A Name in Blood

by Matt Rees

  Scipione twitched his moustache, as though deriding the value of such security as del Monte afforded the artist. ‘He needs you to vouch for him when he’s arrested and thrown drunk into the Tor di Nona, I’ll wager.’

  ‘He has been known to call upon my guardianship on such occasions. As you said, these artists are rough sorts. His work, however, is incomparable.’ They came to the top of the staircase. ‘My own collection is through here,’ del Monte said. ‘It includes seven canvases by our Maestro Michelangelo of Caravaggio. Please, Your Illustriousness, this way.’

  He drew Scipione into a wide gallery. The walls were hung almost to the ceiling with paintings. The best were at eye level, hidden behind green curtains to protect them from sunshine and fly droppings. The cardinals crossed the room. Del Monte took hold of a yellow brocade cord to draw back one of the curtains.

  A young maid scrubbed beeswax into the terracotta tiles of the palace as a man in his mid-thirties came to the head of the stairs. She sat back on her heels, wiped her forehead and tucked a strand of red-brown hair behind her ear. Her features brooded with a resentment and resignation the man recognized well from his years living in the palaces of wealthy patrons, though he sensed it wasn’t yet of the kind that betokened bitterness and collapse. From her olive skin, her sharp jet eyebrows and angular nose, he assumed she was from the south, where the people were descended from early Greek settlers of the Italian peninsula. Grime darkened her hands. Each fingernail was framed by a black halo of dirt.

  A statue of Hercules dug out of the Roman Forum guarded the head of the stairs. The man threw the end of his short black cloak over his shoulder and leaned against the stone figure. The habitual set of his face was hostile, forceful and proud, so that when he smiled at her he saw that the girl hadn’t imagined it was possible for such features to allow themselves repose or gaiety. His teeth were white between his black moustache and goatee. He took up a heroic stance at Hercules’s shoulder, ran his hand through his longish, wavy black hair, cleared his throat, and mimicked the pagan god’s noble gaze.

  ‘How do I look?’ he said.

  The girl laughed.

  ‘Who cuts the better figure? Me or this fellow?’ He tapped the statue’s muscular upper arm. ‘Come on, he’s been underground for fifteen hundred years. Surely I don’t look so bad?’

  ‘You do look a bit sick, though.’

  ‘Yes, well, I was out late with the notable architect Maestro Onorio Longhi, dear girl, and much fun it was.’ He touched the tip of his moustache with his tongue and rubbed at the pitted stone of Hercules’s hand. ‘Poor fellow, his limbs of ancient marble forbid him to reach out and caress the beauty before him.’

  ‘That’s a shame.’

  His brows drew down over eyes of glowing brown, Indian red lightened with the warmth of russet, and he stepped towards her. ‘But I am no hero on a pedestal. I may touch.’

  He bent his knees to crouch beside her, smelled the wax on her hands and the old sweat in her rough workdress, which she had tucked up at the side so that she might kneel. She regarded him with neither the stupid incomprehension of an ordinary serving girl nor the lascivious complicity of the whores at the Tavern of the Moor. In her eyes he saw a quiet beauty of such calm that he briefly forgot the seduction upon which he had embarked and wondered what to say next.

  A footman came into the corridor and cleared his throat. ‘Maestro Caravaggio, His Illustriousness awaits your pleasure in the gallery.’

  ‘My pleasure.’ The man recovered his playfulness and winked at the girl. ‘My pleasure.’

  She dabbed her brush in the beeswax. He watched her face a moment more. It was a little too wide, but her jaw was fine and it tapered to a chin of great delicacy.

  Without looking up, she sensed his gaze and smiled. ‘I’ve work to do. Go and study His Illustriousness instead.’

  He crossed the tiles, gleaming with the results of her earlier labours. As he entered the cardinal’s chambers he glanced back at her. The soles of her bare feet were turned upward as she leaned forward on the brush. They were soiled in such striations of black, brown and grey that he could taste the dirt on his tongue.

  Since Caravaggio’s last summons to the gallery in the Madama Palace, del Monte had expanded his collection. A spasmodic Francis of Assisi now adorned the wall beside a version of the same saint by Caravaggio. Across the room an unfamiliar face turned to him, a cardinal, flattening his hand in expectation of a flunkey’s kiss. But Caravaggio’s eyes were drawn to the new work. The saint’s head was thrown back, his eyes rolled up into his skull. His clumsy, stubby fingers splayed out. He seemed to be in the midst of a fit of the falling sickness, rather than the ecstasy he was supposed to be experiencing. A fat cherub gestured towards a crown of thorns, though how he expected the saint to look at it in his present state was beyond Caravaggio. It was just the kind of nonsensical gesture he hated to see on canvas. That it should hang at the side of his own Francis appalled him. His saint was breathless, gashed in his side with the stigmata, cradled by an angel who shared Francis’s transport of divine love.

  ‘You’ve noticed my new acquisition from the studio of Maestro Baglione,’ del Monte said. ‘It’s exquisite, isn’t it?’

  Caravaggio gave a low, scornful laugh. I might’ve known this would be that fool Baglione’s work, he thought. It had become hard to tell which of Rome’s artists had executed any given imitation of his art, so many of them had committed themselves to thieving his style. None of them knew what was behind his use of light and shadow, his work with mirrors and lenses, the choice of models from among his poorest acquaintances. To other painters, they were just a bag of tricks to make pretty decoration. Men like Baglione failed to see that what Caravaggio did was profound – that he took the things everyone had seen countless times, the bar-room cheats and pretty boys on the make, the martyred saints and even the Lord Jesus, and he made people see them as if for the first time.

  ‘He has captured something of your style, Maestro Caravaggio,’ the new cardinal said.

  Don’t say it, cazzo mio, Caravaggio told himself. Don’t say, ‘What the hell do you know?’ If del Monte’s taking the time to introduce you, this must be someone important. ‘My style?’

  ‘Quite so.’ The cardinal’s eyes glistened in his long, soft face. ‘The light, falling on the most revealing features of the subject. The close, intense focus. The lack of a background. This is your accustomed device, isn’t it? Upon which your reputation is founded.’

  My ideas, debased for a quick judgement by a man who pretends to be a connoisseur. Caravaggio closed his eyes.

  Del Monte clapped his hands. ‘So what do you think of my new St Francis?’

  Caravaggio muttered something behind his hand.

  ‘What was that?’ del Monte said.

  Caravaggio threw out his arm with disdain towards the painting. ‘I said, he needs to get laid.’

  Del Monte covered his smile with his hand. The other cardinal rubbed a finger along the side of his nose. ‘I, too, have heard it said of Maestro Baglione that he’s a virginal man who doesn’t give himself to the flesh.’ He ran his hands down his front to draw attention to his cardinal’s suit of red velvet. ‘Do you have something against a life dedicated to celibacy?’

  Caravaggio had seen painted streetwalkers come bruised and stumbling out of alleys jostled by gangs of drunken Spanish soldiers and they had still looked more celibate than this cardinal. ‘A life of such renunciation is one thing for a man of the cloth. But for an artist? How can you paint skin if you’ve never touched it?’

  ‘You’ve painted the skin of Our Lord, as I saw at the Church of San Luigi. Have you ever touched that? Or are you going to tell me you’ve tasted it in the form of the Holy Communion?’

  ‘Skin’s skin. Whether it’s a bag for my bones or those of Our Lord Jesus Christ – or Your Illustriousness.’

  The cardinal watched him long enough to know that Caravaggio, neither embarrassed nor disconcerted, wasn�
�t about to drop his eyes. ‘A heretic. I see why you get on so well with this one, del Monte.’

  Caravaggio’s old patron forced a smile and bowed. ‘Maestro Caravaggio, your presence was requested here by Cardinal Borghese.’

  The new pope’s nephew, the man who now runs the Vatican. Caravaggio touched the pulse in his neck, feeling the charge of adrenaline under his fingertip, thrilled by the prospect of impressing the most powerful art lover in Rome and shaking at the thought of how close he had come to insulting him. He fell onto one knee. With his head low, he took the smooth pale hand which Scipione eased forward from his soutane. He brushed it with his lips. It smelled of calfskin gloves and the ambergris used to scent them.

  ‘The divine Michelangelo used to say of a mediocre artwork that it hurts no one,’ Scipione said. ‘May we not say so of this St Francis by Maestro Baglione?’

  ‘It hurts me.’

  ‘Michelangelo’s formulation was a way of avoiding offence. I see this isn’t one of your objectives. Before an excellent work of art, he used to say that it was painted either by a great scoundrel or a great rascal.’ Scipione tugged on the golden cord that drew the curtain back from Caravaggio’s Musicians. He went close, stilling the swinging viridian taffeta with the palm of his hand. ‘Which are you, Maestro?’

  Caravaggio hadn’t seen this canvas in months. Four youths wreathed in loose white shirts or draped in sheets, their shoulders and hairless chests exposed. Del Monte had commissioned several like this. The young artists and musicians who lived at the Madama Palace called him Cardinal Madama, because of his discreet preference for pale, yielding boys. At the front of the composition, pretty Pedro, the castrato singer, Caravaggio’s closest friend when he had first lived in del Monte’s palace, now returned to Spain.

  Over the singer’s shoulder, a self-portrait. He couldn’t bear to look at it. He had made himself appear so innocent and wan, his lips parted in a tender, sensuous moan. He found it hard to remember a day when you could have truly read such inexperience and freshness on his face. Perhaps once, he thought. With Costanza and Fabrizio Colonna. In their palace, in my hometown – before they sent me away.

  ‘A scoundrel or a rascal?’ He hooked his thumbs into his belt. ‘That depends on the night and how old the girl is.’

  ‘Or the boy?’ Scipione tapped his knuckle against the swooning features of Pedro, who tuned a lute at the centre of The Musicians as if he were caressing a lover’s belly. ‘Don’t you agree, del Monte?’

  The older cardinal flinched.

  Well, well, Scipione knows about Cardinal Madama and his little peccadillo, Caravaggio thought. From the way he wrinkles his lips, I’d say he shares the same predilection. Here’s the man who heads the Inquisition, making jokes about effeminate boys, when only last week a baker was burned to death by the Holy Office in the Campo de’Fiori for buggering a street urchin.

  ‘But this is my favourite, Maestro Caravaggio. Her eyes follow me even through the curtain.’ Scipione ran back the material that covered St Catherine of Alexandria. ‘The face is inescapable. Bravo, bravo.’

  The saint leaned against the spiked cartwheel that had been the instrument of her torture and fondled the sword that had dealt her death and martyrdom. Kneeling on a red cushion, she was encased in a billowing black silk dress of intricate embroidery. Her hair was red-blonde and tied in braids at each side. She looked out of the canvas directly at the viewer. Fillide. Caravaggio smiled to himself. She strokes that rapier like it was the stiff member of a high-paying client.

  ‘Since I saw her, I’ve barely been able to think of anything else. Her gaze is mesmeric. But why doesn’t she look to heaven as the saints do in their moment of martyrdom?’ Scipione’s voice sharpened and Caravaggio saw that, despite his air of levity, the cardinal was to be addressed with care.

  ‘She stares out at you, because I wished to show that your relationship with the saint is more important than her connection to heaven,’ Caravaggio said. ‘Her martyrdom isn’t a distant suffering for which we should feel only awe. I want you to sense her anguish as your own.’

  ‘Mine?’

  ‘Surely even a cardinal—?’

  ‘Oh, the afflictions are many, you’re quite right. Meetings and paperwork, requests for this and that, builders who don’t keep to the construction schedule for my palace. There are criminals who want to be pardoned and supporters of this or that holy buffoon who absolutely must be granted sainthood to secure the faith of the people in some freezing Bavarian town.’ Scipione shared a look of resignation with del Monte. ‘But is it merely your superb technique that makes the saint’s face so compelling to me, Maestro? I feel there’s something else. Perhaps I might be acquainted with the lady.’

  ‘Her? The model?’

  Out of Scipione’s sight, del Monte lifted a hand in warning.

  ‘Quite so, her,’ the Cardinal-Nephew said.

  ‘I doubt it, Most Illustrious and Reverend Sire.’

  ‘Do you? Why?’

  ‘She’s a whore.’

  Del Monte dropped his hand and moaned.

  ‘Your Illustriousness would never take his pleasures with a woman.’ Caravaggio rolled his tongue through his cheek. ‘A woman such as this, I mean.’

  Scipione escaped the gaze of St Catherine for long enough to turn upon Caravaggio. His sybaritic features stiffened and Caravaggio saw something vindictive and inexorable in his weepy, little eyes. Look out, Romans, he thought. This one has only as long as his uncle stays alive to tax you and rob you. He’ll waste no time about it.

  The cardinal examined the painter. His focus rested on each of the small tears and worn patches in the black velvet of Caravaggio’s jacket. Scorn burned through the scanty material to the artist’s skin.

  Caravaggio scratched the back of his neck. Be nice, Michele. At least, try harder. He considered mentioning that Fillide was no cheap street whore, though she was undoubtedly too inexpensive a companion for Scipione. The illustrious cardinal would need a more accomplished musician and singer, a girl or a boy who could improvise a rhyme when they weren’t servicing him. In the six years since he had painted her as St Catherine, Fillide had coupled with half the priests and minor nobility of Rome, but she had added no skills to her repertoire beyond those of a purely carnal nature.

  ‘I like this work, Maestro Caravaggio.’ Scipione’s voice was quiet and sharp. ‘But I don’t like the black frame. I’d change it. I like a gilded frame.’

  Caravaggio was about to say that Scipione had better commission a painting to put in the frame first, but he caught his lip. Silence, Michele.

  ‘Yes, a gilded frame would do best,’ Scipione said.

  ‘Do you think so, Your Illustriousness?’

  The unforgiving eyes again. ‘That’s what I said. So you must assume that it’s also what I think. Though I can’t say that you may be sure of it.’

  That was the trap set by the powerful for everyone around them, and for artists in particular. An undiplomatic word spoken by a courtier could be quickly corrected, but an aberrant painting hung in a church or on the wall of a palace was an undeniable testament to the artist’s error and vice. Painters rehashed the work of Raphael and Michelangelo, because these departed masters protected them against accusations of dangerous, innovative thinking. But Caravaggio painted according to his heart, his reading of the Scriptures, his hope of salvation, and he painted what he saw in the world, not what Leonardo had seen a century before. Sometimes he decided to be careful and he checked his compositions against the guidelines for painters of religious subjects set out by the Council of Trent. But now Scipione decided if a work was orthodox or impious, to be praised or condemned. Paint a canvas that doesn’t conform to the Cardinal-Nephew’s idea of the order of the world and an artist might forfeit more than his commission. It would be the fire for him.

  Del Monte crooked his hand around Scipione’s elbow and laid an insistent palm on Caravaggio’s shoulder. He manoeuvred both men to the high window overlook
ing the simple façade of the Church of San Luigi. ‘His Illustriousness the Cardinal-Nephew was most admiring of The Calling of St Matthew when I showed it to him this afternoon.’

  Goaded by a pressure from del Monte’s hand, Caravaggio made great show of bowing, his head low over his extended leg.

  His knee appeared through his stocking. Where did that tear come from? he thought. He had an indistinct recollection of a tumble in the street the night before. By the tennis courts near the Piazza Navona. Someone shoved me. A lost bet which I didn’t want to pay, that’s right. To whom do I owe the money? The gamblers at the courts aren’t inclined to forgive a debt. He swallowed hard, an ominous queasiness in his stomach.

  Scipione was talking about St Matthew. It was nothing Caravaggio hadn’t heard again and again in the five years since he painted it. The sensation around his style in Matthew had yet to subside. He had endured many expositions from connoisseurs on the originality with which he shrouded Our Saviour in the gloom of a basement and, in doing so, illuminated him more lustrously than all the expensive ultramarine blue on a conventional painter’s palette could have done. He had suffered just as many curses and as much haughty derision, too.

  But none saw it as Caravaggio did. They all thought the light fell on the grey-bearded figure at the table, that this was Matthew the tax collector, turning his finger towards himself as if to ask whether Christ called to him.

  They had the wrong man. The finger pointed beyond the bearded fellow to a youth with his head lowered over the dark tabletop. He shuffled his coins, sullen and dissatisfied with his career. Most of those who saw the painting looked upon this young man as a symbol of the miserable life Matthew was about to leave behind him. But all the other figures on the canvas were content that there should be nothing more in their world than a melancholy counting-house. That despondent young man at the end of the table saw the world through a veil of unfulfilment. He was the one waiting to be called.