Caravaggio

by Andrew Graham-Dixon

  Much of Rome was still down at heel, as it had been when Montaigne visited. But by the time of Caravaggio’s arrival the city was in the throes of a great transformation. In the spring of 1585 a devout Franciscan, Felice Peretti, Cardinal of Montalto, had been elected Pope Sixtus V. Energized by the same sense of mission as the formidable Carlo Borromeo – with whom he collaborated on an edition of the writings of St Ambrose – he set out to rebuild Rome both spiritually and physically. The edicts of the Counter-Reformation, handed down at the Council of Trent, were to be scrupulously observed. The fabric of the city itself had to be transformed into the visible symbol of a triumphantly reaffirmed Catholicism.

  Under Sixtus V and his immediate successors, the appearance of Rome was dramatically altered. Seven grand new radial avenues were created to link the seven principal Christian basilicas and to ease the passage of pilgrims through the city. Many of the ancient Christian sites of Rome – including the catacombs, the tombs of the early martyrs – were excavated and restored. The dome of St Peter’s, begun by Bramante nearly a century earlier, continued by Antonio da Sangallo and finally redesigned by ‘the divine’ Michelangelo, had at last been completed. Within a year of Caravaggio’s arrival a gleaming ball topped by a golden cross had been mounted above its lantern.

  As if to justify Montaigne’s assertion that ancient Rome still ‘terrified the world’, its vestiges were yet more thoroughly subjected to Christian zeal. Prominent remains of antiquity were appropriated – moved, transformed, sometimes defaced and demolished – to demonstrate the eternal triumph of a resurgent Catholic Church over paganism and heresy alike. Sixtus V’s principal architect, Domenico Fontana, transported a vast obelisk from the Circus of Nero to the square of St Peter’s. Inscriptions were added to its base, declaring that a monument erected to the impious cults of the ancient gods had been brought to ‘the threshold of the apostles’ and consecrated to ‘the undefeated cross’.11 The old Renaissance spirit of admiration for the art and literature of the classical past began to be regarded with a distrust that bordered on outright hostility.

  The same, severe repudiation of pagan antiquity had been expressed by one of the most prominent commissions of Sixtus’s predecessor, Gregory XIII: Tommaso Laureti’s painting The Triumph of Christianity – a fresco decoration for the Sala di Costantino in the Vatican Palace, completed in the mid 1580s. In a chilly atrium, a statue of Mercury lies shattered at the foot of an image of Christ on the Cross. The fragments of stone that symbolize the destruction of the ancient gods – hand, torso, decapitated head – have been placed in the foreground, at the start of a brutally insistent single-point perspective scheme. The vanishing point of the picture is like a black hole, where all energy converges. The painter rushes the eye from pagan idol to redeeming Christ and beyond – to a glimmering avenue of architectural mystery that stands, by implication, for the ineffable mystery of the one true faith.

  CLEMENT VIII

  Caravaggio arrived in Rome some seven or eight months after the election of a new pope. Clement VIII was determined to carry on the work begun by his predecessors, albeit in a somewhat less militant style. He was a shrewd, cautious and deeply pious man, whose pontificate was marked by a relaxation of hostility towards the culture and mythology of antiquity. In the private sphere, at least, it became permissible to commission paintings on profane subjects from the artists of the city. So it was that during the 1590s the Bolognese painter Annibale Carracci covered the ceiling of the Palazzo Farnese – the palace of Cardinal Odoardo Farnese, one of the richest men in all Italy – with a dizzying cornucopia of nudes re-enacting the loves of the gods on earth, in the air and in the water. There had been nothing like this joyful celebration of Eros in Rome since the Renaissance.

  Clement VIII had been elected, on 30 January 1592, on the strength of his supposed moderation. In practice, he would tread a fine line between political pragmatism and Counter-Reformation zeal. He could be ruthless in the suppression of heresy and dissent, so the Rome that Caravaggio knew could hardly be described as a haven of creative and intellectual freedom. It was under Clement’s pontificate that the speculative mystic Giordano Bruno – who believed in a thousand different worlds spinning through space, but denied the existence of God – was burned at the stake in 1600. Clement was not actively hostile to Philip II of Spain, but he set out to emancipate the papacy from what he perceived as undue Spanish influence. Rival French and Spanish factions lobbied tirelessly for influence in Rome, and at times their disagreements spilled over into street fights and public brawls. Clement steered a skilful middle course. He cultivated closer relations with France, acknowledging the legitimacy of Henri IV’s claims to the throne and thus paving the way for the French king to renounce Protestantism and return to the Catholic fold. He then brokered the peace of Vervins of 1598, which effected a rapprochement between Henri IV and Philip II.

  The French king’s conversion was a tremendous coup for the Catholic Church and would come to be considered the greatest triumph of Clement’s reign. (The pope also courted James I of England, whose queen, Anne of Denmark, was already a convert to Catholicism, but to no avail.) At home he did his utmost to restrict the powers of the aristocracy, reining in the feudal barons of the Papal States at every opportunity. In 1597, when the venerable Este dynasty failed due to the lack of a male heir, he promptly claimed title to the family’s fiefdom of Ferrara and incorporated it into the papal states. Clement revised the Vulgate, promulgated a new edition of the Index librorum prohibitorum and took his duties as Bishop of Rome no less seriously than his role as supreme pontiff. He curbed prostitution, introduced a general ban on the carrying of weapons in public, outlawed duelling, made libel a capital offence and sought to enforce the strict celibacy of his clergy. The papal sbirri, the constabulary, were a vital tool in his control of the city. They were the equivalent of the Bishop of Milan’s famiglia armata, but even more numerous. They were given wide-ranging powers, including the power to stop and search anyone suspected of heresy, of bearing arms or of being out after curfew without good cause. They did much of their work at night and were known for the dark cloaks that they wore to conceal themselves as they tailed their suspects, or paid unannounced visits to the houses of witnesses and potential informers.

  Punishment, by contrast, took place in broad daylight. Death by execution was a grim public spectacle, a theatre of retribution designed to instil fear and the spirit of penitence into all who witnessed it. In 1581 Montaigne had observed the last moments of ‘a famous robber and bandit captain’ by the name of Catena:

  they carry in front of the criminal a big crucifix covered with a black curtain, and on foot go a large number of men dressed and masked in linen, who, they say, are gentlemen and other prominent people of Rome who devote themselves to this service of accompanying criminals led to execution and the bodies of the dead; and there is a brotherhood of them. There are two of these, or monks dressed and masked in the same way, who attend the criminal on the cart and preach to him; and one of them continually holds before his face a picture on which is the portrait of Our Lord, and has him kiss it incessantly. At the gallows, which is a beam between two supports, they still kept this picture against his face until he was launched. He made an ordinary death, without movement or word; he was a dark man of thirty or thereabouts …12

  After the criminal’s death, his body was cut into pieces. At this point, Montaigne notes, ‘Jesuits or others get up on some high spot and shout to the people, one in this direction, the other in that, and preach to them to make them take in this example.’ Such executions were still very much part of life in the Rome that Caravaggio knew.

  Religious observance was not a matter of choice. At Easter everyone living in Rome was obliged to take Communion and procure a ticket of evidence from the priest who administered the sacrament. Procuring the ticket – proof of orthodoxy, and necessary to pass muster with the police – was itself part of a system of surveillance and involved a separate visit
to the priest, who was obliged to write down the name and address of each communicant. But he also had to write down other details, noting for example who lived where and with whom, and listing their servants. It was, in effect, an annual census. It is because Counter-Reformation Rome was such an intensely controlled society that so much is known about those who lived there.

  As in the Milan of Caravaggio’s youth, great importance was attached to the question of what people should see, or be allowed to see. In a world where even the death of a criminal could be orchestrated as a grisly spectacle, religious art was inevitably subject to all kinds of supervisions. At the very start of his pontificate (1592–1605, therefore coinciding almost exactly with Caravaggio’s years in Rome) Clement proved particularly keen to establish himself as a ruthless enforcer of the doctrines laid down by the Council of Trent. On 8 June 1592, some four months after his election, he issued the papal Bull Speculatores domus Israel, declaring a ‘Visitation’ of all churches of the city of Rome. The clergy would be inspected and so would the fabric and decoration of their churches, including works of art.

  It was to be no comprehensive survey. The churches Clement actually visited are listed, in order, in the so-called Secret Vatican Archives (Archivio Segreto Vaticano). He started at the top, with St Peter’s itself on 3 July 1592. He then went on to Santa Maria Maggiore, followed by San Giovanni in Laterano. By the time the Visitation had finally petered out, four years later, only twenty-eight churches had been covered. The reason was not dilatoriness but Clement’s meticulous attention to detail. He insisted on visiting every church himself, and interrogating any suspect members of his clergy personally. Even though he surrounded himself with an entourage of four cardinals and three bishops – including Audwyn Lewis, the Bishop of Cassano, a Welsh Catholic who had left England in 1579 – the work of inspection was painfully slow. Its eventual abandonment may be taken as further proof of Clement’s common sense.13 Although deeply concerned for the well-being of the Church, Clement was not a man in the same obsessive mould as Carlo Borromeo. He stopped, perhaps knowing that his point had been made. The mere threat of the Visitation had reminded the Roman clergy to pay close attention to the works of art in their churches, and to use their powers of censorship if necessary. Caravaggio’s career would be directly affected as a result. Several times during his years in Rome he would experience the humiliation of having a painting intended for the altar of a Roman church rejected on the grounds of indecency or impropriety.

  IN THE ARTISTS’ QUARTER

  Like his immediate predecessors, the new pope was determined both to stabilize the foundations of the Catholic Church and to reassert the Eternal City as the radiant centre of Christendom. The beauty of Rome’s churches must compel faith and crush heresy. That is why the city was filled with artists. Painters, sculptors and architects throughout Italy, and further afield, knew that there was more than enough work to go round in Rome. As Florence had been during the fifteenth century, and as Paris would be at the peak of Louis XIV’s power, Rome under Clement VIII was the artistic capital of Europe. The artists of the city were so numerous – at a rough estimate, there were 2,000 of them, out of Rome’s total population of around 100,00014 – that they had their own quarter.

  This was an area of a little more than two square miles situated, roughly, between the Piazza del Popolo and the Piazza di Spagna. Artists tended to arrive in groups – whether from Naples or Bologna, Lombardy or Emilia-Romagna, Flanders or France – and to board together to save money; it was not unusual for two or three to share a room, using the space both as bedroom and workshop. Rome could be stiflingly hot, which placed a premium on the lower, cooler floors of rental accommodation. But that suited the traditionally hard-up community of painters, who preferred the less expensive upper floors anyway, because there was more light there to paint by. They particularly favoured houses backing on to the Pincio, the hill perched above the Piazza del Popolo.

  Different national groups of artists ran in gangs and swapped racial insults with their rivals. There were stereotypes to fit all. Germans were crude, the Flemish were drunks, and the French were violent thugs hiding behind a veneer of fake refinement. The Italians themselves, according to the exiled English earl encountered in Rome by the hero of Thomas Nashe’s novel of 1594, The Unfortunate Traveller, were addicted to ‘the art of epicurising, the art of whoring, the art of poysoning, the art of sodomitry’.15

  An Englishman like Nashe grouped all Italians together, but for them the matter of national belonging was less clear cut. Italians had some sense of communal identity but an even sharper feeling for the distinctions that set them apart from one another. The Bolognese were known to hate the Tuscans, while most Romans treated Sicilians as if they were little better than peasants. Neapolitans were said to be obsessive about horsemanship. The Milanese, as we have seen, were famously keen swordsmen, and naturally unruly – although ‘Lombards’ as a group were often stereotyped as sluggish provincials, heavy of mind and body thanks to their rustic diet.

  In 1589 the writer Giovanni Botero went so far as to propose a north–south fissure in the Italian temperament: ‘Those who live in northern countries but not in the extreme north, are bold but lack cunning; southerners on the other hand are cunning but not bold … They are as the lion and the fox; whereas the northerner is slow and consistent in his actions, cheerful and subject to Bacchus, the southerner is impetuous and volatile, melancholy and subject to Venus …’16 The personality of Caravaggio would be hard to locate on this particular map. He does not fit either profile, and in fact he would make his sense of his own singularity the subject of one of his earliest paintings – a self-portrait as Bacchus, but a Bacchus who is suffering and full of melancholy.

  CITY OF MEN, CITY OF WHORES

  The chronology of Caravaggio’s early years is impossible to establish with precision, although we can work out that he changed his address frequently – ten times or so between 1592 and 1595. The houses changed but the milieu was always the same: the dark network of alleyways clustered around the Piazza del Popolo; the narrow streets bordering the Palazzo Firenze, home of the Medici’s ambassadors to Rome; the Piazza Navona, which had once been the stadium of Domitian and still preserved its ancient double-horseshoe outline; the Campo de’ Fiori, the marketplace.

  This artists’ quarter was a dangerous area of the city. Fights were common and fists were not the only weapons used. In an attempt to deter armed violence, the papal police made a public example of anyone caught wielding a pugnello, the short-handled dagger that was so often Exhibit A in the cases brought before Rome’s criminal tribunals. At the corner of Via del Corso and Via dei Greci, in full shaming view of the city whose laws he had violated, the arrested suspect would be subjected to the strappado, an excruciating form of rope torture. The victim’s hands were tied behind his back, with another loop of rope passed beneath his joined arms. He was then hauled into the air and left dangling for half an hour, the full weight of his body gradually pulling his arms further and further back and behind him. The inevitable result was dislocation of both shoulders. Victims eventually recovered but they did not forget the pain in a hurry. A painter subjected to the strappado could not work for weeks.

  At night Caravaggio, his friends and his enemies shared the streets with the city’s prostitutes. Rome’s whores and courtesans had long been one of the sights of the city. In the early 1580s Montaigne had noted a craze for open-topped carriages especially adapted for the purpose of erotic ogling: ‘One preacher’s joke was that we turned our coaches into astrolabes … To tell the truth, the greatest profit that is derived from this is to see the ladies at the windows, and notably the courtesans, who show themselves at their Venetian blinds with such treacherous artfulness that I have often marvelled how they tantalise our eyes as they do; and often, having … obtained admission, I wondered at how much more beautiful they appeared to be than they really were …’17

  By Caravaggio’s time the prostitutes were s
o numerous that they had been coralled by papal edict into their own enclosure by the Tiber, the Ortaccio di Ripetta – a name which joked that the place was a kind of reverse Eden, since the literal meaning of ortaccio was ‘evil garden’. But they would escape after dark to ply their trade in the ill-lit streets around the Piazza del Popolo. They were an embarrassment to the authorities because their very presence in such great numbers represented a blatant betrayal of Christian ethics at the very heart of the Catholic world.

  Rome was not just an overwhelmingly male city; it was a city full of young and unattached men competing desperately with one another for favours. The city’s whores were a much needed outlet for the accumulated sexual energy of this male-dominated, testosterone-fuelled society. But they were also, often, an occasion for violence in themselves. Some girls offered certain services for free to clients whom they liked, which could easily breed resentment. For an artist, the service might be posing naked for a picture (painting the nude model was officially illegal and this was one way of getting around the rules). But if the girls’ pimps discovered such an arrangement, there was generally trouble.