Caravaggio: A Passionate Life

by Seward, Desmond

  V

  The Flight from Milan, 1592

  We do not know why Caravaggio left Milan, but he left as a very young man and never returned. Mancini, in a barely legible note scrawled in his Considerations, says that Caravaggio was in a brawl involving “a nobleman and a whore,” during which a sbirro (policeman) was killed, and that he then spent a year in prison and was forced to sell his patrimony. Bellori seems to confirm the note, writing that “because of some sort of strife he fled from Milan.” In his copy of Baglione’s Lives of the Painters he amplified this, scribbling in the margin that Caravaggio had been forced to escape from the city after killing someone.

  Bloodshed was an everyday occurrence in sixteenth-century Milan. The streets were dangerous because they were so narrow. Pious Milanese boasted that by the time Archbishop Borromeo died, crimes of violence had almost ceased in the city. If so, they seem to have been revived very quickly. A man might be robbed or murdered in broad daylight by an ordinary footpad, a starving Spanish soldier, or a bravo, one of the hired killers with whom every rich nobleman surrounded himself for his own protection.

  Except for lawyers or clerics, any man with the slightest pretension to status wore a rapier and a long dagger. The swarming slum-dwellers also went armed, with knives, which they were ready to use at the least provocation. The ragged, venal sbirri (policemen) with their rusty halberds and cumbersome muskets were more of a menace than a safeguard. Much of the violence stemmed from the example set by the Spaniards, the Lombard nobility adopting hidalgismo, the outlook of the Spanish aristocrat, or would-be aristocrat, and becoming much haughtier and readier to take offense. Milanese merchants and bankers copied their arrogance, although well aware that a true nobleman regarded anyone connected with trade with the utmost contempt.

  Montaigne once observed that everybody went to Italy to learn how to fence. Duelling was fashionable all over Lombardy, especially at the capital. Caravaggio’s contemporaries associated a rapier with him as much as they did a paintbrush. Made by renowned swordsmiths, Milanese rapiers were famous. When fighting, a swordsman crossed his fingers round the base of the three-foot blade to guide his aim, the newly invented botta lunga, or lunge, giving him an incredibly long reach. Normally a pugnale, or dagger held in the left hand, was used to deflect an opponent’s blade, but sometimes a cloak was held instead, to whirl into his face.

  In November 1588, Caravaggio sold a plot of land for 350 imperial lire, with the option of redeeming it in five years for the same sum. The most likely explanation is that he was out of work, and the widow Caravaggio could no longer afford to support him; judging from what we know of his later years, expensive clothes, gambling, and taverns may have been responsible. In July 1590, and again in March 1591, he and his brother Giovan Battista, the future priest, sold more land, which suggests that the family was increasingly short of money. Apparently the other brother, Giovan Pietro, was dead by now. Their mother died at about the same time. In May 1592, Caravaggio, Giovan Battista, and their sister Caterina divided their parents’ estate among them, Caravaggio taking his share in cash. He received 393 lire, which he spent within a very short period, perhaps to pay his jailers. Obviously he kept enough to finance his flight from Milan.

  He appears to have left Lombardy toward the end of 1592. The fact that he never went back seems to confirm Mancini’s and Bellori’s statements that he had to leave quickly after getting into serious trouble with the law. His destination was Rome, and in the document dividing up the family property, mention is made of an uncle, Lodovico Caravaggio, who lived there. But it seems unlikely that he ever intended to live with Lodovico, or that Lodovico wanted him to. According to Baglione, his motive for going to Rome was his wish “to study diligently the noble art of painting.” He may also have been encouraged by the knowledge that a fair number of people from Caravaggio had settled in the city, working as artisans, shopkeepers, sword makers, notaries, and papal officials.

  The cheapest, quickest, and, on the whole, safest way of reaching Rome was to go to Genoa and travel down the coast by boat. Almost certainly, Caravaggio took this route. He would have gone by felucca, the universal ship-of-all-work until well into the present century. It was an uncomfortable voyage, lasting over a week, probably during autumn or early winter, when the Mediterranean was prone to sudden storms, and wind and rain were commoner than sunshine.

  His arrival at Ostia must have been something of an anticlimax. To discourage Muslim raiders, there was no proper port for Rome, and, a day’s march southwest, this was the nearest landing place, accessible to only the very smallest ships. Although Ostia had once been the harbor of ancient Rome, it had silted up, so that the town had become a small, miserable village in the middle of a malarial, reed-fringed lagoon. After going ashore, Caravaggio had to travel another fifteen miles over land. At last, he came to the Eternal City and entered through the crumbling gate that, long before, had been the Porta Ostienses but was now the Porta San Paolo.

  VI

  Rome, 1592

  The Rome that became Caravaggio’s home was a magic place with its churches, monasteries, palaces, and fountains set amid the majestic ruins from classical times. Only the part next to the Tiber was inhabited. More than half of the ancient city had become a wasteland, often thickly wooded, sometimes interrupted by farms or vineyards. As well as isolated chapels and abbeys and the odd villa among beautiful gardens, there were a few hamlets with cornfields in the southern area. But the overwhelming impression was of a haunted wilderness. Cows and goats grazed beside fallen marble columns, while shepherds folded their sheep in what had once been the atria of Roman mansions, and outlaws hid in noble rooms underground. There was a brooding sense of history and legend.

  Some visitors found Rome a melancholy spectacle. “What he had seen was nothing but a sepulchre,” the great essayist Montaigne wrote mournfully after his pilgrimage in 1581. But he had to admit that in the grandeur and number of its public squares, the beauty of its streets and palaces, the city was far more imposing than Paris.

  The Romans themselves—a mere hundred thousand compared to at least two million in the days of the Caesars—were enormously proud of their past. Antique statuary, constantly unearthed, was purchased eagerly by a host of distinguished collectors, including cardinals, who displayed it in galleries at their palaces and villas. Even humble artisans collected Roman coins. A young tourist from England, Thomas Nashe, grumbled that they “shewed us all the monuments that were to be seene, which are as manye as there have beene Emperours, Consulles, Oratours, Conquerours, famous painters or plaiers in Rome. Tyll this daie not a Romane (if he be a right Romane indeed) will kill a rat, but he will have some registred remebraunce of it.” Nashe adds, “I was at Pontius Pilates house and pist against it.”

  However, the vast majority of visitors, especially artists, seem to have been spellbound by the ruins. During the early years of the century, Raphael and his friends had themselves let down by ropes into the banqueting halls and bedchambers of antiquity, which they called grotte (grottoes). By the light of guttering torches they searched for grotteschi, their name for Roman murals, gazing entranced at a flickering, phantom world of gods and goddesses, nymphs and fauns.

  When Caravaggio arrived, there were also fine modern buildings. Pope Sixtus V (1585—1590) completed the dome of St. Peter’s in less than two years, totally rebuilt the Lateran Palace and the Vatican Library, enlarged the Quirinal, built the Sistine Chapel at Santa Maria Maggiore and the Loggia Sistina at St. John Lateran and new streets, notably the Via Sistina and the Via delle Quattro Fontane, besides resiting obelisks and statues all over the city. Less admirably, he demolished one or two important classical buildings but failed in his plan to convert the Colosseum into a wool factory. His greatest triumph was to be the first man since Roman times to construct, or at least restore, an aqueduct in Italy, the Acqua Felice.

  Despite his gloomy reflection that Rome was a sepulchre, Montaigne admitted that it had more rich men in c
oaches than any city he had ever seen. Lesser folk, too, could live very pleasantly. Rising early, they did most of their work in the morning, before dining frugally at twelve—an astonishingly late hour by northern standards—after which they rested till six. The evening, interrupted by a light supper at about nine, and much of the night were devoted to amusement, in particular to promenading.

  The city was especially cheerful during the Carnival before Lent, with pageants and floats, masks and masquerades, cockfights, jousting matches, and battles with sugared almonds (the original confetti). Races were run along the Corso by donkeys and buffalo, urged on mercilessly with whips and goads. There were also races by wretched old men and by Jews, who, after being stripped naked, were forced to take part and then pelted with rotten eggs, dead cats, and every sort of filth as they ran. The Corso races always culminated in a wild gallop by fifteen superb Arabian horses.

  In its own way, Lent was no less colorful. Brethren from a hundred pious confraternities thronged the streets in hooded gowns of white, red, blue, green, or black, with masks that concealed their faces except for the eyes. On the night of Maundy Thursday, Rome looked as if it were on fire when the brethren marched to St. Peter’s in their thousands, each bearing a lighted torch. In their midst were five hundred hooded penitents with naked backs, which they scourged till the blood ran.

  On Holy Saturday—Easter Eve—the supposed heads of St. Peter and St. Paul were displayed at the church of St. John Lateran. Given Caravaggio’s future obsession with severed heads, he may well have been among the bemused spectators on at least one Easter Eve.

  Throughout the year there were more somber entertainments, the most frequent and most popular being public executions. Parents brought their children to watch them, waiting breathlessly for the condemned to receive the Sacrament at the foot of the scaffold and reassure everyone that they were dying reconciled with God. Occasionally heretics—“soul murderers”—were burned, as were sodomites, although they often escaped by paying an enormous fine.

  There was also the casting out of evil spirits. Montaigne came across one quite by chance, in the chapel of a church where he had been hearing Mass. A small crowd watched a priest praying over a lunatic bound with ropes, hitting him, spitting in his face, holding a holy candle upside down to make it burn faster, and shouting threats at the devil inside the man. When he stayed crazy and was led away, the priest told the crowd that it was a particularly nasty demon and could be got rid of only by a great deal more prayer and fasting. He then described a more satisfactory exorcism he had recently conducted, driving a really big devil out of a woman; at the moment it left her body, she had vomited up its nails and claws and a large piece of scaly hide. Her friends complained that she was still “not quite herself,” but he had explained to them that another evil spirit had immediately entered her, although not such a bad one.

  However beautiful Rome may have been, there was always the threat of famine, and even without famine, innumerable beggars and abandoned children starved in the streets. In summer the Romans shivered all too frequently with the ague—malaria from the nearby marshes—and venereal diseases were rife, spread by the many prostitutes who served the bachelor officials. It was an extremely dirty place, its streets filled with human excrement. Almost the only scavengers were the pigs, who roamed everywhere. Despite pleasantly warm weather from spring to autumn, bitterly cold winds set in during the late autumn, followed by drenching rain, which fell throughout the winter.

  Rome was notoriously dangerous, even by sixteenth-century standards. If Caravaggio became a violent man, the city’s violence and savagery were in some degree responsible. Undoubtedly, there was a peculiarly sinister atmosphere at Rome, and it can have had only a baneful influence on him. Montaigne tells us that it was unsafe to walk through the city’s streets at night, that houses were constantly being broken into. Murder was commonplace. More discreet weapons than swords or guns were available. A thinbladed stiletto, properly handled, caused almost no external bleeding, while a tiny folding crossbow, easily concealed beneath a cloak, was virtually noiseless, even at close range. There was also poison, administered by a quick scratch from a “death-ring,” a fruit knife, or a lady’s hat pin.

  Pope Sixtus had succeeded in making murder less fashionable during the years just before Caravaggio’s arrival in Rome, by the most savage measures, but he had died in 1590, and Pope Clement was neither so frightening nor so effective. Gradually, the murder rate rose again. Caravaggio must have seen plenty of heads rotting on the Ponte Sant’ Angelo or over the city gates. No assessment of him should omit this background of constant violence and daily executions.

  VII

  The Rulers of Rome, 1592

  Everything in Rome revolved around the pontiff and, after him, the sixty or so resident cardinals. The Papal States were a theocracy governed by priests, and the pope was a temporal prince, an absolute monarch. In 1581 Montaigne saw the then pontiff pass by, wearing a white cassock and a red hat and cape, riding a gray horse decked in red velvet fringed with gold. After him came three cardinals on mules, a hundred mounted men at arms, bareheaded, “each with lance on thigh and in full armor,” and then a hundred monsignori and courtiers, also mounted.

  When Caravaggio arrived in Rome, the Pope was Clement VIII, only recently elected. A giant of a man, fat and white-bearded, who, from a weakness in his tear glands, often wept uncontrollably, he was kindly by nature, although he prided himself on his severity. He was also prone to fits of undignified rage. The last of the austere Counter-Reformation popes, Clement said Mass every day at noon and confessed every evening to his greatest friend, the Oratorian Cardinal Baronius.

  A recent predecessor, the dynamic Sixtus V, had made the papacy stronger than ever. It finally secured undisputed control of central Italy, and Sixtus took advantage of favorable conditions to make Rome very rich. He amassed millions in gold, by draconian reductions in the cost of the papal court and by heavy new taxes on all agricultural produce. Marshes were drained, roads and bridges repaired, farming and manufacture encouraged, all of which would have been impossible before the Spaniards’ enforced pacification of the Italian peninsula.

  At the same time, the Counter-Reformation was succeeding. The decrees of the Council of Trent were transforming Catholicism, partly because new religious orders were spreading their message, partly because enough Catholics were determined to save their religion from indifference and corruption. Today, it is difficult to appreciate the sheer power of Catholic Christianity in Italy at that period. Only a few rare eccentrics, gathered in swiftly by the Inquisition, ever felt the need or the possibility of doubting the existence of God, even if they criticized the shortcomings of priests or bishops. Science had not yet emerged. There was not even a vocabulary for atheism, while heresy barely existed. Only one or two foreign Protestants were caught from time to time, generally ending at the stake. In any case, it was impossible to be an individual in the modern sense. Well-balanced men and women were convinced that it was neither right nor proper to hold opinions contrary to those of their rulers.

  Clement VIII found himself reigning over a Rome much richer and much less threatened than it had been for centuries, leading a Church in many ways reborn. Neither a very clever nor a very forceful man, surprisingly, he was a most successful pope, and especially effective as a statesman. Not only would he receive Henry IV of France back into the Catholic fold, in the face of fierce opposition from Spain, but he used France as a counterweight against Spanish attempts to control him, and he managed to do so without alienating the Spaniards. If the Romans did not love Pope Clement, they certainly respected him.

  Next among the rulers of Rome came the Princes of the Church, the cardinals who elected the pontiff and who held all the important offices. Caravaggio must have caught glimpses of them in their magnificent palaces, open to the public; or in their black carriages drawn by black horses; or riding sidesaddle on their mules with the skirts of their long scarlet trains pinn
ed to their bridles. Invariably they were escorted by retinues of violet-clad monsignori and gentlemen in black.

  There were also the great lay princes of Rome. Although neither so powerful nor so wealthy as in the past, they were still enormously rich, with splendid palaces at Rome and immense estates in the Campagna. While they usually held some hereditary ceremonial office at the papal court, they were seldom in the city, preferring to stay at one or another of their many castles. Like the cardinals, the princes were surrounded by officials, servants, and hangers-on, so that it would need luck bordering on the miraculous for any of them to take notice of a ragged young painter in search of a patron.

  There was a whole host of other clergy at Rome, ranging from bishops to parish priests and seminarians, from abbots to monks and friars. The members of the new religious orders were especially influential. Those who stood out were the Theatines, Oratorians, and Jesuits. There is no record of Caravaggio being in contact with the Theatines, but he saw a good deal of the Oratorians and the Jesuits.

  The Oratorians, groups of priests and laymen, preached a cheerful, warmhearted religion, with emotional sermons on the need for simplicity and the value of inner voices. Marching through the streets to prayer meetings in the Catacombs or at some venerated shrine, they sang oratorios, antiphons set to music by composers such as Palestrina or Vittoria. Caravaggio may have come across the Filippini as a boy in Milan, where Borromeo gave them an enthusiastic welcome, helping them establish a Milanese Oratory. He may even have seen their founder, Filippo Neri, still alive when he came to Rome, at their church of Santa Maria in Vallicella.