Caravaggio

by Andrew Graham-Dixon

  Then they go in a group to walk about the district, bullying everyone they meet, demanding the right of way, and with their plumes, whether black or white, they flutter fearlessly about, so that they will be taken for the boldest swordsmen on earth. Then they stop on a street corner and here, drawn up in a circle, they make fun of whoever passes, and mockingly salute whomever they like with their hats, deride the farmers, poke fun at the masters, and stop their servants by force … They also make it their custom to go out in the piazza and, as ruffians, stop to look at the peasant-girls and the countrywomen, whom they harass … Then they go to where the whores and procuresses are found: there they play a bit with Laura, strut about with Betta, and mess around with Rosa. With Cieca they have an argument, pinching a pair of clogs and taking away her shoes, or giving her some slaps on the head, pinching her buttocks, biting her breasts, and making her howl like a wretched bitch. On the way home they meet some other bravi, by whom they are punished as they deserve …

  There is no written evidence to place Caravaggio in the company of any particular Laura or Betta, any Rosa or Cieca, but he was certainly friendly with a number of prostitutes, some of whom modelled for him. His favourite was a dark-eyed girl destined to become one of Rome’s most famous courtesans. Caravaggio painted her portrait, perhaps in exchange for favours received, which she would bequeath to her richest lover and patron, a Florentine nobleman named Giulio Strozzi. It later passed into the collection of Cardinal del Monte’s friend Vincenzo Giustiniani, in whose collection it was catalogued as ‘a courtesan called Fillide’, and eventually the work entered the collections of the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum in Berlin. It was destroyed during the Second World War, but black-and-white photographs survive. They show a smouldering beauty, in understated finery, with a look of wary self-possession about her. She could be a sister to Edouard Manet’s hard-faced nineteenth-century whore Olympia. She clutches a posy of jasmine blossoms, symbol of erotic love, to her breast.

  ‘Fillide’ was Fillide Melandroni. The literary land of Arcadia was peopled with pure and innocent shepherdesses named Fillide (or Phyllida, as the name is often anglicized), but this was her real name. Someone, once, had dreamed of a bright future for her – her father perhaps, whose own name, Enea, conjured up the epic deeds of Aeneas recounted by the Roman poet Virgil.

  Fillide was born in Siena, but in early adolescence she was uprooted to Rome. Her father had died when she was still young, so money was scarce. Her aunt Pietra was already waiting on tables in a taverna in the city; perhaps it was she who encouraged the family to move there in search of better prospects. Fillide made the journey with her mother, Cinzia, and her brother, Silvio. They arrived on a rainy day in February 1593, less than a year after the young Caravaggio had first come to the city. They shared their coach with the Bianchini family. Sibilla Bianchini had a son called Matteo and two daughters, Alessandra and Anna. Anna was the same age as Fillide.

  The two families lodged together in the same house on Via dell’Armata. Close by was the church of Santa Caterina, patron saint of their home town, Siena. Not long after arriving in Rome, the two mothers, Cinzia and Sibilla, put their daughters to work as prostitutes. In April 1594 the two girls were arrested together for being out after curfew, on suspicion of soliciting. The investigating magistrates called them ‘Donna Anna’ and ‘Donna Fillide’, which made them sound more grown-up than they really were. They were fourteen and thirteen years old, respectively.70

  Caravaggio painted his portrait of Fillide around 1598, by which time she was seventeen or eighteen, and when she and Anna Bianchini were still going around together. According to a witness statement made in that same year, Anna was ‘smaller rather than bigger’ and had ‘long red hair’.71 There is an outside possibility that she was the girl who modelled for The Penitent Magdalen and the sleeping Virgin Mary in The Rest on the Flight to Egypt.

  Fillide first appears in a devotional painting of about 1598, Martha and Mary Magdalen, now in the collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts. The picture is badly damaged and of questionable quality: the brightly illuminated Magdalen is puffy and distorted and clumsily portrayed, giving her a pop-eyed appearance, but it is certainly by Caravaggio.

  The painter shows the moment when the Magdalen, urged on by her sister Martha, forswears her life of harlotry. The shadowy Martha, viewed in half-profile, is another figure who may possibly have been modelled by Fillide’s friend, Anna Bianchini. Like preachers of the time, Martha counts on her fingers the reasons to repent. But her sister has already decided to devote herself to God. Fillide as Mary Magdalen once again holds a flower to the bodice of her scarlet silk dress. This time it is not perfumed jasmine but orange blossom, symbol of purity. A gap-toothed ivory comb and a precariously propped-up convex mirror – probably the same convex mirror in which Caravaggio studied his own distorted features to paint the screaming Medusa – here symbolize worldly vanities renounced. The mirror also evokes the prophecy of St Paul: ‘Now we see through a glass darkly, but then we shall see face to face’ (1 Corinthians 13:12). Her mind has turned away from the things of this world, and towards the next.

  The ring on the wedding finger of her left hand symbolizes her decision to embrace chastity and become a bride of Christ. The finger sticks out at an angle, as though dislocated or nerve-damaged. Another figure by Caravaggio for which Fillide modelled, that of the slightly later St Catherine, suffers from the same slight deformity of the same finger: Fillide must have had a damaged hand.

  The painter could easily have disguised or corrected the flaw, but he chose to preserve it on both canvases. Why? The most likely explanation is that he intended it as an advertisement of his militant naturalism. To animate the old stories of Christianity, to make them seem as though taking place in the present day, he had developed his own unique method: he would systematically restage the sacred dramas, using real, flesh-and blood people, and paint the results. The crooked finger was there to call attention to the most distinctive aspect of his practices: his reliance on the study of actual models carefully posed in the stage setting of the studio.

  Martha and Mary Magdalen was probably painted for Olimpia Aldobrandini.72 The picture’s subject may have reflected Olimpia’s own charitable activities. Gregory Martin, an English Catholic priest who was in Rome in the 1580s, observed that a group of noblewomen had formed an association for the reform of whores. Regardless of their own safety, they would go into the Ortaccio di Ripetta, the ‘evil garden’, and plead with prostitutes to mend their evil ways: ‘honest and wise matronnes of Rome … match them selves with the famous or rather infamous and notorious sinful wemen of the citie, such as sometime Marie Magdalen was, and so by their wordes and behaviour and promises and liberality towards them, they winne them to honest life, and by Gods merciful hand working with exceeding charity they plucke them out of the deepe pitte of dayly fornication, as it were raysing dead stinking carcasses out of their graves.’73 Perhaps Olimpia Aldobrandini was one of these modern-day Marthas. The reformed prostitutes were known as convertite, or convertites. ‘These be therefore so called,’ noted Martin, ‘bycause they are converted from their naughty life, and of common whores and harlots made good Christian wemen …’

  ‘I’LL GET YOU NEXT TIME’

  The young Fillide Melandroni could pose as the Magdalen, but actually it seems that repentance was the last thing on her mind. During the years when Caravaggio knew and painted her, she was often in trouble with the authorities, and not solely for prostitution. On 4 December 1600 a Roman court investigated an accusation of assault made against her and another courtesan, Tella Brunora. The litigant was a third prostitute, Prudenza Zacchia, who lived directly ‘behind the monastery for the Convertites of the city’. All three of the women involved worked for the same pimp, a man called Ranuccio Tomassoni from Terni. Caffarelli, in The Families of Rome, described Ranuccio as ‘a good young man, and good in his conduct’, but others disagreed. Caravaggio, for one, would become his deadly enemy
.

  Ranuccio belonged to a family of soldiers and mercenaries with long-established links to the Farnese dynasty. One of Ranuccio’s brothers, Giovan Francesco, had served with honour under the general of the pontifical army, Giovan Francesco Aldobrandini. Another brother, Alessandro, had fought in Flanders. Ranuccio himself never saw military service, although he often carried a sword in the evenings. His excuse was that he was in the service of Cardinal Cinzio Passeri Aldobrandini.74 But his real job was running an unruly gang of prostitutes. If any of his girls’ clients turned nasty, it was as well to be armed. As well as taking a cut of their earnings, he took payment in kind from those he favoured. This sometimes caused trouble, as an investigation of December 1600 revealed.75

  Prudenza Zacchia was called first by the court. She had recently been charged with throwing a brick at an agent of the Governor of Rome, but this time she was the injured party. She claimed that Fillide and Tella had been conducting a vendetta against her:

  Your Honour should know that yesterday evening, at about the first hour of the night, the two accused came to look for me, and not finding me, they gave my mother several kicks, and went out. Nothing else happened yesterday evening. This morning I was in the house of Ranuccio, who lives at the Rotonda [i.e. next to the Pantheon]. The said Fillide, the accused, came to this said house and attacked me with a knife, which she had in her hand, and was restrained by Ranuccio. She came at me in every way, and gave me many blows, and tore off a lot of my hair. Then she left …

  Later I was in a downstairs room in my own house, when both of the accused arrived and entered the house by force. In coming in they gave my mother, who was at the door, a shove. The said Fillide came at me with a knife to disfigure me, and she hauled me up by the mouth to give me a scar. I defended myself with my hand, which she cut on the wrist and wounded me, as your Honour can see … and as soon as they saw that I was bleeding, they went with God. Later they went out again to have a go at me, and if they hadn’t been restrained by certain gentlemen … they would have gone at me again. Then the said Fillide came up to the window, and started to taunt me, saying that she wanted to scar me all over. I am making a complaint about this …

  Other testimony fleshed out the story. Geronimo Mattei told the court that he had been warming himself by the fire downstairs in Ranuccio’s house earlier that morning. ‘Ranuccio was in bed together with a woman called Prudenza Zacchia … and a woman called Fillide came into the house and ran upstairs to the said Ranuccio and Prudenza, and as soon as she saw the said Prudenza she began saying, “Ah, you slag, you baggage, there you are!” and at the same time she ran to the table and took a knife and went to the said Prudenza, saying, “Whore, I’m going to scar you everywhere.” ’

  Geronimo intervened and took the knife from Fillide, but he could not prevent her from attacking Prudenza again. This time, ‘she tore lots of hair from her head.’ Later on, he told the court, ‘I was passing by the said Prudenza’s house, just behind the monastery of the Convertites, when Prudenza called out to me and showed me a wound in her hand, saying that Fillide and Tella had attacked her in her house, and that Fillide had taken a knife to scar her, and had wounded her in the hand …’ It is not hard to imagine how Fillide might have acquired the bent and damaged finger of her own left hand.

  There was one more witness, a man called Cesare Pontoni. He was a close friend of Ranuccio and Giovan Francesco Tomassoni, and often testified in cases where they were involved. He had witnessed only the last incident in this serial fracas. Cesare told the court that he was walking down the street when he saw Fillide shouting at Prudenza. Fillide was at the window of Tella’s house, which was opposite where Prudenza lived. Prudenza was standing in her own doorway. ‘You dirty whore!’ Fillide screamed. ‘I hurt your hand, when I wanted to stab you in the mouth, but I’ll get you next time!’ Moments later Fillide advanced on Prudenza with a stone in her hand, yelling, ‘You dirty whore! I want to cut you! I want to cut you!’

  The interpretation of the case is clear enough. Prudenza and Fillide were vying for Ranuccio Tomassoni’s affections. Amongst the elaborate rituals of insult and injury, the crucial terms in the court documents are sfregio and the related verb sfregiare. Literally, a sfregio was a facial scar, but in the honour code of the time it also carried the figurative meaning of a serious affront to a person’s reputation. When Fillide said, repeatedly, that she wanted to cut Prudenza in the face, she was expressing a desire to dishonour and shame her. She uttered her threats publicly because she wanted her intentions to be known in the public arena of the street – the theatre in which reputation was made and harmed. Prudenza repeated those threats in court for the same reason. To accuse someone of the intention to inflict a sfregio was to alert the law to a potentially serious offence.

  In the event, the many threats of wounds to Prudenza’s face seem not to have actually been carried out, perhaps because Fillide’s main aim was to frighten her rival. If she had actually cut her in the mouth, or sliced off her nose – a not unheard-of tactic in the more extreme revenge assaults – Prudenza would have become damaged goods. That would not have pleased Ranuccio. The impression that emerges from the testimony is that, for all her apparent wildness, Fillide knew what she was doing and remained in control throughout. Probably because nobody was seriously hurt, the case seems to have come to nothing.

  Caravaggio’s name does not appear in the trial transcripts involving Fillide, Tella, Prudenza and Ranuccio, so these documents shed little direct light on the painter’s future quarrels with the pimp. But they shed a good deal on the murky world in which both men moved. Ranuccio’s contacts and alliances may also be significant. His family’s patrons, the Farnese, were supporters of Spain against France, so the Tomassoni clan was closely connected with Rome’s pro-Spanish faction. This was true of Ranuccio’s friends too. Politics could have been one cause of bad blood between him and Caravaggio. But the artist’s relationship with Fillide may have been another: a mere painter was hardly a desirable client for Ranuccio’s most beautiful courtesan.

  PAINTING FILLIDE

  Fillide had been miscast as the virtuous heroine of Martha and Mary Magdalen, which is perhaps why that picture seems less than completely convincing. On two other occasions Caravaggio painted her more as the historical record suggests she truly was – tough, passionate, with a capacity for violence. Even though she only appears in devotional pictures, her presence in them tips the balance of his art from sacred to profane.

  In 1598 or 1599 Caravaggio painted a startlingly sado-erotic Judith and Holofernes, with Fillide in the leading role. Like that of David and Goliath, the biblical story of Judith was a parable of underdog virtue triumphing over tyrannical might: the Jewish heroine of the tale seduces the ruthless Assyrian general and then slays him, with his own sword, in his tent. It was a subject that had been treated by many celebrated artists. Michelangelo had depicted Judith and her maidservant elegantly bearing aloft the tyrant’s severed head, as his corpse writhed in darkness, in one of the four paintings at the corners of the Sistine Chapel ceiling. The great Florentine Renaissance sculptor Donatello had created a famous bronze Judith in which the heroine hacks implacably at the neck of her victim. But even Donatello’s stark and visceral image pales by comparison with Caravaggio’s clinically violent conception of the subject.

  Once again, the painter brought a scene from the biblical past into the world of his own time, but never before had he done so with such brutal, shocking immediacy. Sanctified execution in an Assyrian tent has become murder in a Roman whorehouse. The bearded Holofernes, lying naked on the crumpled sheets of a prostitute’s bed, is a client who has made a terrible mistake. He wakes up to realize that he is about to die. Fillide pulls on his hair with her left hand, not only to expose his neck but to stretch the flesh taut so that it will part more easily under the blade. In her right hand, she holds the oriental scimitar – Caravaggio’s one concession to historical accuracy – with which she has just managed to seve
r her victim’s jugular. She frowns with grim concentration, as he screams his last, and as the blood begins to spray from the mortal wound in bright red jets. A theatrical swag of dark red drapery hovers directly above the act of murder.

  Caravaggio has imagined the whole scene as a fantastically extreme version of the kind of violent incidents in which he and his companions were often embroiled. ‘I want to cut you! I want to cut you!’ Fillide would yell at her rival Prudenza. Here, the threat is fully carried out. The heroine’s grizzled maidservant, readying herself to bag up the bloody trophy of a severed head, reinforces the impression that the action is indeed taking place in a darkened brothel somewhere in Rome. She is the stock figure of the procuress, the whore’s wizened partner in corruption.76 Caravaggio adds a sexual frisson to the thrill of bloody violence: beneath the diaphanous fabric of her tight-fitting bodice, Fillide’s nipples are visibly erect. It is the sort of detail that Cardinal Paravicino may have had in mind when he made his remark about pictures that he ‘would not have wanted to see from a distance’.

  Judith and Holofernes divided Caravaggio’s contemporaries. Annibale Carracci’s succinct condemnation of the work encapsulated the reservations of all those who found Caravaggio’s realism rude and indecorous. ‘When pressed to speak his opinion on a Judith by Caravaggio, he replied “I don’t know what to say except that it is too natural.” ’77 Artemisia Gentileschi, by contrast, was fascinated by it. During the second decade of the seventeenth century, she made a name for herself by painting numerous versions of the same subject in a darkly tenebristic style directly modelled on Caravaggio’s own. She gave an idiosyncratic twist to the theme by using it to take public revenge on the man who had raped her, painting herself as the sword-wielding heroine and Agostino Tassi as her victim.