Every social class makes at least a cameo appearance in his work, but in his final and greatest Roman paintings, the poor have claimed center stage. He lived with them and understood them. By the time he painted his Madonna of Loreto for the Church of Sant’Agostino—a scene in which a stately, graceful Madonna appears with her son in a doorway of an ordinary house that evokes so many doorways in Rome—the calloused, bare, filthy feet of the pilgrims who kneel before her strike us as being as familiar to Caravaggio as the back of his own hand.
In his choice of models he worked his way up from the demimonde to the world of the honest laborer and the pious, devoted poor. Near the start of his career he was drawn to portray cardsharps and thieves, criminals at work, pretty-boy musicians, and his Roman neighbors dressed up in the costumes and attitudes of saints. If his art depended on observing nature, on paying close attention to the visible world, there must have been plenty of opportunity to witness the full range of illicit activity in the taverns and streets around him, and to find visually arresting faces and characters that required only a costume change for their transformation from street whores into repentant Magdalenes and virginal Madonnas resting on the flight into Egypt.
According to a census taken in 1600, the population of Rome was approximately 110,000. It was a city of men, a fact that will become important when we consider Caravaggio’s social and sexual life. Males outnumbered females, of whom there were 49,596. Of that number 604 were prostitutes by profession. A decade before, it had been reported—apocryphally, it is now believed—that the courtesan population of Rome totaled 13,000. Throughout the countryside, banditry had reached epidemic proportions, and in the city, crime was so rampant that Pope Sixtus V decreed that robbers should be beheaded and their lopped-off heads arranged on the bridge across the Tiber near the prison in the Castel Sant’Angelo. Public executions provided a popular form of free mass entertainment.
Gangs of toughs—the bravi—roamed the neighborhoods, looking for trouble, dueling (a practice that had been outlawed by papal decree), battling over obscure points of personal honor, frequenting brothels, and vying for the affection of the most desirable prostitute of the moment. The Italians’ reputation for violence and banditry spread beyond their own cities and dangerous country roads. Just as Anglophones today can’t seem to get enough of the misbehavior of the Corleone and Soprano Mafia families, British playwrights of sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—Caravaggio’s contemporaries and near-contemporaries—mined Italian street life and exaggerated the sad histories of Italy’s spectacularly dysfunctional and incestuous noble families for the plots of their gory dramas. Many of the revenge tragedies written by Tourneur, Webster, and Ford—plays that ended with the stage littered with corpses, the victims of poisonings, stabbings, swordfights, and garrotings—were set in Italy or on occasion in Spain, anyplace where a tempestuous Southern temperament and a Latin lack of impulse control could be guaranteed to satisfy the audience’s taste for dashing swordplay and for ingeniously plotted (poison might be concealed in the pages of a Bible or in a bouquet of flowers) and cold-blooded murder. Indeed, the violent incident that initiates the dramatic action in Romeo and Juliet—the eruption of a street fight that ends in the death of Juliet’s cousin and Romeo’s banishment from Verona—was very much like the lethal brawl that forced Caravaggio to leave Rome.
Belligerent, contemptuous, competitive, Michelangelo Merisi would soon be drawn into the whirlwind of insults, attacks, retaliations, and vendettas that passed for nightlife in the Campo Marzio, the raffish neighborhood in which many artists, including Caravaggio, lived. And yet he somehow managed to stay out of trouble with the law until close to the end of the century. In the meantime, he had a career to begin and attend to. For one of the most remarkable things about Caravaggio was that, even when his private life was at its most chaotic and disordered, nothing (or almost nothing) prevented him from painting. While a number of his colleagues were famous for the extent to which they delayed and procrastinated, carousing in the taverns when their commissions were months overdue, Caravaggio generally succeeded in finishing his assignments on time.
New in Rome, living “without lodgings and without provisions,” he resisted the siren song of the sword and the street. He did what his contract with Simone Peterzano had promised he would be qualified for: He found work as a painter.
Despite the poverty, disease, and crime that were the daily lot of so many Roman citizens, it was not an inauspicious moment for an ambitious and gifted young artist seeking to make his mark in the capital. From a purely economic standpoint, the scores of new palaces and churches under construction meant that someone would have to be hired to paint and decorate them. Moreover, it was widely agreed—though of course not by the established painters—that art had grown tired, that the static formality and the conventions of high mannerism could use some revitalizing infusion of originality and passion. Important collectors complained publicly about the paucity of genuine talent.
Pope Clement VIII’s ascension brought some measure of stability to the city. Previously the brief reigns of three short-lived popes had done little to control the sudden resurgence of banditry and crime. Flanked by his two nephews, Pietro and Cinzio Aldobrandini, who would become his closest advisers, Clement VIII—known for his asceticism and for the copious tears he shed during religious services—indulged his interest in philosophy, science, and literature. Under the auspices of Cinzio Aldobrandini, the famous poet Torquato Tasso was invited to Rome, where he remained to work on his epic, Gerusalemme Liberata.
Caravaggio’s entry into the higher echelons of Roman social and cultural life was not nearly so seamless or smooth. Penniless, dependent on the hospitality of strangers, he moved frequently from cheap inns to spare rooms in the homes of acquaintances of his father’s former employer and of his uncle, a church official. His departures rarely featured fond farewells and warm invitations to return. For a while, he stayed in the Palazzo Colonna, with Monsignor Pandolfo Pucci, a steward in the household of the sister of the former pope, Sixtus V. But Pucci forced the proud young artist to do work that he found degrading, and to make knockoff copies of devotional paintings. In addition, he nearly starved him on a frugal diet, so that later Caravaggio referred to Pucci as Monsignor Insalata.
After his unsatisfactory sojourn with Monsignor Insalata, Caravaggio briefly and barely supported himself by making pictures to sell on the street. The biographical accounts of whom he stayed with and how he survived are as jumbled and contradictory as his life must have been during this unsettled period. He was said to have spent time in the atelier of a Sicilian who produced cheap art, and it was there that he may have met Mario Minniti, a young Sicilian artist with whom he lived, possibly for years, and who served as a model for several of the luscious, dark-eyed boys in Caravaggio’s early paintings. Ultimately, Minniti returned to Sicily, married, and had children—and was later called upon to be his old friend’s protector, host, guide, and business agent in 1608, when Caravaggio turned up in Syracuse, in flight from Rome, Naples, and Malta.
In a marginal note, written by Bellori in the manuscript of Baglione’s biography of Caravaggio—the same inscription that notes that Caravaggio was forced to leave Milan after having committed a murder—Bellori writes that the young painter found work painting three heads a day in the studio of Lorenzo Siciliano, and from there moved on to the employ of Antiveduto Grammatica, a more esteemed and established painter of heads. But the first job that has been convincingly documented took Caravaggio, for eight months or so, into the busy, prosperous studio of Giuseppe Cesari, later known as the Cavaliere d’Arpino.
A favorite of at least two popes and several powerful cardinals, Cesari was nearly as prickly and difficult as Caravaggio, but far more tractable and eager to please—qualities reflected in the safe presentability of his art. After working on the Vatican frescoes, he was awarded a series of prestigious commissions that included frescoes in the Churches of Santa Prassede and San Lu
igi dei Francesi, and in the Basilica of San Giovanni in Laterano, where he demonstrated his ability to manipulate perspective and foreshortening in order to give the viewer a sense of rising into the firmament in the company of the apostles and saints.
If Caravaggio’s paintings are brilliant, nearly photographic representations of miracles in progress, Cesari’s frescoes more often evoke the illustrations in Sunday school textbooks. Indeed, Cesari is one of the many of Caravaggio’s contemporaries whose work reminds us of what it is easy to forget or overlook—that is, how revolutionary Caravaggio was, how much he changed and rejected: the baby-blue heavens, the pillowy clouds, the airy ascensions accompanied by flocks of pigeonlike cherubs and choirs of attractive angels. For Caravaggio, the lives of the saints and martyrs and their dramas of suffering and redemption were played out among real men and women, on earth, in the here and now, and in almost total darkness.
In addition to his religious frescoes, Cesari turned out stylish canvases, quasi-erotic treatments of such mythological themes as Perseus rescuing a nude, provocatively posed Andromeda from the jaws of a predatory monster. These smaller works were sold, for respectable prices, to patrons and collectors. It’s possible that Caravaggio helped Cesari with his church commissions, but Bellori informs us that Caravaggio’s duties were more limited, that Cesari deployed Michelangelo Merisi’s talents solely in the decorative representation of flowers and fruit, an activity that was considered to be inferior to figure painting. As a consequence of this reluctant apprenticeship, Caravaggio became a skillful painter of still lifes, although he resented being “kept away from figure painting.”
Ultimately, Caravaggio could not be prevented from using his masterful renderings of flowers and fruit as a decorative element in the kind of figure painting for which he was so temperamentally suited. Two of his earliest paintings—the so-called Sick Bacchus and Young Boy with a Basket of Fruit—were probably done when Caravaggio was still working in Cesari’s studio. Both works graced Cesari’s collection until, in 1607, they were seized by Pope Paul V and given to the acquisitive Cardinal Scipione Borghese. Perhaps the impecunious young Michelangelo sold them to his employer, or perhaps Cesari appropriated them when Caravaggio left his studio under the shadow cast by his lengthy and mysterious stay in the Hospital of Santa Maria della Consolazione.
This long, unexplained illness was described as resulting from a kick by a horse, though the so-called equine mishap may have been the era’s equivalent of running into a door. Rumors of violent crime linked Caravaggio, Giuseppe Cesari, and Giuseppe Cesari’s brother (and fellow painter) Bernardino Cesari, who was already a well-known felon. And there were hints of dark reasons why the brothers failed to visit their friend during his protracted recuperation.
It could hardly be mere coincidence that Caravaggio’s enigmatic self portrait as the Sick Bacchus was painted at around the time of this serious illness. In the painting, a young man in a classical toga with an ivy wreath on his dark curls and a bunch of grapes in his hand regards us over his alluringly bare and muscular shoulder. Everything about his posture and his knowing, ironic ghost of a smile would suggest lasciviousness and sexual invitation, except for one little problem: Bacchus looks diseased, hollow-eyed, bilious. Green. What he offers is sex and death neatly combined in one simultaneously appealing and repellent package. His expression is unfathomable. Is he inviting the viewer to kiss him, or is he pleading to be rushed to a doctor? In the complicated art-historical debate about the painting’s symbolism, iconography, and meaning, few critics have bothered to point out the obvious: how deeply strange the painting is. It’s almost as if Caravaggio had discovered surrealism more than three centuries prematurely, and found himself unable to resist the impulse to produce something this outrageous and peculiar while employed in the studio of one of Rome’s most conventional painters.
Sick Bacchus is the evil twin of Boy with a Basket of Fruit, which features another young man with bare shoulders, dark curls, and bunches of grapes. Here the straw basket is filled with the slightly overripe, imperfect fruit. Even at this early stage, Caravaggio was asserting his right to paint accurately, without idealization, a flawed and imperfect nature. It’s hard to imagine two more dissimilar figures than Bacchus and the fruit bearer. For this boy is as rosy, as luscious and healthy, as the ripe peach in his basket.
Through the boy’s pink, half-parted lips, we can glimpse the tip of his tongue. His head is tipped back, his eyes sleepy and half lidded, as if he has just had sex or is just about to. His smooth, lovely neck swans up from the deep well of his clavicle. Every cell of his being communicates enticement and seduction, and seems intended to make viewers long to remove that one last obstacle that separates us from him, to take the basket of fruit from his hands, set it down, and embrace him.
The intention of the boy, the painting, and painter is essentially the same: to so completely seduce us that we feel we can’t live without this boy, or at least his representation. Ambitious, restless, probably bored in Cesari’s employ, eager to strike out on his own but understandably uneasy about how he could support himself, Caravaggio was, at this point, one of those streetwise young men who cannily and shrewdly—and sometimes with unhappy consequences—understand that seduction is a likely route to survival. Nearly all his early paintings read like calculated attempts to charm and beguile the viewer, the collector, the patron, the buyer. His musicians, his singers, his chubby Greek gods fix us in their vampish sights and won’t let us look away, while his cardsharps and fortune-tellers coyly pretend not to see us while they work their ruses and scams, knowing full well that we are watching.
But then the most remarkable thing is how drastically all of that changes. Begining with the earliest of his great religious paintings—The Calling of Saint Matthew and The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew—the players in his dramas turn their backs on the viewer and focus their full attention on the mystery they are enacting. In his later works, the come-hither glance has given way to the anguished grimace; the bare smooth shoulder has been replaced by the torturer’s muscular buttocks and the filthy feet of the pilgrim. And the paradox is that even as these figures lose all interest in us, and in how we are reacting, we are caught up and drawn in even more strongly than we were when they were trying to invite us. In fact, everything is still calculated to work its magic on the viewer, to make us feel that a miracle is transpiring in front of our eyes, that it is happening to people like us, that we can touch and feel and smell it.
One of Caravaggio’s last paintings portrays the full figure of a nearly naked boy, said to represent the youthful Saint John the Baptist. Beside him, a fat old ram, thickly horned, shows us his hindquarters. The painting is thought to be one of the works that Caravaggio made to present as a gift of propitiation or thanks to the patrons who were arranging the pardon that would let him return to Rome. It was presumably one of the paintings on the boat that sailed away without him and left him to die on the beach at Port’Ercole.
In the boy’s dreamy, slightly melancholy prettiness, you sense that old urge to charm and beguile. But somehow it fails, and the final effect is anything but seductive. The boy looks wan, exhausted, used up. His dark eyes and the childish slope of his shoulders make us feel vaguely anxious and oppressed. He seems to have seen and suffered some of what his creator has endured. Caravaggio may still have been trying to charm and please, but his heart—worn out by travel and trouble—was no longer in it.
Eventually, Caravaggio recovered from his “kick from a horse” and was pronounced well enough to leave the Hospital of the Consolation. And whatever he experienced there seems to have strengthened his resolve to quit Cesari’s art factory.
Now, Bellori tells us, “he began to paint according to his own genius…and nature alone became the object of his brush.” This is when it was suggested to him that a figurative painter should seek inspiration in the idealized and pleasing proportions of classical sculpture, and when Caravaggio replied that he would rather find his mod
els among the Gypsy women in the street. Throughout Caravaggio’s work—in the poses and gestures of his sinners and saints, in the stance of a Madonna, the grimace of Medusa, the languor of Bacchus—you can see his familiarity with Greek and Roman art, and the extent to which that knowledge formed him. And yet you never feel that he is simply dressing up an idealized and imaginary Greek figure in a sixteenth-century costume, or that he is following the example of the ancient Greek painter whose image of Helen of Troy was said to be a composite combining five perfect body parts from five different women. Rather Caravaggio persuades us that he is finding the classical grace in the prosititutes he employed as a models, or borrowing the techniques that the Greeks used to render expression and animation in his efforts to depict the awe and terror of the neighbors he paid to pose as witnesses to a miracle or a martyrdom.
Obviously, Caravaggio did not invent the idea of direct observation from nature. Leonardo da Vinci’s sketchbooks are full of drawings of elderly or grotesque men and women that the artist made after spending hours following his subjects through the streets of the city. But this practice had fallen off among Caravaggio’s contemporaries, who were far more interested in imitating Michelangelo and Raphael than in rethinking the relation between everyday reality and artistic representation.
To emphasize further his point about his preference for painting street folk over classical statuary, Caravaggio is supposed to have recruited the first Gypsy woman who walked by and brought her back to his quarters, where he painted her in the act of telling a baby-faced young man’s fortune—and in the process covertly stealing her unwary client’s ring. Still, for all the vehemence with which he insisted on the importance of copying directly from nature without falsification or adornment (“When he came upon someone in town who pleased him,” wrote Bellori, “he made no attempt to improve on the creations of nature”), the painter appears to have given nature plenty of help.
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