by Matt Rees
‘I bet I could get you clean.’ Her daring made him laugh. With relief, she thought, as much as with amusement. ‘You didn’t change your mind? About me modelling?’
He shook his head and sucked in his lips. ‘Lena, I may not be able to see you for a while. I have to hide. The police . . .’ She waited for him to look at her, preparing a coquettish smile to encourage him. But he stared at the dirt where his feet fell.
‘Even so, I’ve already seen you in the pose in which I’ll paint you, as soon as I’m free again.’ He closed his eyes. ‘I’ve seen you as the Virgin. Standing at your door with Domenico. And then also when you were playing with him, walking his feet on yours.’
‘That sounds like me, not the Virgin.’
He whispered, ‘You’ll see. There’s no difference.’
He’s not like the others in the Evil Garden. He’s not just after my honour. Understanding and amazement suffused her chest like warmth from a brazier. He really does see the Madonna in me.
‘I have to wait for the right commission, of course.’ He looked up, noticing the awe in her face. ‘What?’
She blushed. ‘Nothing. Go on.’
‘That’s how I work, you see. Someone, a cardinal like del Monte, pays me to do a canvas for him, and only then I get my models together for the painting.’
She rocked on her heels, as they waited for a gap in the flow of carriages so that they might cross the Corso. If he sees the Madonna in me, what do I see in him? He carried a sword and lived in the roughest neighbourhood of Rome. No doubt he mixed with bad sorts – all artists did. But he was gentle; she felt it. That’s why he’s come to me. I’ve never been like the other girls round here, either. We’re different, him and me.
She lost herself, as if she were dreaming. He took her arm to go across the street, and she jumped as though she had been woken from a sleep. ‘You can call on me in the meantime,’ she said, ‘while you’re waiting for a commission.’
‘What will your suitor, the notary, say about that?’
Her gaze drifted to the other side of the street. She hadn’t expected him to remember the papal notary who came every week to press her to marry him. She would have liked to explain that the man was two decades older than her, that she hated his arrogance, his assumption that she would want him simply because of his position and wealth. It was hard to find the words now. It was difficult enough for her to understand her resentment. She ought to have welcomed the man’s attention. She was a menial at a palace, who supplemented her income selling vegetables in the Piazza Navona, and he was an employee of the Holy Father. The notary could have tried to buy her honour for a night. Perhaps it was the fact that he hadn’t done so that made her dislike him. It would have been more honest than the pomposity with which he declared that he would have her only on the terms decreed by the Church. She felt disdain in his declarations. By making a show of his refusal to buy her, he indicated that he believed her to be for sale. Like most men, he saw a poor girl as a whore who had yet to find a pimp.
‘He’s just someone my mother knows.’ She flicked her hand in dismissal. ‘When you paint, how long does a model have to stand in the same pose?’
‘Three or four hours at most. In one day, that is. You’d have to come back again and again.’ He held her glance. She felt their faces drawing closer, the slow, bewitching course to a kiss. She moved towards him. The tripes slopped to the side and the basket tipped. Caravaggio took a step to rebalance, so the innards wouldn’t fall to the floor. He laughed, shyly, with her.
Anna was laying out anchovies to dry for a puntarelle salad when they reached Lena’s house. ‘Did you get the sprouts, my girl?’
‘No, I forgot, Mama. I’ll go back out for them.’
‘Better clean those tripes first.’ The old woman saw Caravaggio and wiped her hands on her apron. ‘Maestro, how good of you to pay a call.’ She curtsied. He glanced at Lena. They smiled at her mother’s formality.
Lena unwrapped the grey tripes and slapped them onto the table. ‘I have to get to work,’ she said. ‘Unlike you, I never have to wait long for a commission.’
‘I didn’t say I have to wait a long time. I wait only for the right one.’
He was on his way through the door into the street. She rolled up her sleeves. ‘Maybe I should’ve been an artist.’
He lifted his chin, questioning.
‘It’s my inclination, too,’ she said, ‘to wait for the right one.’
Costanza Colonna determined to hide Caravaggio until the papal police had finished their sweep of the brawlers from the Piazza Navona. She called him to her rooms at the Colonna Palace and told him he would find refuge at her son Muzio’s lodgings nearby.
Caravaggio shuffled before her and scratched at his beard.
‘What’s wrong, Michele?’ she asked.
His head dipped, side to side. ‘My lady . . .’ He shrugged. ‘Don Muzio?’
‘It’s a matter of convenience and urgency, Michele. The fight was in one of the most important public places in Rome. Blood was spilled. The police want to make some arrests. They left you at large until you had made the final touches to the Holy Father’s portrait. But now you have to hide.’
‘But Don Muzio . . .’
Costanza recalled the tension between her eldest son and Michele. It had been years since the older boy had teased Michele for his low birth. They were grown men now. Surely their duty to her would outweigh those old disputes.
‘I’d prefer to take my chances,’ Caravaggio said.
Costanza brought her hand down on the white leather cover of the armchair where she sat. Why do men take nothing seriously, except their honour? Men were trapped forever in their boyhood relations. Michele would be wound tight by her son’s taunts, just as he had been when they were boys at her palace. Plague orphan, that’s what Muzio used to call him. Taking over the Marquisate since her husband’s passing hadn’t reduced her eldest son’s eagerness to show his superiority to others. He goaded Fabrizio every time they met. Michele was even more vulnerable.
Caravaggio glanced about the room as though he didn’t trust its silence. Is he so hunted? she wondered. I see now that he has been helpless all this time. An outsider in her home, he had been reminded of it by her husband, by Muzio, even by the servants. Only Fabrizio and I welcomed him. But the love we offered failed to mute the rage in him.
‘Don Muzio and I, my lady, have unfinished business,’ Caravaggio said.
‘What can you mean?’
‘You remember, in the Oratory . . . ?’
‘But that was twenty-two years ago.’
He shrugged. Muzio wouldn’t have forgiven it, either, she thought. The last time they had been together, her son had taunted Michele while they played in the Oratory of the palace chapel in Caravaggio. Fabrizio had defended him, but Muzio had accused them of dreadful sins against nature. Her husband had overheard from the cloister. He had struck Fabrizio a fearful blow across the head and given him a kick to the very buttocks he believed to have been defiled by Michele. Fabrizio told her later that her husband had looked at Michele the way the priests glared at heretics who refused to repent in the fire. After her husband had left the Oratory, Michele had beaten Muzio with a candlestick until Fabrizio had restrained him.
She shivered as she had when her husband came to her chamber to order that Michele be sent away. She had resisted, until she saw Michele with the painters making the fresco some weeks later. It had seemed an opportunity to restore peace to her household and to give the boy a chance at a career in which he wouldn’t be tormented by his past.
Did I send him away because of my own revulsion at what he did with Fabrizio? She had always thought it a good deed she had done for her ward. Now she doubted herself. She rubbed her fingers against her thumb, as if she counted the beads on a rosary.
She watched him shifting awkwardly on the flagstones before her, like the boy she had sent away. She saw it now. There had been love between him and Fabrizio, thoug
h she had never experienced such feelings herself. Some part of her had failed to mature beyond the age at which she had been dispatched to be a bride. I made him leave because their love exposed me as a child still. I felt a mother’s love, but never a lover’s emotions. She had put Michele on the mail coach and sent him to Milan, hoping never again to think of the love she had been denied.
‘Very well,’ she murmured. ‘I’ll hide you here at the Colonna Palace for a few days. I’m only a guest and I risk the displeasure of my brother, but I’ll see that it’s done.’
‘Your Ladyship has always shown herself most gracious towards me.’ He bowed with a formality that seemed to mock her.
As he went towards the door, she whispered to him, ‘I’m sorry, Michele.’
He reached for the door handle. ‘The fault is mine, my lady. It always has been.’ Without turning, he left the room.
That summer of 1605, the conflict between the supporters of the French and Spanish monarchs escalated on the streets of Rome. Caravaggio had witnessed its spark, the defeat of the Colonna wrestler by the groom from the Farnese palace. The bout in the Piazza of the Sainted Apostles had led to a night of brawling in the neighbourhoods each family controlled. In turn, every animosity in the city ignited. It was as though someone had set fire to a tree at its trunk and now the flames reached out along the branches to the smallest twigs and to the buds of the fruit that would be. The Farnese and the Colonna. The men who lived on the Quirinale hillside against those whose homes were near the Campo de’Fiori. Frenchmen versus Spaniards. And among the many contentions coming into leaf that summer: Caravaggio against Ranuccio Tomassoni.
One afternoon, Costanza Colonna came with a message from del Monte: the police were no longer interested in the fight at the Piazza Navona; Caravaggio could come out of hiding. He went straight to Lena. She was just home from work at the Madama Palace, removing her headscarf, when she saw him in the door and smiled. It thrilled him that the brightness moving in her features was for him. He was accustomed to admiration, but he recognized something else in her face. She drew him away from the door, reached up and kissed him.
This would have been the moment to take her to the back of the room, to lead her behind the curtain to the padded board that served as her bed. But he found himself untroubled by lust and even wishing to prolong this period of – of what? Of innocence, he thought. It was an unaccustomed sensation and it filled him with a curious energy. Could it be this is what those who’ve done no wrong feel?
‘Let’s go for a walk.’ He caught her around the waist.
She slipped away from him. ‘Is it really a walk you want?’
He looked down at her breasts, bit at his lip playfully, and nodded.
‘Take me somewhere you really like,’ she said. ‘I want to know more about you.’
‘That won’t take long. I’m a very simple man.’
‘That’s not what people say.’
‘What do they say?’
She spun her finger at the side of her head and they laughed.
He took her to the Piazza Farnese. In each corner of the square, bravos loitered, waiting for a fight. They flexed their fingers in their gloves, and they touched the hilts of their swords as though they might, without noticing, have mislaid these blades of more than four feet in length.
For once, Caravaggio allowed himself to believe that the tension around him wasn’t his concern. He led Lena under the barrel entryway of the Farnese palace. She glanced up at the family’s fleurde- lis carved into the ceiling coffers and touched the rose-marble columns at the side, plundered from the Baths of Emperor Caracalla. ‘Why’re you bringing me here? Do they need a cleaning woman?’
‘I want to show you that I have my reasons for being a little crazy.’ He turned his finger beside his head as she had done.
‘You don’t need an excuse for that, but I’m willing to listen.’
They went towards a broad, enclosed staircase. Across the courtyard, another platoon of edgy swordsmen affected to lounge against the massive pillars. At the landing, a fountain splattered its stream into an ancient sarcophagus. Lena splashed water over Caravaggio. She giggled at her own mischief. She’s not accustomed to the freedom to be herself in a palace, he thought. He chased her up the steps, laughing.
At the head of the stairs was a gallery hung with the paintings of the greatest masters of the last century. When Caravaggio had been there before, there were always a few gentlemen and their ladies admiring the art. Now the long hallway was empty. The swordsmen in the piazza had dispelled the art lovers. A chill of apprehension edged his happiness.
‘Who’s this cold fish?’ Lena smiled.
A portrait of a cardinal, distant and withdrawn, craning his thin neck.
‘Alessandro Farnese, painted by Maestro Raphael. See how his face appears to come out of the picture? This was something new in that time. It makes you feel as though you’re in conversation with the painting, with the man himself.’
‘I don’t think I’d like what he’d have to say.’
‘Here he is again.’ He moved to the next canvas. A hunched pontiff on a throne, his nephews paying him homage. ‘Now he’s older. He’s become Pope Paul III. This is by Maestro Titian. See how he painted everything in red tones?’
‘The Holy Father looks like an animal, frightened and ready to pounce at the same time.’
‘Everyone looks like that, if you examine them closely enough.’
‘That isn’t how you look.’
‘You barely know me.’
She touched her finger to the tip of his nose, stepped ahead and pointed. A Virgin and Child with St Anne and the Baptist, and at their feet a rotund cat. ‘I like this.’
‘It’s by Giulio Romano, a pupil of Maestro Raphael. He took his composition from Maestro Leonardo. At this time, every artist began simply to copy the finest elements of those who’d been before. The Madonna is very well done, but a little empty, no?’
‘The best part is the cat.’
‘Let’s call it the Madonna of the Cat.’
She purred.
He spread his arm along the gallery. ‘All these works are full of symbols. They don’t just tell a story. You have to know the meaning of the bunch of grapes in the Baptist’s hands to understand the Madonna of the Cat. You can’t just look and see it for itself.’
‘How am I supposed to know what those things mean?’
‘The artists and the men who buy paintings don’t care about you. Come, I’ll show you one man who wants to make it easier for everyone.’
They went along the loggia. He glanced into the courtyard and noticed that more swordsmen were moving in from the garden at the back of the palace.
He led her into a gallery facing the Tiber. It was narrow and only twenty-five paces long. The gods of myth wooed and battled each other across the ceiling.
‘There at the centre, see? Bacchus and Ariadne.’ He watched her eyes move slowly over the luxuriant colours. ‘You might not know the stories or even the names of the gods. But you know what’s happening. They’re marrying. They’re experiencing the joy of love. It’s right there. You don’t need to know anything else. No need to read the symbols.’
Pensive, she let her fingers rest delicately on her bust. ‘That’s why you like this room?’
‘That, and the way he uses space. Don’t you feel as though they’re all going to fall out of the ceiling and land on top of you? They have real bulk, even though they’re actually painted on a flat surface.’
‘Do you know how to do that?’
‘Yes, but once in a while I get it wrong. Annibale made no mistakes on this ceiling.’
‘Annibale?’
‘Carracci. The Maestro from Bologna who painted this work.’
‘Do you know him? What’s he like?’
It pleased him that she asked about the character of the painter. She sees the humanity of what he’s done. For her, this work isn’t just decoration. Then he looked down into the gar
den. The remaining swordsmen funnelled towards the courtyard. He had the first intimation of having mistaken the situation. ‘We’d better go.’
They returned to the loggia. The bravos gathered around a massive statue of Hercules, the height of two men, in the arcade across the court.
He pulled at her arm, but she held still. ‘You said you’d tell me your reasons for being a bit crazy.’
He stared across the courtyard. ‘Annibale finished that fresco three years ago. It was the marvel of all Rome. All the painters thought it was the best thing ever done. He worked on it for four years for Cardinal Farnese. The cardinal didn’t even thank him. He sent a servant to Annibale’s rooms with two hundred scudi.’
‘So much.’
To you, girl, yes. ‘You don’t understand. I get paid that much for a painting that takes only three months.’
‘He was cheated, then.’
‘Whatever a cardinal offers, it’s the deal you get. You can’t claim to be cheated by a prince of the Church. Annibale went crazy. Four years of intense work for almost nothing. He sits alone in the dark now, doesn’t accept visitors to his home. He’ll be dead soon enough.’
‘What’d you do if one of these cardinals tried that with you?’
‘I keep waiting to find out. That’s what makes me crazy.’
The swordsmen strode towards the gate. Caravaggio recognized their faces from the tennis courts and the football game on the Piazza Navona. He hurried to leave the palace. He wanted to be away before these men dispersed into the streets.
‘Painter,’ Ranuccio jogged out of the mass of men towards Caravaggio. ‘Is this your new slut?’
Caravaggio pulled Lena away. ‘I’ve no quarrel with you, Tomassoni.’
‘I beg to differ.’ Ranuccio’s brothers came to his shoulder. He squared up to his full height, a head above Caravaggio. ‘I don’t think I’ve seen this whore before.’
‘Watch your mouth.’
Ranuccio waved his gloves as though Caravaggio had made a poor joke. He scrutinized Lena. ‘Nice big tits. Girl, did he tell you what happened to Prudenza, his last tart?’ He drew his finger across his throat.