It was not until the spring of 1607 that the rejected painting found a buyer. A passionate admirer of Caravaggio’s, Peter Paul Rubens persuaded the duke of Mantua to purchase The Death of the Virgin, which was sent off to Mantua after being on display in Rome for a week so local painters could see it. But by then, the happy news could hardly have provided much comfort to Caravaggio, who had fled Rome (for good, as it would turn out) and briefly found refuge and work in Naples.
The Death of the Virgin expressed the essence of everything Caravaggio believed about art. The simultaneously theatrical and naturalistic casting of ordinary human beings in intensely affecting religious dramas and the translation of biblical narrative from story-book fantasy into contemporary reality have an emotional immediacy and an impact on the viewer that the idealized, saccharine, and spiritually “uplifting” work of his contemporaries could never come close to attaining. And when the painting was rejected, it must have crossed his mind that those ideas—which were always, at best, warily regarded, dimly understood, and only tentatively embraced by many of the ecclesiastical officials who hired him to decorate their altars—were also in danger of being rejected by the priests, the patrons, and the art world of Rome.
The news of that rejection must have been a relief to those whose essentially conservative tastes were offended by the principles and the power of Caravaggio’s work. And how it must have reasured them to find out that they had been right all along in preferring Cesari’s neatly coiffed, brightly robed, squeaky-clean saints to Caravaggio’s barefoot laborers and dirty whores masquerading as dignified apostles and virginal Madonnas. Meanwhile, the wealthy and pious Romans were turning their attention to a rising talent, Guido Reni, a painter who offered the frisson of Caravaggism but with the rough and disturbing edges neatly sanded off. In his art, Reni promised to explore the middle ground between the dark crypts and bleak rooms in which Caravaggio’s dramas took place and the cottony firmaments, teeming with pudgy cherubs, in which Baglione and d’Arpino set their Resurrections and Ascensions.
Some of this may partly explain the fervor with which Guido Reni was welcomed as the new darling of the Roman art scene. Fastidious, well-mannered, presentable, a pious and sensitive soul whose only vice was gambling and who was so devoted to the Virgin that he himself was rumored to practice a celibacy that aspired to her spotless purity, Reni was Caravaggio’s opposite, and the differences in their natures were reflected in their compositions. The chasm between them remained wide even when Reni painted by the light of Caravaggio’s theories—a notion that Caravaggio found infuriating. For little is more demoralizing or conducive to self-doubt than the way in which a poor imitation can point up the flaws and banalities of the original, and confirm even the most confident artist’s own worst fears about his work. Like their creator, Reni’s paintings are stylish, sweet, sentimental, easy on the eye. Even in his Caravaggesque phase, his imagery suggests Caravaggio’s less than that of the French romantic painters like Adolphe Bouguereau who, centuries later, would recast Guido Reni’s angels and pentitent Magdalenes as the nymphs and bathing beauties whose heavily idealized, perfectly pulchritudinous, and oddly sexless femininity ensured them an elevated place in the pantheon of artists most admired and approved by the Nazi leaders.
Like Baglione, Reni was recognized by his contemporaries, including Caravaggio himself, as a competitor and a threat. Malvasia, an early biographer of Reni’s, writes that Caravaggio asked why, if Reni was so great, he was always trying to see and to buy Caravaggio’s paintings. Why, Caravaggio demanded to know, had Reni copied his technique when Reni painted The Crucifixion of Saint Peter for the Church of the Tre Fontane—a commission that would have gone to Caravaggio if d’Arpino had not unfairly interceded to help Reni get the assignment?
Caravaggio was receiving fewer and fewer commissions, while Reni’s stock was rapidly rising. And when Pope Clement VIII died in the winter of 1605, his successor, Paul V, promptly reverted to a more traditional taste for the sort of heroic, exalted art that, he felt, would reflect the importance and the ideals of his papacy. Once more the Cavaliere d’Arpino—Guido Reni’s champion—resumed his former position as a papal favorite.
It’s easy to imagine how it must have galled Caravaggio to see his inferiors lionized and praised and to observe the ebbing enthusiasm for his own work and ideas. Marked, as we have seen, by increasingly frequent legal troubles, brushes with the police, and outbursts of temper and volatility, 1605 was a particularly unfortunate year for the painter.
That summer, he returned from Genoa to find that he had been evicted and was essentially homeless—a peculiar situation for a painter who remained, despite his recent setbacks, among the most celebrated in Rome. The inventory drawn up by the landlady, who repossessed his belongings for nonpayment of rent, is not merely modest but grim: He owned two beds, a few simple pieces of furniture, some kitchen items, ragged clothes, studio props, weapons, a guitar, twelve books, and some art supplies. Bellori tells us that Caravaggio liked expensive clothing but that once he put on an outfit, he wore it until it was in tatters. He paid only minimal attention to personal cleanliness, and for many years he used the canvass on which he’d painted a portrait as a tablecloth and ate off it, day and night.
Far more worrisome was the fact that Caravaggio seemed to be having trouble completing his commissions on time, or at all. He had contracted to do some paintings for the duke of Modena, but a series of letters from Fabio Masetti, the duke’s agent in Rome, describe Masetti’s futile attempts to extract the promised work. First he reports, somewhat balefully, that he is unable to obtain the pictures since Caravaggio, as a consequence of his assault on the notary, is currently in Genoa, a fugitive from justice.
Masetti appealed to Del Monte for help, and, in a famous letter, Masetti repeats Del Monte’s description of the painter as having an extreme and erratic personality—literally un cervello stravagantissimo (a most extravagant and unruly head). To prove his point, Del Monte described how Caravaggio had refused an offer of 6,000 scudi to paint a loggia for the Principe Doria. This decision must have seemed even more puzzling to Masetti when, twice during the next few months, Caravaggio turned up at his door to beg for an advance—first of 12 scudi, then of 20 more—against the 50 or 60 scudi that he had agreed to charge the duke of Modena for his work.
Much later, after Caravaggio fled Rome, Masetti continued to write a long series of heartfelt and almost comical letters in which he assured his employer that, even though the painter has committed a murder and left the city, the agent had not slackened in his efforts to obtain the promised paintings, or at least to recover their 32-scudi advance.
Throughout that difficult year of 1605, the downturn in Caravaggio’s fortunes seems to have increased his determination not only to stick to his principles but to see how far he could take them, how hard and how recklessly he could push against the increasingly straight and narrow confines of orthodoxy. His work became even more provocative and outrageous, almost as if he were testing the limits and the patience of the patrons who had engaged his services.
And so, in the late autumn, after years of wishing to be included among the artists hired to work on Saint Peter’s, after years of resenting those—among them, Il Pomarancio, Domenico Passignano and Lodovico Cigoli—who were employed in the ongoing redecoration of the basilica, Caravaggio was commissioned by the Archconfraternity of the Palafrenieri (the papal grooms and horse guards) to paint an altarpiece for their chapel in Saint Peter’s. The painting was supposed to depict the Virgin, the Christ Child, and Saint Anne, the patron saint of the Palafrenieri. Furthermore, the image was meant to illustrate the doctrine, formally established by Pope Pius V in 1569, that Christ and Mary were equally responsible for the eradication of original sin. This ruling was intended to address and combat heresies such as that of the Protestants, who believed that the credit for man’s liberation from the consequences of Adam and Eve’s fall was due solely to Christ, and not to his mother.
/> In the painting, the Virgin, dressed in a red, low-cut gown rucked up to reveal a dark skirt, bends over to support her young son. Christ is a fair-haired, unusually tall, naked boy of two or three. He is old enough and so naturalistically rendered that his nakedness seems startling, sexual, denuded of the innocence we are used to associating with the holy infant. Indeed, there is nothing beside the dramatic situation of the painting to distinguish him from any other little boy or to identify him as Our Lord and Savior.
Mary’s hands tenderly cup the sides of Jesus’s chest, just beneath his armpits, steadying and bracing his tense, energized, and slightly off-balance little body. Besides them stands Saint Anne, an old woman in a coarse gown, whose gaze helps direct our own to the bottom of the painting, where the baby’s bare foot rests on his mother’s bare foot as, together, they apply their weight and force to the presumably critical spot directly behind the head of a serpent that twists, coiling up off the ground. All three figures are looking at the snake, and we need their direction, because, without (and even with) their help, our attention tracks first to the Virgin’s radiant face, then to the bright flash of white paint on the body of the snake, and finally—or perhaps it is what we have noticed first and have required a moment to process—to the little boy’s penis, very much at the center of the trio of figures, and again so realistically depicted that it casts its shadow on the boy’s thigh.
Even today, regardless of how sophisticated and knowing we imagine ourselves to be, the painting still has the power to make us look and then look again to see if we are really seeing what we think we are seeing. How did Caravaggio expect the Vatican grooms to react? What precisely did he think they would do when he delivered the painting in the early months of 1606 and collected his modest fee of 75 scudi?
Once more, Caravaggio’s painting was rejected—owing, says Bellori, to the vile portrayal of Virgin and the naked Christ Child. Baglione adds that the cardinals in charge of Saint Peter’s ordered it removed from the church. In addition, it was decided that the grooms would not be given their own altar in the main portion of the church, and they were later assigned a chapel in a less central part of the basilica.
On the night of Sunday, May 28, 1606, two men—both soldiers, both Bolognese, both armed and up to no good—loitered in the Via della Scrofa near the tennis courts. They were waiting for something to happen, a fight about which they’d been warned. At least one of the men had agreed or been hired, as he said, to perform a service.
Late May can be very hot in Rome. It had already proved to be an unusually troubled and restless night. A celebration with fireworks and parades to mark the anniversary of the pope’s coronation had degenerated into chaos and violence. A man had been murdered in a fight along the banks of the Tiber, not far from the spot where the pair of thugs—a guard at the papal prison and his one-eyed companion—anticipated the moment when rival gangs would meet, and Caravaggio’s crew would battle Ranuccio Tomassoni’s.
The Tomassoni were a family of street fighters and neighborhood bosses, the caporione of the Campo Marzio, Caravaggio’s neighborhood. Their forebears had a military history illustrious enough to justify the clan’s distinguished social status, which involved a mix of outright criminality and political clout. They functioned as guards, as private armies, and as the strong right arm for such influential families as the Aldobrandini, the Farnese, and the Crescenzi. Ranuccio Tomassoni had been the lover of Fillide Melandroni, the courtesan who had modeled for Caravaggio, and who had attacked another woman she believed had stolen Tomassoni’s affections. It was said that the ill will between Caravaggio and Tomassoni had something to do with Fillide. Depending on who was testifying in a series of criminal actions, Onorio Longhi had been a friend or an enemy of Ranuccio Tomassoni’s, and over the years the two men had a number of hostile and violent confrontations.
So, too, with Caravaggio, the line between friend and enemy could shift suddenly and without warning. Not long before the night of the twenty-eighth, a feud had erupted between Caravaggio and Tomassoni, a dispute that had some connection to a game of tennis.
The detail of the tennis game clings persistently to the event. But like so much of what has come down to us about the life of Caravaggio, the story of the tennis match has survived in a number of variant forms. Everyone (not just the early biographers, but also the professional clerks who wrote the first avvisi, or official notices) seems to have heard or imagined something slightly different, or to have concocted his own version of the crime according to a personal recipe of hearsay, fantasy, and truth.
In a letter from one of the duke of Modena’s representatives in Rome, the fight is described as having broken out over a disagreement about a tennis game that Caravaggio and Tomassoni were actually playing together. Something akin to that idea must have influenced Bellori’s contention that part of the struggle involved the two men beating each other with tennis rackets. According to the best known avviso, written three days after the fight, the cause of the disagreement was a bet on a tennis game, a wager in which Tomassoni had won ten scudi from Caravaggio. Another avviso confirms the story about the bet, and goes on to say that Caravaggio indignantly refused to pay the ten scudi.
It was not a light or casual wager, especially when we consider how Caravaggio’s fees had decreased. He had received a mere 75 scudi from the Palafrenieri and was planning to charge the duke of Modena 50 or 60 scudi for the work he would never deliver. Meanwhile, as we have seen, he had come to beg the duke’s agent for two advances—the first of which was for only 12 scudi. And all this was around the time that he had been evicted, and was homeless, and had had his belongings repossessed.
Consequently, the initial conflict and the fight that evolved were about more than honor, temper, and indignation. Ten scudi, the amount of the bet, must have seemed a considerable sum to a man struggling for his economic survival. And it provided an excellent excuse for a fight to a man who seems never to have required much of a reason for violence.
The tension had led to conflict a few days before the twenty-eighth, the night on which, as everyone involved seemed to know, the dispute would be settled. Each side would consist of at least four men, though one avviso claims that twelve were involved. And the two Bolognese had been conscripted to round out the numbers for the painter and Onorio Longhi, Caravaggio’s friend and longtime partner in crime.
None of this was spontaneous. It was not the result of a quick, hot response, a lightning flash of temper. It was almost balletic, so carefully choreographed and staged that, like so much of Caravaggio’s life, it evokes Shakespearean drama.
On the night of May 28, Caravaggio and his little band swaggered past the house of Ranuccio Tomassoni, in the Piazza di San Lorenzo in Lucina. And Ranuccio’s gang, which included his brother Giovan Francesco and two other family members, rose eagerly to the challenge.
Violent struggles are of course difficult to observe clearly, to recall, sort out, and describe with accuracy. But there seems to have been a rare degree of concurrrence about this one, though Baglione presents Ranuccio as the “very polite” victim of a sociopath always on the lookout for a chance to risk his own life or endanger someone else’s. According to Baglione, Ranuccio fell to ground after Caravaggio had stabbed him in the thigh. Only then did Caravaggio finish him off. Mancini takes the opposite view, claiming that Caravaggio was defending himself when the death occurred.
Ranuccio and Caravaggio fought, one on one. Caravaggio was wounded, and the Bolognese captain came to his aid. Finally, Ranuccio tripped and faltered. And Caravaggio killed him.
It took two days before the wounded artist was well enough to leave the city. During that time, the last he would spend in Rome, he hid, probably in the palace of the Marchese Giustiniani. His injuries could not possibly have healed by the time he fled, by most reports to the Alban Hills, where he stayed under the protection of the Colonna family.
Until the end of that summer, he remained in the vicinity and painted, doubtless
out of some combination of the compulsion to keep working and the need to stave off a financial emergency. One of the canvases he completed was a Mary Magdalene, her head tipped back, one shoulder bared, gestures reminiscent of the boys he had painted for Del Monte. But the Magdalene’s central prop is not a lute but a skull, and she projects the opposite of coyness and seduction. The power of remorse and regret has rendered her nearly unconscious, taken her so far outside herself that she is bordering on the ecstatic. The painting reads like a barely encoded message to God and to the world: an image of Christianity’s most exemplary penitent depicted by a sinner who has every reason to long for forgiveness from heaven and from the state.
Again, unlike the luscious Magdalenes who make you think first of the ways in which they have sinned rather than the fervor with which they are repenting, Caravaggio’s penitent is almost anti-erotic. For one thing, she has the shoulders of a young man. For another, she has retreated so far from us that, unlike the darling and highly approachable lutenists and fruit bearers in his earlier work, she makes us feel that any attempt to communicate with her, let alone to touch her, would be an insult and an affront.
Caravaggio also did another depiction of The Supper at Emmaus, far darker, more serious, and profound than his earlier version. The glossy, umarred Christ has been replaced by one who has suffered, and the pilgrims at the supper are less shocked than moved and touched by this evidence of what Caravaggio himself must have longed to believe: that one can find a miracle and discover salvation at the end of what had seemed to be merely a hard day on the road. But if these paintings had personal and spiritual significance for their creator, they were also intended to secure him the funds that he would need during the uncertain period that lay before him. The Supper at Emmaus was promptly sold to another loyal longtime patron, Ottavio Costa.
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