by Walter Ellis
The Valide Sultan nodded. ‘Let us hope that you are right,’ she said. ‘The empire that ceases to grow creates the circumstances of its decline. But the will of Allah cannot fail. I expect great things from you and the Camerlengo. A place of honour is being prepared for each of you in the Yeni Valide mosque being built even now in Istanbul. Your names shall live forever in the memories of the faithful. I urge you to be worthy of the honour.’
The Spaniard bowed. ‘We shall not fail you,’ he said.
Fonseca could not have known it, but five hundred miles to the North preparations for the papal conclave were not in fact going according to plan. Battista had lobbied hard and paid extensive bribes from the Vatican’s own treasury to ensure the election of Camillo Borghese, the cardinal-Vicar of Rome, as successor to Pope Clement. But then the unexpected occured. Using a fortune of 300,000 écus provided by the king of France, Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini, the former cardinal-nephew, had backed Borghese’s rival, the strongly pro-French Cardinal Alessandro de’ Medici, Archbishop of Florence. Battista was outbid and de Medici was duly crowned Pope Leo XI on Easter Sunday, 1605.
It was not, as things turned out, a catastophe for Battista. France and Spain were now at each other’s throats and in no position to threaten Ottoman power. But then, even as the Camerlengo worked hard to consolidate a policy of divide and rule, de Medici died, aged seventy, having reigned for a mere twenty-seven days. Aldobrandini, still only thirty-four and too young to take the prize himself, was completely thrown by the unexpected turn of events. Lacking the funds necessary for a second round of bribery, he gave in with as much grace as he could muster. ‘We live at God’s pleasure,’ he told Battista. ‘We know neither the day nor the hour.’
Battista in reply offered the thinnest of smiles. ‘Nor yet, Eminence, the state of our bank accounts when they are most needed.’
At the year’s second conclave, the ill-preparedness of the French camp told quickly. Battista spared no effort and at the second time of asking secured the succession of Borghese. The new pontiff, taking the name Paul V, did not suffer fools gladly. He was also more mindful of his dignity than almost any other pope in the last hundred years. An ecclesiastical lawyer by training, for whom religion was a matter of observance rather than devotion, he quickly buried himself in Church business and privilege. His first concern was the promotion and elevation of his family. Once that was secured, he banished to their dioceses the hundreds of absentee cardinals and bishops who were the scandal of Rome, thus, at a stroke, preventing scores of his enemies from plotting together. Borghese, unlike his famous predecessors of the previous century, was inward-looking, preoccupied with his role as sovereign of the Holy See. To him, the Papal States were his garden and the Ottomans a remote and alien distraction. His one foreign adventure would centre on events much closer to home than the Sublime Port.
The Most Serene Republic of Venice was celebrated for its lagoon but extended west to Verona and south along the Dalmatian coast as far as Dubrovnik. The entire edifice was built on trade. While the Doge could call on an effective army and a large, efficient navy, these existed primarily to sustain the city and its hinterland as the richest entrepot in Europe, independent of the Papal States. Rome had long wished to bring Venice to heel and even to add it to its dominions. When the Doge and the ruling Council of Ten passed laws restricting the property rights of the clergy and required them to seek planning approval before building new churches, Pope Paul decided to act. Advised by Battista, he excommunicated the government and placed the whole of the Republic under an interdict, suspending public worship and denying the sacraments to its citizens. The Turks were delighted. Safiye Sultan was able to tell her grandson, Ahmed I – still just fifteen years old, but impatient to make his mark – that if he wished to expand the prestige of the empire, now was the time.
Less success accrued to Battista from his dealings with de Wignacourt. The wily Grand Master was not happy with the Camerlengo’s proposal that half his fleet be based in the Balearics to protect Spain from the Barbary pirates. Nor did he see the necessity for more than a modest flotilla to be deployed in the Atlantic against the same Moroccan raiders. But he did agree to a secondment of ten ships, and Battista had to be happy with that.
The cardinal’s one undoubted triumph was not of his own making, but an inspired response to events. Shah Abass I of Persia, whose empire had for many years been in conflict with the Ottomans, invited a delegation of Western diplomats to Isfahan and, to their great surprise, proposed an alliance with Europe against the might of Turkey. At first, the new Pope was keen to proceed. He could see value in dividing Islam against itself. But Battista would have none of it. ‘Holy Father,’ he argued, holding out his pectoral cross between the fingers of both hands, ‘such an alliance would surely be contrary to the law of God. Can we permit our soldiers to fight alongside the Persians – whose heathen beliefs are, if anything, more anathema to us than those of the Ottomans? Would Our Lord wish us to make common cause with an oriental power that denies his very divinity?’
It worked. Abbas’s overture was politely rebuffed and nothing was done. Pope Paul returned his gaze to the parish politics of Rome. In a letter to Safiye Sultan, sent via Fonseca, Battista boasted that by his action he had saved the empire, and the true faith, from possible destruction at the hands of its enemies.
Across the Tiber, Caravaggio had no triumphs to savour. Instead, as his money ran out, he spent more and more of his time reassessing his career. In some ways, he was his own worst enemy. He liked to shock. He liked to disturb. He saw no point in art that was merely devotional. Where his rivals drew from an established palette of ideas and images, he tried to engage his public in an argument. He was also an impresario, for whom art was, above all, theatre. Patrons knew this. That was why they came to him. They wanted it to be said of them that they were free and independent thinkers. The trouble was that in recent years the arguments he started often ended up as rows, with consequences. A new puritanism, not unlike that said to be stalking England, had entered Rome with Paul V. Orthodoxy, not exploration, was back in vogue. These days, a patron would as likely as not wait to see what the opinion-formers in the Curia had to say about a painting before adopting that opinion as their own. This was good, or at any rate profitable, if the response from the top was positive, but disastrous in the event of a thumbs down.
The way Caravaggio saw it, the consensus among the greybeards was that he was an unsettling, possibly heretical figure, whose influence, formerly given free rein, ought now to be curbed. His own view was that his critics were medicocre men, steeped in the banality of greed, who recognized his genius but would rather die than admit it. The result was that his situation was becoming desperate. His canvases hung in churches, in the halls of cardinals and princes, even in the Vatican itself. But as his enemies and rivals observed with relish, he no longer had the wherewithal to open a knocking shop in Ortaccio.
He thanked God for Orsi, his flagbearer and truest friend, who did what he could for him, settling his wine bill and securing him several private commissions. Longhi, too, mentioned his name all over town. After he was thrown out of his lodgings in the Vicolo Cecilia e Biagio for non-payment of rent, it was the poet who found him refuge near the Piazza Colonna with the lawyer Andrea Ruffietti.
His eviction was a humiliation. Even now, he trembled with rage at the memory of it. It was his own fault. He should have known better than to venture out, with drink taken, wearing a sword. He had been arrested for the same offence just weeks before and warned about his future behaviour. Then again, if bloody Lena Antognetti, that daft little strumpet, who everybody knew was his woman, hadn’t got herself pregnant by that bastard lawyer Pasqualone, there wouldn’t have been any need for a confrontation. What was he supposed to have done? Pasqualone was boasting that he’d won out in an affair of the heart against the great Caravaggio. People were sniggering. Even then, if the damned fool hadn’t stepped out in front of him in the Piazza Navon
a, he might have got away with it. But there he was, plain as day, smelling of cologne, dressed like an undertaker. It was the work of an instant to smack him in the back of the head with the hilt of his sword. It wasn’t a proper wound, it was a challenge Anyone else would have turned and faced him. But not Pasqualone. Instead, he screamed for the sbirri, who came running, almost out of nowhere. ‘The painter Caravaggio’ had tried to murder him, the little worm had told them. Well, that was it. He should have done for him there and then. But remembering the warning from Battista, he decided not to hang around. Instead, within a matter of hours, he was on the road to Genoa, where the Doria family had offered him work.
As it happened, the commission in Genoa, for an ambitious sequence of frescoes, didn’t interest him – though it would have made him a rich man. He had never trusted himself at frescoes – all that wet plaster – and was concerned, in addition, that if he stayed out of Rome too long he would be forgotten. Instead, he took the advice of Doria’s lawyer and apologized fulsomely to Pasqualone for his insolence. Groveling was not in his nature, and it rankled with him to beg the forgiveness of a man who had set out to cuckold him. But life away from Rome was, if anything, more unbearable. Two weeks later, after learning that his apology – posted by Pasqualone in the portico of Santa Maria Maggiore – had been accepted, he journeyed south once more to pick up his career.
His return proved as tempestuous as his leaving. His landlady, he discovered, had evicted him from his lodgings and disposed of his possessions as if he were an impecunious student. He had protested, of course. He even threw stones at her windows, causing the small crowd that gathered to erupt with laughter – though whether it was with him or at him, he wasn’t sure. To add insult to his injury, an inventory of his worldly goods, seized in lieu of rent, was pinned by the official receiver to what had been his front door: a bed; several stools (‘one broken’); a guitar; a violin without strings; two swords; a couple of daggers; two large, unfinished paintings; a mirror; three devices used for tightening canvases; a painting on wood; a wooden tripod … and an unopened letter. As a litany of his misfortune, it made dismal reading. No clothing was mentioned, which surprised some people, but not those who knew him. According to Orsi, Guido Reni, a second-rate painter but a first-class cardsharp, had remarked to anyone listening in the Turk’s Head: ‘Any clothes Michelangelo owns, he’s wearing.’
The whole episode had soured him. How had it come to this, that he should end up a figure of fun to the populace? Most of the city’s other artists weren’t fit to tie his bootlaces. Only Annibale Carracci was worth a damn. But they knew how to work the system. That was why they were in favour and he was not.
Using the silk scarf around his neck to wipe the grime from a window of the tiny living room of his temporary lodgings – accommodation that he had moaned was better suited to a servant than a master – Caravaggio stared out at the street beyond. It was a late evening in May. The Piazza Navona was no more than fifty paces away and as the sun drifted beneath the horizon, the human comedy, as ever, played out before him. The fishmonger opposite, wiping his streaming nose with a corner of his apron, was disposing of his unsold stock, the pungent stench of which completely overpowered the scent of Alyssum flowers drifting down from an overhead balcony; an old man wearing patched-together rags, looking as if he had made the narrowest of escapes from an outbreak of the plague, sat on an upturned box plucking at a lute, while an equally diseased-looking monkey on his shoulder held out a miniature basket; a fat-bellied fire-eater, wearing an extravagant turban, exhaled a foot-long tongue of flame, then smiled hopefully at his audience through a mouthful of missing teeth.
Caravaggio turned away. He had had enough. Was that how people saw him – a tradesman or street entertainer, applauded one day, forgotten the next? There was no hiding the fact that his life had gone from bad to worse. Paintings for important patrons remained unfinished; the sbirri never let up on him, accusing him of brawling and affray, looking for the chance to lock him up and toast his feet over a brazier of burning coals. He was losing control. Not long before, he had returned home in the early hours wounded in the ear and throat, with blood streaming down his jerkin. He had no idea what happened and had taken to telling anyone who asked that he had fallen on his own sword while drunk, which could even have been true. Fate, though, took no account of the aggregation of circumstance. It was while he was recovering from his wounds, absorbed in self-pity, unable even to lift a brush, that he had been awarded one of the most important commissions of his career.
St Peter’s Basilica, the largest church in Christendom, remained a work-in-progress. Thirteen popes so far had come and gone, and still the construction went on. To be displayed in St Peter’s was the ultimate accolade for any artist and Caravaggio was determined to seize the opportunity. It was Cardinal Del Monte, his former patron, who had spoken for him – which was typical. Del Monte gave painters the latitude they needed. He knew better than anyone that the wind blowing through the Vatican had changed and was careful these days whom he promoted. But the opportunity was exceptional and only Caravaggio, he felt, could do it justice. The canons and cardinals in charge of the basilica had decided that a vacant altarpiece in the northwest corner should be assigned to the Confraternity of the Palafrenieri, or Papal Grooms – bankers, merchants and lawyers, mostly – who shamelessly used their connections to advance their careers. The Grooms’ patron saint was St Anne, the mother of the Virgin Mary, widely venerated as a virtuous woman. It was well known that Caravaggio had been planning a St Anne canvas for at least the last two years, and it was this fact that Del Monte used as his trump card.
The question was, was the artist up to it?
‘I can do this,’ he told Orsi over a pitcher of wine in the Turk’s Head. ‘I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking I’ll miss the deadline or produce something they can’t accept. But I won’t. The Palafrenieri may be a bunch of bastards, but they’ll still get my best work, Prosperini, depend on it.’
‘I don’t doubt it,’ Orsi said. ‘You’ve never produced anything second-rate in your life. But, for God’s sake, try to remember who’s paying you. This lot aren’t only hypocritical and pompous, they’re vindictive and they’re greedy – and they have the ear of the Pope. Give them what they want, Michelangelo. Don’t tempt fate.’
It took him three months. He worked on it every day and almost every night, sometimes until dawn. Finally, it was done and, with huge Vatican fanfare, the Madonna dei Palafrenierni was placed over the vacant altar. Three days later, at the height of one of the most vicious whispering campaigns in the city’s artistic history, it was removed.
The whole of Rome, it seemed, had queued up to have a go at the man who for years was their favourite son. The Virgin’s dress was disgracefully low-cut, an Austrian archbishop said. How had he put it? ‘Her dumplings were boiling over.’ Another prelate, clearly familiar with his model, complained that St Anne had been represented as a retired whore. But particular ire was reserved for the figure of the Christ child, who, with his Holy Mother was pictured stamping upon a serpent – evidently the Devil – while his infant penis jutted out towards the congregation.
Was that a provocation too far? Caravaggio asked himself. What was too far, anyway? And who got to draw the line? Whoever it was, he had crossed it. What incensed him was that, privately, the artistic community of Rome, led by Del Monte and Guistiniani, acknowledged that the composition was a masterpiece. They loved it. But the canons of San Pietro – as self-serving a group of hypocrites as any in Christendom – weren’t having it. They were affronted, they said, and all they would pay him for his months of labour was seventy-five scudi. But that wasn’t the end of it – as he never thought it would be. Like Death of the Madonna, the painting itself was quickly sold on – at a handsome profit. The next thing he knew, it was in the private collection of Scipione Borghese, the cardinal-nephew, along with five other of his works, including David with the Head of Goliath and a recentl
y completed portrait of the Pope. Scipione’s homosexuality was an open secret in Rome. His worldly ambition would have shamed Nero. Not only did he set the artistic standards of the age, he also worked with the Church to fix the prices. Everyone, it seemed, could make a profit out of Caravaggio except Caravaggio himself.
Later that night, having once again measured his considerable debts against his meagre resources, the artist climbed the narrow stairs to his studio. Using the candle that had guided his way, he lit five of the lanterns he employed for painting at night. Some of his detractors held it against him that the colours he used were too rich and overly accentuated. They accused him of cheap trickery and of using light like a stage prop. Caravaggio ignored their strictures, which he dismissed as jealousy. He had no doubt of his place in the pantheon, alongside da Vinci, Michelangelo, Titian and Raphael. Nor did he doubt the fact that his rivals, including his friends, were, at best, second-rate.
But while none who knew him doubted the sincerity of his vision, especially his devotion to the art of chiaroscuro, of which he was the acknowledged master, Caravaggio had another, practical reason for eschewing the subtleties of daylight. His nightmares, always frequent, were now constant. The horrors of the Cenci executions had been joined by a recurring dream in which he himself was dragged from a prison cell – or else set upon in a church – and decapitated, either by sword or axe. The worst dreams were those in which he remained conscious after his head was struck from his shoulders, so that he gazed up at his executioner – often a thick-bearded Turk who grinned as he wiped the blade of his scimitar – unable to speak, or even to blink, waiting for the eternal darkness to enfold him. That was when he woke up screaming and clutching at his neck, mistaking the sweat that poured down his face for blood. So it was not merely that he was fascinated by the interplay between light and shade. He also wished desperately to remain awake.