Caravaggio

by Andrew Graham-Dixon

  87. Still from Mean Streets, directed by Martin Scorsese (1942– ), 1973, Taplin-Perry-Scorsese/The Kobal Collection.

  Text illustration, p. 325: Sketch of Caravaggio’s sword and dagger made by the police officer who arrested him on the evening of 28 May 1605. As reproduced and cited in Maurizio Marini, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio ‘pictor praestantissimus’ (second edition, Rome, 1979), p. 54.

  Text illustration, p. 328: A Knight of Malta being Defrocked by Wolfgang Kilian (1581–1662), from C. von Osterhausen, Eigentlicher und gründlicher (Bericht, Augsburg, 1650), no. II. Photo: Zentralinstitut für Kuntsgeschichte. Engraving, 5 x 3 in. (12.7 x 7.5 cm).

  Map 1

  Milan, c. 1590

  Map 2

  Rome, c. 1600

  Map 3

  Valletta, c. 1607

  Map 4

  Naples, c. 1610

  Map 5

  Italy, c. 1610

  Preface and Acknowledgements

  This book has taken me a shamingly long time to write, more than ten years in total. My excuse is that I have had a lot of other things to do at the same time. For the first five of those ten years I was responsible for two weekly articles for the Sunday Telegraph (latterly reduced to one, to make life workable); in 2007 I had to stop work on Caravaggio almost completely to finish a book about Michelangelo’s paintings in the Sistine Chapel; and throughout the past decade I have spent at least five months of every year writing and presenting various television series about the history of art for the BBC.

  While often frustrating, the many delays and interruptions have, overall, worked to the book’s advantage. Had I delivered my manuscript more quickly, I might have caused my miraculously patient and long-suffering publisher, Stuart Proffitt, considerably less stress. But I would not have been able to take advantage of numerous recent archival discoveries – a set of remarkable finds that cumulatively have transformed our knowledge of Caravaggio, particularly of his later years. Because those discoveries have emerged piecemeal, often in out-of-the-way academic journals or private publications, I have found myself in the unusual and fortunate position of writing about one of the greatest artists ever to have lived fully four centuries after his death, yet able to draw on fresh and important documentary material unavailable to previous biographers.

  As a result, I believe I have been able to shed light on aspects of Caravaggio’s life that have until now remained shrouded in mystery to all except the scholars most closely involved – including the painter’s sexuality, the circumstances that led him to commit the murder of 1606 that cast such a long shadow over the rest of his life, and the events surrounding his imprisonment on the island of Malta. In addition I publish here for the first time some hitherto overlooked descriptions of the Osteria del Cerriglio, the establishment in Naples where he was badly assaulted near the end of his life in a vendetta attack. By returning to other previously discovered documents I believe I have also been able to offer a convincing solution to the riddle of how Caravaggio met his death in the summer of 1610.

  My principal focus throughout is on the artist’s paintings. I dwell on them at length because they are the main reason to be interested in Caravaggio, notwithstanding the tempestuous drama of his life. Attentive readers will notice that I am less generous in my attributions than many other scholars of Caravaggio’s work: I prefer to be too rigorous than over-inclusive. It may be assumed that if I do not mention a particular picture, for example the frequently proposed Narcissus from the Barberini Collection, it is because I am not satisfied that Caravaggio painted it. The main exception to this is The Annunciation in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nancy, which is indeed a Caravaggio, but one so badly damaged as not to be worth discussing here.

  I have incurred many debts in writing this book, above all to the community of scholars whose researches have yielded so much new information over the past half-century or so, especially in recent years. I am deeply grateful to Sandro Corradini for helping to guide me through the labyrinth of Rome’s criminal archive and for sharing the fruits of his twenty years and more of research there. Maurizio Marini took me on a memorable tour of Caravaggio’s old haunts in the artist’s quarter of the city and made interesting suggestions, which I have developed, about the significance of damage done to the ceiling of a particular room in a house in the present-day Vicolo del Divino Amore. Maurizio Calvesi generously communicated his insights into the painter’s ‘pauperist’ religious orientation, and the role that members of the Colonna family may have played in the various events of his life. In Naples, Vincenzo Pacelli showed me his archival discoveries concerning Caravaggio’s last painting, The Martyrdom of St Ursula, and shared some speculations about the painter’s final days.

  My thanks are also due to Peter Robb, who met me in Naples and sent me on what proved to be anything but a wild-goose chase on the island of Malta. On Malta itself I profited from conversations with Fr John Azzopardi and Keith Sciberras, who have between them shed much light on Caravaggio’s ill-fated attempt to join the Order of the Knights of St John. John T. Spike, who received me at his home in Florence, allowed me to see an advance copy of the CD-ROM catalogue and bibliography that accompanied his monograph on Caravaggio: an invaluable guide to the vast literature on the artist. My old friend Mary Hersov, former Head of Exhibitions at the National Gallery in London, has talked and walked Caravaggio with me far beyond the call of duty.

  Helen Langdon, whose own biography of Caravaggio appeared in 1998, has also been extremely supportive throughout the writing of this book. In particular, she generously allowed me to profit from the time-consuming work that she put into combing through Riccardo Bassani and Fiora Bellini’s sporadically fascinating but deeply flawed book of 1994, Caravaggio assassino – the curate’s egg of recent Caravaggio studies – sifting the true not only from the false but also from the outright invented. Helen also set me straight at a particular crossroads in my research into the painter’s second and final stay in Naples, for which I am very grateful.

  I have not spoken to Sir Denis Mahon in the course of writing my book, but, like everyone engaged in serious study of Caravaggio, I have benefited enormously from his pioneering work. The shades of Walter Friedlaender and Roberto Longhi have given me much assistance along the way, as has that of my old tutor at the Courtauld Institute, Michael Kitson, whose wisdom I sought to absorb along with the smoke of many amiably shared packets of cigarettes. I have drawn rather more lateral inspiration from the work of John Michael Montias, whose Vermeer and His Milieu of 1989 is a truly remarkable work. The shape of my own book has been certainly influenced by his, as well as by a meeting with Montias at his home in New Haven in the autumn of 2001. Without laying any claim to Montias’s eminence as an archival scholar, I have myself tried to spin a ‘web of social history’, to use his phrase – to convey, through an account of one man’s life and milieu, some sense of an entire lost world, in this case the civilization of Italy at the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth. Charles Nicholl’s books about Marlowe and Shakespeare, The Reckoning and The Lodger, have been among my other touchstones.

  Writing about Caravaggio has been an intellectual challenge, but it has also been an adventure, one which has led me into some fairly unusual situations. With John Azzopardi’s generous help and the loan of a slightly rickety ladder, I have inspected the stone well, or guva, in which Caravaggio was imprisoned on Malta (I can now laugh at the practical joke of his pretending to lock me in and leave me there, although it seemed less funny at the time). I have duelled (after a fashion) with master-swordsman Renzo Musumeci Greco in his Roman fencing school, in an attempt to understand the sort of manoeuvres that might result in the emasculation of a man during a swordfight. I have walked along the quays of the old port at Valletta with the Maltese naval historian Joseph Sciberras, to learn about transport by felucca in Caravaggio’s time. I have been allowed to inspect the book of the dead in the parish of Porto Ercole by local historian Giusepp
e La Fauci. I have spent some happy hours poring over Caravaggio reproductions with the film director Martin Scorsese, who generously gave his time to open my eyes to the artist’s importance for modern cinema. To these and all the others who have gone out of their way to help me – the boy who lowered that ladder down the guva on Malta, the sacristan who got the keys to the church of Santa Lucia in Syracuse, the librarians and archivists in London, Rome, Naples, Milan and Malta who found so many books and documents – a heartfelt thank you.

  Closer to home, I would like to thank my producer Silvia Sacco for devising a schedule for my television and other work that made the seemingly impossible possible. Without her constant encouragement, moral support and ruthless deadline-setting, I really might never have written the book at all. Without the help of my researchers, I would certainly never have been able to finish it. Opher Mansour did a first-rate job of translating Corradini’s essential anthology of archival documents, Materiali per un processo, from a mixture of legalistic Latin and often difficult sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italian vernacular slang. Opher also allowed me to read his enlightening doctoral thesis about censorship in Caravaggio’s Rome and unearthed several eyewitness accounts of the plague that ravaged Milan in the mid 1570s. In the very final stages of the book, Nicholas Stone Villani took time away from his own thesis to travel to Italy on my behalf, where he found out the seedy truth about the Osteria del Cerriglio. My principal researcher throughout has been Eugénie Aperghis-van Nispen tot Sevenaer, who has been unfailingly helpful, resourceful and thorough in carrying out what must sometimes have seemed a daunting series of tasks. She also did the picture research for the book and secured the reproduction permissions. While running her marathon, Eugénie was ably assisted by Kasja Berg, who on more than one occasion responded to my plaintive demands for particular texts or documents with exemplary calm and efficiency. My mother and father, far more knowledgeable about music than I ever will be, kindly brought their considerable erudition to bear on Caravaggio’s early paintings of musicians and lute-players, greatly to my advantage.

  I will always remain affectionately grateful to Roger Parsons, with whom I first began to explore the complexities of Caravaggio’s world such an absurdly long time ago. Stuart Proffitt has made extremely valuable suggestions concerning style, structure and approach. Donna Poppy, my copy editor, has improved my original manuscript immeasurably with her rigorous and unsleeping eye for sense, proportion, perspective and detail. Finally I would like to thank my wife, Sabine, who must have read this book ten times while I was writing it once, for contributing so many emendations, corrections and indeed fresh ideas – and also my whole family, for helping me to keep my sanity and managing to keep their own while enduring the difficult birth of this long-gestated child.

  London, February 2010

  PART ONE

  Milan, 1571–92

  DARKNESS AND LIGHT

  Caravaggio’s art is made from darkness and light. His pictures present spotlit moments of extreme and often agonized human experience. A man is decapitated in his bedchamber, blood spurting from a deep gash in his neck. A man is assassinated on the high altar of a church. A woman is shot in the stomach with a bow and arrow at point-blank range. Caravaggio’s images freeze time but also seem to hover on the brink of their own disappearance. Faces are brightly illuminated. Details emerge from darkness with such uncanny clarity that they might be hallucinations. Yet always the shadows encroach, the pools of blackness that threaten to obliterate all. Looking at his pictures is like looking at the world by flashes of lightning.

  Caravaggio’s life is like his art, a series of lightning flashes in the darkest of nights. He is a man who can never be known in full because almost all that he did, said and thought is lost in the irrecoverable past. He was one of the most electrifyingly original artists ever to have lived, yet we have only one solitary sentence from him on the subject of painting – the sincerity of which is, in any case, questionable, since it was elicited from him when he was under interrogation for the capital crime of libel.

  Much of what is known about him has been discovered in the criminal archives of his time. The majority of his recorded acts – apart from those involved in painting – are crimes and misdemeanours. When Caravaggio emerges from the obscurity of the past he does so, like the characters in his own paintings, as a man in extremis.

  He lived much of his life as a fugitive, and that is how he is preserved in history – a man on the run, heading for the hills, keeping to the shadows. But he is caught, now and again, by the sweeping beam of a searchlight. Each glimpse is different. He appears in many guises, moods and predicaments. Caravaggio throws stones at the house of his landlady and sings ribald songs outside her window. He has a fight with a waiter about the dressing on a plate of artichokes. He taunts a rival with graphic sexual insults. He attacks a man in the street. He kills a man in a swordfight. He and a gang of other men inflict grievous bodily harm on a Knight of Justice on the island of Malta. He is himself attacked by four armed men in the street outside a low-life tavern in Naples. His life is a series of intriguing and vivid tableaux – scenes that abruptly switch, as in the plays of his English contemporary William Shakespeare, from comedy to tragedy, from low farce to high drama.

  Anyone attempting a biography of Caravaggio must play the detective as well as the art historian. The facts are rarely straightforward and the patterns of intention that lie behind them often obscure. The artist’s life can easily seem merely chaotic, the rise and fall of an incurable hot-head, a man so governed by passion that his actions unfold without rhyme or reason (this was, for centuries, the prevailing view of him). But there is a logic to it all and, with hindsight, a tragic inevitability. Despite the many black holes and discontinuities in the shadowplay of Caravaggio’s life, certain structures of belief and certain habits of behaviour run through all that he did and all that he painted. The evidence has to be decoded using guesswork, intuition, speculation and above all a sense of historical imagination – a willingness to delve as deeply as possible into the codes and values that lie behind the words and deeds of a far distant past.

  A lot has been made of Caravaggio’s presumed homosexuality, which has in more than one previous account of his life been presented as the single key that explains everything, both the power of his art and the misfortunes of his life. There is no absolute proof of it, only strong circumstantial evidence and much rumour. The balance of probability suggests that Caravaggio did indeed have sexual relations with men. But he certainly had female lovers. Throughout the years that he spent in Rome he kept close company with a number of prostitutes.

  The truth is that Caravaggio was as uneasy in his relationships as he was in most other aspects of life. He likely slept with men. He did sleep with women. But he settled with no one. From a very young age, and with good cause, he suffered from a deep sense of abandonment. If any one thing lay behind the erratic behaviour that doomed him to an early death, it was the tragedy that befell him and his family when he was still just a little boy. The idea that he was an early martyr to the drives of an unconventional sexuality is an anachronistic fiction.

  To understand the emotions that drove him and the experiences that most deeply shaped him, it is necessary to begin where he was born: in the town of Caravaggio, in Lombardy, from which he would later take his name. He lived both there and in the nearby city of Milan for the first twenty-one years of his life. His youth is the least documented period of his existence – the darkest time, in every sense, of this life of light and darkness. But in its shadows may be found some of the most important clues to the formation of his turbulent personality.

  FACTS AND FICTIONS

  There are three early biographies of Caravaggio. All were composed after his death, and each is unreliable for different reasons. The first was written during the second decade of the seventeenth century by Giulio Mancini, a physician from Siena who met Caravaggio in Rome, probably in about 1592, and who knew him we
ll between 1595 and 1600. The second was published in 1642 by Giovanni Baglione, a rival painter who had competed and quarrelled with Caravaggio during his years in Rome, in particular between 1601 and 1606, on one occasion suing him for libel in response to some scabrous verses, on another going so far as to accuse him of hiring paid assassins to kill him. The third was written, three decades later, by an antiquarian and art theorist named Giovanni Pietro Bellori, who had never known Caravaggio and who based his own account on those of the two earlier authors.

  Mancini is sporadically informative but frustratingly brief. Baglione is more circumstantial and surprisingly objective, given that he was writing the life of a man whom he suspected of having plotted to murder him. As a rule of thumb, Baglione is the most trustworthy early source. His biography has been shown to be extremely accurate in its presentation of the bare facts. Many later discoveries of original documents concerning Caravaggio have simply confirmed the truth of his original account. Baglione is only really unreliable in his smug, moralizing conclusions, which are plainly coloured by Schadenfreude. This is particularly evident in the mean-spirited passages that tell the story of Caravaggio’s various falls from grace.

  Bellori wrote his life of Caravaggio considerably later. It was published in 1672, more than sixty years after the painter’s death. Bellori plainly drew much of his material from Baglione. But he did glean some new facts. He also went to much trouble to see the painter’s works in situ. He was seduced by their power and their drama, and fascinated by the novelty of Caravaggio’s technique. Bellori wrote about the painter’s art with far greater sensitivity than either Mancini or Baglione. Yet he was also fundamentally appalled by it. Caravaggio’s vivid capturing of poverty and violence – his depictions of Christ and the Virgin Mary as barefoot paupers, his bloodily realistic portrayals of Christian martyrdom – went directly against Bellori’s own most cherished beliefs. Bellori upheld the academic principle that art should not represent the world as it is, but as it should be, sweetened and idealized. So although he responded instinctively to Caravaggio’s captivating realism, he felt bound to condemn him all the more strongly for it. Bellori crystallized what would remain for centuries the standard academic objection to the painter’s work: