Caravaggio: A Passionate Life

by Seward, Desmond

  Normally the Genoese were unpopular at Rome. They had spread all over Italy and were disliked everywhere as bankers, moneylenders, and tax collectors who bought titles and estates at knockdown prices, fawning on the Spaniards to such an extent that they were called meretrici di Spagna—“Spanish whores.” However, if the old Roman nobility may secretly have regarded the Giustiniani brothers as wealthy upstarts, they could not help being impressed by the way they spent their money. Benedetto and Vincenzo shared the same tastes, filling their palace and their villa in Bassano Romano, which contained a private theater, with paintings and classical statuary. Benedetto was particularly fond of such artists as Jan Brueghel, Gerrit van Honthorst, and Luca Cambiaso, a fellow Genoese.

  Clearly, both brothers were keen admirers of Caravaggio’s painting, eventually acquiring fifteen pictures by him, including six portraits. It has been suggested that Benedetto commissioned the religious works and Vincenzo the profane. Whatever Baglione may say about Ciriaco Mattei having bought the Incredulity of St. Thomas, it appears to have been one of the religious works painted for Benedetto. The Giustiniani did more than buy his pictures, they urged other Roman patrons to employ him.

  In a contract of September 1600 for a Crucifixion of St. Peter and a Conversion of St. Paul, Caravaggio was given a banker’s order drawn on the Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani, but the pictures were to be painted for Monsignor Tiberio Cesari, Pope Clement’s treasurer, who had bought a chapel in the church of Santa Maria del Popolo and commissioned Annibale Carraci to decorate it. Vincenzo insisted that he use Caravaggio as well. In the Crucifixion of St. Peter, Peter is a fine old man with a bald head, showing complete indifference as the cross to which he has been nailed is raised upside down by three brutish executioners; from his reflective face, he is apparently remembering how Christ suffered the same death. In the Conversion of St. Paul, the apostle lies flat on his back, blinded by the vision and raising his arms to embrace it. Above him stands his patient horse, held by a groom, both unaware that anything is happening. The vision is conveyed by an explosion of dazzling light, signifying the presence of God. An earlier version of the painting in the Odescalchi Balbi collection is not so successful, although it has the same marvelous light.

  Generally, light was the only symbolism Caravaggio employed. It had an essentially spiritual meaning for him, that of the “light shining in the darkness” of St. John’s Gospel. He used it for evoking holiness, the light of heaven as opposed to the darkness of hell, and did so very movingly in his Taking of Christ. He also used it to signify inspiration, as in his portraits of St. Matthew and St. Jerome. But nowhere did he use light more effectively than in the Conversion of St. Paul at Santa Maria del Popolo.

  Another commission was for the Discalced (Barefoot) Carmelites’ church of Santa Maria della Scala, where Laerzio Cherubini, a rich lawyer, had bought a side chapel. His professional activities having brought him into contact with Cardinal Giustiniani, he probably chose Caravaggio on the Marchese Vincenzo’s advice. In a contract drawn up in June 1601, Caravaggio agreed to paint a Death of the Virgin for an initial payment of fifty scudi, with the proviso that Vincenzo should decide the final price, which was the unusually high sum of 180 scudi. The most likely date for its completion is between November 1601 and June 1602.

  What he painted may seem strange to modern Catholics, accustomed to the dogma of the Virgin’s bodily assumption into heaven. He shows her as a corpse that has fallen asleep in the Lord, what the Orthodox Church calls the “Dormition.” At the time, it was in full accord with Catholic teaching. The Virgin’s deathbed is surrounded by grieving apostles, with a bowed Mary Magdalene seated in the foreground. This is a true portrayal of death—one can feel the sense of shock and loss among those who had loved and cherished her. She is painted with stark naturalism. Hers is an exhausted, swollen body whose naked feet and ankles project stiffly from beneath the coverlet, yet one that lacks neither grace nor dignity. In her remarkable study of the picture, Pamela Askew concludes, “In the last analysis, pictorially, the experience for the apostles, and for all the observers of his scene, is death as illumination.”

  For unknown reasons the Carmelites rejected this glorious painting. Baglione says it was because of the Virgin’s legs being “swollen and bare.” Bellori, who had not seen the picture, thought it was because he had painted the swollen body of a dead woman much too realistically. Mancini has a far more exciting explanation; Caravaggio had used as a model for the Virgin “some dirty whore from the Ortaccio,” a red-light district in the Campo Marzio. He suspected that the artist’s subsequent misfortunes were divine retribution for such a blasphemy. A later legend even claimed that the model was the body of a drowned prostitute, dredged out of the Tiber.

  Laerzio Cherubini kept the rejected Death of the Virgin for some years. Early in 1607 it was bought by Vincenzo Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, on the advice of Peter Paul Rubens, who had seen it in Rome and reported that it was unquestionably one of Caravaggio’s finest works. Before it left Rome for the fabulous Gonzaga collection at Mantua, it was exhibited for a week and warmly admired by many of the city’s artists. Later, it was bought by King Charles I of England.

  On 7 February 1602, Caravaggio signed a contract for another altarpiece, The Inspiration of St. Matthew, which would show the saint in the process of writing his Gospel. It was commissioned for the Contarelli Chapel by the Abbate Giacomo Crescenzi, who agreed to pay him 150 scudi. When he had finished, sometime during 1602, it was placed over the chapel’s altar. However, Bellori informs us, “it was taken down by the priests, who said that the figure had neither a saint’s dignity nor semblance, sitting with crossed legs and feet rudely exposed to the people.”

  “Caravaggio was in despair,” writes Bellori. Already, he must have been despondent enough over the Death of the Virgin’s rejection. Fortunately, “the Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani intervened on his behalf and helped him find a way out of this unpleasant situation; after negotiating with the priests, he bought the painting for himself while persuading him to paint another, which is still to be seen over the altar.” The new version, often known as St. Matthew and the Angel, amused Berenson by “the incongruity of the stately elder with one knee on a wooden stool, as if he had jumped out of bed to dash off a happy thought or phrase before it escaped him.” Even so, it is a magnificent image of divine inspiration.

  In 1602, while working on the Inspiration, Caravaggio had signed a contract to paint an Entombment of Christ for the Vittrici family chapel in the Oratorian church of Santa Maria in Vallicella. In Caravaggio’s day the building remained just as Filippo Neri had wanted it, plain, with whitewashed walls, which made the Entombment even more impressive for contemporaries. This time the Virgin was portrayed as a dignified mother superior in late middle age, wearing a nun’s coif, not as an attractive young woman; the artist was taking no chances after all the fuss over the model in the Death of the Virgin. Christ’s body is being lifted down from the Cross. Since the painting was hung over an altar where Mass was celebrated every day, when the priest said “This is my body” as he elevated the Host, it proclaimed the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, attacked with such fury by Protestants. Once again, Caravaggio’s carefully thought out composition was doing exactly what the Council of Trent asked, and, as always, his grasp of theology was impeccable. For a man of his time, it was still the most important of the sciences, a matter of eternal life, or eternal death.

  He was probably much better educated than we realize. His friends were not uncultivated: two poets, the Cavaliere Marino and Aurelio Orsi; an architect, Onorio Longhi; and an unnamed bookseller. Paintings like Narcissus indicate at least a smattering of classical learning, and he seems to have read Baronius’s Roman Martyrology.

  At some time during the second half of 1603, he painted The Sacrifice of Abraham for Monsignor—soon to be Cardinal—Maffei Barberini. In this alarmingly violent picture, now at the Uffizi, a tough young angel is telling Abraham to spare his shr
ieking son as he raises his knife to cut the boy’s throat. What was so revolutionary was to show Abraham as savagely cruel and Isaac as struggling desperately, instead of piously submissive. It has been argued recently that, in what is very far from being a naturalistic rendering of the story of the sacrifice, Abraham symbolizes God’s wrath and Isaac mankind atoning for the sin of Adam, while the angel is Christ interceding, and Abraham’s obedience to God is meant to stress the Catholic doctrine of justification by works.

  Caravaggio also painted Monsignor Barberini’s portrait, now in a private collection at Florence. He depicts a suave, cultivated senior bureaucrat, one of the handful of men who governed Rome and Roman Catholicism. In 1623 Barberini would be elected pope, taking the name “Urban VIII.” Del Monte may have introduced the artist to the Monsignor, who was a member of the Accademia degli Insensati.

  Most of Caravaggio’s many other portraits have been lost, although some may await discovery. Among them were those of his friend Onorio Longhi, Onorio’s wife, Caterina, and members of the Crescenzi family. One especially interesting sitter was the Cavaliere Marino, who had been generally acknowledged, since Tasso’s death, as Italy’s greatest living poet. Marino’s praise for the Medusa shield prompted del Monte to give it to Grand Duke Ferdinand, while he introduced Caravaggio to the Crescenzi. Another sitter was Cardinal Benedetto Giustiniani.

  During the 1990s a small portrait at the Uffizi of the Vatican librarian, Cardinal Baronius, has sometimes been attributed to Caravaggio, but that has not received general acceptance. If he really did paint Baronius, it would certainly confirm the impression that his sitters were beginning to include an imposing selection of the most influential men in Counter-Reformation Rome. The greatest church historian of his day, a man who had been one of Filippo Neri’s first followers, the Oratorian Baronius was Pope Clement’s confessor, spiritual adviser, and closest friend.

  Caravaggio’s friendship with the two Giustiniani brothers continued to flourish. For Vincenzo, he painted an Amor Vincit Omnia, a laughing Cupid. The German artist Joachim von Sandrart, who long after Caravaggio was dead spent ten industrious years at the Palazzo Giustiniani recording the marchese’s cherished collection in drawings, recounts how “this picture was displayed in a room together with a hundred and twenty others by famous artists, but at my suggestion it was covered with a dark green curtain and only shown when the others had been seen, because it made all the rest seem inferior.” Post-Freudian critics have tended to exaggerate the Cupid’s homoerotic quality.

  By now, Caravaggio had become an almost exclusively religious painter, with very little time for secular subjects. Whether by accident or design, he had made himself the Counter-Reformation’s foremost champion on canvas. Even so, if one is to judge from his private life, he was a most unlikely apostle of orthodoxy.

  XVII

  The Swordsman, 1600–1606

  In Flanders, Carel van Mander heard strange rumors about Caravaggio from friends in Rome. In 1603 he wrote that Caravaggio was doing “wonderful things,” having risen from obscurity by sheer ability, determination, and hard work, but “after working for a week or two, he wanders round for as long as two months on end, with his rapier by his side and followed by his servant, strolling from one tennis court to another, always ready to fight a duel or start a brawl, so that it is seldom very comfortable to be in his company.”

  A recent book, Caravaggio assassino (1994), claims that he had close links with one of the sinister robber gangs that terrorized Rome by night, but this is untrue. He was not a criminal, merely unbalanced. During a court case in 1603 he referred to “Mario, a painter,” who can only have been Mario Minniti. “This Mario once lived with me, but left three years ago, and I haven’t spoken to him since.” According to Minniti’s earliest biographer, he left because he could not put up with Caravaggio’s “disorderliness.” Later, after marrying, he fled from Rome, apparently after killing a man in a duel.

  Earning the income of a minor, well-to-do nobleman or a prosperous merchant, Caravaggio could do as he pleased. Restraints on his private life may have had something to do with his leaving del Monte’s household; the cardinal had begun to think that he had “a most strange brain.” In September 1603 he moved out of the Palazzo Maffei, taking rooms in the Campo Marzio, in a house in the Vicolo San Biagio. His landlady was a highly respectable widow. While he had no wish to live in the cramped quarters provided by del Monte, he was anxious to stay near him, in case of trouble with the police.

  Baglione, who knew Caravaggio personally and disliked him intensely, tells us that “because of an excessively fearless temperament, he sometimes went looking for a chance to break his neck, or to put somebody else’s in danger.” Yet even Baglione had to admit that he was only “a little,” not wholly, dissolute. Bellori says that painting could not calm Caravaggio, that after working for a few hours he would stroll around Rome, pretending to be a soldier. He wore “the costliest silks and velvets like a nobleman, but once he had put on a suit, he left it on until it was in rags.” Often he slept in his clothes and always he wore his dagger in bed. He was careless about washing, and for many years used an old portrait as a tablecloth.

  All the early sources agree that he was an exceptionally difficult man. Baglione found him “sarcastic and haughty,” but what really annoyed him was a withering contempt for all Mannerists, dead or alive, including Baglione. “He spoke ill of all the painters of the past, and of the present day too, however distinguished they might be; because he was convinced that he had surpassed everyone else in the profession.” Sandrart says, “It was not easy to get on with him.”

  But Caravaggio was not invariably disagreeable. He could be surprisingly fair-minded; on at least one occasion he described Arpino, whom he loathed, as a good painter. Although disreputable, his boon companions, if Sandrart can be believed, were cheerful enough, “young men, most of them stout fellows, painters and swordsmen.” His close friends stayed loyal to him. Onorio Longhi, a Lombard like himself, fought at his side in at least one duel, while Mario Minniti was delighted to meet him again in Sicily many years later, and long after his death the Cavaliere Marino wrote an affectionate poem in his memory. His patrons went out of their way to protect him, and it is unlikely that they valued him for his art alone. Nevertheless, his signs of a profoundly unhappy nature are unmistakable.

  The first suggestion of a disorderly private life came in May 1598, when the sbirri caught him wearing a rapier without a permit. He told the police magistrate, “Yesterday, I was arrested at about two o’clock at night between Piazza Madama and Piazza Navona because I was wearing a sword, which I wear as painter to Cardinal del Monte, since I’m one of the cardinal’s men and in his service and lodge in his house, and my name is written down on the list of his household.”

  The next hint of rowdiness was in October 1600, when Onorio Longhi was charged with insulting and attacking Marco Tullio, a painter. During his defense, Longhi said his friend Caravaggio had intervened between Tullio and himself, pulling them apart. At no time had “Michele” drawn his sword, as alleged; recovering from an illness and barely able to stand, he was so weak that a servant had to carry it for him. “Marco Tullio grabbed his scabbard and threw it at me,” claimed Longhi. The story of Caravaggio’s illness does not sound very convincing, as it was far from unusual for a servant to carry his master’s sword.

  In November of the same year, Caravaggio was accused of assault by a Tuscan, Girolamo Stampa, who alleged that without provocation Caravaggio had dealt him several fierce blows with his fist and the flat of his sword. In February 1601, Caravaggio paid Flavio Canonico, former sergeant of the guard at Castel Sant’ Angelo, to settle out of court an action for armed assault, which can only mean that Caravaggio had attacked him with his rapier.

  The Baglione libel case opened on 28 August 1603, offering a unique glimpse into the world of Caravaggio, who was arrested and incarcerated in the Tordinona. Giovane Baglione, a moderately talented Roman painter
, had been employed on the frescoes at the Vatican and the Lateran. Caravaggio’s work so impressed him that he tried to imitate the Ecstasy of St. Francis. He then painted a Divine Love for Cardinal Giustiniani in an attempt to compete with the Amor Vincit Omnia, the laughing Cupid. Although the cardinal did not think Baglione’s picture was as good, he was so pleased with it that he rewarded him with a gold chain. The last straw was when he succeeded in obtaining an important commission Caravaggio wanted for a painting at the church of the Gesù. Baglione had, in his own words, painted “a picture of Our Lord’s Resurrection for the Father General of the Society of Jesus. Since the unveiling of the picture on Easter Sunday this year, Onorio Longhi, Michelangelo Merisi [da Caravaggio] and Orazio Gentileschi, who had hoped to paint it themselves … have been trying to ruin my reputation by speaking ill of me and finding fault with my painting.”

  The model for Baglione’s Resurrection has survived, fussy, overcrowded, melodramatic. One can only sigh for the picture Caravaggio might have painted. It has been suggested that the “Black Pope,” the Jesuit General, Claudio Acquaviva, did not give Caravaggio the commission because he was afraid he would produce too startling an interpretation of Christ rising from the dead, somewhere between the sacred and profane.

  The court was told how verses vilifying Baglione and his art were circulating, supposedly distributed by Caravaggio’s servant. Caravaggio said that he knew nothing about the verses, but did not deny describing Baglione’s Resurrection as “clumsy,” or saying “I consider it the worst he’s ever done.” He added, “I don’t know of any artist who thinks that Baglione is a good painter.” During the trial Caravaggio defined a good painter as one who could “imitate natural things well.” “I believe I know every painter in Rome,” he declared, and went on to say that the only ones who were not among his friends were Arpino, Baglione, Gentileschi, and Georg Hoefnagel, “because they don’t speak to me—all the rest talk to me and have discussions.” The painters he thought really worthwhile (valentuomini) were Arpino, Federico Zuccari, Cristofero Roncalli, Annibale Carracci, and Antonio Tempesta. This public tribute to so many of his rivals by Caravaggio refutes Baglione’s claim that he despised all painters other than himself.