Caravaggio: A Passionate Life (10 page)

By now, Caravaggio had become an almost exclusively religious painter, with very little time for secular subjects. Whether by accident or design, he had made himself the Counter-Reformation’s foremost champion on canvas. Even so, if one is to judge from his private life, he was a most unlikely apostle of orthodoxy.

XVII

The Swordsman, 1600–1606

I
n Flanders, Carel van Mander heard strange rumors about Caravaggio from friends in Rome. In 1603 he wrote that Caravaggio was doing “wonderful things,” having risen from obscurity by sheer ability, determination, and hard work, but “after working for a week or two, he wanders round for as long as two months on end, with his rapier by his side and followed by his servant, strolling from one tennis court to another, always ready to fight a duel or start a brawl, so that it is seldom very comfortable to be in his company.”

A recent book,
Caravaggio assassino
(1994), claims that he had close links with one of the sinister robber gangs that terrorized Rome by night, but this is untrue. He was not a criminal, merely unbalanced. During a court case in 1603 he referred to “Mario, a painter,” who can only have been Mario Minniti. “This Mario once lived with me, but left three years ago, and I haven’t spoken to him since.” According to Minniti’s earliest biographer, he left because he could not put up with Caravaggio’s “disorderliness.” Later, after marrying, he fled from Rome, apparently after killing a man in a duel.

Earning the income of a minor, well-to-do nobleman or a prosperous merchant, Caravaggio could do as he pleased. Restraints on his private life
may have had something to do with his leaving del Monte’s household; the cardinal had begun to think that he had “a most strange brain.” In September 1603 he moved out of the Palazzo Maffei, taking rooms in the Campo Marzio, in a house in the Vicolo San Biagio. His landlady was a highly respectable widow. While he had no wish to live in the cramped quarters provided by del Monte, he was anxious to stay near him, in case of trouble with the police.

Baglione, who knew Caravaggio personally and disliked him intensely, tells us that “because of an excessively fearless temperament, he sometimes went looking for a chance to break his neck, or to put somebody else’s in danger.” Yet even Baglione had to admit that he was only “a little,” not wholly, dissolute. Bellori says that painting could not calm Caravaggio, that after working for a few hours he would stroll around Rome, pretending to be a soldier. He wore “the costliest silks and velvets like a nobleman, but once he had put on a suit, he left it on until it was in rags.” Often he slept in his clothes and always he wore his dagger in bed. He was careless about washing, and for many years used an old portrait as a tablecloth.

All the early sources agree that he was an exceptionally difficult man. Baglione found him “sarcastic and haughty,” but what really annoyed him was a withering contempt for all Mannerists, dead or alive, including Baglione. “He spoke ill of all the painters of the past, and of the present day too, however distinguished they might be; because he was convinced that he had surpassed everyone else in the profession.” Sandrart says, “It was not easy to get on with him.”

But Caravaggio was not invariably disagreeable. He could be surprisingly fair-minded; on at least one occasion he described Arpino, whom he loathed, as a good painter. Although disreputable, his boon companions, if Sandrart can be believed, were cheerful enough, “young men, most of them stout fellows, painters and swordsmen.” His close friends stayed loyal to him. Onorio Longhi, a Lombard like himself, fought at his side in at least one duel, while Mario Minniti was delighted to meet him again in Sicily many
years later, and long after his death the Cavaliere Marino wrote an affectionate poem in his memory. His patrons went out of their way to protect him, and it is unlikely that they valued him for his art alone. Nevertheless, his signs of a profoundly unhappy nature are unmistakable.

The first suggestion of a disorderly private life came in May 1598, when the
sbirri
caught him wearing a rapier without a permit. He told the police magistrate, “Yesterday, I was arrested at about two o’clock at night between Piazza Madama and Piazza Navona because I was wearing a sword, which I wear as painter to Cardinal del Monte, since I’m one of the cardinal’s men and in his service and lodge in his house, and my name is written down on the list of his household.”

The next hint of rowdiness was in October 1600, when Onorio Longhi was charged with insulting and attacking Marco Tullio, a painter. During his defense, Longhi said his friend Caravaggio had intervened between Tullio and himself, pulling them apart. At no time had “Michele” drawn his sword, as alleged; recovering from an illness and barely able to stand, he was so weak that a servant had to carry it for him. “Marco Tullio grabbed his scabbard and threw it at me,” claimed Longhi. The story of Caravaggio’s illness does not sound very convincing, as it was far from unusual for a servant to carry his master’s sword.

In November of the same year, Caravaggio was accused of assault by a Tuscan, Girolamo Stampa, who alleged that without provocation Caravaggio had dealt him several fierce blows with his fist and the flat of his sword. In February 1601, Caravaggio paid Flavio Canonico, former sergeant of the guard at Castel Sant’ Angelo, to settle out of court an action for armed assault, which can only mean that Caravaggio had attacked him with his rapier.

The Baglione libel case opened on 28 August 1603, offering a unique glimpse into the world of Caravaggio, who was arrested and incarcerated in the Tordinona. Giovane Baglione, a moderately talented Roman painter, had
been employed on the frescoes at the Vatican and the Lateran. Caravaggio’s work so impressed him that he tried to imitate the
Ecstasy of St. Francis
. He then painted a
Divine Love
for Cardinal Giustiniani in an attempt to compete with the
Amor Vincit Omnia
, the laughing Cupid. Although the cardinal did not think Baglione’s picture was as good, he was so pleased with it that he rewarded him with a gold chain. The last straw was when he succeeded in obtaining an important commission Caravaggio wanted for a painting at the church of the Gesù. Baglione had, in his own words, painted “a picture of Our Lord’s Resurrection for the Father General of the Society of Jesus. Since the unveiling of the picture on Easter Sunday this year, Onorio Longhi, Michelangelo Merisi [da Caravaggio] and Orazio Gentileschi, who had hoped to paint it themselves … have been trying to ruin my reputation by speaking ill of me and finding fault with my painting.”

The model for Baglione’s
Resurrection
has survived, fussy, overcrowded, melodramatic. One can only sigh for the picture Caravaggio might have painted. It has been suggested that the “Black Pope,” the Jesuit General, Claudio Acquaviva, did not give Caravaggio the commission because he was afraid he would produce too startling an interpretation of Christ rising from the dead, somewhere between the sacred and profane.

The court was told how verses vilifying Baglione and his art were circulating, supposedly distributed by Caravaggio’s servant. Caravaggio said that he knew nothing about the verses, but did not deny describing Baglione’s
Resurrection
as “clumsy,” or saying “I consider it the worst he’s ever done.” He added, “I don’t know of any artist who thinks that Baglione is a good painter.” During the trial Caravaggio defined a good painter as one who could “imitate natural things well.” “I believe I know every painter in Rome,” he declared, and went on to say that the only ones who were not among his friends were Arpino, Baglione, Gentileschi, and Georg Hoefnagel, “because they don’t speak to me—all the rest talk to me and have discussions.” The painters he thought really worthwhile (
valentuomini
) were Arpino,
Federico Zuccari, Cristofero Roncalli, Annibale Carracci, and Antonio Tempesta. This public tribute to so many of his rivals by Caravaggio refutes Baglione’s claim that he despised all painters other than himself.

A crony of Baglione, Mao (Tommaso) Salini, apparently a painter of still lifes, alleged at one hearing that a certain “Giovan Battista” was the
bardassa
of both Caravaggio and Longhi. The word means either a ne’er-do-well or a male prostitute. Clearly, Salini was trying to harm Caravaggio’s reputation by implying that he employed young criminals or had homosexual tastes. In response, Caravaggio said that he had never even heard of Giovan Battista, and the court ignored the allegation.

The trial ended inconclusively with Caravaggio being released from the Tordinona on 25 September, after the intervention of the French ambassador, Philippe de Béthune, Comte de Selles. A Florentine Knight of Malta, the Commander Fra’ Ainolfo Bardi, gave a guarantee in writing to the governor of Rome, Monsignor Ferrante Taverna, that Caravaggio would do nothing to harm or insult either Baglione or Mao Salini. Even so, he was confined to his house for a time, under pain of being “sent to the galleys” if he left it without permission. It looks very much as though Béthune and Bardi each acted at the prompting of Cardinal del Monte, who did not care to see his favorite artist in prison and unable to paint. The king of France’s queen was a sister of the Grand Duke Ferdinand, so in consequence there were close links between France and Tuscany. Since del Monte was Tuscany’s representative at Rome, and one of the “French party” among the cardinals, both Béthune and Bardi must have been only too willing to oblige him.

Caravaggio was placed under virtual house arrest because the authorities were desperately anxious to discourage quarrels, which might otherwise end in duels and potentially fatal bloodshed. In November, Onorio Longhi was arrested, Baglione having complained that Longhi was insulting himself and Salini. But on this occasion Caravaggio kept his head down and was left in peace.

Baglione lived for another forty years, becoming president of the Accademia
di San Luca and publishing two important books—an account of the new churches that had been built at Rome and a history of Roman artists in recent times. He took a long-delayed revenge on Caravaggio in acknowledging the beauty of his old enemy’s paintings, while enlarging on his failings as a human being. Nowhere, in either work, does Baglione make any mention of his quarrel with him.

Meanwhile, the feud between Caravaggio and his old master Arpino simmered on. In 1600, delighted by the frescoes that Arpino had painted at San Giovanni Laterano, Pope Clement had made him a Knight of the Order of Christ, since when he had been styled the “Cavaliere d’Arpino.” It was a rare honor for a painter, and it appears to have made Caravaggio fiercely jealous. Joachim von Sandrart recounts how, when Caravaggio met the Cavaliere riding proudly to court, he challenged him to a duel. “Now’s the time for us to settle our quarrel, since we’re both armed,” he shouted, telling him to get down off his horse. The haughty Arpino replied that, as a Papal Knight, he could not possibly fight someone of inferior rank. “So courteous an answer wounded Caravaggio more deeply than any sword thrust,” writes Sandrart, who believed it was this exchange that first made him think of becoming a Knight of Malta, to put himself on the same level as Arpino.

He managed to keep out of trouble for several months after the Baglione case, if only because he could not leave his house without permission or was away from Rome on business. Then, in April 1604, a waiter at the Albergo del Moro complained that Caravaggio had thrown a plate of hot artichokes into his face, endangering his eyes, and had threatened to draw his sword; he seems to have escaped with a fine. In October, walking home from dinner at the Torretta with two friends, a bookseller and a member of Cardinal Aldobrandini’s household, Caravaggio was arrested on a charge of throwing stones. His reaction was to ask the bookseller to tell del Monte he was back in jail. The arrest took place near the house of a certain “Menicuccia,” whose name sounds like a courtesan’s. (He has been romantically linked by historians with Menicuccia, unconvincingly identified as the Siennese prostitute
Domenica Calvi.) In November, after insulting a
sbirro
who had demanded to see his license to carry weapons, he spent another spell in the Tordinona.

The
sbirri
must have known “Michelangelo” (or “Michele”) only too well by now. The famous painter in his splendid if rumpled clothes had become one of the sights of Rome. Besides the blond servant carrying his rapier, he was always accompanied by a shaggy black dog with the alchemical name of “Cornacchia” (“Raven”), a performer of spectacular tricks.

Unhappily, he kept on being arrested. In May 1605, caught with unlicensed weapons in the small hours of the morning, he went back to the Tordinona. In July, having grossly insulted a woman called Laura, he suffered a further spell in prison. He was bound over not to molest her or her daughter Isabella with verbal abuse or by singing scurrilous verses about them that had been set to music.

At about this time, he tried to fight a duel with Guido Reni, who had replaced him as Cardinal Aldobrandini’s choice to paint another
Crucifixion of St. Peter
for the basilica of St. Peter’s. Enraged, he accused Guido of “stealing his style and his color.” The duel never took place, though Guido was certainly copying his style. Caravaggio later became furiously jealous of the Florentine Passignano (Domenico Cresti), whom he sometimes encountered in taverns. When Passignano was working on yet another
Crucifixion of St. Peter
for the basilica, Caravaggio destroyed his work tent in St. Peter’s, cutting it in pieces and shouting at everyone that Passignano’s picture was “terrible.”

Sometimes, however, he went out drinking at taverns with Passignano’s great friend Ludovico Cardi, known as “Il Cigoli” after the castle where he had been born in Tuscany. A painter himself, Il Cigoli seems to have been terrified of upsetting Caravaggio, afraid of provoking his “persecutions and very strange temper.”

In July 1605 Caravaggio quarreled over a girl with Mariano Pasqualone, a notary from Accumoli. A few days afterward, he attacked Pasqualone from behind as he was walking past the Spanish ambassador’s palace in the Piazza Navona, giving him a sword cut or a blow from a pistol butt on the back
of his head. He then ran off and took refuge in the nearby Palazzo Madama. The police report described the girl as “Lena, who stands in Piazza Navona … who is Michelangelo’s girl.” It sounds as though she was a prostitute and Caravaggio was passionately in love with her. From the evidence of his paintings we know that he had acquired a beautiful new model. Professional female models were always prostitutes, and one historian believes Caravaggio attacked Pasqualone because “the notary had had commerce with her.” Another thinks she may have been Pasqualone’s former fiancée. It is likely, however, that she was Maddalena Antonietti, one of a family of dedicated Roman whores. She and her sister Amabilia were much in demand, their clients including a nephew of the late Pope Sixtus V and the chief of police.