He was a hard worker, who rarely slept for more than five hours and often went without food due to the permanent backlog of papal business requiring his attention. But to those who did not know about his punishing regime he may well have seemed like just another corrupt cardinal-nephew, the latest in a long line of such self-serving placemen. The pope appointed him to a dazzling array of positions, including the Protector of Portugal, of Lower Germany and of the seven Catholic cantons of Switzerland; as well as Protector of the Carmelites, Franciscans, Humiliati, Canons Regular of the Holy Cross at Coimbra and of the orders of St John and Christ in Portugal.15 He was also the absentee abbot of a number of monastic foundations. From these sources and his family estates he derived an annual income of around 50,000 scudi, a princely sum in mid sixteenth-century Italy. He was a keen and energetic huntsman who spent lavishly on his horses and hounds, and equally lavishly on his household, which he turned into a magnificent manifestation of his innate asceticism and sobriety: he kept one hundred and fifty servants and retainers, all dressed from head to toe in a uniform of funereal black velvet.
Borromeo in his youth was a volatile combination of pride and piety, but it would take a personal tragedy to transform him into one of the most fervent and inventively radical priests of the Counter-Reformation. His elder brother, Federico Borromeo, died suddenly in 1562. Carlo, who was administrator of the pope’s native diocese, the Archbishopric of Milan, was widely expected to give up his career in the Church, renounce his vows of piety and continue the family line by marrying in order to father a son and heir. Instead, he concluded that all man’s earthly hopes and aspirations amounted to no more than a handful of dust. He gave up the trappings of wealth, sacked the majority of his household staff and forbade those remaining in his service to wear garments of silk or to indulge in any other luxuries. He took holy orders and briefly considered retreating from the world altogether, to a monastery. Eventually he decided that it was his role in the divine plan to revive and reform the Roman Catholic Church – and he set about the task with the evangelical zeal of a man convinced that he had God on his side.
It was only after the death of his brother that Carlo Borromeo’s influence would really be felt in Milan. In 1565 he was consecrated Archbishop of Milan. He signalled his intentions by making his triumphal entry into the city wearing archbishop’s robes, rather than dressed as a cardinal. It was his way of indicating that he came with his own sense of duty and purpose, not as the mere servant of papal Rome. He was determined to make the city and its provinces into the crucible for an extraordinary socio-religious experiment. Under his steely control and watchful gaze, the 900,000 souls of the Duchy of Milan were to be systematically indoctrinated in the ways of his own, deeply ascetic brand of piety. What he attempted was nothing less than a form of forced mass conversion to what he saw as the real and true tenets of Christian faith.
The archbishop had a darkly pessimistic view of human nature. He passionately opposed the doctrine of free will favoured by so many Protestants, and by some within his own church. To him, the idea that man had a God-given ability to choose between good and evil was a pernicious lie. He had a revealing disagreement with another prominent figure in the Counter-Reformation Catholic Church, the Bolognese theologian Gabriele Paleotti. Paleotti argued that ‘Since God created human volition free and its own arbiter, it can be forced by no chains, but only sparked with the help of God’s grace.’ In Borromeo’s bleaker view, human nature is ‘already tainted by sin’ – the Original Sin of Adam and Eve – and ‘is by itself so inclined to evil that we easily neglect and forget to do good’. Borromeo’s stern conclusion was that ‘we need help and stimulants to live well, and always someone to remind us of it.’16 What that sentence portended, for the people of Milan, was a systematic attempt to change their way of life and transform their habits of thought. Borromeo saw himself as a spiritual successor to St Ambrose. Just as Ambrose had defied the Roman emperor, so Borromeo challenged the Spanish governors of Milan with the aim of asserting his own authority as the city’s spiritual leader.
One of his first acts was to reassert the ancient right of the Archbishop of Milan to maintain a private army. Borromeo’s so-called famiglia armata, or ‘armed family’, which was a corps of armed men drawn from his own household, became a key weapon in his fight to reform what he regarded as the rotten state of the city. The archbishop claimed wide-ranging powers, so that those suspected of any offence that he judged to touch on public morality – such as heresy, blasphemy or sodomy – were liable to receive the not so tender attentions of his ‘family’. He revived the defunct civil and criminal tribunals of the archiepiscopal curia, and reopened ancient prisons for the confinement of those found guilty in Milan’s ecclesiastical courts. Borromeo’s insistence on the unrestricted use of his famiglia armata, and his extension of ecclesiastical authority into areas of life long regulated by the secular courts and justice system, led to numerous clashes with the city’s Spanish rulers. At the climax of one particularly acrimonious row over jurisdiction, Borromeo went so far as to excommunicate the Spanish governor, the Marqués de Requesens. When Requesens retaliated, Borromeo himself was nearly exiled from the city.
Borromeo saw to it that the Spanish Inquisition, which operated in Spain’s offshore Italian possessions, Sardinia and Sicily, was excluded from Milan. He was able to clip and curtail Spanish power in a number of such ways, largely because he had strong support in Rome. He removed jurisdiction over alleged religious crimes from Milan’s Spanish rulers, insisting that he himself should be the final judge in all such cases. But he also slowly won the grudging respect of the pious Philip II – to whom he explained, in a long and persuasive letter, that his aim was not to usurp Spanish power but to strengthen the Roman Catholic Church.17
For two decades, throughout the formative period of Caravaggio’s life, the archbishop pushed through a multitude of Church reforms intended to control the hearts, souls and minds of the people at large, measures that ranged from the introduction of new confessionals to the segregation of men and women in church. He made no secret of his distaste for self-styled elite clerical associations such as the Theatines or the Barnabites. He actually suppressed one of the orders nominally under his protection, the Humiliati, on the grounds that its membership was restricted to a corrupt, self-serving clique of aristocrats. He was promptly shot in the back at close range by a disgruntled Humiliatus, but survived the attack unharmed – an escape subsequently attributed, by his hagiographers, to divine intervention.
Borromeo was an obsessive regulator and centralizer, and he did his best to turn his clergy into a spiritual equivalent of the famiglia armata – a body of Christian soldiers animated by a single purpose and method. All priests with a pastoral duty were obliged to preach every Sunday and feast day. Reports were gathered from every parish in the diocese and underperforming priests were summoned to the archbishop’s presence to practise their skills in front of him (they also had to leave a written copy of their sermon behind for his perusal). Not least because Milan was on the frontier with partly Protestant Switzerland, Borromeo was determined to turn his diocese into a shining demonstration of revitalized Roman Catholicism – a beacon to those who had erred, the brilliance of which might persuade them to mend their ways. He built new churches by the score and trained up an army of new priests to spread the word of God to their congregations. He founded diocesan seminaries and many schools. By the time of his death some 40,000 children in the diocese of Milan were being educated at any one time, an unprecedentedly high proportion of the juvenile population.18 Caravaggio’s own family would be directly involved in the Borromean spiritual experiment: his only brother became a priest. No one in Milan and its surroundings was left untouched by the archbishop’s plans for spiritual revival.
Borromeo saw sinfulness everywhere and envisaged his priests as an army of spiritual stormtroopers taking the battle to the devil. No detail was too small to escape his eye, especially in the design
of churches, which he saw as machines for the purification of an evil world. He wrote entire volumes of instructions about the minutiae of ecclesiastical architecture, the so-called Instructiones, in which he pronounced on matters ranging from the precise amount of space church architects should allow for each member of the congregation (‘one cubit and eight ounces square’ exactly, four square feet in modern terms) to the appropriate scale and decoration of the entrances: ‘the middle doorway must be distinguished by its width and ornamented with sculptures of lions … to represent the Temple of Solomon and the vigilance of bishops.’19 Borromeo was particularly concerned to ensure that men and women be separated from one another in church. He devised movable screens to be erected between groups of male and female worshippers, to prevent them exchanging glances with one another – often, in Borromeo’s view, the first occasion for sin. He also sought to set strict controls on the clothes worn by worshippers, especially female worshippers, whom he berated for coming to church dressed for seduction, as if they were going to Carnival rather than participating in a holy ritual.
The mass of directives issued from the archiepiscopal palace of Milan must have occasionally wearied even the most conscientious of the Milanese clergymen whose task it was to enforce them. Here for example is the archbishop on the intricacies of the holy-water stoup, its placement, its design, its necessary accessories:
[The holy-water stoup] should not be put outside, but rather inside the church, accessible to those who enter and at their right hand, if possible. One font should be placed on the side where men enter and another … where the women enter. These [stoups] should not be near the wall but distant from it in proportion to the space that is there. They should be supported … on a small pillar, or some type of base on which nothing profane appears. There should be a sprinkler on a small metal chain hanging from the rim … it should not terminate with a sponge rather than bristles. It may terminate with a sponge only if it is enclosed in a silver, tin, or brass-perforated knob that has bristles on the outside.20
The bristles about which Borromeo was so particular symbolized the cleansing branches of hyssop that purify the souls of the faithful in the ancient biblical psalm (Psalm 50): ‘Sprinkle me with hyssop and I shall be cleansed; wash me and I shall be made whiter than snow.’
Many years later, near the end of his life, when Caravaggio was a fugitive from justice in the Sicilian town of Messina, he was offered some holy water in a little church. The story is told by Francesco Susinno, a Messinese writer of artists’ lives. It suggests that Caravaggio may still have carried with him some sardonic remembrance of the obsessive concern with the purification of souls that had coloured so much of his childhood and youth in Milan: ‘One day he went into the church of the Madonna of Pilero with certain gentlemen, and the politest of them stepped forward to offer him some holy water. Caravaggio asked him what it was for, and was told ‘to cancel venial sins’. ‘Then it is no use,’ he said. ‘Because mine are all mortal.’ That terse remark captures the darkest of the painter’s moods – the sullen conviction that nothing, certainly no holy water, could ever wash his soul clean or whiten the stain of his sins.
‘EGO TE ABSOLVO’
For Carlo Borromeo, confession was the Church’s greatest weapon in the war on sin and evil. His highest priority was to regularize and control the administering of the sacrament of penance – which he believed could be used not only to mould the individual conscience but to redesign society. In Borromean Milan the hearing of confession was restricted to trained teams of diocesan confessors, who were allowed to operate only under direct licence from the archbishop himself. Each confessor was obliged to attend weekly classes to hone his confessional technique and receive the latest instructions from Borromeo. The archbishop told his confessors that they were even more important than the parish priests when it came to the saving of souls; he told them that they ‘have the souls in their hands’ and ‘speak to Jerusalem’s heart’.21
In 1566 a new Roman Catechism had been composed, under Borromeo’s supervision, in which the sacrament of penance had been described as ‘the fortress of Christian virtue’. It had preserved the Roman Catholic Church from the attacks of the devil and his heretical minions, and it was to be considered responsible for ‘whatever today’s Church has preserved in holiness, piety and religiosity’.22 Borromeo went to great lengths to ensure that ‘the fortress of virtue’ remained pure of carnality or corruption. He popularized a new article of furniture for the administering of the sacrament, the confessional box, to create a physical separation between confessor and penitent – and thus avert any danger of unclean thoughts polluting their necessarily intimate relationship. It placed the confessor in his own kind of indoors fortress, making him invisible to the penitent and, it was hoped, immune to temptations and blandishments.
The archbishop’s suspicious view of human nature extended to his own priests and confessors. In the late 1570s, when a woodworker named Rizzardo Taurini was commissioned to build five confessionals for the new Jesuit church of San Fedele in Milan, he provoked Borromeo’s rage by fractionally curtailing one of the partitions at the bottom of the standard double sentry-box design. The Jesuit provost of San Fedele recalled the archbishop’s outraged protest – ‘the confessor can easily touch the woman’s feet with his own.’ Borromeo repeated the objection several times, to the evident exasperation of the provost, who found the archbishop’s insistence on the moral dangers inherent in a proximity between two people’s feet more than faintly absurd. ‘He greatly insisted on this,’ the provost remembered, ‘as if lust enters the body through one’s shoes, and he is unaware that in his confessionals the woman’s mouth is close to the confessor’s ear.’23 The Jesuit knew a truth that Borromeo did not want to acknowledge: no matter how strong the grilles and walls of any confessional box, nothing could absolutely prevent priests and penitents from harbouring feelings for one another. The partitions intended to separate man from woman might even enhance the illict thrill of such emotions. This exchange between the worldly provost and the archbishop reveals the paranoid fear of sinfulness – and the corresponding desire to close off almost every avenue of human sensuality – that lay at the heart of Borromean piety.
Borromeo believed that confession was nothing less than an instrument, given to him by God, to purify the world. The sacrament of penance already gave the confessor a fearsome weapon for the discipline of each soul – the power to grant or withold absolution. But Borromeo enhanced that power by putting checks in place to ensure that penance was true and not merely a matter of words and assurances. He insisted that confessors make enquiries about their penitents with their parish priests. Those priests in turn were instructed to tell confessors of any conditions that might disqualify a particular penitent from absolution – adultery, for example, or cohabitation outside wedlock. If absolution were not granted, the penitent would soon find himself or herself before the episcopal magistrates, and under the threat of imprisonment.
Borromeo also ordered his confessors to interrogate their penitents for any knowledge they might have of heretics, or of anyone harbouring prohibited books. This cast the net wide, since such was the repressive cultural effect of the Counter-Reformation that the list of banned books – the Index – included many of the works now considered part of every Italian’s intellectual heritage: Boccaccio’s Decameron, the poetry of Petrarch and Ariosto, the political theory of Machiavelli, to name just some.24 Anyone who made too public a display of owning any of those books was likely to find themselves given away to the authorities.
The situation in Milan was not unique, in that harsh measures against heresy were being taken in cities all across Italy, but it was extreme. For example, when the Roman Inquisition recommended that Catholic confessors should encourage their penitents to inform on heretics, Borromeo applied the condition with particular severity. In Milan any confessor too fastidious to enquire about heresy was summarily excommunicated; and if a penitent did confess to knowle
dge of heretical activities, he or she was immediately sent to higher authorities to give further information about these enemies of the faith – to supply names and addresses, to give details of what they had done or might be planning to do. Only then might the penitent return to their confessor to hear the consoling words, ‘Ego te absolvo.’25
Borromeo did not entirely succeed in his efforts to turn Milan into a model Tridentine police state. Even though he had the firm support of the pope and, eventually, Philip II of Spain, some of his attempts to redesign the Milanese way of life met with angry resistance. He tried in vain to ban dancing on feast days and Sundays, and in 1579 he even attempted to kill off the exuberantly joyful pre-Lenten tradition of Carnival. To the disgust of many Milanese citizens, he prohibited all jousts, tournaments, masquerades, plays and dances, and declared the automatic excommunication of all those participating in or attending such spectacles. Borromeo regarded Carnival as the devil’s work, a dissolute rite lodged like a parasite at the beginning of the holy season. His prohibition was backed up by the threat that his confessors would exploit their information-gathering networks to identity those who had taken part in the celebrations. But this time he had gone too far. Borromeo’s attempt to shut down the festive life of the city was met with panic by the civic authorities and rage by the people. Rome and Spain both had to intervene to prevent a popular uprising and Borromeo was forced, reluctantly, to acknowledge that there were limits to his power. In the end, the Milanese were content to fall short of spiritual perfection.
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