Repudiating all other rules, [Caravaggio] considered the highest achievement not to be bound to art. For this innovation he was greatly acclaimed, and many talented artists seemed compelled to follow him … Such praise caused Caravaggio to appreciate himself alone, and he claimed to be the only faithful imitator of nature. Nevertheless, he lacked invenzione, decorum, disegno [draughtsmanship], or any knowledge of the science of painting. The moment the model was taken from him, his hand and his mind became empty.
Bellori went on to say that ‘Just as certain herbs produce both beneficial medicine and most pernicious poison, in the same way, though he produced some good, Caravaggio has been most harmful and wrought havoc with every ornament and good tradition of painting.’1 In other words, the painter might have had a gift for mimicking reality, but there was no depth to him. If Bellori were to be believed, he was little more than a machine for producing optically convincing images – a kind of human camera, with his workshop a prototypical photographer’s studio, long before the invention of photography itself. In this way was the myth of Caravaggio as an untutored, thoughtless virtuoso, the master of a debased and pernicious brand of naturalism, attached like an anchor to his posthumous reputation.2 In fact, he was an extremely thoughtful, inventive painter, a close and careful reader of the texts that he was called to dramatize and to embody in the form of images. But how and where he got his education remains unknown, partly because his three biographers have so little to say about his early life.
MODEST ORIGINS, NOBLE CONNECTIONS
Caravaggio was born three years after the publication of the second, revised edition of Giorgio Vasari’s pioneering anthology of artists’ biographies, The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects. Vasari’s book was the model on which later writers such as Baglione and Bellori based their own collections of artists’ lives. In it, he confirmed and sought to extend a great rise in the status of artists within the Italian peninsula during the period now known – also largely thanks to Vasari’s efforts – as the Renaissance. Previously the profession of art had been ranked low because it involved work with the hands and was therefore classed as a form of manual labour, a craft rather than a liberal art. But implicit throughout Vasari’s thousand and more pages is the belief that the greatest artists deserve to be ranked with poets and philosophers as men of true genius, rightful companions of kings and princes.
As well as raising the reputation of his own profession, Vasari established certain formulae for writing the life of an artist. Particularly famous painters and sculptors, such as Giotto or Michelangelo, are established as miraculous prodigies from an early age: the brilliance of Giotto, for example, is said to have been discovered by the older artist Cimabue, who came upon the young man when he was still a callow shepherd and found him drawing perfectly upon a stone. But no such uplifting fables are attached to the youth of Caravaggio by his biographers. Mancini compresses his early life to just two sentences, and Baglione to a paragraph. Bellori has a tale to tell about the young Caravaggio, but it runs counter to the kind of prodigy stories favoured by Vasari because it is designed to stress the artist’s principal failing, as Bellori saw it – his supposed lack of intellect, which meant that his work could never rise from mere craft.
Bellori’s story tells of Caravaggio’s origins as the son of an artisan. Since the painter ‘was employed in Milan with his father, a mason, it happened that he prepared glue for some painters who were painting frescoes and, led on by the desire to paint, he remained with them, applying himself totally to painting. He continued in this activity four or five years …’ Bellori may have meant to imply that this imitative, unreflective training predisposed Caravaggio to his great mistake – that of recognizing ‘no other master than the model, without selecting from the best forms of nature’.3 His moral is certainly blunt: once a craftsman, always a craftsman.
The story is not exactly true but like many stories about Caravaggio it contains elements of the truth. He could never have been employed in tasks such as preparing glue or plaster for his father, because his father died when Caravaggio was only five years old. But the record shows that Fermo Merisi was indeed a mason. This might suggest that the artist’s origins were, as Bellori implies, rooted in the humble world of the artisan. But the sources hint at a more complicated truth. There is room for ambiguity because Fermo Merisi’s job of mason could encompass different ways of working with stone, and possibly even the vocation of architect.
Baglione’s brief account broadly agrees with that of Bellori – he simply says that the artist, ‘born in Caravaggio in Lombardy, was the son of a mason, quite well off’.4 But Mancini makes the artist’s background sound considerably grander. According to him, ‘He was born in Caravaggio of honourable citizens since his father was majordomo and architect to the Marchese di Caravaggio.’5 Mancini may have got the gist of his account from the artist himself, in particular the idea that Caravaggio was of better than merely common birth. A number of incidents in the painter’s later life indicate that he believed that he came from good stock, and deserved respect on account of that. It is important to establish the truth, because Caravaggio’s elevated sense of his own status would lie at the root of many of his future troubles.
Most of the known facts about Caravaggio’s youth were published by the scholar Mina Cinotti in 1983.6 One of the more revealing documents to emerge from her research records the wedding of the artists’ parents. On 14 January 1571 Fermo Merisi married a woman called Lucia Aratori. Fermo was born in about 1540 and was a widower, with a daughter named Margherita by his first marriage. Lucia was some ten years younger than him and had not been married before. Fermo was recorded as resident in Milan, but the marriage took place in the town of Caravaggio, where both his bride and the rest of his family lived. It would have been an unexceptional wedding had it not been for the presence, among the witnesses, of the Marchese Francesco I Sforza di Caravaggio. The marchese was a member of one of the leading noble families of Italy, the Sforza, who were former lords of Milan. His wife, the young Marchesa di Caravaggio, was from the enormously powerful Colonna family. These were the most important people in the neighbourhood.
The presence of nobility at the nuptials of the Merisi family turns out to have had precious little to do with Caravaggio’s father. Fermo Merisi was just an ordinary stonemason, perhaps reasonably well off but with no great social pretensions. He was certainly not an architect. In a number of documents relating to him he is referred to as a mastro, designating him as a qualified artisan with the right to set up his own workshop and hire apprentices. He ran this modest business in Milan. His probate inventory lists ‘some old iron mason’s tools’, but does not include any books or instruments that would indicate a knowledge of the theoretical aspects of architecture. His retention of an independent workshop makes it unlikely that he was in the direct employ of the Marchese di Caravaggio. Caravaggio’s paternal grandfather, Bernardino Merisi, was himself no higher up the social scale. He too had run a small business. He was a wine merchant and vintner based at the family home in Porta Seriola, in the north-east quarter of Caravaggio.
There were in fact close links between Caravaggio’s family and the noble Colonna dynasty, but all on the side of the painter’s mother.7 Her father, Giovan Giacomo Aratori, was an agrimensor, or ‘surveyor’, whose job it was to help resolve disputes over land ownership. He was also involved in buying and selling land. His work brought him directly into contact with the Colonna, who owned much property in the region. Whereas Caravaggio’s father and paternal grandfather worked with their hands, Giovan Giacomo was a professional rather than an artisan. His work required more literacy than that of a mason, as well as a knowledge of geometry and arithmetic. In 1570, a year before the birth of his grandson, the future painter, he was made a member of the college of land surveyors of the Duchy of Milan.
Giovan Giacomo Aratori also played his part in the religious life of Caravaggio. The most celebrated event in the
history of this sleepy little agricultural town had occurred in 1432, when a peasant girl working in the fields was reputed to have had a vision of the Virgin Mary. According to legend a freshwater spring had miraculously gushed from the spot where she experienced her vision, and a shrine had been subsequently erected to the honour of the wonder-working ‘Madonna della Fontana’. By the second half of the sixteenth century, the shrine of Santa Maria della Fontana had become the most significant religious institution in Caravaggio. It was administered by a body of scolari, to which Giovan Giacomo was elected at various times from the mid 1560s onwards.
In addition, he held important positions in the local comune, as councillor, treasurer and emissary to the Spanish authorities (the Duchy of Milan, including the town of Caravaggio, was at that time part of the vast Habsburg empire, controlled by Philip II of Spain from the Escorial, his palace and monastery outside Madrid). Giovan Giacomo’s many responsibilities meant that he was a familiar figure among the local nobility. He acted directly as an agent for the Marchese Francesco Sforza I di Caravaggio, served as a legal witness for the Sforza family and collected rents on their behalf. Some documents connect him directly to the marchese, others to the marchese’s wife, Costanza Colonna.
There were yet more intimate links between the Colonna family and the Aratori clan. Giovan Giacomo’s daughter Margherita, Caravaggio’s maternal aunt, was wet-nurse to the Sforza children. She lived in the Colonna household for many years and breastfed Costanza Colonna’s sons, including the future adventurer and sometime militant Knight of the Order of St John, Fabrizio Sforza Colonna. In 1584, as a reward for her service, Costanza gave Margherita a small estate in Fara d’Adda, near the town of Caravaggio. As late as 1601 Margherita was still in regular touch with the marchesa, writing letters to her in Rome – at a time when Caravaggio, elsewhere in the city, was receiving some of his most important commissions.
Costanza Colonna would be called on many times by Caravaggio. Always she would respond. She would be a constant support to him in times of crisis, giving him shelter when he was on the run and shielding him when he was under sentence of death. Yet, unlike any of his other noble allies or protectors, she would never try to acquire a painting by his hand. All the evidence suggests that she genuinely cared for him, perhaps even loved him as a child of her own. Her influence and that of her family, with its tentacular network of feudal and familial alliances, reaching right across the Italian peninsula, can be sensed throughout Caravaggio’s life – but especially during his later and more troubled years.
Social class, in particular questions of ‘nobility’ and ‘virtue’, would be at issue in many of Caravaggio’s future disputes and quarrels. These were matters of intense debate in medieval and Renaissance Italy. In northern Europe the aristocracy took its own pre-eminence for granted and assumed that nobility was a quality that could only truly inhere in those fortunate enough to be born into the upper, landed classes. There, a nobleman was easily identified: a man of virtue and pure blood, who had the right to bear arms in the service of his monarch, who was a skilled swordsman and horseman and would never dirty his hands with trade. In Italy the situation was more ambiguous, because Italian society was more fluid and its ruling elites more diverse, made up of imperial knights, communal knights, magnates and other types of feudal lord. It was also an increasingly urbanized society, and that too led to the blurring of social distinctions. From the second half of the fourteenth century onwards, urban patriciates sought to tighten their hold on government. The men who made up those bodies, which included merchants, moneylenders, textile manufacturers and other drivers of early capitalism, were themselves intensely class conscious. They founded their own dynasties, staked their own claims to nobilità – so much so that the very term itself became, in Italy, shifting and unstable. As early as the fourteenth century, writers ranging from the poet Dante to medieval jurists had struggled to define the concept. Legal definitions based purely on titles conferred by the monarchy or the church were countered by those who preferred to regard nobility as a moral quality to which, in theory, almost anyone could aspire.8
What position did Caravaggio’s maternal grandfather occupy within this world of subtly shaded social distinctions? Giovan Giacomo Aratori is referred to in the documents of the time as signor, messer or dominus. While his social status was certainly higher than that of anyone on the Merisi side of Caravaggio’s family, neither he nor his descendants possessed any actual titles. He was a member of what might be called the upper, professional bourgeoisie, while the likes of Bernardino and Fermo Merisi belonged to the petty, trade bourgeoisie. Mancini’s statement that Caravaggio was born into a family of ‘very honourable citizens’ – cittadini is the word he uses in Italian – was entirely accurate.
But in the small world of Caravaggio, where the artist spent much of his youth, his status may to him have seemed grander than that. As we have seen, his maternal grandfather was a highly respected man, but other factors may have conspired to make him feel that both he and his family were blessed by aristocratic favour. Maybe Costanza Colonna showed particular favours or kindnesses to Caravaggio’s mother, Lucia, sister to her own children’s wet-nurse. Lucia’s early years of motherhood were hard indeed, marked by bereavement and loss. Costanza Colonna too had suffered a difficult time during the early years of her marriage to Francesco I Sforza. She had been married off, as the custom then was among the nobility, at the age of thirteen. The duties of a wife had at first been abhorrent to her, so much so that she had at one point threatened suicide. Did Costanza Colonna feel a particular sympathy for Lucia and her young children during the harsh years of their early upbringing? It is impossible to know for sure, but she certainly took a particular interest in Caravaggio’s wellbeing later in his life. Perhaps the date of his birth had something to do with it too, because as far as anyone in Christendom was concerned – but especially a Colonna – he was born at an auspicious time.
THE ANGEL WITH SWORD AND SHIELD
Caravaggio grew up as Michelangelo Merisi. It was an evocative name for a future artist – the same Christian name as that of the most famous Italian sculptor and painter of all, Michelangelo Buonarrotti, who had died just seven years earlier. But Caravaggio’s parents did not have that in mind when they named their son. They called him Michelangelo for reasons of faith and superstition. He came into the world on 29 September 1571. His parents named him after the Archangel Michael, whose feast day it was.
This was a charged and momentous time in the history of Christendom. Throughout the 1550s and 1560s the Christian powers of the western Mediterranean were threatened by the forces of Islam – led first by the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman ‘The Magnificent’, and then by his successor, Selim II. The bitter and bloody conflict between Muslim and Christian reached a climax at exactly the moment of Caravaggio’s birth. In 1570–71 Christian Cyprus, a strategically vital island fortress long controlled by the Venetians, fell into Ottoman hands. The garrison stationed at Famagusta, the last Christian stronghold in Cyprus, fought bravely before being forced to surrender. The survivors of the siege were cruelly massacred. Churches and cathedrals were converted into mosques, their stained glass smashed, their paintings and sculptures destroyed, their belltowers turned into minarets. Pope Pius V was appalled not only by the atrocity and its immediate consequences, but also by the possibility that the Ottomans might gain control over the principal trade routes of the Mediterranean. He joined forces with the Venetians, and together the allies sought additional support wherever they could find it. Missions were sent to Spain, to Portugal and to all the independent states of Italy. The princely families of southern Europe rallied together and thousands of soldiers were pressed into service. The result was no mere political alliance, but a self-styled Holy League for the defence of Christendom against the infidel.
Under the command of Don Juan of Austria, illegitimate brother of Philip II of Spain, a vast fleet of galleys – most of them constructed, in record time, within
the great dockyard-cum-factory production-line that was Venice’s Arsenale – set out to humble the Turkish navy. Eight days after Caravaggio’s birth, on 7 October 1571, the two sides met in the Greek Gulf of Corinth, then known in the west as the Gulf of Lepanto. The result was the last great sea battle fought between galley-rowed ships. Both sides suffered heavy casualties. Eight thousand Christians died, and many more Turks. But, while the fleet of the Holy League survived the battle all but intact, the Ottoman fleet was destroyed and its commander-in-chief killed. One of the heroes of the battle was the commander of the papal forces, Marcantonio Colonna, father to Costanza Colonna, father-in-law to Francesco I Sforza, who had been witness at the wedding of Fermo Merisi and Lucia Aratori. After the victory, the pope declared that the Virgin Mary herself had interceded with God on behalf of the Holy League. Henceforward, the day of the victory was to be remembered as the Feast of Our Lady of Victory. Marian cults across Catholic Europe received a huge boost to their popularity. In Venice the day was declared a permanent festum solemnis, to be marked every year by a procession led by the doge, and by celebratory masses. All across Italy, churches were built in honour of Santa Maria della Vittoria. Devotion to the Rosary reached a new pitch of intensity.
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