Heretics and Heroes

by Thomas Cahill

  1565–1680: CHARRING THE WOOD

  In the straitened new atmosphere of Reformation and Counter-Reformation, it is not surprising that art took a nosedive. What follows Michelangelo is a long procession of imitators. If they’re not imitating Michelangelo (who was not really imitable), they’re imitating Raphael to even worse effect. They are called the Mannerists, and we will pass over them in silence.

  At last we come to Caravaggio, who’s the real deal. Though Caravaggio certainly would have his own imitators, he himself imitated no one. His real name was Michelangelo Merisi, a Lombardian who hailed from Caravaggio, near Milan. Quite early he set himself a course in very nearly direct opposition to his great namesake. He rejected the idea that art should be elevated in subject or ennobling of purpose. According to one of his critical contemporaries, Caravaggio “knew no master other than the model.” And his model could be anyone, the odder, the more begrimed, the funkier the better. He was a realist, indeed a superrealist, in an age of idealists.

  When he paints Bacchus, god of wine, his god has nothing godlike about him [Plate 23]. In fact, he’s a sick kid. Sick Caravaggio was himself the model for this picture, observing his own image in a mirror, for at the time he could not afford to employ a model.

  When he paints a basket of fruit—the first artist to paint a stilllife since ancient times—that’s what it is: a basket of fruit [Plate 24], extraordinarily real in every respect, so real it almost seems about to pop out of its frame and hit us in the face. Why had still-life subjects dropped out of art? Because they weren’t considered sufficiently significant. Symbolism? Drama? Yes, there are symbolism and drama, if you consider that in this deceptively simple image Caravaggio shows us green leaves and brown, healthy fruit and spotted. Think whatever you like, Caravaggio would have said, it’s just a basket of fruit.

  Even Caravaggio’s pictures of traditional religious subjects, painted as commissions for the usual cast of cardinals, titled patrons, and wealthy merchants, were shocking in their sheer nitty-grittiness. His Madonna dei Pellegrini (Our Lady of the Pilgrims) [Plate 25] provoked enormous consternation when it was first displayed in the Roman Church of Sant’Agostino, where it may nonetheless still be seen. Who is the utterly ordinary-looking woman holding a child who might be seen in any backstreet of the city? Why, she actually seems weighed down by him. Is her forehead glowing, or is she sweating? What poor hovel is it that she is emerging from? Why is there so much darkness, such obscurity? And those unthinkable peasants on their knees! Without boots! And with their dirty legs and filthy feet!

  The first audiences to view this picture were scandalized by its lack of reverence and propriety. Caravaggio would no doubt have answered as did Michelangelo to Pope Julius, “But they are all poor people.” Nor was Caravaggio lacking in religious conviction. Among his very last paintings is The Denial of Saint Peter [Plate 26], in which Peter, achingly frightened, abjectly ashamed, denies that he knows Jesus on the night of his arrest. It is the very picture of the sinner in horror at himself as he commits his sin. It is, by far, the most effective (and affecting) image ever made of this scene, though one might say upon examination that it could very nearly have been painted by Rembrandt, a spiritual son of Caravaggio.

  We have seen in the course of our bus tour several Davids. Caravaggio was also drawn to the subject of the young David, but whereas our other artists tended to imagine themselves (more or less) as David himself, Caravaggio at the end of his brief life imagines himself as the beaten Goliath, his head already severed from his body. The face of Goliath, modeled on the artist’s own, is now a ravaged face, disfigured in one of his many knife fights [Plate 27]. This was a man who knew the depths of his own darkness, who saw himself (though he would never have admitted it) as God’s own charcoal. In the words of Francis Thompson, another boozing, brawling street person of a later century:

  Ah! Must—

  Designer infinite!—

  Ah! Must Thou char the wood ere Thou canst limn with it?

  And yet Caravaggio was also a man capable of great enjoyment. He seems to have loved his models, all of them, men and women, the seductive and the desiccated, the beautiful and the ugly, the impish and the broken. Kenneth Clark is right to compare him to D. H. Lawrence in his “thoroughgoing sensuality,” which “has about it a kind of animal grandeur” and “that conquest of [sexual] shame which D. H. Lawrence attempted in prose.”

  He died in a hospice in Port’Ercole, Tuscany, after losing all his belongings, including his paintings, in a travel mix-up during which the boat to Rome took off without him. His desperation at his loss impelled him to run frantically up the beach after the boat in the full glare of the summer sun, after which he collapsed. He died of fever a few days later, weeks short of his thirty-ninth birthday.

  Let us conclude with the ever resourceful Gian Lorenzo Bernini, a man on top of the world, almost the exact opposite of poor, doomed Caravaggio, though Caravaggio was indeed one of his inspirations. Born in Naples to a Neapolitan mother, Bernini was sired by a Mannerist sculptor from Florence. The family soon moved to Rome, where the boy was sculpting prodigiously by the time he was eight. Bernini, a daily mass-goer and frequent communicant, ended each day in prayer at Rome’s new Jesuit church and was a vocal advocate for the hard-edged Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola. He was in every respect a fervent Counter-Reformation Catholic. He was also a highly competitive, high-pressured, vindictive son of a bitch, who could never bear to lose any match or contest. His David [Plate 28] is depicted not before or after the contest with Goliath, as had been all other youthful Davids, but on the very edge of his success. All of Bernini’s own pumping aggression has gone into this sculpture, in which there is no coy hint of lissome weakness, only floods of testosterone and an overwhelming will to win. David’s face is a not very concealed idealization of Bernini’s own.

  Ruthless with rivals and demanding every compliance from his many mistresses, the sculptor once ordered a servant to cut up the face of one of those mistresses—a woman who was the wife of his assistant—when Bernini discovered her two-timing him with Bernini’s own brother, whose ribs the artist broke with a crowbar. How he squared these activities with his evening prayers we don’t know.

  But there is no taking away from Bernini the imprint he left on the city of Rome, an imprint greater than that of any other single artist. To him belongs the still-breathtaking Piazza Navona with its three soaring fountains. To him we must credit Saint Peter’s Square, the most extraordinary public space in the world, and the Scala Regia, the grand stairway that leads to the Vatican Palace. To him we must assign much of the interior of Saint Peter’s: the sheltering baldacchino with its unique, oscillating columns that surround the papal altar, the enormous, floating Chair of Saint Peter in the apse, and the luminous window with its depiction of the Holy Spirit as a dove entering its sanctuary.

  Bernini’s talent was as theatrical as it was sculptural. His combinations of paint, glass, sculpture, architecture, and light were principally intended as dramatic stage sets for the public performance of religious belief and theological assertion. Perhaps his most successful continuing performance may be found in the Cornaro Chapel of the Roman Church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, where we encounter the great female saint of the Counter-Reformation, Teresa of Ávila, wounded by the spear of love administered by an angel [Plate 29]. The scene is based on Teresa’s own description of her experience:

  I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron’s point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it. The soul is satisfied now with nothing less than God. The pain is not bodily, but spiritual; though the body has its share in it. It is a caressing of love so sweet which
now takes place between the soul and God, that I pray God of His goodness to make him experience it who may think that I am lying.

  Though we would normally think such language metaphorical, Teresa seems bent on having us take her literally. But by turning his sculpture of her experience into an elaborately staged spectacle, Bernini may be showing the viewer more than he intended. The longer we contemplate Teresa and the clever appurtenances devised by Bernini to frame the scene, the more likely we are to note the magician’s sleight of hand in the construction, and the more the spectacle seems not so much divinely inspired as earthbound. As one worldly Roman lady was heard to remark when Saint Teresa in Ecstasy was first unveiled, raising an eyebrow as she made her comment: “If that’s spiritual ecstasy, I’ve experienced it.”

  DATES OF THE ARTISTS WHOSE WORK IS DISCUSSED IN CHAPTER II

  Several artists are known—in an affectionate Italian custom—by their first name only or by their nickname (in which case their legal name follows in parentheses).

  Masolino da Panicale (Tommaso di Cristoforo Fini)

  c. 1383–c.1447

  Donatello (Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi)

  c. 1386–1466

  Masaccio (Tommaso di ser Giovanni di Simone)

  1401–1428

  Piero della Francesca

  c. 1415–1492

  Andrea del Verrocchio

  c. 1435–1488

  Botticelli1 (Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi)

  c. 1445–1510

  Ghirlandaio (Domenico di Tommaso di Currado di  Doffo Bigordi)

  1449–1494

  Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci2

  1452–1519

  Filippino Lippi

  c. 1457–1504

  Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni

  1475–1564

  Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino)

  1483–1520

  Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi)

  1571–1610

  Gian Lorenzo Bernini

  1598–1680

  1 “Botticelli” means “Little Barrels,” rather an odd nickname. The artist’s older brother was first nicknamed “Botticello” (Little Barrel). Why the name subsequently accrued to the artist and why it turned plural, no one knows, but—at least in his self-portrait—he does not appear to have been either barrel-shaped or little.

  2 As with so many of the names from this period, Leonardo’s “di ser Piero da Vinci” is not a genuine surname, merely a designation, indicating “(son) of Sir Piero from Vinci.”

  1 The unfinished Virgin and Child and St. Anne of perhaps 1510, which hangs in the Louvre.

  2 His full name was Gian Giacomo Caprotti da Oreno. His nickname, Il Salaino or Little Unclean One (that is, the Devil), was shortened to Salai.

  3 Fresco technique is described in Mysteries of the Middle Ages, page 248.

  4 The Guelphs were the party of Dante—and of all the good people of Florence. See Mysteries of the Middle Ages, pages 276-277.

  5 These are complications that never occurred to Matthew and Luke, the narrators of these events in the gospels. For a complete treatment of the function of virginity in the gospel narratives, I commend to the reader the extraordinary God and Sex: What the Bible Really Says by the exquisitely precise American scripture scholar Michael Coogan.

  6 This figure is originally called Chloris. She becomes the goddess Flora upon congress with Zephyr. Her feast of May 1 was observed with wild delight by the ancient Romans. The Ludi Florales (or Floral Sports) were actually celebrated from April 28 to May 2 and were conducted, in the dry description of The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature, “without much restraint.” This background was known to Botticelli.

  7 Dante called his poem Commedia. “La Divina” was added later.

  8 “Ghirlandaio,” a nickname meaning “Garland-maker,” refers to the fact that this artist started out as a designer of garland-shaped necklaces for his goldsmith father. The graceful necklaces were much treasured by the jewelry-loving women of Florence, but Ghirlandaio also went on to become an important painter, though his work shows little influence on the work of Michelangelo. Nonetheless, artistic-intellectual Florence comprised a tight social circle: for example, one of Ghirlandaio’s earliest panels, the Madonna of Mercy, decorates the wall above the sepulcher of Simonetta Vespucci.

  9 È uno coi coglioni in Italian.

  III

  NEW THOUGHTS FOR NEW WORLDS

  DEVIANT MONKS

  You two are book-men.

  Love’s Labour’s Lost

  1500–1517: ERASMUS AND LUTHER

  Erasmus of Rotterdam—for so he called himself, even though he spent but the first few years of his life in (or near) that city—was the poor bastard son of a Dutch priest. A narrative—somewhat confusing, in all likelihood deliberately so—of his early years is contained in his Compendium Vitae (Summary of My Life). It seems that when he was still in his teens both his parents died of plague, after which he was sent by his legal guardians, who wished to discharge their responsibilities as expeditiously as was seemly, to a tuition-free boarding school run by the Brethren of the Common Life. The Brethren had begun as a lay association of similarly minded men who endeavored to follow the example of Jesus by living as simply and prayerfully as possible. Erasmus soon enough found himself forced to take monastic vows in the convent of the Augustinian canons at Steyn near Gouda, so that he might continue to be fed and housed once his school years were over and the small inheritance left by his father had dwindled to nothing—thanks, according to Erasmus, to the guardians’ mismanagement. By the time Columbus set sail, Erasmus had been ordained a priest. It was, in one respect, an unequal exchange: Erasmus had received no inner call to be a cleric and had to spend much of the rest of his life putting distance between himself and his official vocation.

  His encounter with the Brethren, however, gave him solid building blocks on which to construct a career. At their school—of which Erasmus has little good to say—the boy had been turned to the pleasures of the intellect, especially to the spirit of Italian humanism and Renaissance textual scholarship, which were slowly gaining adherents in northern Europe. Moreover, the Brethren were devoted to a book—possibly, after the Bible, the most influential book in all of Western history—by one of their predecessors, The Imitation of Christ, the masterwork of Thomas à Kempis, written a century earlier, which pointed the reader toward constant meditation on the events in the life of Jesus as depicted in the gospels. The practical purpose of this meditation was to implement the advice and imitate the example of Jesus in one’s own life, insofar as that was possible. This evangelical1 bias—that is, this predisposition for interpreting all matters through the perspective of Jesus and the challenge of the gospels—remained with Erasmus for the rest of his life. Humanistic learning in original languages and enthusiasm for ancient texts and their interpretation were combined in Erasmus with his profound reverence for the received words of Jesus.

  For more than a thousand years, the only Bible known to Christians in the West was the translation called the Vulgate (this page). Over time, despite the fact that Jerome may have had to rely in some instances on inferior Hebrew manuscripts, the Vulgate accrued virtually infallible status in the monolingual Western Church, whose intellectual resources had been so diminished.

  The Vulgate was not infallible but, like any large translation ever made, contained both obvious mistakes and passages and phrases the accuracy of which was arguable. By Erasmus’s day, however, the ability to read Greek and even Hebrew (both of which had been virtually unknown to Christian scholars of the West in the Middle Ages) was becoming more usual, at least among the learned. And this development, supported by the spreading use of the printing press, enabled Erasmus to carve out an original career: he became the first writer to live by his writing. He was indeed the inventor of the bestseller.

  His first book, Adagia (Adages), was a collection of Latin sayings and phrases, which Erasm
us had culled from antiquity, some attributable,2 others copied by Erasmus from classical monuments, still others as anonymous as the most ancient of ancient writings. The Adagia could hardly have been simpler in concept and execution, but it caught something of the mood of the time—a popular quest for ancient roots—and was an enormous success in its first edition as well as in its several subsequent editions, each edition expanded and containing ever more notes and diverting mini-essays by Erasmus. Thanks to this collection, modern European languages contain translated variants of many of the simple sayings originally collected by Erasmus, such as “Festina lente” (“Make haste slowly”). Such seemingly timeless bons mots as “to call a spade a spade,” “a cough for a fart,” “crocodile tears,” “the bowels of the earth,” “to look a gift horse in the mouth,” “In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king,” “There’s many a slip ’twixt the cup and the lip,” “Leave no stone unturned,” “Fields are green far away,” and thousands more may be traced ultimately to the Adagia.

  Erasmus’s second book was entitled Enchiridion Militis Christiani (Handbook for a Christian Knight), and with it the author took his first uncertain step into the fray of controversy. He himself tells us how he came to write it, driven out of Paris, where he was then studying, to the castle of Tournehem on account of a recurrence of plague. At the castle resided a knight, a friend of Erasmus, whose wife was “of a deeply religious turn of mind, while he himself was no man’s enemy but his own—a spendthrift plunged in fornication and adultery, but in other respects a pleasant companion in every way.” The pious wife entreated Erasmus to “write something that might get a little religion into the man,” for she was “fearfully concerned about her husband’s salvation.” Erasmus goes on to boast—modestly—that he was chosen for this unenviable task because the man to be addressed had “the greatest contempt for all theologians, except for me.”