Caravaggio: A Passionate Life (13 page)

XXII

Interlude at Naples, 1606–1607

A
ccording to a report from Modena, Caravaggio was still at Paliano on 28 September 1606, supposedly waiting for a pardon. But on 6 October he was paid two hundred ducats at Naples for a new commission. A Roman friend may have reminded him of Pope Paul’s sternness toward those who had shed blood, warning that, for the moment, there was no hope of forgiveness. In any case, his plans did not include returning to Rome, while he may have had an invitation from the Marchesa di Caravaggio to come to Naples.

The marchesa had acquired a palace on the Chiaia, on the seafront, presumably to be as near as possible to her second son, Fabrizio Sforza Colonna, a Knight of Malta. Formerly prior of Venice, he had spent four years in prison at Valletta for killing a man in a duel, before being released in 1606 and appointed Captain-General of the Galleys. His mother could scarcely avoid knowing the prior of Naples. Understandably inclined to be sorry for the runaway painter, she could easily have put in a good word for him. Caravaggio may also have heard of the imminent arrival of his old patron, Cardinal del Monte, who came at the end of October, accompanied by a group of Roman nobles, including one of the marchesa’s Colonna kinsmen.
He stayed until March of the following year and, although there is no evidence, it seems likely that Caravaggio called on the cardinal.

On the great bay beneath Vesuvius, Naples was by turns beautiful and squalid. A population estimated at three hundred thousand, increased daily by migrants, made it three times as big as Rome or Milan. It had hordes of beggars, some so destitute they went about stark naked. The Neapolitans were crammed into an area eight miles square, twelve if the suburbs were included. Their city was a checkerboard of straight, narrow streets laid out on the ancient Greek pattern, with houses six stories tall to make extra space, when at Rome they were seldom as high as three. The people, who looked more Levantine than Italian with their dark skins, were noticeably small. They lived on pasta, which had recently supplanted bread and vegetables as their staple diet. In manner, they were “merry, witty and genial,” though the upper classes looked, or tried to look, like Spaniards, affecting a haughty gravity. Everyone spoke a clipped, nasal Italian, very different from Roman or Milanese. To Caravaggio, it must have sounded like a foreign language.

This was the capital of the Two Sicilies, the
Regno
, since the twelfth century the only kingdom in Italy. It had become part of the Spanish empire in 1504, southern Italians accepting Spanish rule largely from fear of being conquered by the Turks. A Spanish viceroy ruled at Naples, attended by a truly regal court. When he processed through the city on foot, a cloth-of-gold canopy was held over his head. Among the disadvantages of a Spanish regime were the troops, not just Spaniards or Walloons but Italians, many of them pardoned
banditti
, underpaid and underfed, who robbed in order to keep alive. The Neapolitans took their revenge, frequently leaving at the crossroads the bodies of soldiers they had stabbed in the back.

The viceroys forced the great nobles to live in the capital, where they built enormous palazzi. “There be in this City very many Pallaces, of Gentlemen, Barons and Princes,” noted Fynes Moryson. “Whereupon the City is vulgarly called Napoli Gentile.” The great families—Carafa, Caracciolo, Ruffo, Minutolo, Sangro, and the rest—were no less respected than the Massimi
or Orsini at Rome. There was an exuberant social life, with lavish balls and masquerades. The Genoese were much in evidence and heartily disliked, the Neapolitans blaming them for the crushing taxation, sometimes attacking them in the streets. Naples should have been very rich, but it was bled white by the duties on such staples as grain and flour.

Yet George Sandys, who saw it in 1611, thought Naples the pleasantest of cities. “Their habit is generally Spanish,” he tells us. “The Gentry delighteth much in great horses, whereupon they praunce continually thorow the streets. The number of carossess [coaches] is incredible that are kept in this City, as of the segges [sedan chairs] not unlike to horse-litters, but carried by men. These waite for fares in the corners of streets, as Watermen doe at our wharfes; wherein those that will not foote it in the heate are borne (if they please unseene) about the City.” He admired the beauty of the women and their elegant clothes, observing that “silke is a worke-day weare for the wife of the meanest artificer.”

Sandys writes of soldiers constantly marching through the streets, so that the Neapolitans’ ears were “inured to the sound of drum and fife, as their eyes to the … glistering of armours.” For Naples, even more than Milan, was a bulwark of Spanish rule in Italy. There was a garrison of four thousand troops, with a further sixteen hundred in the other cities of the Regno, and thirty-seven war galleys.

Caravaggio must have been interested in the courtesans as the main source of models. “The women are generally well featured but excessively libidinous,” remarked John Evelyn, who visited Naples in the 1640s. He noted that there were thirty thousand registered prostitutes. One of their tricks during the Carnival was to throw eggshells filled with scented water from their windows, while some were even credited with using witchcraft to ensnare clients. Living mainly in an area near the Porta Capuana, they plied their trade everywhere, not just in the famous Ciriglio tavern, but during Mass at the fashionable churches, by the booths on the Largo del Castello, where the Commedia del Arte was played, in the gardens at Poggioreale, or on the pleasure boats bound for Posillipo.