There is unmistakable pain on the faces in many of the paintings from Caravaggio’s later years in Rome. Costa’s St. John the Baptist wears a sulky, even lowering look. Disturbance is still more apparent in two somber studies of Francis of Assisi that date from this time. They show not the slightest suggestion of ecstasy. But, although they are not self-portraits, both portray someone of the same physical type as Caravaggio—small, black-bearded, unkempt. There could be no more eloquent expression of Caravaggio’s very personal and strange blend of the most sincere spirituality with the most profound unhappiness than these two paintings of St. Francis.
XIX
The First Baroque Pope, 1605
Clement VIII died in March 1605, and by the end of spring Paul V was pontiff. Clement is often described as the last of the Counter-Reformation popes, while Paul is sometimes called the first “Baroque” pope. This is an oversimplification. The Counter-Reformation remained very much alive even if the Baroque was in full swing by the end of Paul’s reign.
Despite Clement’s indecisiveness, he had been surprisingly successful, and not merely because of his saintly life and austere court. He had restored the Papacy’s political influence to an extent that had not been seen for centuries. France was saved for Catholicism, while both the French and the Spanish competed for Rome’s favor.
Inevitably, a papal conclave to choose a new pope was fraught with tension. So, too, was the entire city of Rome. Everyone knew that a completely new court with new favorites was about to emerge. From the moment the Cardinal Camerlengo took the Fisherman’s ring from the dead pontiffs hand, he ruled Rome in his place until the election of a new pope, and struck coins that bore his own name. In practice, during a conclave the city was virtually ungoverned. Armed guards were doubled outside the palaces, with chains placed across their gateways. A “Lantern edict,” ordering householders to place a light at a window each night, did little to deter wrongdoers. The sbirri were far too busy to worry about the brawls of Caravaggio and his friends.
The cardinals were divided into French and Spanish factions, and there was much lobbying. News of the surprisingly swift election on April 1 of the elderly Alessandro de’ Medici was greeted in Paris by fireworks and cannon fire. But the new pope, Leo XI, died before the end of the month, so the conclave reassembled. On May 16 it chose the mild-mannered, gentle-seeming Cardinal Borghese.
Like more than a few pontiffs, Camillo Borghese’s mild manners and gentleness soon vanished. In Ranke’s words, “immediately after his election, Paul V evinced a peculiarly rugged disposition.” From then on, Rome was to be ruled by an iron and seemingly merciless hand. A penniless, half-insane Lombard scholar had written a ridiculous parallel history of Clement VIII and Tiberius Caesar, comparing the late pope to the sinister Roman emperor. The manuscript stayed in his garret until he foolishly showed it to a woman in the same house, who denounced him. He was arrested with all Rome laughing at the story. There was a general impression that Pope Paul would take a lenient view, several people petitioning him to show mercy, but the wretched man was beheaded on the Ponte Sant’ Angelo, and his pitiful possessions were confiscated. Paul swiftly issued draconian edicts against loose women, swindling innkeepers, and those who spread false news. Gentlemen faced still sterner penalties for wearing swords. Although the edicts were largely ignored or evaded, everyone in Rome was uncomfortably aware of an unusually frightening presence on the papal throne.
Some historians believe that Caravaggio’s prospects were darkened by Paul’s election; in reality they had never looked brighter, and if the pope, the future patron of Bernini, was more interested in architecture and sculpture than in painting, his nephew was a very different story. By the end of Paul’s reign, Cardinal Scipione Borghese had amassed one of the most wonderful private collections known to history.
Caravaggio did his best to satisfy so important a customer. “For the same Cardinal, he painted St. Jerome, who is shown writing, absorbed, and reaching out a hand to dip into the inkwell,” Bellori tells us. The artist’s portrayal of the compiler of the Vulgate derived from the account in The Golden Legend: “After doing penance for four years, he went to Bethlehem and obtained permission to dwell at the Lord’s crib like an animal.” Fasting each day until evening, “he persevered in his holy resolution, and labored for fifty-five years and six months at translating the Scriptures.” The picture is still to be seen at the Villa Borghese.
The painting delighted Cardinal Scipione, whose collection eventually included thirteen Caravaggios. Five of them were confiscated from the Cavaliere d’Arpino, no longer the pope’s favorite artist, since he fell foul of the authorities over tax arrears. Scipione was a ruthless collector of pictures, imprisoning at least one rash artist who failed to oblige him. He could be equally forceful, however, in defending his favorites, and his benevolent role in Caravaggio’s career has been underestimated. He tried to protect him whenever he could, even in exile.
Caravaggio’s new patron was not only the cardinal nephew, but the cardinal secretary of state as well, the most powerful person in Rome after his uncle. While the Venetian ambassador may have reported that the cardinal nephew was not particularly clever, he was undeniably astute. As soon as Scipione received the Red Hat, shortly after his maternal uncle’s election, he changed his name from Cafarelli to Borghese. He knew how to interpret Pope Paul’s wishes and ensure that they were put into effect. Nor could anyone deny his good taste.
We know what Scipione looked like from Bernini’s bust, almost comically corpulent and heavy-jowled but nonetheless impressive. He was unusually amiable, famous for his charm and tact. Romans who sampled his sumptuous hospitality called it delicium orbis, the world’s delight. Although no scandals of the flesh were ever linked to him, his wildly extravagant expenditure on food and drink earned him a rebuke from the pope on at least one occasion. It was common knowledge that within a few years he possessed an income of 140,000 scudi, and eventually he appropriated four percent of the entire papal revenue, enabling him to indulge to the full his passion for the arts. Bellori records in his lives that the Cardinal Scipione Borghese was so pleased with the pictures Caravaggio had painted “that he introduced him to the Pontiff, Paul V, of whom he painted a seated portrait, being richly rewarded by the said lord.”
Even Caravaggio must have been cowed by the prospect of painting the pope. No doubt he had to go through the ritual of alternately bowing and genuflecting at his first audience, since Paul was a stickler for protocol. He was a burly man of imposing presence, ponderous and taciturn. Heavily overweight, it was rumored that he sweated to such an extent at night that his barber had to comb his hair for an hour every morning to dry his head.
The authenticity of Caravaggio’s portrait of Paul V, which remains at the Villa Borghese, has occasionally been questioned on the grounds that it seems too tame. But faced with an exceptionally formidable sitter, ferociously careful of his dignity, Caravaggio is unlikely to have tried to make his subject adopt a striking pose. An unpleasant look in His Holiness’s eyes, verging on the malevolent, has been ascribed to short sight.
The pope’s patronage of the arts, and his nephew’s, undoubtedly helped to usher in the Baroque Age. No one knows when the term “Baroque” was first used, but the movement was fundamentally religious in inspiration, set in motion by the Counter-Reformation. Despite its exuberance, it was haunted by an all-pervading concentration on death and dying and how to face them. More than a few Baroque artists attended public executions, or watched corpses being dissected. Their age coincided with a long period of peace in Italy, when turbulent natures could find outlets only in the most savage violence.
The Counter-Reformation, which gave birth to the Baroque, succeeded because it harnessed profound human impulses, whether the female principle through the cult of the Madonna or the need for forgiveness through confession. Its gorgeous liturgy satisfied a thirst for theater and color while, despite its leaders’ asceticism, it exalted the human body and
was not afraid of nudity in art. Baroque had genuine popular appeal. Instead of using classical Antiquity, accessible to only a small, highly educated audience, as had Renaissance art, it concentrated on the religion of the humble as well as that of the elite. Its novelties were breathtaking, and a novelty like Caravaggio’s experiments with light—compared by Kenneth Clark to the kind of lighting fashionable in films of the 1920s—had enormous dramatic impact. So long as the Catholic revival continued, Baroque art would retain its vitality.
Most of us have colorful images of the Baroque churches in their full, triumphant splendor, with gilded altars crowned by sunbeams amid serpentine columns, walls of marble, porphyry, and scagliola, even of bronze and silver, and statues of swooning saints. All this was still in the process of emerging when Caravaggio died. Because of his uncompromising realism and avoidance of decoration, many historians do not see him as an artist belonging to the Baroque. “Baroque is the last epithet I would apply to Caravaggio, although it is the one he is now so often graced with,” grumbled Berenson. “Indeed, a more descriptive one would be the un-Baroque, or even the anti-Baroque.”
Nevertheless, the churches for which Caravaggio painted his altarpieces, his greatest achievements, are unmistakably Baroque. And he was very much aware of these churches, painting his altarpieces in such a way that, if they have been removed to a gallery, they must be viewed from six feet below if they are to be appreciated properly. For all his realism, he cannot be understood outside a Baroque context. Certainly, no one can question that Caravaggio belonged to the Counter-Reformation. His utterly sincerc, down-to-earth treatment of sacred subjects moved the faithful deeply, and no artist was more successful in proclaiming the new Catholicism. As the first anniversary of Paul V’s accession drew near, Caravaggio’s prospects must have seemed enviable. His work was admired and collected by the all-powerful cardinal secretary, whose favorite he had become, and he had painted the pope himself.
XX
The Killing of Ranuccio Jommasoni, May 1606
If you listen to the ringing martial music of Monteverdi’s Combat Between Tancredi and Clorinda, you may catch a faint echo of the secret approval Caravaggio’s contemporaries felt for men who fought duels. It is not surprising that Monteverdi found inspiration for his warlike “dramatic dialogue” in a battle scene from the Gerusalemme Liberata for, although Tasso was the reverse of a duelist, he was famous for realistic descriptions of single combat. Montaigne, in his essay “Cowardize, the Mother of Crueltie,” also recognized Tasso’s gift for describing a fight to the death, quoting a stanza in which the poet explained just what it felt like to fence for one’s life with a mixture of rage and fear. Every literate man and woman in Rome read Tasso. Even if they admired the duelists, they can have had no illusions about the lethal, often vicious nature of dueling. The Roman authorities had no illusions either. They regarded duels as an unmitigated nuisance, and, if caught, survivors went to the scaffold.
An avviso of 31 May 1606, reports the event that ruined Caravaggio’s life and very nearly ended it, after his refusal to pay Ranuccio Tommasoni a bet of ten scudi, lost over a game of tennis. Until recently, all we knew about Tommasoni was that he came from Terni and was “a young man with very good manners” in Baglione’s opinion. Caravaggio sounded like a savage bully picking a fight with a callow teenager. But from recently discovered evidence, the reverse was true. Ranuccio, who called himself “Captain Tommasoni,” was a swaggering thug whose brother, Giovan Francesco, was caporione, or nominal captain, of the Campo Marzio district (rione) and therefore its local gang boss. Giovan Francesco and his two brothers appear to have terrorized the Campo Marzio by night. Only the year before, the three, unlawfully “armed with sword, dagger and pistol,” had led the Campo Marzio “guard” against the sbirri, disputing the arrest of some criminals who were probably under their protection. In the ensuing brawl, several men had been wounded and at least one killed.
On the evening of Sunday, 29 May, Caravaggio and some friends were passing Tommasoni’s house in Via della Scrofa when Tommasoni suddenly emerged with his cronies, challenging him to fight. During the ensuing combat, says the avviso, “the painter was wounded and Captain Petronio came to his rescue. Ranuccio’s brother, a captain too, was on the other side with several more friends, so that as many as a dozen took part. Finally, Tommasoni lost his balance and fell over, a sword thrust leaving him dead on the ground.”
Mancini’s version is that “Caravaggio killed his enemy, helped by Onorio Longhi,” while Baglione reports that “after Caravaggio had wounded him in the thigh, Ranuccio fell down, and he killed him as he lay on the ground.” Bellori, clearly less well informed, states that “during a game of tennis with a young man who was a friend, they began hitting each other with their rackets and then drew their swords, so that he killed the youth, but was himself wounded.” Sandrart, still more imaginative, believes the duel had its origins in Caravaggio’s quarrel with the Cavaliere d’Arpino.
Another account, only recently discovered and dated 3 June 1606, confirms the story in the avvisi, together with the details given by Mancini and Baglione. “Because of some game near the Grand Duke’s palace, a quarrel broke out between a son of the late Colonel Lucantonio [Tommasoni] da Terni and the celebrated painter, Michelangelo da Caravaggio, in which Tommasoni fell dead from a thrust delivered when he had fallen to the ground. His brother Gio. Francesco and Captain Petronio, a Bolognese friend of Caravaggio, joined in the affray, during which the said Gio. Francesco mortally wounded Captain Petronio and Caravaggio in the head, after which he and Caravaggio fled, and Petronio was put in prison, where he remains under guard.”
The most plausible reconstruction of what took place is that Caravaggio and Tommasoni both had five seconds. Those on Ranuccio’s side included his brothers, Alessandro and Giovan Francesco, the latter being the gang boss of the Campo Marzio, with two unknown friends. On Caravaggio’s there were Onorio Longhi, Captain Petronio (otherwise known as “Antonio da Bologna”), and perhaps Aurelio Orsi. (The historian Maurizio Calvesi suggests that Mario Minniti may have been one of the others.) They fought separate combats with each other until they had disabled their opponents, then went to their comrades’ aid. After disposing of his own enemy, Longhi rushed to help Caravaggio, knocking Tommasoni’s rapier aside with his sword, or throwing a cloak over it, so that Caravaggio was able to bring Tommasoni down and give him a final thrust as he lay prostrate. Having finished with Petronio, Giovan Tommasoni ran up to avenge his brother, giving Caravaggio a thrust in the head. At that point, the sbirri appeared, and the combatants left hastily.
Ranuccio Tommasoni appears to have been the only man killed outright in the duel, although Petronio was fatally wounded and Caravaggio badly injured. It is only fair to point out that Caravaggio did not start the fight.
Everyone who had taken part fled from Rome as soon as possible. Prevented from doing so by his wound, Petronio was arrested, although no record has been discovered of his fate; he probably died in prison. Onorio Longhi succeeded in reaching his Lombard homeland, where he was later joined by his wife and children. Despite eloquent pleading that he had not killed anybody and had tried to restrain Caravaggio, Longhi’s petition to be allowed to return to Rome was not granted for several years.
It was very different for Caravaggio, who most certainly had killed somebody. Slaying Ranuccio was murder and meant the death penalty. Already well known to the sbirri, if caught he would have been immediately brought before a police magistrate, and his head would swiftly have joined those rotting on the Ponte Sant’ Angelo. Too badly wounded to escape from Rome at once, he hid in the Palazzo Giustiniani, sheltered by Vincenzo, until he regained enough strength to be able to travel. For the moment, the sbirri did not dare break into a palace with such important owners, and clearly the Giustiniani brothers were ready to protect him.
Fortunately, some very influential and powerful people were determined to see that he got away. If his patrons were distressed by h
is private life, irritated by his difficult temperament, and shocked by the news of the duel, they had no wish to see the end of a man who painted such wonderful pictures. Significantly, Cardinal Borghese bought the Madonna dei Palafrenieri less than three weeks after the duel, paying a hundred scudi, although he could easily have confiscated it. Nor is it beyond the bounds of possibility that the cardinal secretary discreetly warned the chief of police that he would not be overjoyed if the sbirri succeeded in making an arrest in this particular case. Apparently it was the agents of the painter’s old friend the Marchesa di Caravaggio who told him where he could find refuge after leaving the city.
He soon recovered his strength, escaping from Rome on the Wednesday after the duel. He dared not go back to his lodgings to collect money for his flight, so obviously someone supplied him with funds. Eluding the sbirri, he managed to get away safely; like William Lithgow, dodging the Inquisition three years later, he may have “leapt the walles of Rome” at midnight, since the guards at the gates would have been looking out for him. Bellori says he was followed, but, if he was, he quickly threw his pursuers off his trail. Then he disappeared.
Among the reasons for such a successful escape was the fact that the sbirri did not know where he was making for, or where he was hoping to find shelter. The countryside immediately around Rome was an uninviting choice for a hiding place, the Roman Campagna being plagued by malaria, and in any case they would have been able to track him down there through their contacts with the banditti. Their first reaction was to expect that, as a Lombard, he would head north. On 31 May, the day of his escape, the Modenese agent at Rome reported rumors that Caravaggio had fled “in the direction of Florence and may perhaps go to Modena.” In reality, he had gone to ground at a much safer haven, only a few miles away.
Caravaggio: A Passionate Life Page 10