Sandrart’s remark about the patron keeping the picture until the end of a tour through his house – saving the best until last – is suggestive. Having shown his guests his splendid palace, his collections of classical statuary, his musical camerino, his pictures by the great masters of Italian art, Giustiniani would show them this – an allegory of all hubris, creative and intellectual, brought low at the feet of love. An elegant gesture of knowing self-deprecation was surely intended. As rich and influential as he was, as accomplished in the arts, letters and sciences, even he still had to concede – with a graceful smile, of course – that there was a limit to his powers. Before love, all must give way.48
But Omnia vincit amor was more than just an excuse for that graceful flourish of rhetoric. The picture is arrestingly littered with letter v’s. The majuscule in the musical part-book is a v. The set square is arranged in the form of a v. The compasses form an upside down v. The violin and lute fall across each other to form a v. The crown and sceptre shape a v. So does the curiously awkward arrangement of the Cupid’s splayed legs. His wings echo the shape too. They are eagle’s wings, which also formed part of the Giustiniani family crest. All these v’s are also implicated in an orgiastic series of sexual consummations. The set square pushes at the furled circle formed by the part-book’s leaves. The compass straddles the set square. The bow of the violin has slid over the neck of the instrument. The sceptre phallically pierces the circle of the crown. Even the white sheet on which the boy rests has contrived to fold itself, at the point just below Cupid’s phallus, into the shape of the female sex.
The phrase omnia vincit amor is taken from Virgil’s Eclogues, where it is followed by the line et nos cedamus amori: ‘Love conquers all; let us lovers all yield to it.’ In Caravaggio’s painting, the objects of art and culture have not merely been conquered by love, they have given themselves up to passion. The picture buzzes and pulsates with libidinous energy. It is a mythology shot through with a raucously erotic and life-affirming sense of comedy, a fantasy of learning and knowledge suddenly caught up in the throes of sexual self-abandonment.
But why would Caravaggio have painted such a picture for a Roman nobleman? And why would a man such as Vincenzo Giustiniani have wanted one? There was in fact a long tradition of such erotically charged mythologies in Italian painting. They were usually created on the occasion of family weddings. The earliest examples were painted on the panels of the wedding chests traditionally given by groom to bride in fifteenth-century Tuscany.49 By the end of the fifteenth century the mythological love painting had emancipated itself from the decoration of wedding chests to become an independent art form. Botticelli’s Birth of Venus is the most famous example. The goddess of love rises from the sea and steps on to dry land. As she does, a cloak is readied by Venus’s handmaiden to wrap her perfect body. A particular bunched fold of that cloak, close to Venus’s face, has been painted by Botticelli to resemble the female sex and within it a tiny leaf is folded, an emblem of fertility. There are shades, here, of Caravaggio’s vulva-like twist of sheet in Omnia vincit amor – and an anticipation of its meaning. The Birth of Venus was painted as a gift to a Medici bride. Its message was unambiguous. Like the virgin Venus leaving the sea and arriving on earth, the bride was about to leave her former chastity behind and embark on married life. As she did so, the painting was offered to her as a prayer for the future fertility of the union.
This tradition was still alive in Caravaggio’s time, although by then it had mutated into yet more spectacular forms – none more so than the mythological-erotic ceiling painted by Annibale Carracci for the ceiling of the Farnese Palace between 1597 and 1601. A deliberately pagan parody of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, Carracci’s Farnese decorations constitute a vast panorama of the loves of the gods, a comical riot of the sexual indiscretions of Jupiter, Juno and a veritable horde of other, amorously inflamed deities. The overarching theme of the ceiling is Omnia vincit amor. The work was painted, just like the wedding chests of Tuscan tradition, just like Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, to celebrate a wedding.50
It is highly likely that Caravaggio’s own Omnia vincit amor was commissioned on the occasion of a wedding in the Giustiniani family. Whether it commemorates a particular event or not, its essential meaning is clear. Vincenzo was a family name among the Giustiniani, so all those orgiastically active v’s in the picture may be taken to stand both for the man who commissioned the work and for his many heirs and descendants. Long live the Giustiniani, the picture priapically exclaims: long may they prosper, and long may they procreate.
THE BLACK WINGS OF ENVY
Giovanni Baglione and his friends were not happy to see the painter from Lombardy doing so well. Forty years later, when he came to write his short biography of Caravaggio, Baglione still seethed with a sense of injustice when he thought of his rival winning a string of commissions from Vincenzo Giustiniani and Ciriaco Mattei. As far as Baglione was concerned, Caravaggio’s patrons had been fooled by nothing more than clever publicity: ‘The Marchese had been put into this frame of mind by Prosperino delle Grottesche, Caravaggio’s henchman [Prospero Orsi, the painter of grotesques] … Moreover, Signor Ciriaco Mattei succumbed to the propaganda … Thus Caravaggio pocketed from this gentleman many hundreds of scudi.’51
Karel van Mander’s Schilderboek of 1604 includes some pithy remarks on the rivalries that divided Rome’s competing factions of artists during the early years of the seventeenth century. According to van Mander, Clement VIII and his papal court commissioned so many new works that they stirred up a frenzy of competition among painters and sculptors: ‘a new ardour is kindled; lean Envy secretly begins to flap her black wings and everyone strives to do his best to gain the coveted prize.’52
The dark wings of Caravaggio’s Cupid certainly fanned the flames of Giovanni Baglione’s envy. Infuriated by the acclaim with which Caravaggio’s Omnia vincit amor had been received – the curtain of green silk later described by Sandrart proof of its status as the coup de théâtre of Vincenzo Giustiniani’s whole collection – Baglione responded with an act of provocation. On 29 August 1602 he brought a new work to the artists’ exhibition held annually in the courtyard of San Giovanni Decollato. Caravaggio was not taking part in the show, but his friend and follower Orazio Gentileschi did have a picture on display. Baglione’s painting was an attack on both of them, as Gentileschi would later explain under cross-examination: ‘there certainly is some rivalry among us. When I hung a picture of St Michael the Archangel in San Giovanni dei Fiorentini [a slip of the tongue; the exhibition took place in San Giovanni Decollato], Baglione showed up and hung one of his opposite, a Divine Love that he had done to vie with an Earthly Love by Michelangelo da Caravaggio.’
The full title of Baglione’s painting, now in the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, is Divine Love Overcoming Earthly Love, the World, the Flesh and the Devil. It is no masterpiece but it is a clever and vicious painting, carefully calculated to try to wound Caravaggio and cloud his reputation. Inverting both the moral and the message of Omnia vincit amor, Baglione shows love conquered by virtue. A saint in armour subdues a cowed and cowering Cupid, while the devil skulks in darkness to one side. Although armed with a thunderbolt rather than shield and sword, the figure of Divine Love evokes traditional images of Archangel Michael trampling Satan underfoot – a detail that can only have been intended to sharpen Baglione’s satire. Caravaggio’s own holy namesake is shown exorcizing the erotic and demonic spirits of Caravaggio’s art. The resemblance to St Michael may also have been meant as a sideswipe at Gentileschi and his own ‘picture of St Michael the Archangel’. But Caravaggio was the primary target. Baglione’s parody is completed by the emphatically Caravaggesque lighting that flashes across the vengeful angel and the prone, flaccid form of Cupid below.
Not content with satirizing Caravaggio and his art, Baglione even dared to offer his own picture to Vincenzo Giustiniani’s brother, Cardinal Benedetto Giustiniani. Yet more galling, it was acce
pted, and Baglione given the traditional painter’s reward of a gold chain. Gentileschi, who would tell this part of the story too in court, was distinctly unamused by the whole affair. He tried to get his own back by telling Baglione that his avenging angel should have been naked and childlike, perhaps deliberately misunderstanding the figure’s pointed and satirical resemblance to the Archangel Michael: ‘[Baglione] had dedicated Divine Love to Cardinal Giustiniani and although said picture was not liked as much as the one by Michelangelo – all the same, that Cardinal gave him a neck chain. That painting had many flaws. I told him he had done a grown-up man in armour who should have been nude and putto, so he did another that was completely nude.’
That last remark is only half true. Baglione did paint another Divine Love, the version now in the Palazzo Barberini in Rome, but he completely ignored Gentileschi’s advice. The second and equally grown-up angel is certainly no naked putto. He still wears armour, albeit modified this time to a breastplate and some wisps of drapery. The most important change has been made elsewhere, at the bottom of the picture. The devil, previously shown lurking in obscurity, now wheels round with an expression of startled guilt on his face. Despite his staring eyes, his fangs and his pointed ears, he is unmistakably a portrait in caricature of Caravaggio, caught in flagrante with a flushed and furtive Cupid. Baglione’s second Divine Love went beyond satire. It was a visual accusation of sodomy.
Baglione repeated that charge verbally, and in public. He and his friends talked openly about Caravaggio keeping company with a bardassa – vulgar Italian slang derived from a Turkish word for a young man who took the female part in sexual encounters with other men. Rome’s artists gossiped, so people may have begun to look at Caravaggio’s Omnia vincit amor in a different light. The identity of the boy who had modelled for Cupid was known. He was Cecco di Caravaggio, who prepared the artist’s paint and his canvases.53 If Baglione was to be believed, not only was he Caravaggio’s assistant and model, he was also his catamite.
Half a century later, the story was still current. In about 1650 an English artist called Richard Symonds was shown round the Giustiniani collection in Rome. He made notes on the pictures, writing down any anecdotes that struck him. He obviously spent a while in front of Omnia vincit amor. The custode told him that it was one of the most precious pictures in the collection, that it had cost 300 scudi, and that both the Cardinal of Savoy and a member of the Crescenzi family had offered 2,000 ducats for it. But the punchline of the spiel, no doubt regularly trotted out to tourists visiting the palace, was the scandalous relationship between artist and model. Here is a full transcription of the entry in Symonds’s travel journal:
Cupido di Caravaggio / Card di Savoya profe. / 2 milia duboli p[er] / il Cupido di Caravaggio / Costo 3 cento scudi. / Checco del Caravaggio tis / calld among the painters / twas his boy – / haire darke, 2 wings / raie, compasses lute / violin & armes & laurel / Monsr Crechy vuolle dare / 2 milia dubole / Twas the body & face / of his owne boy or servant / that laid with him.54
From the readiness with which the story was believed and then accepted into local legend, it seems that nobody had been particularly surprised to hear about Caravaggio’s alleged homosexual proclivities. He was known to be an impetuous man who followed his passions. He kept company with whores and courtesans, such as Fillide Melandroni, and on the evidence of his paintings he was equally alive to the physical charms of men. Caravaggio and Francesco Boneri, alias Cecco, were close: Cecco stayed with him even after he was obliged to leave Rome in 1606. There is a good chance that the rumours were true and that Caravaggio did indeed have a sexual as well as a working relationship with ‘his owne boy or servant’.
Whatever the reality, Baglione’s accusations were damaging and dangerous. Sodomy was a capital crime in Clement VIII’s Rome, and though the authorities were unlikely to investigate the well-connected Caravaggio’s sexual behaviour, as long as he was reasonably discreet, the potential harm to his name and prospects was immense. Once an artist had been smeared as a pederast, his work was smeared too. People were liable to stop taking it seriously, seeing it only through the lens of its creator’s presumed sexual aberration. This had happened half a century before, notoriously, to an artist named Giovanni Antonio Bazzi. Bazzi had offended the famous chronicler of artists’ lives, Giorgio Vasari, who had taken his revenge in print: ‘since he always had about him boys and beardless youths, whom he loved more than was decent, he acquired the by-name of Sodoma.’55 This was all a pure fabrication on Vasari’s part, first started perhaps by Bazzi’s rival, the Sienese painter Domenico Beccafumi. But the mud stuck, and to this day the artist is known as Il Sodoma, ‘the Sodomite’.
Caravaggio was deeply sensitive about his reputation. He never knowingly allowed the least slight to go unpunished. His nocturnal assault on Girolamo Spampa, the art student from Montepulciano, was proof of that. Spampa had probably been recycling Federico Zuccaro’s criticisms of Caravaggio’s Contarelli Chapel paintings, which he had most likely heard from Baglione in the first place. Either way, Baglione must have been aware of the beating that Caravaggio had given Spampa, which had taken place just eighteen months before. He knew that his satires and smears would not be forgotten. Sooner or later, Caravaggio would retaliate.
The autumn and winter of 1602 passed without incident, as Caravaggio bided his time. Only in spring of the following year did he give vent to his simmering anger. He was stung into retaliation by the unveiling of Baglione’s largest work yet, The Resurrection, an altarpiece for the principal Jesuit church in Rome, the Gesù. That work is now lost, but, to judge by Baglione’s preparatory study in the Louvre, it was a clumsy and grandiose essay in the same proto-Baroque idiom as Carracci’s Assumption of the Virgin. In the sketch Christ stands heavily on a stage-flat cloud as angelic choirs hymn his heavenward ascent. Below on earth, one of the soldiers guarding the tomb gets drowsily to his feet, while others snooze or look on in laboured poses of amazement.
Baglione could carry off the mock sublimity of a parody like the Divine Love. But when he strove for effects of awe-inspiring transcendence, he was undone both by his lack of skill and by the essentially prosaic nature of his imagination. His shortcomings can only have been magnified by the scale of the altarpiece for the Gesù: eight metres high and nearly five across.56 The picture was in its allotted place by Passiontide 1603, but kept under wraps until Easter Sunday itself, the day of the Resurrection. It seems never to have been much loved. Caravaggio and his friends set the tone for its reception by poking fun at it from the moment it was unveiled. There would be no protests when it was quietly removed from the church towards the end of the seventeenth century, following alterations to the transept altars.
Caravaggio observed (and probably helped to orchestrate) the picture’s unfavourable reception with rancorous pleasure. He was already annoyed that Baglione had been given such a prestigious assignment – and all the more irritated because he suspected that Baglione had won the job through the ruse of offering his satire, the Divine Love, to Benedetto Giustiniani. Cardinal Giustiniani was a Jesuit and had probably intervened with the general of the order, Claudio Acquaviva, to obtain the commission for Baglione. So when his rival produced his monumental flop, Caravaggio decided that it was the moment to take his revenge. What better time to kick a man than when he is down?
Shortly after Easter Sunday 1603 a couple of newly composed satirical poems caused something of a sensation in the artists’ quarter of Rome. Copies were passed round. Impromptu recitals were held. The verses were aimed at ‘Gioan Bagaglia’ or ‘Gian Coglione’, ‘John Baggage’ or ‘Johnny Testicle’. They were not the most ingenious nicknames for Giovanni Baglione, but they were effective. One of the poems also included a swipe at ‘Mao’, the alias of Tommaso Salini, who was a minor still life painter and Baglione’s closest associate.
The first poem is crude and makeshift, a mock-sonnet with all the subtlety of a punch in the face:
Gioan Bagaglia tu no[n] sai
un ah
le tue pitture sono pituresse
volo vedere con esse
ch[e] non guadagnarai
mai una patacca
Ch[e] di cotanto panno
da farti un paro di bragesse
ch[e] ad ognun mostrarai
quel ch[e] fa la cacca
portela adunque
i tuoi disegni e cartoni
ch[e] tu ai fatto a Andrea pizzicarolo
o veramente forbete ne il culo
o alla moglie di Mao turegli la potta
ch[e] libelli con quel suo cazzon da mulo più non la fotte
perdonami dipintore se io non ti adulo
ch[e] della collana ch[e] tu porti indegno sei
et della pittura vituperio.57
John Baggage you don’t even know
That your pictures are mere woman’s-work
I want to see
That you won’t even earn a counterfeit penny from them
Because with as much canvas
As it would take to make yourself a pair of breeches
You can show everyone
What shit truly is
Therefore take
Your drawings and cartoons
That you have made, to Andrea the grocer’s shop
[so he can wrap fruit and veg in them]
Or wipe your arse with them
Or stuff them up the cunt of Mao’s wife
Because he isn’t fucking her anymore with his donkey cock
Pray pardon me, painter, if I do not worship you
Because you don’t merit that chain you wear round your neck
And your painting deserves only vituperation.
Benedetto Giustiniani’s award of a gold chain to Baglione evidently still rankled. Rubens, Van Dyck and Rembrandt would all paint themselves wearing chains of gold, symbols of accomplishment and courtly patronage. It was a mark of intellectual distinction, a sign of honour, but it had been conferred on Baglione for painting a picture that explicitly dishonoured Caravaggio.
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