The Battle of Lepanto was a triumph to salve the wounds of a Christian world that had been sundered by the Reformation some half a century before. The Protestant king of faraway Scotland, James VI, was so carried away by the news that he wrote an epic poem to celebrate the great Catholic victory (though he felt compelled to add a prefatory disclaimer that Don Juan of Austria, hero of his verses, should still be regarded as ‘a foreign papist bastard’). Meanwhile, Costanza Colonna’s father, Marcantonio, made his triumphal entry into Rome. He rode into the city on a white horse, a modern-day Mark Antony stealing the glory of the caesars of old. But he also had the decorum to temper that show of pride with a spectacular display of humility. Having processed in triumph, he exchanged the armour of victory for rags and set forth on a pilgrimage to give thanks to Our Lady of Loreto.9
Michelangelo Merisi had been born on a day full of promise for zealous Christians, whose world was under threat. Archangel Michael had been the guardian angel of the Hebrew nation, and was associated with the protection of the faithful from harm. He had also been adopted, in Christian times, as the principal saint of the Church Militant. In depictions of the Last Judgement, he weighs the souls of the blessed and the damned, separating good from evil. In such paintings he is commonly shown wearing chain-mail and armed with a sword and shield, symbols of the archangel’s ancient association with knights and crusades, and holy wars against the infidel.
Michelangelo was a fitting Christian name for any child within the sphere of the Colonna family, defenders of the faith and warriors against heresy – but all the more so in the case of a child born not just on the saint’s name day, but on the eve of a great battle between Christian and Muslim in which the head of the Colonna family himself would take a leading role. When victory at the Battle of Lepanto followed within just over a week of his birth, the hopes and prayers attendant on his baptism were answered. Perhaps he was thought of as a child who had brought good luck. Perhaps that was another reason why, despite his difficult personality and frequent lapses into criminal behaviour, Costanza Colonna would always stand by him.
TOWN AND CITY
The artist’s early life was divided between the town of Caravaggio and the city of Milan. The contrast between the two could hardly have been greater. Set in the fertile plains of Lombardy, Caravaggio was a quiet place, architecturally undistinguished, which had once been a Roman outpost. The activities of the town revolved around agriculture, which was vital to the booming prosperity of the region. Since the later Middle Ages the entire area had been intensively developed. Irrigation channels, networks of stream and canal that still criss-cross the fields today, had been systematically introduced. Better understanding of crop rotation had transformed the area into a prime producer of cereals. Large plantations of mulberry trees were grown as feed for silkworms, silk being the essential raw material for Milan’s booming textile industry. The people of Caravaggio lived and worked by the rhythms of nature. They were known for their phlegmatic character, their solid business sense and their piety, the symbol of which was, from the 1580s onwards, the construction of the great shrine dedicated to Santa Maria della Fontana. Caravaggio was tranquil bordering on dull, a place where it felt as though nothing much had happened for a hundred years and more.
Milan, the great city, two hours’ ride away, had a population of 100,000, much the same as that of London or Paris at the time. Milan was noise and bustle, trade and industry, a populous and prosperous city – the place where Fermo Merisi, Caravaggio’s father, went to work each day with his mason’s tools of iron. It was a city known for the skill of its stone-workers and the ingenuity of its sword-makers. Milanese armour, Milanese swords and Milanese daggers were renowned as the finest in Italy. The men of the city were famous for their swordsmanship, a skill at which Caravaggio would come to excel.
The men of Milan were also known for their singular reluctance to marry. ‘In Italy marryage is indeede a yoke, and that not easy, but so grevious, as brethren no where better agreeing, yet contend among themselves to be free from marryage.’10 Distrust of matrimony was common enough in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy, especially among the upper classes, to have provoked many such comments from visitors. Italian humanists, including Petrarch and Leonbattista Alberti, had railed against marriage as a distraction to the intellect and a potential cause of economic ruin. Nowhere was the misogynistic cult of celibacy stronger than in Lombardy. It did not necessarily entail sexual abstinence, merely a refusal to be yoked to any single woman. The rate of celibacy among the Milanese aristocracy reached unprecedentedly high levels in the second half of the seventeenth century, so much so that it has been calculated that more than fifty per cent of all high-born males in the city never married at all.11 Caravaggio would never marry either, although it is impossible to establish whether this was another example of the painter imitating aristocratic mores, or simply the result of his restless temperament.
The traveller Thomas Coryat visited Milan in 1608, by which time Caravaggio was long gone from the city. But the Englishman’s vivid account, published in 1611 under the title Coryat’s Crudities, describes the metropolis much as it had been when Caravaggio was young. Coryat noted Milan’s conspicuous opulence, and the many luxury trades that thrived there: ‘No City of Italy is furnished with more manuary arts than this. Their embroderers are very singular workemen, who worke much in gold and silver. Their cutlers that make hilts are more exquisite in the art than any that I ever saw. Of these two trades there is a great multitude in the city: Also silkemen do abound here, which are esteemed so good that they are not inferiour to any of the Christian world.’12
He grouped the city’s armourers and sword-makers together with its embroiderers and silk-workers, perhaps implying that all were working in different branches of the Milanese fashion industry. The ability to fight was certainly just as important, to a young man out to impress, as the clothes that he wore. Swordsmanship was part of that intangible code of pseudo-chivalric skills and values encompassed by the Italian words virtù and nobilità – although in Caravaggio’s Italy it was never easy to tell whether a young man’s aspirations to virtuous nobility were rooted in fact or fantasy.
Coryat was also struck by the number of churches in Milan and impressed by the city’s close links with some of the most dynamic figures of early Christianity. He visited the church of St Ambrose, where the relics of Ambrose himself, Bishop of Milan in the fourth century, were preserved. He seems not to have visited Santa Maria delle Grazie, the Dominican friary for which Leonardo da Vinci, more than a hundred years before, had painted his famous Last Supper (another English traveller, Fynes Moryson, who visited Milan in 1618, noted that ‘in this Monastery … in the place where the Friers eate, the supper of our lord is painted with wonderfull art’). But Coryat did pay a trip to Milan’s cathedral, ‘an exceeding glorious and beautifull Church, as fair if not fairer then the Cathedrall Church of Amiens’, where he witnessed ‘one of the nayles wherewith Christ was crucified, as they affirme’. He then climbed the cathedral tower to get a view of the whole city and the plains beyond, the little town of Caravaggio somewhere in their midst. As he did so, looking out and beyond the city’s nine great gates, he encompassed the whole world of the artist’s childhood:
There I observed the huge suburbs, which are as bigge as many a faire towne, and compassed about with ditches of water: there also I beheld a great part of Italy, together with the lofty Apennines; and they shewed me which way Rome, Venice, Naples, Florence, Genoa, Ravenna &c. lay. The territory of Lombardy, which I contemplated round about from this tower, was so pleasant an object to mine eyes, being replenished with such unspeakable variety of all things, both for profite and pleasure, that it seemeth to me to be the very Elysian fieldes, so much decantated and celebrated by the verses of Poets, or the Tempe or Paradise of the world. For it is the fairest plaine, extended about two hundred miles in length that ever I saw, or ever shall if I should travell over the whole habitable world
: insomuch that I said to my selfe that this country was fitter to be an habitation for the immortall Gods than for mortall men.
Milan was built on a circular plan. At the centre of the circle stood the massive, intimidating Castello Sforzesco. This daunting structure had originally been built as a palace for the mighty Sforza dynasty. It is an epitome of the Renaissance architecture of tyranny, with its dark and towering walls covered with diamond rustication, like the studs on a knuckleduster. When Milan came under Habsburg control in the 1530s, the patronage of the Sforza came to an end. Caravaggio knew the building as the fortress from which the city’s Spanish governors nervously ruled, ever on the lookout for insurrectionists within and heretics without. Hostile, watchful suspicion was a frame of mind deeply ingrained in the Spanish rulers of Milan. They knew how important it was that they maintained their grip on the city. Whoever controlled Milan controlled the overland route from Italy to the rest of Europe. Milan would be on the front line in the event of any attempted invasion from the Protestant north, so it needed its heavy fortifications. In Caravaggio’s day, the principal danger was thought to lie in France and, to a lesser degree, Switzerland. For all the animosity between the Milanese and their occupiers – caused to a large extent by taxes and grain levies on the local people to feed the Spanish troops – the religious and political interests of Catholic Spain and Catholic Italy were as one in the face of such perceived threats from the Protestant north.
Milan had been a strategically important city since the days of the Roman empire, when Julius Caesar and Pompey had at different times made their residence there. Unlike the caesars of the past, Philip II of Spain did not go so far as to live in Milan. But he jealously guarded his power over the city. He had inherited both his crown and his empire from his father, Emperor Charles V. There is no more vivid document of the larger world of realpolitik, of the patterns of religious and political division that fractured Europe in Caravaggio’s time, than the long ‘Instruction’ that the ailing Charles V dictated, towards the end of his life, for the benefit of his son. He warned his heir to watch out for the dangers lying in wait throughout the vast range of his territories, from Spain to Naples, from the Netherlands all the way across to Germany and Austria. He gave particular emphasis to the importance of keeping a grip on Milan, a key military outpost at the crossroads of Europe:
Leave German affairs, as I now do, to my brother Ferdinand, but maintain contacts there, for your vigilance must be alert throughout all the possessions of our house. The most constant threat comes from France. Their kings have been and are bound to us by treaties, but remember that they are not true to their undertakings and only keep to their word when they are too poor to go to war … Keep a good guard on our northern borders with France, and maintain a fleet of galleys in the Mediterranean as a warning both to the Turks and to the French. We need to maintain good relations with Genoa because of its port, so take good care for this.
In the north-east I have strengthened Flanders against France by my annexation of Guelders, Utrecht and Frisia. Still, you must keep money on hand there in case there is need for a sudden mobilisation; the inhabitants are reasonably loyal to us, but do not relax your watchfulness … I have settled the affairs of Savoy somewhat to the detriment of our ally the Duke, but do not help him to recover the lands occupied by the French even if they are his by right. That could give the French an excuse to press south again against our Milan and if that happens our links with Genoa and Florence and our rule in Naples and Sicily could all be put at risk.
Still Charles V continued, spinning out a web of complex alliances and counter-alliances, seeking to pass on to his son his own, pragmatically paranoid brand of statecraft:
Further to Italy: do not trust the Pope, who neither honours his word nor has the general interests of Christianity at heart; keep an eye on any strengthening of the Duke of Ferrara’s family relationships with the French; Venice is unlikely to form any close attachment to France, Florence is much indebted to our support of the Duke and is safe, but be watchful of Lucca and Siena. Above all, keep Milan and Naples well garrisoned with troops regularly paid to keep them loyal to us. As for the rest, remember that the Swiss covet part of our Franche-Comte; keep on good terms with England but, given the Pope’s resentment against that country, very warily; with Scotland, you need have little to do.13
Charles V gave Philip II that advice in 1548. By the 1570s relations between Spain and the papacy had somewhat improved, but Europe remained the same fractious place described in the emperor’s world-weary anatomy of the continent’s political and religious divisions. And Milan, important enough to get two mentions in his long memorandum, remained vital to Spanish interests. Charles V always regarded the city as ‘the key to Italy’, and his son Philip II never deviated from that view. To lose Milan would not only expose the whole of Spanish rule in southern Italy to danger; it would also separate Spain from its territories in the Low Countries. The caution of Milan’s Spanish rulers was exacerbated by their knowledge that the city’s defence was in the hands of no more than around 5,000 soldiers. Any hint of trouble – the merest suggestion that the French were fomenting revolt in Genoa, the chance appearance of a group of gypsies from Venice – and a state of emergency was liable to be declared.
On the surface, the city where Caravaggio spent much of his youth was run as it had been during the era of Sforza rule. The Duchy of Milan might have become a vassal of Spain, but its bureaucratic apparatus remained unchanged and the same magistracies held the reins of power. The most significant difference was that the Consiglio Segreto, or ‘secret council’, that had once advised the Sforza dukes now reported to the Spanish governor. The Senate continued to exercise supreme judicial and administrative authority in the city, but was obliged to do so with a careful eye to Spanish interests.14 The members of the Senate were jurists drawn from the Milanese patriciate, men with a strong sense of Milanese legal traditions, whereas the governor of the city was one of the highest representatives of the Spanish sovereign, who was naturally disposed to act in accordance with Spain’s larger strategic aims. Milanese politics was a balancing act, a fragile equilibrium of occupier and occupied.
Institutional continuity under Spanish rule was mirrored by a continuity of approach to the balance of secular and religious powers. The Sforza had pursued a gradually consistent policy of strengthening civil authority and weakening that of the Church. One of their main aims had been to establish control over ecclesiastical nominations in the Duchy of Milan, so that those whom they considered politically undesirable, or outright hostile, could be excluded from powerful positions such as that of bishop. Under Spanish rule, this strategy was pursued to the point where many other traditional powers of the Church were usurped by the state. Frequently, it was the civil, rather than the religious, authority that tried those accused of heresy, that took responsibility for discipline in the duchy’s convents and monasteries, and that assumed the right to punish clerical abuses. This naturally reinforced Spanish power over all areas of life in Milan, but, though its aim was to limit ecclesiastical powers and privileges, it was never intended to weaken the Catholic faith itself.
In his instructions to his viceroys and governors, the fervently devout Philip II constantly stressed that the defence of Catholicism was his absolute priority. He had inherited a medieval Spanish conception of his role as monarch, according to which his first duty was servicio de Dios. He was brought up to believe that as king he had been singled out as the instrument of divine will. So, by a self-perpetuatingly circular logic, his policies were held to be those decreed by God and those best calculated to advance the holy mission of Catholicism. Spain’s cause was the cause of God; and this was true even if Spanish policies clashed directly with those of the supreme ecclesiastical authority, the pope. That was exactly what happened in Milan during the years immediately before and after the birth of Caravaggio. Other circumstances besides conspired to create a mood of incendiary religious fervour, often
bordering on hysteria, in the city where the artist spent his formative years.
CARLO BORROMEO
The dominant figure in Milan during Caravaggio’s youth was not a Spaniard but an Italian. Carlo Borromeo was a dour and deeply pious man with a fierce sense of mission. He became Archbishop of Milan in 1565. He saw the city as the world itself in microcosm, a place teetering on the brink of damnation, teeming with sinners to be converted and souls to be saved. Like the ascetic Dominican friar Savonarola, who had preached in Florence almost a hundred years before, Borromeo galvanized the Milan of Caravaggio’s childhood into regular paroxysms of mass repentance. His appearance, gaunt, hollow-cheeked, charismatically severe, was itself symbolic: a visible sign, like the rags adopted four centuries earlier by St Francis of Assisi, that Borromeo had renounced wealth and privilege to follow directly in the footsteps of Christ and his apostles.
Although he would become one of the most radical reformers of the Catholic faith and way of life, he had first been pressed into the service of the Church by the forces of old-fashioned nepotism. His uncle, Pope Pius IV, appointed him to the position of his own private secretary and elevated him to the rank of cardinal when Borromeo was still barely in his twenties (and despite the fact that he had received no theological training). Yet he soon justified that favouritism. A skilled negotiator, he played a vital part at the end of the Council of Trent. This was the hugely significant nineteenth Ecumenical Council of the Roman Catholic Church – and was, in essence, the Catholic Church’s concerted response to the multiple challenges to its authority posed by the Protestant Reformation.
It was at the Council of Trent that the Catholic Church reaffirmed the importance of the sacraments and the role of the priesthood; that it insisted on the importance of good works as well as of faith, in contradiction of Martin Luther’s belief in ‘justification by faith alone’; that it pronounced its own interpretation of the Bible final, branding any Christian with the temerity to substitute his or her own interpretations a heretic; and that it reaffirmed a multitude of Catholic practices that had been criticized by reformers in the north, such as pilgrimage and the veneration of saints and their relics. These were the basic principles that would underpin the Counter-Reformation, as it became known, the Catholic riposte to Protestant reformers. Yet such was the mood of contention surrounding the questions under debate, in which nothing less than the future of the Catholic Church was at stake, that there were many times when it seemed as though agreement might never be reached. First summoned in 1537, the council was concluded only in 1562–3. Carlo Borromeo was one of the men who saved it, at the last, from breaking down altogether.
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