Caravaggio: A Passionate Life (11 page)

Caravaggio was frightened after attacking Pasqualone that the assault could be interpreted as attempted murder. If he was found guilty, it would mean the gallows. Early in August, he fled to Genoa, but he was back in Rome before the end of the month. Pasqualone settled out of court, no doubt in return for generous compensation. One wonders if del Monte’s famous comment on Caravaggio was provoked by the Pasqualone affair. In a letter of August 24, the cardinal was reliably reported as describing him as
uno cervello stravagantissimo
—“a wild, wild, spirit.”

In September, Caravaggio’s former landlady, Prudenzia Bruni, complained to the authorities that he had thrown stones at her windows and broken her Venetian blind. He had not been back to the rooms he rented in her house since his flight to Genoa, so, as he owed her six months’ rent, she had obtained a warrant to seize the belongings he had left behind. She told the police she was convinced that he stoned her house in reprisal, “in order to upset me.”

In October, the
sbirri
found him lying in the street with sword or dagger wounds in his throat and left ear. They took him to a friend’s house nearby, where he recovered. It was obvious that he had been fighting, but he insisted stubbornly that he had merely fallen on his sword. The authorities fined him five hundred scudi, once more placing him under house arrest.

Between 1598 and the end of 1605, he was brought before the magistrates
not less than eleven times. Perhaps social ambition, the desire to behave as well as dress like a nobleman, had something to do with his behavior; looking for a fight, especially with the
sbirri
, was a fashionable amusement among the younger Roman nobles, who also enjoyed swaggering round the city pretending to be soldiers. Later, a desire to rise in the world socially was one of Caravaggio’s motives for wanting to become a Knight of Malta. Another possible reason for his belligerence is a weakness for the bottle; most of the incidents seem to have taken place after he had dined at a tavern. Even so, neither social climbing nor drunkenness can have been altogether responsible for his relentless brawling. All too clearly, the long history of repeated violence indicates grave inner disturbance. The mood swings hint at some form of depressive illness. Sandrart, another early writer, records how he and his cronies had chosen for their motto
Nec spes, nec metu
—“with neither hope nor fear”—a very peculiar motto for someone so passionate and emotional in his art. To a certain degree, the tension may have been soothed by painting, which would partly explain his prolific output and why he nearly always delivered on time.

It is particularly unfortunate that there should have been so many frustrations in his professional life. Again and again he failed to obtain a commission for St. Peter’s, at that time the topmost pinnacle of every Italian artist’s ambition. Most unfairly, each of the cardinals who ran the
Fabbrica di San Pietro
preferred to choose a painter who came from his own part of Italy, instead of allotting the commissions according to talent. As time went by, Caravaggio became understandably infuriated that a succession of mediocre rivals should be rewarded, while he was invariably passed over. He was very conscious of his own genius, yet professional disappointment, however intense, cannot account for the baffling contrast between the spirituality of Caravaggio’s art and his squalid police record.

XVIII

“Wonderful Things at Rome,” 1603

W
hen Carel van Mander wrote of Caravaggio’s disreputable private life, he added that he was “doing wonderful things at Rome.” “He will not make a single brush stroke without a close study from life, which he copies and paints.” Undoubtedly, Caravaggio produced some of his finest work during this later Roman period. In January 1604, he went to Tolentino, not far from the Adriatic coast, where he had been invited to paint an altarpiece for the Capuchin church of the Crocefisso. No trace of such a picture survives. But having made the long journey from Rome to Tolentino it seems unlikely that he would have omitted to make a pilgrimage to Loreto, the Counter-Reformation Lourdes, which was only a few miles away.

According to a widely believed tradition, during the thirteenth century, the house in Nazareth where the Blessed Virgin was born, and where Jesus spent his childhood, was carried away by angels through the sky, first to Dalmatia and then to Loreto. It was a tiny brick building, twenty-eight feet by twelve, and thirteen feet high. Countless pilgrims flocked to it in the hope of finding miraculous cures, or to pray for divine intervention. It was a place of last resort, when everything else had failed. It was also a place where sinners were sent by their confessors, to atone for their misdeeds.

Quivering with horror at the “shamefull opinions of the Papists” and their “idolatry,” the daring Scots tourist William Lithgow came here in 1609, only six years after Caravaggio. As a Calvinist, he observed scornfully that when any of his Catholic companions approached the town gate, they pulled off their shoes and stockings, walking barefoot to the shrine, “many hundreds of bare-footed, blinded bodies, creeping on their hands and knees.” He also learned that every year these pilgrims offered “many rich gifts, amounting to an unspeakable value, as Chaines, & Rings of Gold and Silver, Rubies, Diamonds, Silken Tapestries, Goblets, imbrouderies, and such like.”

In Loreto’s narrow streets Caravaggio saw the crippled and the palsied, the blind and the deaf, the fevered and the crazed. Courtiers came because the shrine had the power to render poison harmless; military men because it could deflect bullets or sword cuts; barren women because it could overcome infertility. Rich and poor, they prayed before the Holy House, which stood inside a church with a dome by Sangallo and side chapels by Bramante.

The shrine had already cast its spell over another painter, Lorenzo Lotto, who had died there as a lay brother in 1557, and who may have influenced Caravaggio. There are paintings by him in the Apostolic Palace that must have been in the church in 1603. If Caravaggio came to Loreto on a pilgrimage, perhaps as a penitent, he is likely to have done so on the feast of the Nativity in September, or of the Translation (removal) of the Holy House in December. Apparently the simplest, humblest pilgrims made the most impression on him.

Entering the church through bronze doors, Caravaggio found its walls covered by frescoes and paintings that told the story of Loreto. Seven massive silver lamps burned before the Santa Casa. Inside, there was an ancient, wonder-working Madonna and Child, carved from wood and black with age, dressed in silks and velvets, ablaze with jewels. Sometimes the statue seemed to come alive, electrifying the pilgrims.

When Caravaggio returned to Rome, he was able to pay special tribute to the Santa Casa. A certain Ermete Cavalleti had bequeathed five hundred
scudi to adorn a chapel with a picture of the Virgin of Loreto, and for this purpose his heirs had purchased the first side chapel on the left in the church of Sant’ Agostino. Probably during the latter half of 1603 they commissioned Caravaggio to paint a
Madonna di Loreto
. The altarpiece that resulted could have been painted only by someone who had felt the full impact of the Holy House, and who understood what it meant to the pilgrims.

In this extremely moving picture, sometimes called the
Madonna dei Pellegrini
, Caravaggio shows the “standing Madonna holding the child in her arms in the act of blessing; kneeling in front are two pilgrims with hands folded in prayer, a poor man with bare feet and legs, with a leather cap and a staff resting on his shoulder, who is accompanied by an old woman with a cap on her head,” Bellori writes. Few modern observers appreciate that the couple’s feet are bare out of piety, not from poverty. A strikingly beautiful model with a very strong face posed for the Virgin. She was almost certainly Lena.

Baglione sneers that one of the pilgrims has muddy feet, while the other wears a dirty, torn cap. But in trying to belittle the painting, he testifies to its popularity, reporting disdainfully how “the common people [
popolani
] made a great fuss [
estremo schiamazzo
] about it.” The picture was every simple pilgrim’s idea of Loreto, of the Virgin appearing miraculously with the child Jesus at the door of the Santa Casa, welcoming those who came in humble simplicity. This was the art envisaged by the Council of Trent.

In fairness to Baglione, many educated people must have agreed with him. Nowadays, it is difficult for us to grasp just how much Caravaggio’s preference for ugly, shabby, lower-class humanity as models shocked contemporaries. Until Victorian times, artists generally depicted men and women as handsome, well groomed, and upper-class when painting scenes from Scripture or history. An Oratorian might have approved, but not many others, apart from common, illiterate folk.

In 1605 Cesare d’Este, duke of Modena, commissioned a Madonna from Caravaggio as an altarpiece for a church at his capital. For once, the artist
was late in finishing, or at least in delivering it. Cesare wrote to Cardinal del Monte, asking him to help. Del Monte warned the duke not to be too hopeful, adding that Caravaggio had recently declined six thousand scudi from Prince Doria to paint a fresco. Some years later, Caravaggio sold a
Madonna of the Rosary
, which may have begun as the picture ordered by the duke of Modena.

Another altarpiece from about this time was the
Madonna dei Palafrenieri
, the Virgin and Child with a stern St. Anne (the Virgin’s mother). He used the same model for the Virgin as in the
Madonna di Loreto
. The figures are stamping on the head of a hissing serpent, which may be intended as an emblem of Protestantism. Ordered for the chapel of the Papal Grooms
(Palafrenieri
) at St. Peter’s, it was just the sort of commission Caravaggio had been seeking. But although he was paid the stipulated price of seventy-five scudi, much less than his normal fee, in Baglione’s smug words “it was removed by command of the Lords Cardinal of the Fabbrica [di San Pietro].” The rejection must have made Caravaggio more bitter than ever and perhaps accounts for some of his violent misbehavior.

He painted a
St. John the Baptist
for the Genoese banker Ottavio Costa, who gave a copy as an altarpiece for the church of a Ligurian village where he was feudal lord. It may have been painted during the artist’s very brief exile at Genoa in 1605, when he fled there after attacking the notary Pasqualone. If his mind was troubled, he worked with greater speed than ever. A banker in Rome, Costa, one of his warmest admirers, came from the gentry of the town of Albenga in Liguria. He was the first owner of
Judith and Holofernes
, eventually possessing five Caravaggios and leaving a clause in his will that his heirs were to sell none of them.

Caravaggio continued to paint other pictures besides altarpieces, but these, too, were invariably religious. In a
Crowning with Thorns
, commissioned by Vincenzo Giustiniani, a pair of sadistic executioners are forcing thorns into Christ’s head, his blood pouring down, while an armored centurion looks on with perverted pleasure. An
Ecce Homo
, Christ presented to
the Jews by Pilate, was painted in response to a request from a Monsignor Massimi. The patient Christ is almost excessively gentle and resigned. In contrast, Pontius Pilate is much more interesting. Ludicrously respectable and fussily bad-tempered, he could easily have been modeled on one of the detested police magistrates with whom Caravaggio had so often come in contact so unpleasantly. What he had not been told was that Monsignor Massimi had slyly commissioned several versions of the subject in a concealed competition between three artists, without telling any of them that they were competing. The version by Il Cigolo pleased the Monsignor best. It was another unfair and humiliating rejection.

There is unmistakable pain on the faces in many of the paintings from Caravaggio’s later years in Rome. Costa’s
St. John the Baptist
wears a sulky, even lowering look. Disturbance is still more apparent in two somber studies of Francis of Assisi that date from this time. They show not the slightest suggestion of ecstasy. But, although they are not self-portraits, both portray someone of the same physical type as Caravaggio—small, black-bearded, unkempt. There could be no more eloquent expression of Caravaggio’s very personal and strange blend of the most sincere spirituality with the most profound unhappiness than these two paintings of St. Francis.

XIX

The First Baroque Pope, 1605

C
lement VIII died in March 1605, and by the end of spring Paul V was pontiff. Clement is often described as the last of the Counter-Reformation popes, while Paul is sometimes called the first “Baroque” pope. This is an oversimplification. The Counter-Reformation remained very much alive even if the Baroque was in full swing by the end of Paul’s reign.

Despite Clement’s indecisiveness, he had been surprisingly successful, and not merely because of his saintly life and austere court. He had restored the Papacy’s political influence to an extent that had not been seen for centuries. France was saved for Catholicism, while both the French and the Spanish competed for Rome’s favor.

Inevitably, a papal conclave to choose a new pope was fraught with tension. So, too, was the entire city of Rome. Everyone knew that a completely new court with new favorites was about to emerge. From the moment the Cardinal Camerlengo took the Fisherman’s ring from the dead pontiffs hand, he ruled Rome in his place until the election of a new pope, and struck coins that bore his own name. In practice, during a conclave the city was virtually ungoverned. Armed guards were doubled outside the palaces, with
chains placed across their gateways. A “Lantern edict,” ordering householders to place a light at a window each night, did little to deter wrongdoers. The
sbirri
were far too busy to worry about the brawls of Caravaggio and his friends.

The cardinals were divided into French and Spanish factions, and there was much lobbying. News of the surprisingly swift election on April 1 of the elderly Alessandro de’ Medici was greeted in Paris by fireworks and cannon fire. But the new pope, Leo XI, died before the end of the month, so the conclave reassembled. On May 16 it chose the mild-mannered, gentle-seeming Cardinal Borghese.

Like more than a few pontiffs, Camillo Borghese’s mild manners and gentleness soon vanished. In Ranke’s words, “immediately after his election, Paul V evinced a peculiarly rugged disposition.” From then on, Rome was to be ruled by an iron and seemingly merciless hand. A penniless, half-insane Lombard scholar had written a ridiculous parallel history of Clement VIII and Tiberius Caesar, comparing the late pope to the sinister Roman emperor. The manuscript stayed in his garret until he foolishly showed it to a woman in the same house, who denounced him. He was arrested with all Rome laughing at the story. There was a general impression that Pope Paul would take a lenient view, several people petitioning him to show mercy, but the wretched man was beheaded on the Ponte Sant’ Angelo, and his pitiful possessions were confiscated. Paul swiftly issued draconian edicts against loose women, swindling innkeepers, and those who spread false news. Gentlemen faced still sterner penalties for wearing swords. Although the edicts were largely ignored or evaded, everyone in Rome was uncomfortably aware of an unusually frightening presence on the papal throne.

Some historians believe that Caravaggio’s prospects were darkened by Paul’s election; in reality they had never looked brighter, and if the pope, the future patron of Bernini, was more interested in architecture and sculpture
than in painting, his nephew was a very different story. By the end of Paul’s reign, Cardinal Scipione Borghese had amassed one of the most wonderful private collections known to history.

Caravaggio did his best to satisfy so important a customer. “For the same Cardinal, he painted St. Jerome, who is shown writing, absorbed, and reaching out a hand to dip into the inkwell,” Bellori tells us. The artist’s portrayal of the compiler of the Vulgate derived from the account in
The Golden Legend
: “After doing penance for four years, he went to Bethlehem and obtained permission to dwell at the Lord’s crib like an animal.” Fasting each day until evening, “he persevered in his holy resolution, and labored for fifty-five years and six months at translating the Scriptures.” The picture is still to be seen at the Villa Borghese.

The painting delighted Cardinal Scipione, whose collection eventually included thirteen Caravaggios. Five of them were confiscated from the Cavaliere d’Arpino, no longer the pope’s favorite artist, since he fell foul of the authorities over tax arrears. Scipione was a ruthless collector of pictures, imprisoning at least one rash artist who failed to oblige him. He could be equally forceful, however, in defending his favorites, and his benevolent role in Caravaggio’s career has been underestimated. He tried to protect him whenever he could, even in exile.

Caravaggio’s new patron was not only the cardinal nephew, but the cardinal secretary of state as well, the most powerful person in Rome after his uncle. While the Venetian ambassador may have reported that the cardinal nephew was not particularly clever, he was undeniably astute. As soon as Scipione received the Red Hat, shortly after his maternal uncle’s election, he changed his name from Cafarelli to Borghese. He knew how to interpret Pope Paul’s wishes and ensure that they were put into effect. Nor could anyone deny his good taste.

We know what Scipione looked like from Bernini’s bust, almost comically corpulent and heavy-jowled but nonetheless impressive. He was unusually
amiable, famous for his charm and tact. Romans who sampled his sumptuous hospitality called it
delicium orbis
, the world’s delight. Although no scandals of the flesh were ever linked to him, his wildly extravagant expenditure on food and drink earned him a rebuke from the pope on at least one occasion. It was common knowledge that within a few years he possessed an income of 140,000 scudi, and eventually he appropriated four percent of the entire papal revenue, enabling him to indulge to the full his passion for the arts. Bellori records in his lives that the Cardinal Scipione Borghese was so pleased with the pictures Caravaggio had painted “that he introduced him to the Pontiff, Paul V, of whom he painted a seated portrait, being richly rewarded by the said lord.”

Even Caravaggio must have been cowed by the prospect of painting the pope. No doubt he had to go through the ritual of alternately bowing and genuflecting at his first audience, since Paul was a stickler for protocol. He was a burly man of imposing presence, ponderous and taciturn. Heavily overweight, it was rumored that he sweated to such an extent at night that his barber had to comb his hair for an hour every morning to dry his head.

The authenticity of Caravaggio’s portrait of Paul V, which remains at the Villa Borghese, has occasionally been questioned on the grounds that it seems too tame. But faced with an exceptionally formidable sitter, ferociously careful of his dignity, Caravaggio is unlikely to have tried to make his subject adopt a striking pose. An unpleasant look in His Holiness’s eyes, verging on the malevolent, has been ascribed to short sight.

The pope’s patronage of the arts, and his nephew’s, undoubtedly helped to usher in the Baroque Age. No one knows when the term “Baroque” was first used, but the movement was fundamentally religious in inspiration, set in motion by the Counter-Reformation. Despite its exuberance, it was haunted by an all-pervading concentration on death and dying and how to face them. More than a few Baroque artists attended public executions, or
watched corpses being dissected. Their age coincided with a long period of peace in Italy, when turbulent natures could find outlets only in the most savage violence.

The Counter-Reformation, which gave birth to the Baroque, succeeded because it harnessed profound human impulses, whether the female principle through the cult of the Madonna or the need for forgiveness through confession. Its gorgeous liturgy satisfied a thirst for theater and color while, despite its leaders’ asceticism, it exalted the human body and was not afraid of nudity in art. Baroque had genuine popular appeal. Instead of using classical Antiquity, accessible to only a small, highly educated audience, as had Renaissance art, it concentrated on the religion of the humble as well as that of the elite. Its novelties were breathtaking, and a novelty like Caravaggio’s experiments with light—compared by Kenneth Clark to the kind of lighting fashionable in films of the 1920s—had enormous dramatic impact. So long as the Catholic revival continued, Baroque art would retain its vitality.

Most of us have colorful images of the Baroque churches in their full, triumphant splendor, with gilded altars crowned by sunbeams amid serpentine columns, walls of marble, porphyry, and scagliola, even of bronze and silver, and statues of swooning saints. All this was still in the process of emerging when Caravaggio died. Because of his uncompromising realism and avoidance of decoration, many historians do not see him as an artist belonging to the Baroque. “Baroque is the last epithet I would apply to Caravaggio, although it is the one he is now so often graced with,” grumbled Berenson. “Indeed, a more descriptive one would be the un-Baroque, or even the anti-Baroque.”

Nevertheless, the churches for which Caravaggio painted his altarpieces, his greatest achievements, are unmistakably Baroque. And he was very much aware of these churches, painting his altarpieces in such a way that, if they have been removed to a gallery, they must be viewed from six feet below if they are to be appreciated properly. For all his realism, he cannot be understood
outside a Baroque context. Certainly, no one can question that Caravaggio belonged to the Counter-Reformation. His utterly sincerc, down-to-earth treatment of sacred subjects moved the faithful deeply, and no artist was more successful in proclaiming the new Catholicism. As the first anniversary of Paul V’s accession drew near, Caravaggio’s prospects must have seemed enviable. His work was admired and collected by the all-powerful cardinal secretary, whose favorite he had become, and he had painted the pope himself.