The majority of the portraits that adorned the walls of the Palazzo Madama are lost, and for good reason: they were junk, copies of copies made in the workshop of a talentless maestro whose name lives on only because it is associated with Caravaggio’s youth. The few that it has been possible to identify show no sign of Merisi’s master hand, whether because he didn’t work on them—he wasn’t Grammatica’s only assistant—or because he turned them out mechanically, with no thought of proving anything to anyone. By then he was trying to make a place for himself as a painter with his own workshop, in the city that was the very navel of the art of his day, and he must have believed that investing effort in work that didn’t even make him a good living was a waste of time.
What we are left with instead are several heads—not all of them gigantic—of Caravaggio himself. He appears in the grips of fever in Sick Bacchus, and stricken with anguish in the face of death in The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew. On May 29, 1606, he killed Ranuccio Tomassoni on a tennis court and was sentenced to death by beheading. Over the following years he painted his own severed head in two works: David with the Head of Goliath—which he sent to Scipione Borghese in return for pleading his cause before Pope Paul V—and Salome with the Head of John the Baptist—which he sent as a gift to the grand master of the Knights of Malta to request the protection of the order when the pope’s executioners were closing in on him.
He had also painted himself as an adolescent in The Musicians, which he completed under the protection of Cardinal del Monte after he came to live on the lower floor—the servants’ floor—of the Palazzo Madama in 1595. The lasciviousness of his half-open mouth, the succulence of his naked shoulders, the supplicatory look he gives the sole spectator of the painting—it was the first work that he painted for the cardinal’s exclusive enjoyment—makes one imagine that he feels a gratitude that is at the very least voluptuous. In The Musicians, he portrays himself as a boy of fourteen or fifteen, though he was already a full-fledged and well-seasoned twenty-four when he painted it. This is unsettling, because during the talks of the conclave of 1621, the argument with which the representatives of Philip IV put an end to Cardinal del Monte’s previously unstoppable campaign for the papal seat was that he ran a charitable mission recruiting boys of twelve or thirteen to be educated under his personal supervision in the palace. According to the cardinals’ accusations, which are known because they were posted anonymously on the statue of Pasquino in Rome, del Monte recruited boys “not on the merits of their intelligence or neediness, but for their beauty.”
There is a sixth head of Caravaggio, sketched ten or fifteen years after his death, in chalk on paper. It was done by Ottavio Leoni, who knew him well. The brown of the eyes, the boldly drawn eyebrows that almost meet at the bridge of the nose, the untidiness of the rather thin beard, the unkempt and chaotic hair, the skin of the face shiny with grease, and the straight nose unblemished by age are the same as in his self-portraits, but in Leoni’s drawing Caravaggio’s expression isn’t theatrical. He looks like what he probably was: difficult, peevish, ready for a fight. His right eyebrow, arched higher than the left, conveys irony and impatience, skepticism. The turned-down mouth signals that he was easily irritated; his slovenliness suggests that he was more arrogant than vain. Most of all, it is the saddest head ever drawn: that of someone already done for, caught in his own trap. The head of someone who no longer has a name of his own.
In March 1595, del Monte bought two paintings from the butcher and art dealer Constantino Spata, paintings by the young artist he had met in Antiveduto Grammatica’s workshop of giant heads. It was so early in his career that they were still signed with the name of his Lombardy boyhood—M. Merixio—rather than the Romanized version of it, Michelangelo Merisi, which he adopted later, or Caravaggio—the town of his birth—with which he signed his works when he became famous.
The cardinal paid eight scudi for The Cardsharps and The Fortune Teller; four scudi each. In that same year of 1595, the artist Carracci sold his paintings for two hundred and fifty scudi apiece; del Monte’s annual income—not the money he used for his political operations and the administration of the palace, but for his personal expenses—was one thousand scudi. It would have been enough to buy two hundred and fifty Caravaggios a year, twenty-one a month. In 1981, the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth bought The Cardsharps for $15 million.
Despite his spectacular stinginess, Cardinal del Monte always knew exactly what he had bought. He unveiled the two paintings in the celebrated music salon of the Palazzo Madama, where they were so admired by his guests that he soon returned to Constantino Spata’s butcher shop and bought Sick Bacchus and Medusa, which he sent as a gift to the grand duke. In the same fell swoop, carried away by enthusiasm, he bought Caravaggio too—fleshy shoulders, fresh mouth—and brought him to live among the servants of the palace so he could paint works on demand.
This was the turning point of Caravaggio’s career, the moment when his life as an orphan adrift moved him onto the service side of the court.
Changeover
As it happened, the Lombard really didn’t remember anything about the night before. Very likely he couldn’t even remember each serve as he returned it, once the ball was in play. Maybe this was why he was enjoying himself so much during the break in a match where he had already lost the first set. The spectators had scattered about the gallery to stretch their legs, and some had gone to piss in the canal, so the painter, Mary Magdalene, and Matthew had a bit of welcome privacy.
Leaning on the gallery railing, he wasn’t sure at all how he had come to be playing a Spaniard at tennis, nor why the Spaniard had an escort of soldiers, nor how he could possibly be losing when his opponent was a lame lordling with a face that drooped to the sides, like a pair of buttocks. Not that it mattered much: he was very happy breathing in the powerful scent of Mary Magdalene’s tits as she asked him why the Spaniards could bear arms and his friends couldn’t. They must be noblemen, said the Lombard, and he lowered his head, as if by sinking his nose into the whore’s cleavage he could remove himself from a world that pressed on his temples and parched his throat. He inhaled. And those ugly soldiers, said the woman. The artist turned to look at them. He gave them a distant stare, his eyes nearly shut. They’re green people, he said; except for their master, who’s worse: pink as a pig. And he turned his attention back to her cleavage.
Matthew, who had been in a sulk for a while over the artist’s disinclination to rapidly crush his opponent, noted that they were probably from the Naples regiment, but not soldiers. He added: They must be mercenaries, capo mio—as if he were morally superior somehow to a soldier, a mercenary, or anyone else. He was standing with his back to the court, next to his capo, who was now nuzzling Mary Magdalene’s left clavicle.
If anyone associated with one of the families who ruled the city rabble had heard Saint Matthew refer to the tennis player as capo, he would have died laughing. The artist had the right to carry a sword because he was in service to a cardinal, which meant that he could make extra money by taking part in debt collection and street fights, but that was all. The flock of lowlifes who followed him everywhere wasn’t a gang, though when bodies were needed they brought sticks and stones to the battle for control of a corner or a piazza. The famiglia that the artist belonged to took him seriously because of the lunatic ferocity with which he fought and because of his close ties to the cardinal, who protected him—he never had to spend more than a few hours in jail—but they didn’t consider him trustworthy.
Saint Matthew scratched his ribs. Finally he said: Why don’t we just give him a good beating? The artist sighed and sank his nose between Mary Magdalene’s breasts again. They’re Spaniards, she said; imagine the scandal. She said it in a dreamy way, her smile almost gentle, as if this imagined world weren’t a feast of stabbings and throat-slittings, toward which it made no sense to hurl oneself. There would be war in the streets, she concluded, running her crooked finger across the
artist’s neck. If they’re playing tennis with us they can’t be very important, grunted the beggar. I tell you they’re noblemen, it’s risky enough to be playing tennis with them, Mary insisted. Win the match and put an end to it, capo, said Matthew. The artist shook himself a little, exhaled the rather stale air from his lungs into the tart’s cleavage, and lifted his face. Shouting Eccola! as harshly as he might have called for a tavern to be opened at dawn, he went to get his racket and the ball he’d left lying on the pavement. Onlookers, gamblers, and friends found new seats in the gallery as the players changed sides.
Heavily and lazily, the Lombard went through the motions of crossing the court: dragging his feet, his eyes on the ground. Before he had settled himself on the defender’s side, his second rose from his seat under the gallery roof, where everyone thought he had been sleeping, shook out his academic robes, and came to whisper something in his ear. The artist listened, his eyes cast down. For the first time that afternoon, his linesman appeared almost animated: he gestured as he talked. Finally, both of them kneeled on the ground and the mathematician drew lines, crossing some over others; he clapped once. The artist shrugged and the professor returned to his place in the stands to count beams.
The Lombard stopped behind the line, scraped the ground a little, and raised his face, in which a new demonic spirit shone. He half closed his eyes before crying Eccola! once again, this time from the depths where all the rage and violence of which he was capable was accumulated.
Admiralships and Captaincies
Neither the conquistador’s widow nor his daughter Juana ever returned to Mexico, but they never developed much of an interest in the peninsular surroundings where they spent the rest of their lives either. Like all of Cortés’s descendants, they found it inexplicable that infinite New Spain was dependent on this dim-witted country where men wore tights and screamed at each other even when they were in good humor. More languages were spoken in my father’s garden than in all Old Spain, Juana would say by way of ungracious explanation of the little interest she took in Europe, where she had in fact been splendidly received. She didn’t become a wallflower like her mother, who accepted every invitation and then was silent at the soirées, but nor was she notable for her devotion to the class to which she belonged by fortune and by marriage.
The decorous madness of the conquistador’s widow made sense, in a way: she was already a grown woman when she left a kingdom of exceptional riches, where her orders were obeyed even before they occurred to her, but she had left it behind so that her daughter could be where one had to be if one was a woman. Her cool and at times even graceful distaste for her peninsular confinement was understandable.
Juana Cortés, on the other hand, lived in a fever of longing for America, because—having left Cuernavaca at fourteen—she never understood the body of war crimes that had made it possible for her to live her childhood like a native princess. The Andalusian orchards weren’t bad, but one couldn’t lose oneself in them, shed one’s clothes deep in the wild, or play at spitting seeds and singing in Bantu with the slave daughters. The Guadalquivir wasn’t the kind of river where heiresses to large fortunes swam stark naked after getting high on chocolate in the kitchen.
Once Juana Cortés had married the heir of the house of Alcalá, the conquistador’s widow bequeathed his gloomy castle in Castilleja de la Cuesta to the religious order of the Descalzas and moved with her daughter to the duke’s palace, which had an unbeatable name: Palacio de los Adelantados, or Palace of the Advance Men. The annual remittances that Martín Cortés was still sending her from New Spain were enough that she didn’t have to worry about trifles like a private fortress on the outskirts of Seville.
In time, the Descalzas sold the conquistador’s house to an Irish order of nuns, which still owns it and has seemingly incorporated into its cloistered existence the considerable penance of enduring the nightly siege of the four thousand lost souls vanquished by sword, lance, and arquebus that Don Hernán’s dreams left plastered in the walls.
Juana Cortés was a Frida Kahlo avant la lettre: she wore huipiles and multicolored skirts until the last day of her life, though she had left New Spain at fourteen and not a drop of Indian blood flowed in her veins. When she was required to attend functions of the Spanish nobility, she carried a coquettish little silver box of serrano peppers wrapped in a handkerchief, taking a bite of chili with each mouthful as if it were bread. She stressed the s sound of her c’s and z’s to signal her Atlantic origins. After all, she too was a product of the balls dubbed His Holiness and the King.
She clung to her father’s weapons and coat of arms with the fierceness of a she-wolf, though the duke of Alcalá allowed her to hang them only in the garden room of the Palacio de los Adelantados, where the marks of Cortés’s glory, won at the cost of hair and teeth, wouldn’t overshadow the little prop weapons that encircled the Enríquez de Ribera coat of arms. She spent most of her life in that room, with her mother, both of them at work on their embroidery and striving to persuade the conquistador’s granddaughters that their grandfather’s virulent blood was the best part of them.
And it was easy for her to be arrogant: each time one of Juana’s brothers—all of them named Martín Cortés, no matter what belly they came from—was hanged in New Spain for crimes of lèse-majesté, the chests of the house of Alcalá were filled to overflowing again.
Not infrequently, Juana lectured her daughters on her curious interpretation of their family names. According to her, the dukes of Alcalá were actually a clan of clerks. It was a bloodline that had maintained its ascendancy at court essentially by marrying off a daughter to a lord of Tarifa, with the subsequent acquisition of the admiralty of Castile. She arched her eyebrows as if to say that it was plainly a decorative title, considering the oceans—she pronounced it “oseanos”—of Castile. What was this compared with the territories that Cortés had won in a flurry of xingadazos for Charles V?
And frankly, for all of Cortés’s many flaws, he is to this day the patron saint of malcontents, of grudge-bearers, of those who had everything and squandered it all. He is also the guardian angel of underachievers and late bloomers. He was no one until he was almost thirty-eight. At thirty-nine it occurred to him, from his perch on the Gulf coast of the Aztec empire in Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz, that his reconnaissance expedition should be a mission of conquest and settlement, and thus ruled by the king and the pope—his balls—and not by the idiot governor of Cuba, whose daughter incidentally was by then his first wife: he fathered a Martín Cortés on her too.
Three years after having defied the government of Cuba, he wasn’t just Europe’s greatest celebrity but the prince of all those who fuck things up without realizing it. He’s the lord of the fight pickers, the litigious, those who can never acknowledge their own success; the captain of all those who win an impossible battle only to believe that it’s the first of many and then sink in their own shit with sword raised. The conquistador wasn’t the great man that the duchess sold to her daughters, but he was an inarguably more entertaining model than the land-bound admirals on the other side of the family.
Juana Cortés’s harangues always ended the same way: she pointed to her father’s arms and said in Nahuatl: There is the sword that cut off the seven heads of the seven princes on the Cortés coat of arms; let it never be forgotten, girls. Then she would return to her embroidery hoop, her thread, and her canvas, her mother seconding her with a series of rather alarming nods from her rocking chair.
This was more or less the atmosphere in which Catalina Enríquez de Ribera y Cortés, eldest daughter of Juana Cortés and the duke of Alcalá, and granddaughter of the conquistador, grew up. At sixteen she was married to Pedro Téllez Girón, Marquis of Peñafiel, future duke of Osuna, future defender of Ostend, future viceroy of Naples and the Two Sicilies, future pirate of the Adriatic, and future patron, comrade in revelry, and brothel mate of Francisco de Quevedo.
Paradise
Unlike the king and the rest of his court, Philippe de Chabot was a devotee not of art, culture, or tennis, but of the glory of France.
Ever since poor Rombaud had made an appearance in his rooms with a fourth ball made from the hair of the Boleyn woman, he had been thinking about the benefits that such an object might yield if placed in the right hands at the right time.
A ball made from the hair of the decapitated queen was the perfect gift for softening the already pliant Giovanni Angelo Medici, then governor of the Papal States, and a key piece in the negotiations with His Holiness regarding the urgency of forcing the succession of the marquisate of Fosdinovo in Lunigiana, where one Pietro Torrigiani Malaspina, patron of mediocre artists and magnificent thugs, was blocking the loading of marble onto French ships in the port of Carrara.
The ball couldn’t be sent to Rome as it was, so he had a little chest made from sheets of mother-of-pearl riveted with gold, which in addition to matching the regal sumptuousness of its contents had the advantage of being a lengthy job for the goldsmith. This allowed the minister—who was a devotee of the glory of France but also (though always secondarily) of the delectable sexual practices of low-ranking and high-breasted courtesans—to embark on a bedroom game or two with the ball, beneath whose leather stays beat Anne Boleyn’s incendiary braids.
Flight to Flanders
Catalina Enríquez de Ribera y Cortés and Pedro Téllez Girón had not just a marriage but a powerful business partnership in which each provided the other with what was needed to act on a grudge. He brought new visibility to the gray house of Alcalá with his political savvy and his proximity to the king; she contributed money and the memory of the wiles of her grandfather, who had gone away and won what he believed he deserved.
Sudden Death Page 6