Caravaggio: A Passionate Life

by Seward, Desmond

  It was an even more dangerous city than Rome. “The Neapolitane carrieth the bloodiest mind and is the most secret fleering murdrer,” warns Thomas Nashe, “whereupon it is growen to a common proverbe, Ile give him the Neapolitane shrug, when one intends to play the villaine, and make no boast of it.” Great nobles maintained a much larger number of bravi in their palaces, and the surrounding countryside held more banditti than the entire Papal States. While duels of the kind in which Ranuccio Tommasoni had died were comparatively rare in Rome, they took place almost every day in Naples.

  Popular religion was fervent and dramatic. After the viceroy, the most important person in Naples was the archbishop, who presided over the liquefaction of the blood of San Gennaro, a fourth-century martyr. The congealed blood, contained in two vials, turned to liquid three times a year, and the well-being of Naples depended upon it doing so as quickly as possible. In Caravaggio’s day, when the vials of blood were held up at the cathedral by the archbishop, many of the crowd fell into a panic-stricken frenzy, howling and shrieking if the liquefaction were delayed for even a few minutes.

  XXIII

  The Neapolitan Altarpieces

  Caravaggio’s fame preceded him. When he arrived, instead of being greeted as a murderer on the run, he was lionized. Later, Bernardo de Dominicis, a seventeenth-century historian of Neapolitan artists, heard how “Caravaggio came to Naples where he was received with great acclaim by both painters and lovers of painting.”

  All we know about his earliest Neapolitan commission, signed in October 1606, is from the document itself. The patron was Nicholas Radolovich, a merchant from Bari. The commission, an altarpiece, was to show the Virgin and Child with choirs of angels above, St. Dominic embracing St. Francis in the center below, and St. Vitus on the left and St. Nicholas on the right, St. Nicholas being the patron saint of Bari. Like other lost Caravaggios, the painting may still survive unrecognized in the dusty corridor of an obscure religious house, or in a crumbling palace in the Mezzogiorno.

  Caravaggio painted three more altarpieces. For the first, The Seven Works of Mercy, he charged the confraternity of the Pio Monte della Misericordia twice what he had charged Radolovich. Clearly, he had soon realized how much he was appreciated at Naples. Working with his usual speed, he delivered it by January 1607, when he was paid the final instalment of the four hundred ducats stipulated. Bellori gives us a good description: “The head of an old man is seen, pushed through the bars of a prison window, sucking the milk from a lady who bends down to offer him her naked breast. Among the other figures are the feet and legs of a dead man, who is being taken off for burial; a torch held by someone carrying the body casts its light so as to shine over a priest in a white surplice, to brighten up all the colors and breathe life into the picture.”

  The young woman and the old man, who represent the Christian mercies of feeding the hungry and visiting prisoners, were inspired by the ancient story of Pero contriving to feed her father, Cimon, when Valerius Maximus tried to starve him to death. Also in the picture are Samson drinking from the jawbone of an ass, St. Martin dividing his cloak, and a host greeting Christ, who is dressed as a pilgrim. Two angels fly above, while the Madonna and Child look down upon the scene. The Virgin has a face not unlike that of the Madonna di Loreto. Tense and worried, it may be the face of Lena from the Piazza Navona, who inspired such passion in Caravaggio and could have followed him to Naples.

  St. Martin’s sword belt and scabbard, painted in some detail, are of considerable value for historians of the rapier. The artist lost none of his interest in swords, even though it is likely that he still felt remorse at killing Tommasoni. There is no record of his falling foul of the Neapolitan authorities, no police report of nocturnal brawls. Chastened by having been hunted for his life, he was on his best behavior.

  Another altarpiece, The Madonna of the Rosary, seems to have been rejected. It was on sale in Naples in the autumn of 1607, together with a new version of Judith and Holofernes. Some believe that in the Madonna the donor kneeling at the side, a bald-headed old gentleman in a ruff, is Don Marzio Colonna, Caravaggio’s shadowy and slightly sinister host in the Sabine Hills. Because Dominican friars dominate this triumphant painting, there is reason to think that it was painted during the early months of 1607, a time of expectation for the friars.

  Their archenemy was the Jesuit General Claudio Acquaviva, the same man who had declined to commission Caravaggio to paint the Resurrection at the Gesù. The Dominicans accused the Jesuits of watering down Catholicism, of stressing the human at the expense of the divine, and of doing so in every area from sexuality to theology. What angered them most was the Jesuit emphasis on free will instead of grace. A series of acrimonious debates on the subject had recently taken place in Rome.

  Pope Clement VIII had distrusted Acquaviva, because he was building a worldwide organization, directed from his headquarters at the Gesù. The pope suspected the Society of Jesus of trying to become a church within the Church. He had taken a keen personal interest in the debates on free will versus grace, which might well have ended in general agreement on the need to suppress, or at least drastically curb, the Jesuits. But Clement died before he could give his verdict. Pope Paul V ordered further debates. Soon it began to look as if he, too, were about to condemn the Jesuits.

  The Dominicans maintained the Augustinian view that a man was saved more by his faith than his good works, an idea that, the Jesuits claimed, verged on Protestantism. If Caravaggio inclined to the Dominican view, as seems likely from his portrayal of grace as blinding light in The Conversion of St. Paul, it provides a rare insight into his mind. This was certainly a comforting doctrine for a man who, despite deep Christian faith, was always prone to spectacular sins.

  Throughout the spring and summer of 1607, the Dominicans were confident they would win the dispute and crush the Jesuits. However, at the last moment, the Jesuits managed to ingratiate themselves with Pope Paul, by providing highly effective support during a quarrel that suddenly broke out between the papacy and Venice. Most unexpectedly, in August Paul adjourned the debates indefinitely. There is a very strong possibility, therefore, that the Madonna of the Rosary was prematurely commissioned by an enthusiastic supporter of the Dominicans to celebrate their forthcoming victory over the Jesuits. The legend depicted in the painting shows the Virgin presenting St. Dominic with a rosary in a vision, after which he gives rosaries to all his friars. It was an ideal theme for proclaiming the order’s triumph, the underlying message being that salvation is best found through Dominican guidance.

  An altarpiece was also ordered by Tommaso and Lorenzo dei Franchis, members of an influential Neapolitan family related to the viceroy. They wanted the picture for their new chapel in the church of San Domenico Maggiore. This was the Flagellation of Christ, apparently completed and delivered by May 1607, for which Caravaggio was paid 290 ducats. The three figures around the column—Christ and the two men scourging him—have a curious rhythm that has been fancifully called “balletic,” and likened to a ritual dance of death. It is among Caravaggio’s most savage compositions, a scene of agony and horror. However, the impression that remains with one is not so much of the artist’s unhealthy pleasure in cruelty as of his genuine compassion for the suffering Lord.

  Caravaggio did not restrict himself to altarpieces during his comparatively short stay in Naples. A Crucifixion of St. Andrew was commissioned by the Spanish viceroy himself. Once again, Caravaggio was finding patrons among the highest in the land.

  According to The Golden Legend, the apostle Andrew angered the Roman proconsul Aegeus by converting his wife, Maximilla, to Christianity. When, after a savage cross-examination, Andrew refused to sacrifice to the idols, he was crucified. For two days he hung on the cross, preaching. When the crowd saw that he was still alive on the third day, they threatened to kill the proconsul if he did not take him down. Alarmed, Aegeus hastened to do as they said. The apostle, however, refused to be taken down, beseeching God to let him
stay on the cross. After he had prayed, “a dazzling light came down from Heaven and enveloped him for the space of half an hour, hiding him from sight, and when the light vanished, he breathed forth his soul.” As for the miserable proconsul, The Golden Legend tells us that on the way home he was “seized by a demon” and died in the street.

  It must have been the heavenly light, the light of glory, so well suited to the chiaroscuro, that inspired Caravaggio. It illumines not only the dying St. Andrew but the amazed faces of those gazing up at him—Aegeus in an elegant armor and plumed headgear, a rapt old woman with a goiter, a gaping peasant in a broad-brimmed hat—and the bare back of the executioner, who is vainly trying to take the apostle down from the cross with trembling hands.

  When the viceroy left Naples in 1610, he took the Crucifixion of St. Andrew home with him to Spain, where it disappeared. It was rediscovered in Madrid less than thirty years ago.

  XXIV

  The Prior of Naples

  We do not know exactly how Caravaggio became a Knight of Malta, but the circumstances suggest that Fra’ Ippolito Malaspina, Prior of Naples, had a good deal to do with it. Although there is no documentary evidence that he supported the artist’s candidacy, he was the logical person in the city to advise him about how to join the order. His head may have been the model for that of another St. Jerome, painted by Caravaggio either at Naples or on Malta. If so, we have a remarkable idea of the impression he made on Caravaggio, who, presumably working from memory, portrayed a tough veteran in his sixties, with very strong features and impressive serenity.

  Caravaggio could well have met him at Rome, in the company of his brother-in-law, Ottavio Costa, and would have noticed his voluminous black “choir mantle” with a large, eight-pointed white cross on the shoulder, and his cloth-of-gold surcoat. He was called “Fra’ ” because, like all his brethren, he had taken the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Not a Neapolitan but a Tuscan marquis from the Lunigiana, born in 1544, he had entered the Order of Malta when very young yet, despite fighting heroically at Lepanto, he had only recently emerged as one of its most influential members, after the election of his friend Alof de Wignancourt as grand master in 1601. Appointed prior of Naples the following year, he had relinquished his priory on taking command of the papal fleet, but was reinstated in October 1606, less than a month after Caravaggio reached the city. Neapolitan grandees took care to be on good terms with him, since, as prior, he ranked among the great dignitaries of Naples.

  Throughout Italy the knights were popular to the point of adulation as the finest fighting seamen in the world. They guarded the peninsula’s coastline against Turks and North African slave raiders, their galleys patrolling the Mediterranean and attacking Muslim ships wherever they found them. Crusading ideals still meant something in the seventeenth century, and it was no accident that Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata should have been a poetic evocation of the First Crusade. What made the order even more imposing was that its warrior-monks were nearly all aristocrats, admitted as Knights of Justice only after providing cast-iron proofs of patrician ancestry. Even the few non-noble knights, or Knights of Grace, had to be men of distinction.

  Sandrart and, by inference, Vincenzo Giustiniani, were both convinced that Caravaggio had planned to become a Knight of Malta before leaving Rome. Bellori, however, has a different story. “Caravaggio was desirous of receiving the cross of Malta, which is generally given by grace to men who are thought worthy because of their merit and quality. So he decided to go to the island, where he was presented to the Grand Master.” But it seems most unlikely that Caravaggio would ever have gone to Malta without an assurance that he would be accepted for the order’s novitiate.

  The idea of an artist entering the order was not such a fantasy as it sounds. Caravaggio’s friend Ludovico Cardi, “Il Cigoli,” joined the order in 1613, and later Mattia Preti was a triumphant success as a painter-knight. Significantly, Il Cigoli owed his admission to Cardinal Borghese, who wanted to reward him for decorating his Roman villa. The grand master was always anxious to oblige the cardinal secretary, and Borghese could easily have done Caravaggio the same service. Although no firm proof exists, it is likely that he played a much greater part in Caravaggio’s career than has been realized. He was certainly the right person through whom to obtain a papal dispensation for a murderer to enter the order.

  Caravaggio had much to offer the knights, who wanted the best paintings in Europe. They did not wish their churches to be in any way inferior to those of the Jesuits or the Oratorians, and they had more ready money. The grand master knew all about the killing of Ranuccio Tommasoni, but did not see it as an obstacle. He was used to dealing with duelists. Given the customs of a violent age and the fact they were professional soldiers, more than a few of his knights besides the Marchesa Costanza’s son had killed an opponent in a duel. As for Caravaggio’s notorious temper, Fra’ Alof had plenty of experience in handling the haughtiest and most pugnacious body of men in the entire Mediterranean.

  Caravaggio’s lack of pedigree was a much more serious problem. The knights had recently become stricter about “noble proofs,” since too many young men were trying to join. Fortunately, the statutes allowed the grand master to let a few non-noble candidates enter the order as Knights of Grace (or “Obedience”). He did so sparingly, because admissions often infuriated the nobly born Knights of Justice. Their wrath was however generally reserved for blatant social climbers, especially those who were Genoese. In Caravaggio’s case, as Francesco Susinno put it, the aspirant knight “was admired by everyone in the Order on account of his skill with a brush, and they all wanted his pictures.”

  There must have been a lot of paperwork concerning Caravaggio’s candidacy. At some stage, Fra’ Alof agreed formally to his coming to Malta and trying his vocation. Although he was thirty-five, for a year the artist would have to submit to all the petty restrictions of a novitiate and obey a novice master. His readiness to do so shows just how anxious he was to become a Knight of Malta.

  XXV

  The Knights of Malta, July 1607

  Just after midsummer 1607, the galleys of Malta sailed into the Bay of Naples, their first visit for over a year. Red-hulled and gilded, with huge triangular lateen sails of striped canvas, flying silk banners, these gorgeous warships were commanded by the knights’ senior fighting officer at sea, the Captain-General of the Galleys. This was Fra’ Fabrizio Sforza Colonna, the Marchesa Costanza’s son. His fleet was bound for Genoa before returning to Malta, and Caravaggio sailed with him.

  The galleys were the fastest ships in the Mediterranean, but, built for speed with long, narrow hulls, they pitched and rolled horribly. They were also overcrowded, each carrying nearly five hundred soldiers, sailors, and oarsmen, and contagious fevers often broke out among the filthy, verminous galley slaves. Caravaggio must have sailed with the dozen red-surcoated knights on the poop deck, sheltered to some extent from sun and rain by a red canvas awning. Even for knights, however, life on board a galley was uncomfortable. No food could be cooked in such cramped quarters, the fleet putting into a harbor every few days to take on food and water. Their only relaxations were cards and dice. When the ship rowed into the wind, the knights plugged their noses against the stench from the oarsmen chained at their benches. Above the crash of oars, a drum beat out the time and the Aguzzino, or overseer, could be heard cracking his whip. Each galley carried a chaplain, oars being shipped for morning prayers, while the Angelus was said at noon and in the evening. Weather permitting, Mass was celebrated on the poop.

  The fleet put in briefly at Livorno and other ports, just long enough for Caravaggio to enjoy a hot meal. The voyage home would have been by way of Corsica, Sardinia, and Sicily. Its main purpose was to look out for the Barbary corsairs, operating from Algiers, Tunis, or Tripoli, who preyed on Christian merchantmen or raided for slaves along the Italian coastline. If the knights sighted a corsair, they could usually run her down, and it is not impossible that Caravaggio saw
a naval action of this sort. His voyage would have been still more uncomfortable if Fra’ Fabrizio’s ships had to ride out one of those frightening Mediterranean storms that even in summer can blow up without warning.

  At last the fleet sighted the rocky coast of Malta, and then Caravaggio caught his first glimpse of Valletta on the ridge of Monte Sceberras—a long beak of rock running out into the middle of a great bay, which it divided into two natural harbors. It is probable that he landed here on 12 July 1607.

  The two things most people knew about Malta were that a great apostle was shipwrecked on it, “where the viper leapt on Paul’s hand,” and that it was ruled by the knights. Being in the center of the Mediterranean, it had always been of strategic importance, and at the same time vulnerable to seaborne raids. When the knights arrived in 1530, they found most of the inhabitants talking “a sort of Moorish” but ruled by an Italian-speaking aristocracy with titles from the kings of Sicily. By Caravaggio’s time, the population had risen to about fifty thousand, the nobles living in the former capital, Citta Notabile—today called Mdina.

  The Order of St. John of Jerusalem had been founded in the eleventh century, to shelter pilgrims to the holy land, taking up arms to defend them. When the Latin East fell to Islam, the “Knights Hospitaller” moved to Rhodes and then to Malta, which they held from the king of Spain (as king of Sicily) in return for the gift of a falcon every All Saints’ Day. They were justly admired for their heroism in 1565 when, hopelessly outnumbered, they had beaten off a Turkish invasion, which many still remembered when Caravaggio arrived on the island. Ever since the Great Siege, the knights had been building their new capital, “Valletta Humilissima.”