by Matt Rees
He folded back the curtain so that the basic elements of the composition were visible to her on the canvas. ‘I’m not doing this painting the way others have done the Madonna of Loreto. I don’t want people to say, “Ah, the Virgin can fly and, oh, what a nice house she had.” I want them to know all the purity of the Madonna’s soul and to be filled with the love she gave the world through her son.’ He came closer to her. There was expectation on her face. She knows what I’m going to say. She feels the same thing. She’s with me. ‘To paint such a thing, I must feel those emotions. And I do feel them. Because I love you.’
Lena’s eyes flickered between the image of herself on the canvas, incomplete and still, and the animated face of the man beside her.
‘If I ever paint anything worth looking at again, it’ll be because I’m thinking of you.’
She lowered her glance and let her shoulder touch his. ‘But I’m not, you know . . . There’ve been one or two gentlemen . . .’
‘I didn’t say that you are the Virgin.’ He raised her chin with one finger. ‘I see the idea of her in you, and you make that idea real. Without you, she doesn’t exist.’
He touched her mouth with his lips.
Del Monte watched him highlight the edge of the dirty step on which the Virgin twirled with her child. The cardinal lifted his beret and scratched his scalp.
‘Baglione and the Academy won’t like it,’ he said.
‘I’d cut it to shreds with my dagger if they did.’ Caravaggio leaned close to the canvas.
Del Monte took in the whole painting, as tall as two men. ‘It’s magnificent,’ he murmured.
‘But?’
‘The Church has guidelines for the portrayal of religious subjects.’
‘Since when did you care about such things?’
‘Don’t misunderstand me. Some say I may one day be Pope – but I prize art as the greatest reflection of God’s light on earth.’
Caravaggio put his brush crosswise between his teeth so that he could take another from a pot at the foot of his easel. ‘So?’
‘Your Madonna has dirty toenails, Michele. Her skin has some flaws around the eyes. The Holy House, on which successive popes have expended enormous sums, is portrayed here as a slum dwelling.’
‘Christ was a poor man.’
‘But the Holy Father is not.’
Caravaggio stretched his back. He kept his eyes on his last few strokes of paint, assessing them.
‘If Our Virgin Lady lives in poverty, Michele, why should anyone venerate a rich man who wears expensive robes and pads around his palace in red slippers?’ Del Monte examined the painting, his face aglow with an admiration no doctrinal quibbles could suppress. ‘Will you at least give her a halo?’
From beneath his tray of pigments, Caravaggio produced a pair of compasses. ‘I thought you’d never ask.’
When his Madonna was finished, Caravaggio sat before her in the quiet of the late afternoon. The winter sun went down. Its beam through the edge of the shutter crossed her body like a heavenly caress. Nothing else should touch her, he thought.
The house was silent. He had sent everyone to the Tavern of the Moor, telling them he would follow for dinner. He wanted to be alone with her, before he gave her to the Church of Sant’Agostino.
The wound on his neck ran like a thick seam gathering him together. If the scar weren’t there, I’d slip to the floor, a suit of clothes with the stitching unpicked. His hair had grown back over the cut on his temple, but he sensed something at work beneath the skin. His body was struggling to repair whatever damage he had suffered there. Perhaps the impact of the sword knocked something free in my brain, to let me know there’s no ‘next time’. At any moment he might cease to exist – with no opportunity to explain, to say farewell, to apologize. The last thing I said to Lena might simply be the last thing I ever say to her.
He saw this in the way he had painted his Madonna. I’m not playing games, he thought. Here she is. Anyone who sees her will know exactly who I am too, even if I’m gone, taken in a brawl or by disease.
In his first years in Rome, his canvases had been whimsical and satirical. He painted cardsharps, for the amusement of cardinals who liked to imagine the forbidden darkness of the inns and the lowlifes within; nubile boys bitten by lizards, as if nature wished to warn of the dangers of love; youths peeling fruit, unaware that someone crept close to watch their pale necks, their delicate fingers. His works were clammy and foetid and disreputable like the bars and bedchambers where he passed his time.
When had he changed? What had started him on the path that led to this Madonna?
The Rest on the Flight into Egypt. He barely knew what he had done at the time, a few years after arriving in Rome. A scene of the Holy Family succoured by the music of an angel as they fled the vengeful Herod, painted with the dreamy clarity of the Venetian school. But later, in the gallery of the Lady Olimpia Aldobrandini, he had recognized that his heart was imprinted on the canvas.
In that painting, exhausted by the journey, the Holy Mother rested her cheek on her baby’s head. The little Jesus, also halfasleep, picked at her mantle, as though he dreamed of feeding at her breast. Menica’s friend Anna had modelled for the Virgin. She had understood that her life as a cheap whore wouldn’t be a long one. Still she had faith that there might be an escape. Caravaggio had illustrated her hope and fear and acceptance in the drained, loving Virgin. The love of a mother who knew her son would be a sacrifice and was yet willing to undergo the hardships of the desert to preserve him for it. I saw all that in the face of a whore.
Anna had been dead a year now, at twenty-five, her skin wasted and scarred, her red hair dry and lustreless. He was with her at the end, and she had reminisced about the sixteenyear- old beauty he had painted as the Virgin. When she expired, he had dropped his head to her breast and shocked himself with his weeping. He had known many whores who had disappeared from the streets with little more than a shrug from him. Yet he had cried for Anna as though she had invented death, a malignant novelty displayed in a gallery which only he might view.
He touched his fingertips to his new Madonna’s toes and traced the arch of her foot. He had to let her go. He kissed his fingers and went down the stairs to the street.
He reached the Tavern of the Moor. In the darkness of the inn, he squinted to adjust his eyes. Something fluttered near the lantern by the bar. It was a hand. Lena was waving to him.
They drank rich wine from the volcanic island of Ischia. Lena pressed against Caravaggio’s shoulder. With his cup in his hand and his friends around the table, he felt a rush of enthusiasm that made him boisterous and extravagant. He loved everyone. Across the table, Gaspare nuzzled Menica. Mario Minniti stabbed his dagger into the board between Onorio’s fingers until he cut the skin. Onorio flattened his hand against Mario’s nose and laughed when it bled. Prospero licked at the wound in Onorio’s thumb and moaned like a dog.
Onorio pushed Prospero away and drew Caravaggio to him.‘Come gambling with me.’
Caravaggio waved him off and drank some more wine.
‘You finished your Madonna. You need to cut loose, like you always do when you complete a painting.’
‘I can’t. Scipione has arranged a new commission. I need to start right away. Tonight I’m celebrating, but tomorrow I’m back in the studio.’
The architect slugged down the rest of his wine. ‘What’s this new commission?’
‘The Death of the Virgin. For the Barefoot Carmelite Fathers at Santa Maria della Scala.’
‘It’s not really your style. The Virgin floating up towards heaven while all the disciples raise their arms and eyes in wonder.’
Caravaggio battered at his friend’s arm. ‘Do you take me for Baglione, stronzo? I won’t paint her the traditional way. I’ll paint her dead.’
Onorio was quiet and intent.
‘I’ve painted Christ dead,’ Caravaggio said. ‘Why not his mother?’
‘You can show Jesus dead, bec
ause we know he’s coming back. No artist ever showed the Virgin’s death as anything but a glorious ascension to heaven. As if she simply didn’t die.’
‘Still, dead she shall be.’
Onorio’s sullen eyes peered from beneath the fringe of his hair with such malevolence that Caravaggio held his breath. ‘So your model for the dead Virgin would have to be dead – to be truly lifelike.’
Though Onorio spoke in a murmur, it stilled Prospero and Mario. They watched him, knowing what was on his mind and fearing it. Caravaggio thought of the man who died in the sword fight at the Farnese Palace and Onorio’s unscrupulous boast that he had killed him.
‘Let’s go and get you a Virgin. Let’s go and kill a whore.’ Onorio’s teeth glimmered in the candlelight.
In a single breath Caravaggio was sober. His lips quivered as he tried to form the words that would end this.
With a sudden burst, Onorio threw up his arms and bellowed.‘I had you, you bastard. I had you.’ He grabbed Caravaggio and kissed his head. ‘I really had you going.’
The laughter around the table was relieved and horrified. Onorio punched Caravaggio lightly in the stomach. His guts chilled, as if the playful jab had disembowelled him.
‘By Jesu, I nearly died there,’ Mario said.
Onorio reached over the table, half-rising, and bestowed a kiss on Mario’s cheek.
Lena held Caravaggio’s hand in hers. ‘I’d do it, Michele. I’d be the dead Virgin.’
His pulse was quick from Onorio’s joke. It picked up still more as she spoke. I couldn’t watch her even pretend to be dead.
‘I enjoyed being a model,’ she said. ‘I liked that you told me what the Virgin might think. That I could imagine the Madonna’s thoughts and show them on my face. It won’t be difficult, after all, to be the dead Virgin. I’ll just have to lie there.’
‘Then you should get Menica to do it,’ Mario said. ‘That’s how she makes her living.’
Menica flipped her finger off her ear.
Lena knitted her fingers into Caravaggio’s hand. ‘You haven’t let me see the finished Madonna of Loreto. When can I have a look?’
He stared into his cup. For now, it was still his. She was his, on the easel of his studio.
‘I, too, should like to see your Madonna,’ Gaspare said. ‘So that I can write a poem about it.’
Lena’s not like those other dead girls. I’ll protect her. Caravaggio made himself jolly. ‘Allow me to give you some of my own verses. They’re not as fine as the sentiments of our true poet Signor Gaspare, but perhaps they’re more appropriate to these surroundings.’
He lifted his cup and took a long draught. Then he said,
I’d like to put my penis
In Botticelli’s Birth of Venus.
His friends guffawed.
But Michelangelo’s Sacra Famiglia
Doesn’t make me want to feel ye.
Onorio hammered the table with his palms. ‘True poetry.’
Caravaggio went on, ‘Giovanni Baglione —’
‘Here it comes,’ Prospero said.
Giovanni Baglione’s Resurrection
Gave me no erection.
But Caravaggio’s St Catherine
Invited me to thrust in.
Mario mimed the act of love against Prospero’s shoulder.
Caravaggio grinned.
Maestro Reni painted Moses with his stone tablets.
Michele’s Madonna’d make me break the commandments.
Lena laughed in good-humoured shock. Caravaggio squeezed her hand.
Gaspare raised his arms. ‘The true work of art is womankind. May I? Lady Menica Calvi —’
‘— one scudo to suck me.’ Mario giggled.
Gaspare tried again. ‘Lady Menica Calvi —’
‘— two scudi to fuck me.’
Lena’s nose touched Caravaggio’s beard. ‘Why don’t you write a poem about me?’
He rose so fast that his hips jogged the table. His friends reached out to catch their drinks. He pulled at Lena’s arm. She stumbled after him to the door of the tavern. Prospero hooted and made a bawdy gesture with his forearm.
Caravaggio went so quickly down the Corso that Lena had to run to keep up. His silence was sudden and violent, but her features were composed, unworried. He took her to his studio.
In front of the Madonna of Loreto, Lena stood more motionless than her image in the picture itself. In the quiet, Caravaggio thought he could hear the Madonna’s skirts as she swung her hips.
‘Maestro Raphael frescoed the Prophet Isaiah on one of the pillars in Sant’Agostino. When they hang this Madonna in that church, do you think anyone will ever so much as glance at Raphael’s work? It’s you they’ll come to see. You still want me to pen some doggerel for you?’
She shook her head and moved backwards until she dropped onto his bed.
When they had made love, she wrapped herself in his blanket and stood before the Madonna of Loreto. ‘They’re praying to her, these two old beggars. But she’s not granting them a blessing.’
He rose from the bed. ‘The Madonna knows she ought to take the baby back inside. With the strength of their devotion, they must persuade her to stay and bless them. I want people to see this in the church and realize that they must draw the grace out of religion. They have to bring the Virgin to life. They have to make her real.’
‘Lucky for you I’m not the Virgin then. You don’t have to try so hard.’
‘Lucky for me.’
‘Yeah, you’ve got it easy.’ She took his naked body into the folds of the blanket with her. ‘The old people in the picture remind me of my grandparents.’ She rested her cheek against his shoulder. Her chestnut hair dropped over her chest and to her nipples of that same dark redness. He ran his fingers through it. It was the first time he had touched her hair this way.
‘Are your grandparents still with us?’ she asked.
He remembered his grandfather’s eyes when his father had closed them in death. His years at the Marchesa’s palace, the fights with Costanza’s sons, the chill of his family home when he visited his melancholic mother. The hand with which he caressed Lena’s hair was the same one that had wrenched at Fabrizio’s hose and clasped his buttocks. Everything is different, he told himself. I’m not bound by the life I’ve led any more than my art is in thrall to works painted long ago. He shook his head. ‘There’s no one.’
‘No parents? No brothers or sisters?’
‘No one.’
He felt an extra pressure from her cheek on his breast.
‘Poor baby,’ she said. ‘Everyone you loved had to die.’
4
The Death of the Virgin
The bald heads of the apostles caught the light from a high window. For a joke, Caravaggio made Onorio model as St John, who was noted for his gentleness. In the foreground Menica bent double as the tearful Magdalene. A red canopy was the only sign of richness in the poor dwelling where Caravaggio set the scene of his new painting.
He had worked for months on the canvas, but still he had only an outline cut into the underpaint with the handle of his brush where he intended the Mother of God to lie. He couldn’t bring himself to paint Lena as a corpse laid out on a simple bed board. When he saw her, he was reminded always of life, not death.
As The Death of the Virgin progressed, so Lena’s pregnancy showed. He went to the market on the Piazza Navona to find her. She was wrapped against the winter damp in a heavy cape, calling the price of the onions piled in the basket at her feet. The chill caught her throat and she hacked out a cough, her hands on her belly. A young trader pushed an empty cart past her. He spoke a few words, leering at her pregnant stomach and thrusting his hips. She flicked the tips of her fingers off her chin to return the insult.
When Caravaggio reached her, the pallor of her skin alarmed him. I waited all this time for love, he thought. Now I can barely feel it because I fear losing it. Perhaps that would be just. It was as if his feelings for Lena had to b
e weighed against all the bitter lusts of his past.
‘My feet are swelling up,’ she said. ‘Mama says it happens to women later in their term. You’d better hurry up and put me in your painting, or you’ll have to change it to a Madonna and Child.’
He blew out a hot breath like smoke. He pictured her reclining dead in the void in his painting, her sufferings at an end. How could he depict her death? He had always painted from life. He remembered Onorio’s macabre joke at the inn. He gasped and closed his eyes.
‘Michele? What’s wrong?’
He lifted her basket. He was frightened because the thought of her death terrified and satisfied him. It would destroy me, but it’s what I’ve got coming to me for the life I’ve lived. ‘I shouldn’t let you do this during the winter. You’re carrying my child. The market’s no place for a woman in your condition.’
‘Has something happened between you and Ranuccio?’ she said.
‘No, it’s nothing.’ I’m the only person who terrorizes me. He hefted the basket out of the piazza.
When he left her at the house on the Via dei Greci, her mother gave him a spiteful look before she shut the door. That’s what I deserve. She knows I’ll never marry her daughter. I’m like all the other scum in the Evil Garden. But as he hunched away through the cold, he imagined Lena rising from the deathbed he had painted for her. She illuminated his unworthy canvas. He went to the Tavern of the Moor and kissed Menica with such enthusiasm that she giggled and blushed. ‘I’m going to be a father,’ he said.
He came back to the piazza the next day, determined to take Lena away from the market. He wanted to bring her to his studio, to light a fire to warm her, to paint her again. A mountebank bellowed from a wooden platform, brandishing a pot of powder he claimed cured worms. The quack’s daughter stamped and played violin at his side. She was shivering and her skin was grey. Lena looks as unhealthy, Caravaggio thought. Have I let her continue to sell her vegetables in this piazza just so she’ll appear sick enough to play the corpse of the Virgin in my painting? The conman raised his voice still more to be heard over the women arguing nearby. ‘I have here a radish whose magic cures toothache,’ he bellowed.