So what did Caravaggio learn during his apprenticeship? It might be supposed – it is the conventional view – that he received a traditional grounding in the techniques of Renaissance painting. In other words, he learned to prepare and grind colours; he learned how to draw; and he learned how to paint in buon fresco, the ‘true fresco’ technique, like Peterzano himself. But Caravaggio never painted a fresco and no single drawing exists by his hand. X-rays of his oil paintings show that he did not even use preparatory drawings on the canvas, as a guide for the brush. In other words, there is almost no resemblance between his daringly improvisatory techniques and those that would have been taught in the studio of an artist such as the safe, dull and cautious Simone Peterzano.
It seems that something must have gone awry during Caravaggio’s apprenticeship. He was a painter of extraordinary innate talent, a unique virtuoso when it came to conjuring the illusion of three-dimensional reality within the two dimensions of painting. Yet his earliest known works, while forceful, are relatively gauche and crude. Those pictures were done after 1592 and they were done in Rome. If someone with his gifts really had applied himself to the study of art in Milan for four whole years from 1584 to 1588 – working ‘day and night’, as the contract says – he should have been far better than he actually was by then. The breakneck pace of Caravaggio’s subsequent acceleration, from uncertain beginnings to full-blown mastery, begs further questions. Was it perhaps only in the early 1590s that he first took painting seriously? Is it possible that he began his career with the merest smattering of an education, and taught himself most of what he knew about painting on the job? Could it be that he spent much of his presumed apprenticeship playing truant?
The hypothesis has the virtue of helping to explain Caravaggio’s extreme technical originality. It is easier, in some ways, for a man to reinvent painting if he has almost nothing in the way of conventionally ingrained techniques to impede him. His contemporaries described him as a difficult young man who liked to settle disagreements with violence and who was prone to disappear for days on end. There is no reason to believe that he was anything but an unruly teenager. Even if he did absorb some of the rudiments of art, he is unlikely to have been a model student. What evidence we have suggests that he was probably a very bad one.
‘THEY COMMITTED A MURDER’
The bare bones of the archive – and they are pretty bare, for this part of the painter’s story – indicate that these were difficult years for the whole Merisi clan. On 25 August 1584 the richest and most influential member of the family, Giovan Giacomo Aratori, went to his grave. On 7 June 1588 Caravaggio’s youngest brother, Giovan Giacomo, died of unknown causes. By this time the painter’s apprenticeship, such as it was, had finished. He was back in Caravaggio by 25 September 1589, to sell a parcel of land. He was not quite eighteen, so the sale could take place only with his mother’s permission, which she gave. There were more land sales the following year. On 30 May and 20 June 1590 Caravaggio and his brother, the future priest Giovan Battista, parted with all of their remaining property in Canigio Nuovo, ‘to clear debts [accumulated] by them or their mother, or by the said Michelangelo by entering into a contract’. The brothers had no option, it seems, but to eat into their rapidly dwindling capital.
There is a hint of trouble too in the fact that legal responsibility for this sale had been suddenly passed from the brothers’ mother, Lucia, to their uncle, the priest Ludovico Merisi, who was their next closest relative. Was Lucia ill or incapacitated in some way? It seems so. On 29 October 1590 she made her will, bequeathing her entire property in equal proportions to her three surviving children. Exactly a month after that she died.
There were two more sales and then – on 11 May 1592 – the final division of Lucia’s estate between Caravaggio and his two siblings. Giovan Battista got some land and the family’s two houses in Porta Folceria. Caterina got some land as well as an undertaking from Giovan Battista that he would pay her dowry of 200 lire. Caravaggio was excused from any obligation to either of them and took nothing except the cash from one last land sale. It looks like the behaviour of a man who wanted to cut all ties with his past. Not long after the division of the property, he would leave Caravaggio and Milan, never to return.
By the middle of 1592 he had raised altogether 1,957 imperial lire from the family’s capital – the equivalent of 600 gold scudi, or about six times the cost of his apprenticeship. By the end of the same year, he would have run through it all. No one knows what he did with the money, just as no one knows exactly what he was doing with his life during and after his apprenticeship. He was twenty-one years old in 1592. By the same age his namesake, Michelangelo Buonnarotti, had established himself as one of the leading artists in Italy. Yet, as far as anyone has been able to establish, Michelangelo Merisi, soon to be known as Caravaggio, had not even painted a picture.
All this suggests he was not so much a slow developer as a reluctant one. Perhaps he did not even want to be an artist. Perhaps he explored other possibilities, such as becoming a mercenary or soldier of fortune. He was good with a sword, and the alacrity with which he would later jump at the chance to become a Knight of Malta suggests he may always have nurtured romantic fantasies about becoming a knight at arms. Another distinct possibility is that he had got into bad company and was just living it up during these years, with no thought to the future – until the money finally ran out. Children often define themselves in opposition to one another, and the fact that Caravaggio’s brother was chosen for the priesthood is in itself suggestive. If Giovan Battista was the good little boy, maybe Caravaggio had taken the role of the rogue. It would not have been surprising. He had grown up with barely a single close male role model. In fact almost all the men closest to him – the men who might have controlled him, helped him, shown him how to live – had died of the plague.
There was no shortage of opportunities for getting into trouble in Milan. Carlo Borromeo was not just flourishing his priestly rhetoric when he called it a city of sin. Milan had a reputation as a violent place, infested with vagabonds, conmen, pimps and whores. Street crime was rife and the murder rate soared during the 1580s and 1590s. The Spanish governor was constantly issuing proclamations about the need to clean up the city and offering rewards for the capture of bandits, muggers and murderers. There are passages in the writings of Caravaggio’s biographers which suggest that he got involved – and got out of his depth – in this dangerous Milanese underworld. Bellori baldly states that ‘being disturbed and contentious, because of certain quarrels he fled from Milan.’51 But that is not the last word from him on the matter, because on the front page of his copy of Baglione’s biography of Caravaggio (still preserved in the Vatican Library), he wrote a further note, just as bald but more informative: ‘he ground colours in Milan and learned to colour and because he had killed one of his companions he fled the country.’52
Baglione, who seems to have known nothing about Caravaggio’s life in Milan, is silent on the subject. Mancini, in his life, was keen to tell the version of the story that Caravaggio himself wanted the world to believe, sweeping any suggestions of ill-doing under the carpet of a single brisk sentence: ‘At a young age he studied diligently for four to six years in Milan, though now and then he would do some outrageous thing because of his hot nature and high spirits.’53
Mancini too left some scribbled, marginal mutterings that throw more light into this dark corner. There is a manuscript copy of Mancini’s life of Caravaggio in the Marciana Library in Venice that contains a number of barely legible lines of disconnected prose: ‘They committed a murder. Prostitute tough guy gentleman. Tough guy hurts gentleman prostitute slashes insult into the skin with knife. Policeman killed. They wanted to know what the accomplices … He was in prison for a year and then he wanted to see his property sold. In prison he didn’t confess he came to Rome and said no more about it.’54
It is with this gnomic, fragmented record – this mangled account of mysterious skuldug
gery and impenetrable misdeeds – that Caravaggio’s life in Milan comes to a close.
PART TWO
Rome, 1592–5
VIOLENT TIMES
‘Whore, bitch, tart! I throw a bowl of shit in your face! Go on, fuck yourself with a horsewhip! I’ll stick the handle of my paintbrush up your arse!’
These are the words of an artist scorned, addressed to a courtesan who refused to sleep with him. They are preserved in a deposition in the State Archives of Rome for 1602.1 The man was before the magistrates for abuse and physical assault. As well as insulting and beating her, he had actually knifed the woman. She had been badly injured, cut deeply to the face. The facial wound was an example of a sfregio, a slash with the blade inflicted as a mark of shame – doubly damaging to a courtesan, whose face was her fortune.
There are many such tales in the annals of the lives of the artists who thrived, floundered or failed in Counter-Reformation Rome. Here is another example.
An artist catches his mistress in the company of his own younger brother, an assistant in his workshop. He pursues his brother to St Peter’s, where they are busy on a commission, and breaks two of his ribs with a crowbar. He then tries to kill him with his sword, but the brother escapes and seeks sanctuary in a church. Meanwhile, the artist sends his servant to the house of his offending mistress, with instructions to give her a sfregio. He finds her in bed and slashes her face with a razor.2
Neither of these stories directly concerns Caravaggio. The first is about a now forgotten painter whose misdemeanours took place at the start of the seventeenth century. The second involves the flamboyant sculptor Gianlorenzo Bernini, who caught his brother in flagrante with his mistress in 1638. More than thirty years and a gulf of talent separated the two artists but they behaved in an identically hot-headed way. Both men acted in the heat of the moment, spurred on by a slight to their honour – a loss of face punished, with terrible literalness, by cuts and slashes to the actual faces of their victims.
During his own fourteen years in Rome, Caravaggio would become embroiled in more than his fair share of assaults, disputes and bloody vendettas. He was a violent man, but it is important to remember that he lived in a violent world. Throughout seventeenth-century Italy – throughout seventeenth-century Europe – an inflammatory code of honour prevailed. The fama of an individual, by which was meant not only his fame or reputation but also his good name, was paramount. Any insult to it had to be paid for, and the price was often blood. Caravaggio went to greater extremes than his contemporaries, in life as in art. He was no angel, even if he had been named after one. He had a hot temper and was forever spoiling for a fight. But he was not the freak or absolute exception that he has often been painted to be – both by his enemies and by those who have claimed to idolize him.
IN ROME
Having cut all ties with his family, the artist travelled to Rome in the autumn of 1592. Bellori says that Caravaggio went there via Venice, ‘where he came to enjoy the colours of Giorgione, which he then imitated’.3 A brush with Venetian art at this formative moment in his life seems likely, although Bellori overplays Caravaggio’s indebtedness to Giorgione. Giorgione’s work had inspired Titian, the most celebrated painter of Renaissance Venice. But that axis of Venetian painting – rich, brightly coloured, with a strong sense of paint as eloquent, material stuff, to be pushed about with the fingers as well as manipulated by the brush – did not hold the young Caravaggio’s attention. Aside from his innate sense of pictorial drama, he would have little in common with either of those great masters. Only in the paintings of his very last years would he move towards the impressionistic manner of Titian’s later work.
If any Venetian painter touched him to the core it was Jacopo Tintoretto. Tintoretto’s brooding, monumental religious canvases, full of dramatic contrasts of light and dark – lightning strikes of supernatural illumination that shiver like spiritual electricity – are the only late sixteenth-century Italian paintings to prophesy elements of Caravaggio’s own mature style. Simone Peterzano, who liked to think of himself as a painter in the Venetian mould, may well have inspired his unruly apprentice to visit the city. If so, he contributed to the final eclipse of whatever dim influence his own art might have had on Caravaggio’s imagination.
The trip to Venice remains hypothetical, but highly plausible. According to such a version of events, the young Caravaggio arrives in Rome with his memory full of vast, dark pictures teeming with images of humanity in extremis. This helps to make sense of his subsequent development. The preferred, monumental scale of his work as well as the ambition behind it; the extreme sense of light and dark; even the distinctive, low-toned palette that Caravaggio would make his own – where could he have got the first glimmerings of all this, if not from Venice, and Tintoretto?
For the next fourteen years Caravaggio would be at the heart of Roman Catholic Christendom, achieving fame and notoriety in equal measure. The most vivid late sixteenth-century account of the city was written by the French essayist and philosopher Michel de Montaigne, who spent several months there in late 1580 and early 1581. That was ten years before Caravaggio’s time. But the city Montaigne described was, by and large, the city that Caravaggio knew.
Montaigne was immediately struck by the ugliness and poverty of the surrounding countryside: ‘The approaches to Rome, almost everywhere, look uncultivated and barren, either for want of soil, or, what I consider more likely, because this city has hardly any labourers and men who live by the work of their hands.’4 The few labourers who were to be encountered in the fields tended to be migrant workers, from the mountains of northern Italy: ‘When I came here I found on the way many groups of villagers who came from the Grisons and Savoy to earn something in the season by labouring in the vineyards and the gardens; and they told me that every year this was their source of income.’5
Rome was a city of migrants. Its shifting population was drawn from every corner of the Christian world – priests seeking preferment, pilgrims seeking salvation, courtesans seeking riches. ‘It is the most universal city in the world,’ proclaimed Montaigne, ‘a place where strangeness and differences of nationality are considered least; for by its nature it is a city pieced together out of foreigners; everyone is as if at home.’6
It was also a suspicious city. On arrival, Montaigne’s baggage was seized. The books in his travelling library were meticulously inspected by Rome’s customs officials. They were looking for forbidden texts, for evidence of heresy, and, although they found little to concern them, Montaigne was struck by the severity of their regulations: ‘the rules were so extraordinary here that the book of hours of Our Lady, because it was of Paris, not of Rome, was suspect to them, and also the books of certain German doctors of theology against the heretics, because in combating them they made mention of their errors.’7 Much to Montaigne’s annoyance, the authorities confiscated a book ‘on the histories of the Swiss, translated into French, solely because the translator – whose name, however, is not given – is a heretic … it is a marvel how well they know the men of our countries.’
More than half a century had passed since the Lutheran troops of Emperor Charles V sacked the city in 1527. But Rome had still not recovered. Thousands had died during the Sack and many others had abandoned their homes. Montaigne was struck by the contrast between the splendour of the papal court – ‘remarkable houses and gardens of the cardinals … palaces divided into numerous apartments, one leading to another’8 – and the squalid, neglected condition of so much of the rest of the city.
Relics and reminders of ancient Rome were everywhere, so that ‘in many places we were walking on the tops of entire houses … in truth, almost everywhere, you walk on the top of old walls which the rain and the coach ruts uncover.’9 But so mangled were the tangible remains of the classical past that Montaigne felt the totality of its destruction more keenly than anything else: ‘those who said that one at least saw the ruins of Rome said too much, for the ruins of so awesome a machine
would bring more honour and reverence to its memory: this was nothing but its sepulchre. The world, hostile to its long domination, had first broken and shattered all the parts of this wonderful body; and because, even though quite dead, overthrown, and disfigured, it still terrified the world, the world had buried its very ruin.’10
Like any other migrant worker from the north, Caravaggio would have entered the city through the Porta del Popolo, into the Piazza del Popolo. In those days the great square was flanked on its northern side by the church and monastery of Santa Maria del Popolo, and on the south by a line of ordinary houses. Attempts had recently been made to aggrandize this main avenue of entry to the city. In 1587 an obelisk had been erected in the middle of the square. A marble fountain had been added too, but still the piazza was anything but grand. A traveller just arrived might get something to eat from one of the fritter vendors at the foot of the obelisk. He might sit with his back to the stump of a classical column – there were several protruding from the ground, like broken teeth – to munch his snack. There was a drinking trough nearby, used by farmers bringing pigs and goats to market, and a watering place where women did their laundry in the open air.
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