Caravaggio: A Passionate Life

by Seward, Desmond

  The Jesuit church, the magnificent Gesù, was still being built all through his stay in Rome. With his temperament, he must have been alarmed by the Jesuits’ uncompromising discipline but, like everyone else, could not have helped admiring their heroism. They trained their men to welcome death, encouraging them to become martyrs, which was why they commissioned scenes of martyrdom for their churches. The Spiritual Exercises, the Jesuit training manual, declared that “no wild animal on the face of the earth can be more ferocious than the enemy in our human nature.” It stressed the inevitability of death and brevity of human life. Dying was not to be dreaded but welcomed as the gate of Heaven.

  Although Caravaggio received important commissions from the Oratorians and only just failed to secure one from the Jesuits, there is no evidence that he ever belonged to a circle dominated by either order. Even so, he must have heard countless sermons by them; in Counter-Reformation Rome it was impossible to remain unaware of Oratorian and Jesuit ideals. The mature Caravaggio’s extraordinarily direct approach when painting, his uncompromising realism, probably owes much more than we realize to the Oratorians.

  Both orders were building churches. They required pictures urgently, to proclaim their message. Unfortunately for the young Caravaggio, so far they only wanted frescoes, and he did not know how to paint them.

  VIII

  The Hack Painter, 1592–1596

  When Caravaggio reached Rome, he was penniless. He had brought brushes, paint, and canvases with him from Milan, but, according to Bellori, he could not afford to pay the modest fees charged by the models whom he then thought indispensable. He drifted into the Campo Marzio in the center of Rome, by all accounts one of the city’s poorest areas. While sleeping out of doors was not too much of a hardship for a young man during the Roman summer, we know from the Venetian ambassador’s dispatches that there was a severe famine in 1593, which began in April and lasted until the harvest. Normally, he could have expected to live on the food doled out to the homeless by religious orders, but because of the shortage of grain this must have been drastically curtailed. He was lucky not to die from starvation.

  Fortunately, Monsignor Pandolfo Pucci, an eminent cleric on the staff of St. Peter’s, lent him a room. Caravaggio had to pay for it by some kind of work, which he later recalled with a touch of bitterness as “demeaning services,” perhaps those of a scullion in the monsignor’s kitchen. All he got to eat was a salad in the evenings that, he said with a laugh afterward, “had to do for breakfast, dinner and supper.” But, even if Pucci’s hospitality was scarcely lavish, it enabled Caravaggio to survive.

  The monsignor was steward to a sister of the late Pope Sixtus, whose family, the Peretti, were closely related to the Sforza Colonna. It is more than likely that Caravaggio had written to the Marchesa Costanza, begging for help, and that she had asked Pucci to take him in.

  He found time and working space to copy some devotional pictures, which the miserly Pucci admired enough to buy and eventually took back with him to his hometown of Recanati. During this period, Caravaggio also painted the Youth Bitten by a Green Lizard, now at Florence, together with a Boy Peeling a Green Citrus Fruit, a portrait of the keeper of an inn where he had once stayed, and another long-vanished portrait of which there is no description.

  After several months, he managed to leave Pucci, whom he sardonically called “Monsignor Salad,” having been hired by Lorenzo Siciliano, who was a hack painter and dealer in cheap daubs. Lorenzo’s speciality was mass-producing rough portrait heads, and Caravaggio, so poor that he went almost naked, turned out three heads a day for a few pence each. If any survive, they have not been identified. However, employment at Lorenzo’s workshop had one consolation. Another young painter was working there, Mario Minniti from Palermo, who was as poor as Caravaggio. They made friends and lived together for the next few years.

  There is no firm evidence for Caravaggio’s movements during his early years in Rome, but it looks as if he left Lorenzo’s to work for Antiveduto Grammatica, a portrait painter of about his own age who afterward had a modest success with religious themes. At the time, like Lorenzo, Antiveduto went in for mass production. Bellori believed that Caravaggio lived in Antiveduto’s house, painting half figures for him. Ironically, in later years, Antiveduto copied his former assistant’s mature style, especially the violence. Some of his paintings have been mistaken for lost works by Caravaggio.

  Caravaggio moved farther up in the world as an assistant to Giuseppe Cesari, better known as the Cavaliere d’Arpino, one of Rome’s most fashionable painters and about to become Pope Clement’s favorite artist. He specialized in historical and religious scenes, and, at their best, his paintings were graceful and hauntingly mysterious. It cannot have been easy working for him; he was vain and haughty. Caravaggio probably spent no more than six months in his workshop. During this time, he painted self-portraits with the help of a mirror. One of these, an odd, sickly little Bacchus (the Bacchino Malato), sits hunched and half naked at a table, holding up a bunch of grapes. His skin is yellowish, his face ugly, with thick lips and would-be mocking eyes. Another painting from this period is the Boy with a Basket of Fruit, which has had many highly imaginative interpretations. Some think it depicts autumn, or the sense of taste. Others consider it an allegory of Christ as Love; still others believe it contains a homosexual message. In Bernard Berenson’s whimsical view, “The ‘Fruit Seller’ is a languishing youth in a situation unsuited to his temperament.” Whatever the boy signifies, he and his basket of fruit are a magnificent study.

  Although Caravaggio did not work long for Arpino, the association ensured his emergence from obscurity. He became known to the city’s artists and connoisseurs as a young man of promise. His employer moved among Rome’s cleverest and most cultivated men, belonging to the “Academy of those without Senses,” whose members pledged themselves as Neoplatonists to forgo sensual pleasure to enjoy more fully the “celestial and divine.” Arpino also belonged to the Accademia di San Luca, revived at about this time to improve the status of Roman artists; its cardinal protector was Federigo Borromeo, Carlo’s nephew. Some of these discerning minds must have noticed the young Lombard, realizing that if Arpino employed him, he was likely to be talented.

  Despite the benefits of being associated with Arpino, Caravaggio developed a lasting hatred for him. Arpino was conceited and overbearing, and nobody ever found Caravaggio easy. Or it may have been sheer envy at the dazzling success of someone still only in his early twenties. Before they could come to blows, Caravaggio left Arpino’s workshop in January 1594, after being injured by a kick from a horse. Penniless, he had to enter a free hospital, Santa Maria della Consolazione, which specialized in nursing the victims of street accidents. During what appears to have been a lengthy convalescence, Caravaggio painted pictures for the prior in charge of the hospital, who afterward took them home with him to Spain.

  On leaving the hospital, Caravaggio worked with another widely respected artist, Prospero Orsi, a specialist in “grotesques” inspired by the ancient murals he had seen underground. The first documentary evidence for Caravaggio’s presence in Rome dates from October 1594, when his name and Prospero’s appear as members of a vigil in a church during a “Forty Hours” exposition of the Sacrament. Then he set up on his own, hoping to live by his paintings, but he failed miserably in trying to sell them. To make matters worse, he had to leave a room he had been lent at the Palazzo Petrignani. Once again, he was destitute.

  Luckily, some gentlemen of the profession came to his rescue out of pity, and Maître Valentin, a French picture dealer, at last managed to sell some of his pictures. One of them was The Fortune Teller, now at the Louvre, which shows a gypsy girl stealing a ring from a young man’s finger while she tells his fortune. Caravaggio received a mere eight scudi for it.

  This was probably during the autumn of 1596, just before a dramatic change in his own fortunes. Valentin’s shop was visited by a distinguished collector, who seems to have admi
red The Fortune Teller but was told that it had already been sold. His attention was drawn to another painting by Caravaggio, The Cardsharps (in Italian, I Bari—“The Cheats”). During the next century Bellori saw this picture in Cardinal Antonio Barberini’s collection and described it: “He depicts a callow youth holding some cards in his hands, with a head which is very well done from life, and wearing a dark suit of clothes, while facing him a young rogue leans on the table with one hand as, with the other behind him, he pulls a false card from his belt. At the same moment a third man next to the youth is reading his cards and signaling what they are to his accomplice with three fingers of his hand….”

  The picture disappeared in Paris in 1899 and, long mistaken for a copy, was rediscovered nearly a century later. It is now at Fort Worth, Texas. The Cardsharps is just the sort of low-life encounter that Caravaggio must have seen often in the seedy taverns of the Campo Marzio. For his contemporaries, the idea of portraying such a scene was utterly new and startling. The collector who bought it was Cardinal del Monte, who lived at the Palazzo Madama, within walking distance of Valentin’s shop, and who was reputed to be one of the most discerning art lovers in Rome.

  It is not difficult to guess the excitement in the shop at the sale of a picture to the cardinal. It transformed Caravaggio’s prospects. A summons came for him to present himself at the Palazzo Madama. Del Monte then asked him if he would enter his famiglia, his household of gentlemen, in servitu particolare, that is to say, do him special service as his painter in residence. He would live at the palazzo, and the cardinal would buy his paintings at a fair price. Caravaggio had found the perfect patron.

  IX

  Cardinal del Monte, 1596

  No one could have played a more benevolent role in Caravaggio’s life, or one of more vital importance to his development as an artist, than Cardinal del Monte. Seemingly without hesitation, he took the shabby, tricky-tempered young man out of the gutter into his household, where he gave him parte e provisione, a room, clothes, and an allowance of food and wine. Del Monte’s object was to enable Caravaggio to paint in peace and security. He protected and encouraged him for over four years, even taking in his no less ragged friend Mario Minniti, presumably at Caravaggio’s request.

  Del Monte is something of an enigma. The official account of his distinguished, if not very eventful, career is in Chacon’s massive history of the popes and cardinals, which was published in Rome in 1677. From the comparatively small space devoted to him, we learn that he came from a noble family in Umbria; that he was born in Venice in 1549; and that, as a boy, he had been a brilliant student of classical learning and the law. He had then gone to Rome, entering the famiglia of his cousin, Cardinal Alessandro Sforza, and becoming his right-hand man. After Sforza’s death in 1581, del Monte entered the service of Cardinal Ferdinando de’ Medici, with whom he established a lifelong friendship. When Ferdinando “resigned the Purple” in 1588 on inheriting the grand duchy of Tuscany, he petitioned Pope Sixtus to let del Monte succeed him as cardinal deacon of Santa Maria in Dominica. Consecrated Bishop of Palestrina, and then Ostia, he was dean of the College of Cardinals by the time he died in 1627.

  Among his duties was the rebuilding of St. Peter’s. He also rebuilt the ruined monastery of Sant’ Urbino for a community of Capuchin friars. He was generous to sculptors, painters, and alchemists. “On Sundays, in honor of the Blessed Virgin, he fasted on bread and water, giving alms to the poor,” writes Chacon’s continuator, and he lived with the utmost frugality, always wearing shabby clothes.

  His godfathers had been Titian, the architect Sansovino, and the satirist Aretino, friends of his father, who was a soldier in the duke of Urbino’s service. Because of his friendship with Grand Duke Ferdinando, he occupied a Medici palace, representing Tuscan interests at Rome. Essentially a bureaucrat, he was among the poorer cardinals, with an income of twelve thousand scudi but no private fortune. Although as a young man he had flirted with girls and played the guitar, in the puritanical climate of the Counter-Reformation he could scarcely help being austere. Still, his interests were never exclusively clerical. When Federigo Borromeo left Rome, his place as cardinal protector of the Accademia di San Luca was filled jointly by del Monte and Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti, author of a treatise on what sacred art should be in the light of the Council of Trent. His brother, Marchese Guidobaldi del Monte, was a famous mathematician, who had taught Galileo and introduced him to the Medici.

  He was also a keen student of alchemy, which was much more than a mere precursor of chemistry. Believing the “divine science” had little to do with magic or making gold, he thought its purpose was to “extract the quintessence of things” and prepare healing elixirs, even if a patient died after taking one. Like Paracelsus, anticipating modern psychologists, he was convinced that a dynamic spirit was at work beneath human nature. Caravaggio, who decorated del Monte’s laboratory, may have used alchemical symbolism in some of his paintings. He certainly acquired a smattering of the divine science from his patron, giving his dog the alchemical name of “Raven,” a symbol of melancholy—“the bird of Hermes that never rests.”

  Like all members of the Accademia degli Insensati, Cardinal del Monte was fascinated by Neoplatonism, a philosophy based on the belief that things are more than they seem, and that each possesses an inner reality of its own. It was reflected in the period’s taste for emblems, which were intended to alert beholders to hidden meanings within a work of art.

  Studies of Caravaggio often credit his complex, subtle patron with homosexual tastes, but their evidence is highly dubious. It consists of no more than a misreading of a report in an avviso of 1624 and a single innuendo in the Relatione della citta di Roma by Dirck Ameyden, a collection of his avvisi that was published in 1642. Handwritten news sheets, the avvisi are no more reliable than modern tabloids as historical documents. Pope Clement grumbled that they “spread lies and calumnies.”

  The report in the avviso of 1624 merely says that a cardinal had given a banquet at Palazzo della Cancellari for three other cardinals, including Cardinal del Monte, and for various gentlemen “in the usual fashion.” It relates how “for recreation there was dancing after dinner in which the best dancing-masters took part. And because there were no ladies, many youths dressed as women participated, providing no little entertainment.” This tells us nothing about del Monte’s sexuality.

  Dirck Ameyden came from the Spanish Netherlands but was brought up in Rome, where he spent the rest of his life. He claims that del Monte “loved the company of young men, not I think from evil urges, but out of natural friendship.” However, Ameyden insinuates rather more by adding that the cardinal hid feelings of this sort until the election of Urban VIII in 1623, when he “indulged openly in his tendencies.”

  Examination of Ameyden’s avvisi shows him to have been both untruthful and malicious. The near-contemporary continuators of Chacon’s history complained that Ameyden “spoke ill of almost all the cardinals and very unjustly.” As a Spanish agent, he was eager to discredit the pro-French Pope Urban and pro-French cardinals like del Monte. His sly reference to del Monte’s private life is contradicted by a Venetian ambassador’s description of the already aged cardinal in 1617, “a living corpse … wholly given up to spiritual exercises, perhaps to atone for the licence of his younger days.” Moreover, del Monte himself revealed a taste for girls in a letter written to a friend in 1608, which wistfully recalled their youth together and “all the honeyed moments with the Artemisias and Cleopatras.”

  There is no whisper of scandal about the cardinal in any other avviso, which is significant, since they were notorious for spiteful fantasy. It was a standing joke in Rome that del Monte’s friend Cardinal Alessandro Farnese had created the three most beautiful things in the city—the church of the Gesù, the Palazzo Farnese, and “La Bella Clelia,” his natural daughter, Clelia Facia Farnese, begotten in the unregenerate days before the Counter-Reformation.

  Gossip surpassed itself when del M
onte’s closest friend, the former cardinal Ferdinando de’ Medici, inherited the grand duchy of Tuscany. He was popularly rumored to have poisoned his brother, Grand Duke Francesco, and his sister-in-law, Grand Duchess Bianca. According to one story, Bianca offered a poisoned tart to Ferdinando at a banquet and, after he insisted on his brother tasting it first, she had swallowed a piece in despair. In reality, both Francesco and Bianca died of malaria.

  What is beyond question is that Francesco Maria Bourbon del Monte was one of the great patrons of early Baroque Rome. Genuinely benevolent, besides being a lover of the arts, he was a good friend to more than a few struggling artists. Everyone is in his debt for discovering Caravaggio and making possible his career.

  X

  Palazzo Madama, 1596–1600

  Caravaggio spent four years at the Palazzo Madama. His room was no better than a monk’s cell, and he probably had to wait on the cardinal at table. Although on the site of the present Palazzo Madama, now occupied by the Italian Senate, the house was completely rebuilt between 1610 and 1642. It was much smaller. From a survey made just before Caravaggio’s arrival, we know that it measured sixty by forty feet, with thirteen rooms on the ground floor—“halls, withdrawing rooms, chambers and antechambers.”

  Caravaggio would have had to pass through three or four rooms before coming to the salone. The “cupboard,” where gold and silver plate and Venetian glass were displayed, was in an adjoining room, with a buffet from which servants might fetch drink and refreshment. The furniture must have been very sparse, compensating by its magnificence, with gilded leather on the few chairs. The tapestries and hangings were of equal splendor, woven with gold or silver thread. Presumably the house’s greatest charm for Caravaggio was the picture collection. Soon his own paintings were hanging on the walls, among them The Cardsharps, the Concert of Youths, The Lute Player, a Bacchus, and a new version of The Fortune Teller, almost certainly commissioned by del Monte to accompany The Cardsharps.