the most mysterious. Did he really visit Venice when he was a young man? Was he forced to leave his native city of Milan, and never return, because of a murder? Was he a homosexual? And who was the enemy who waged a relentless vendetta against him?
One of the reasons Caravaggio is so fascinating is that he put so much of his troubled personality into his paintings. In pictures he produced during times of great stress, one can often detect his wretchedness and exhaustion. What we know of his short existence was filled with tragedy. His childhood in Milan was darkened by the bubonic plague that killed his father, his early manhood in Rome by poverty and discouragement. His few years of prosperity and fame were ruined by an uncontrollable temper, ending in his banishment as a murderer. And the pattern was to be repeated. Many of his last days were spent in fear and foreboding.
Modern research has added enormously to our information, yet we can often only say what we don’t know about Caravaggio. No one familiar with his story can deny that his behavior was so full of contradictions that it sometimes defies analysis. Few if any really great artists have had a police record like his. He was obsessed with beheading, and he painted at least a dozen severed heads, including his own. I have done my modest best to understand what went on inside it.
W
hile writing this book I always kept in mind Alessandro Manzoni’s helpful comment in
The Betrothed
on an obscure seventeenth-century official’s behavior during the riots of Milan: “What else he did, we cannot tell, as he was quite alone and history can only guess. Luckily, it is quite used to doing so.” If, in the absence of firm evidence, speculation about Caravaggio is sometimes inescapable, I have at least tried to avoid invention.
Among the many people who have helped me with advice or encouragement, I would particularly like to thank Canon John Azzopardi, Curator of the Cathedral Museum, Medina; Carol Bado; Professor Mario Bouhagiar of the University of Malta; Professor A. S. Ciechanowiecki; Anne Freedgood, my editor in New York, without whom this book would never have been written; Anna Somers-Cocks; Susan Mountgarret; and Fr. Marius Zerafa, Director of Museums, Valletta. I am also grateful to Sir Stephen and Lady Egerton for their hospitality in Rome in 1992, which enabled me to visit the exhibition
Caravaggio: Come nascono i Capolavori
, at the Palazzo Ruspoli; and to Peter and Margaret McCann for lending me their farmhouse on Gozo as a base for research on Malta.
Among others who have helped me, with much patience and kindness, are the staffs of the British Library, the National Fine Arts Library (London), the London Library, the Library of the National Gallery (London), and the National Library of Malta.
ii:
Carlo Borromeo and the Plague, 1576–1578
viii:
The Hack Painter, 1592–1596
xi:
Homosexual or Heterosexual? 1596–1600
xii:
“Nature the only subject fit for his brush,” 1596
xiii:
The Year of Murders, 1599
xiv:
The First Severed Heads, 1599
xv:
The Contarelli Chapel, 1599–1600
xvi:
The New Patrons, 1600–1602
xviii:
“Wonderful Things at Rome,” 1603
xix:
The First Baroque Pope, 1605
xx:
The Killing of Ranuccio Jommasoni, May 1606
xxi:
Outlaw in the Roman Hills, Summer 1606
xxii:
Interlude at Naples, 1606–1607
xxiii:
The Neapolitan Altarpieces
xxv:
The Knights of Malta, July 1607
xxviii:
“Fra’ Michelangelo,” July 1608
xxix:
The Unknown Knight, September 1608
xxx:
A Dungeon Called the “Birdcage,” September 1608
xxxiv:
“The Neapolitan Shrug,” 1609
xxxv: “
Puerto Hercules,” July 1610