The world needed to mature, to evolve past eighteenth-century decorum and Victorian prudery in order to accept the sexuality of Caravaggio’s paintings, a sexuality that is at once bravely unapologetic and furiously private. It’s worth noting that the spike in Caravaggio’s popularity took place during an era in which our sensitivities were being simultaneously sharpened and dulled by artists like Robert Mapplethorpe, whose passion for formal beauty and stillness, and whose own brief dramatic career, made him as emblematic of his time as Caravaggio was of his. In order to love Caravaggio, we ourselves had to learn to accept the premise that the angelic and the diabolic, that sex and violence and God, could easily if not tranquilly coexist in the same dramatic scene, the same canvas, the same painter.
These contradictions partly explain why Caravaggio so nearly fulfills every popular notion—and cliché—about the personality of the artist. The genius, or so we have learned, is a soul in the process of being drawn and quartered, pulled in countless different directions, a psyche struggling to balance the impulse to seduce against the compulsion to offend, weighing the desire for acceptance against the terror of confinement, laboring to calibrate the optimal chemistry of compassion and loathing, despair and transcendence. Several of Caravaggio’s earliest biographers grudgingly admired his art while condemning his bad behavior and distancing themselves from his famously difficult personality. And until very recently, critics were still making a strenuous effort to distinguish the living devil from the angelic, immortal artist.
Only now can we admit that we require both at once. The life of Caravaggio is the closest thing we have to the myth of the sinner-saint, the street tough, the martyr, the killer, the genius—the myth that, in these jaded and secular times, we are almost ashamed to admit that we still long for, and need. The arc of his life seems biblical as it compresses the Bible’s core—the fall of man, the redemption of man, the life eternal and everlasting—into one individual’s span on earth, one painter’s truncated existence. Each time we see his paintings, we are reminded of why we still care so profoundly about this artist who continues to speak to us in his urgent, intimate language, audible centuries after the voices of his more civilized, presentable colleagues have fallen silent.
One could say that Caravaggio has gotten what he wanted. His controlling desire, it appears, was not so much for wealth or personal fame as for a much purer sort of recognition. He wanted the greatness of his work to be acclaimed and understood. He wanted his ideas about art to be accepted as gospel, though he bridled and exploded whenever he felt that a disciple was following too closely in his footsteps. And finally he wanted his paintings to be acknowledged as vastly superior to anything else being done in his own time. Had he wanted us to know more about him, he might have left more evidence, documents and detritus, clues to his existence. But there is almost nothing. Police reports, legal depositions, court transcripts, cross-examinations, public notices, promissory notes, and contracts for commissions give us what few facts we have about Caravaggio’s biography.
Only very rarely do we hear him speak, and, except for the testimony that he gave at his trial for libel in 1603, it is always through the ventriloquism of others. He had, it would seem, two themes. One of his topics was insult, and the other was art. The insults are noted and preserved in the criminal record, the long list of provocations and responses that repeatedly got him into trouble. But we also hear him discoursing on the subject that meant most to him, on the correctness of his aesthetic theories and of the path he chose. His voice comes through in the famous anecdote about his boastful insistence that the first Gypsy woman who passed by on the street was a more appropriate subject for art than was any classical sculpture, and through the court records of a libel trial in which he used his appearance on the witness stand as an opportunity to hold forth on the qualities that constitute a good artist. There was nothing else that he appears to have cared about. And when, during his last years in Rome, he felt that his primacy was beginning to slip, that the light of respect and acclaim was beginning to shine on artists like Guido Reni, whose work he detested, disappointment and anger drove him to the edge of a sort of madness.
Ultimately, he has left us his paintings as the incontrovertible proof of what he believed, of what he practiced, of how right he was. That, too, is what he would have wished: that the eloquence of his work should offer the decisive testimony and tell us all we need to know. But this means that for nearly everything else we must depend on his early biographers—Giovanni Bellori, Giulio Mancini, Karel van Mander, Joachim von Sandrart, and Francesco Susinno. The earliest, Giovanni Baglione, was Caravaggio’s contemporary, a painter who competed with and deeply resented Caravaggio, whose work Caravaggio destested, and who was also the plaintiff in the libel suit that named Caravaggio as a defendant. How are we to interpret the account of lifelong rival who sums up Caravaggio’s legacy in this almost comically ambivalent coda: “If [he] hadn’t died so soon he would have made a great contribution to art because of the skill with which he painted things from nature, even though he showed poor judgment about representing the good and omitting the bad. Even so, he became well known, and was paid more for painting a head than other painters received for whole bodies, which proves that reputation has more to do with what people hear about an artist than with what they see. His portrait is in the Academy.”
All we know, or think we know, about Caravaggio has been subject to revision and reinterpretation. Informed guesses made by early biographers harden into facts in the work of later writers, while events recorded by those same biographers and long accepted as truth are later—after years of research have failed to substantiate them—dismissed as anecdotes with little basis in reality. There are protacted, undocumented periods in his short life, and considerable uncertainty about such seemingly straightforward matters as his place and date of birth.
He was not, as was once believed, poor and uneducated, a self-taught brute who came out of nowhere to overthrow and revolutionize the well-mannered, conventional, moribund art of his day. In fact his family was relatively prosperous. They owned land near Milan, in the village of Caravaggio, where they belonged to the new middle class.
His father, Fermo Merisi, worked principally in Milan as a chief mason, builder, architect, and majordomo for Francesco Sforza, the Marchese di Caravaggio, whose wife, Costanza, was a member of the illustrious Colonna family. In January 1571, Fermo married his second wife, Lucia Aratori, who was also from the town of Caravaggio. Francesco Sforza attended the wedding, which suggests that Fermo Merisi was a respected member of the marchese’s household. That autumn, Fermo and Lucia’s son Michelangelo was born, most probably in Milan.
His birth occurred at an extraordinary moment in the history of our culture. Shakespeare’s life span, from 1564 to 1616, was remarkably close to Caravaggio’s. And indeed an intensely Shakespearean spirit—theatrical, compassionate, alternately and simultaneously comic and tragic—suffuses Caravaggio’s art, though it must be noted that Shakespeare possessed a considerably more panoramic and forgiving view of human nature. In the year of Caravaggio’s birth, Galileo was a boy of seven, in Pisa; Claudio Monteverdi was a child of four, in Cremona. Rubens would be born six years later, in Westphalia.
It was also a period during which whole generations of artists were periodically wiped out by the virulent plagues that were notably indifferent to status, talent, and reputation. Titian was killed by the pestilence that swept through northern Italy in 1576. During that same epidemic, Carlo Borromeo, the bishop of Milan, was beloved for the courage he showed in remaining in his city to help the suffering victims, even as other church and civic officials fled to the countryside. A seventeenth-century painting shows Saint Carlo Borromeo ministering to the ill, possibly in the Lazaretto di San Gregorio, the plague hospital that, by the early 1800s, could accommodate 16,000 victims.
Throughout Europe, Italy had long been known for its efficient and relatively—that is, by the abysmal standards of the d
ay—effective methods of plague control, a system that imposed draconian measures on both the sick and the healthy. The dead were buried in mass graves, their clothing and possessions burned. The families of victims were walled up in their houses, and the legal penalties for defying quarantine laws often involved torture and death.
Understandably, Fermo Merisi decided to move his family from Milan to the comparative and, as it would turn out, deceptive safety of his hometown. As so frequently happened, the disease proved hard to outrun, especially when it was being imported to the rural areas by refugees from the city. In one night, Caravaggio’s father and grandfather succumbed to the plague; his uncle had died not long before. Michelangelo’s mother was left alone (fortunately, with the support of her parents) to raise her four children and a stepdaughter.
Caravaggio is believed to have received at least the rudiments of a formal education, which at that time would have included the Greek and Latin classics. Decades later, his work would display the lifelong legacy of an effective religious training. His younger brother would go on to study at a prestigious Jesuit college in Rome, and it seems likely that the two brothers started out in school together. Even for a painter, however, Caravaggio had notably little interest in writing—unlike, say, Leonardo da Vinci, who composed learned treatises on subjects ranging from art to medicine and warfare. Nor was he moved to record, or comment on, the events of his life, as was Jacopo Pontormo, whose diary offers intimate updates on the fluctuating state of his appetite and his digestion. No letters from Caravaggio survive; neither, like Michelangelo Buonarroti, did he leave us written work that included poems and grocery lists. Not a single drawing or preparatory sketch by Caravaggio has ever been discovered.
As far as we know, Caravaggio wrote nothing about himself, certainly nothing about his childhood, and his adult life seems to have included no one who had known him as a boy. Indeed, when his younger brother, Giovan Battista, who had become a priest, asked to see him in Rome, Caravaggio—by then a successful artist—claimed that he did not know him, that they were not brothers at all, that he had no relatives. The rejected Giovan Battista replied “with tenderness” that he had not come for his own sake but for that of his older brother, and for that of his family, if God was someday to grant Michelangelo a wife and children of his own. Tenderness, indeed! Perhaps there was a double edge to this selfless fraternal valediction, since by then it must have been clear to all involved that Caravaggio was unlikely to settle down and become a family man.
After the horrors of the 1576 plague, Caravaggio vanishes from recorded history until April 6, 1584, when a contract was drawn up to certify the official beginning of his apprenticeship in the Milan studio of Simone Peterzano, a former pupil of Titian and a competent but unexceptional painter of religious scenes. Little is known about why young Michelangelo chose a career in art, nor is there much evidence about the earliest manifestations of his talent, though one anecdote relates how, as a small boy helping his father in his duties as a builder for the Colonna family, Michelangelo prepared glue for, and became fascinated with, a group of painters hired to fresco the palace walls. One biographer claims that he attracted attention when, as a child, he scrawled in charcoal on a wall. What does seem undeniable is that the young Caravaggio had plenty of opportunity to study great painting and sculpture in the churches of Milan and even in his hometown, where frescoes by Bernardino Campi decorated a local church.
According to the terms of Michelangelo Merisi’s contract with Simone Peterzano, the thirteen-year-old apprentice agreed to live with the painter for four years, to work constantly and diligently, to respect his master’s property, and to pay a fee of twenty gold scudi. In return Peterzano agreed to instruct his pupil in the necessary skills (presumably drawing, perspective, anatomy, fresco painting, and the transformation of pigment into paint) so that, at the end of his apprenticeship, he would be capable of making his living as an artist.
In 1588, the apprenticeship ended. The next year, Caravaggio’s mother died. For a brief time after that, Michelangelo shuttled back and forth between Milan and Caravaggio, settling, sorting out, and rapidly spending what remained of his inheritance.
The next thing we know is that he left Milan for Rome in the autumn of 1592. Perhaps he sensibly realized that for a painter the opportunities for employment and advancement would be greater in the epicenter of ecclesiastical and aristocratic power. Or, like any ambitious young man, he resolved to follow his luck to the source of influence and wealth. He may have been tired of Milan with its painful associations, its gloomy history of misery, plague, and famine. Several of his biographers suggested that he murdered a man in Milan and had to leave town in a hurry. Possibly he had already begun the first of the successive cycles of violence, escape, flight, and exile that would recur, with increasingly disastrous consequences, throughout his life.
Mancini states that Caravaggio’s hot temper frequently made him act in outrageous ways. Bellori reports that because of his turbulent and quarrelsome nature, and because of certain disputes, he left Milan and traveled to Venice, while a note on another manuscript mentions that he fled the city after killing a companion. Still another inscription on yet another manuscript, this one in an almost indecipherable scrawl, refers to an incident involving a whore, a slashing, daggers, a police spy, and a jail term.
Something happened. He left Milan. He decided to go to Rome.
In the Salone Sistine, at the Vatican, there is a fresco depicting the Piazza Santa Maria del Popolo around the time when Caravaggio first arrived in Rome. The scene suggests the main square of a prosperous rural town on a day when the farmers’ market happens not to be in session. The animals—donkeys pulling overloaded carts, horses, a flock of sheep—nearly outnumber the humans. In the lower right-hand corner, a man is spreading an impressive quantity of laundry out to dry on grassy bank. In the background is the Church of Santa Maria del Popolo, where, less than a decade after Caravaggio arrived—from the north, through the Porta del Popolo, then the principal gateway into the city—he would paint the masterpieces that now adorn its Cerasi Chapel. Bisecting the fresco is the obelisk from the Circus Maximus, which Pope Sixtus V ordered erected in the square, and which remains the fixed point around which the street life of the modern piazza swirls. You can use these landmarks to orient yourself as you try to stretch your imagination far enough to encompass the fact that the semibucolic public space portrayed in the fresco is the same one that—swarming with pedestrians dodging buzzing motorini, surrounded by stylish cafés at which there is still an occasional movie-star sighting—occupies its site today.
Paradoxically, the tranquillity of the scene in the Vatican fresco was an indication of fresh energy, of recovery and resurgence. In 1527, Rome had been entirely destroyed, looted and razed by the army of Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor. Churches and palaces were burned to ashes, citizens tortured into surrendering the last of their wealth. It was said that not a single window in Rome was left unshattered. Some 45,000 Romans—including many artists and cultural figures—fled their ravaged city, which promptly lapsed into ruin and decay.
Only in the last decades of the sixteenth century had the city begun to rebuild, largely under the direction of the visionary Pope Sixtus V, who launched an ambitious progam of urban revitalization, building monuments, reorganizing neighborhoods, replacing the tangles of alleyways with broad avenues connecting the major basilicas. But late-sixteenth-century Rome was still a long way from the urban paradise that Sixtus envisioned.
A wave of migration from rural areas—inspired less by the capital’s attractions than by the hope of escaping the grim cycle of bad weather, crop failure, and famine—severely overtaxed the resources of a city in which there was virtually no industry except for the few wool and silk mills Sixtus helped to establish. As a result of the zeal with which new churches and palaces were being planned and constructed, the building trades provided the principal opportunities for employment. But still there were not nearly
enough jobs for the poor who begged in the streets, their desperation increased by the plagues and famines of the 1590s, their numbers swelled by the hordes of indigent pilgrims who flocked to the city’s shrines.
Confraternities of priests and lay brothers were founded to aid beggars and pilgrims, and to bury the anonymous paupers who simply dropped dead on the street. Exemplary figures like Saint Filippo Neri sought to make the teachings of the church accessible to the common man, an ideal that would later guide Caravaggio as he conceived his great religious paintings. Meanwhile the rich—aristocrats, bankers, financiers, church officials—were actively setting new standards of ostentation and display, cultivating a taste for luxury and ornamentation that expressed itself in their jewels, clothes, carriages, daughters’ dowries, and the decoration of their palaces. Under the reign of Clement VIII, who had been chosen pope earlier in the same year in which Caravaggio arrived in the Eternal City, the Roman cardinals became avid art collectors and patrons.
This was the world Caravaggio entered when he moved from Milan to Rome—poor himself, but possessing a skill that might prove useful and amusing to the rich. With its stark divisions between the indigent and the privileged, the culture provided him with the high contrasts that he observed meticulously and incorporated in his art. For among the qualities that made, and continue to make, his work so original and enduring was an acute power of observation: the ability to see how age and gender, social status and occupation, expressed themselves not only in gesture and dress but in tendon and knuckle, elbow and wrist, in the depth of a furrow and the droop of an eyelid.
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