Caravaggio
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Bellori also confirmed Luca’s description of the ‘disorderly’ and ‘threadbare’ state of Caravaggio’s clothing. But he added an interesting twist to it. ‘We cannot fail to mention his behaviour and his choice of clothes, since he wore only the finest materials and princely velvets; but once he put on a suit of clothes he changed only when it had fallen to rags.’ Caravaggio was one of those who liked to play the gentleman, to put on airs and graces and set himself above the people at large – even though his actual status remained highly ambiguous.
So the dark, threadbare Caravaggio was wearing a sword by night in 1597. He was evidently still doing so in spring of the following year: on 4 May 1598 he was arrested for bearing arms in a public place at eleven o’clock at night. A certain lieutenant Bartolomeo, attached to the Bargello of Rome, reported that ‘I encountered Michelangelo da Caravaggio between the Piazza Navona and the Piazza Madama, carrying a sword, without a licence, and also a pair of compasses, so I took him and put him in prison at the Tor di Nona.’ The following day, after a night in jail, Caravaggio was in court. Asked to account for his actions, he replied with righteous indignation. ‘I was arrested last night … because I was carrying a sword. I carry the sword by right because I am Painter to Cardinal del Monte. I am in his service and live in his house. I am entered on his household payroll.’55 Unusually, the notary transcribing the day’s evidence capitalized the word ‘painter’, perhaps in an attempt to capture the self-important stress that Caravaggio had placed on the word. Because he had such powerful contacts, the magistrate had no choice but to release him. The case was dismissed.
Joachim von Sandrart, a German etcher and art historian, wrote a brief account of Caravaggio’s life that contains a short but telling paragraph about the painter’s years in Rome. According to Sandrart, Caravaggio liked to go about ‘in the company of his young friends, mostly brash, swaggering fellows – painters and swordsmen – who lived by the motto nec spec, nec metu, “without hope, without fear”.’56 A number of those friends can be identified from contemporary sources. Prospero Orsi and Costantino Spata seem to have been among his more peaceable companions. Caravaggio’s Sicilian friend, the painter and occasional model Mario Minniti, must also be included. He was no stranger to violence but he lacked Caravaggio’s positive relish for it. According to his biographer, Francesco Susinno, Minniti was close to Caravaggio during his early years in Rome but eventually abandoned him; ‘he settled down and got married, because he found the turbulent adventures of his friend too much to stomach.’57
Orazio Gentileschi was among the more volatile ‘painters and swordsmen’ with whom Caravaggio kept company. Orazio was a gifted artist in his own right, but a difficult man with a short temper, whose reputation was under a cloud. In 1615 Grand Duke Cosimo II of Tuscany – son and heir to Cardinal del Monte’s patron, Ferdinando de’ Medici – considered bringing Orazio to Florence as an artist and asked his agent in Rome, Piero Guicciardini, to file a report on the painter’s character. The resulting reference was less than favourable: ‘he is a person of such strange manners and way of life and such temper that one can neither get on nor deal with him.’58
Some ascribed the fiery temperament of painters to the toxic qualities of the materials that they used. Lead white and vermilion were particularly poisonous. The mere touch or smell of either might cause a variety of symptoms including depression, anxiety and increased aggressiveness. Those suffering from ‘Painter’s Colic’, as it was called, also tended to drink heavily. While wine alleviated some symptoms, it exacerbated others, and was itself the catalyst for innumerable brawls and scraps in the artist’s quarter. Most of the people around Caravaggio were involved in some kind of violent incident at one time or another. Orazio Gentileschi’s own daughter, Artemisia, herself a painter, was raped by another artist. His name was Agostino Tassi. The enraged Orazio subsequently accused Tassi of ‘repeatedly deflowering’ his daughter. Artemisia’s matter-of-fact testimony, given at Tassi’s trial on 9 May 1611, gives a very clear view of the real violence that stalked the lives of so many of Caravaggio’s contemporaries.
Artemisia told the court that she was with her sister, Tuzia, when the attack took place:
After midday dinner the weather was wet and I was painting a portrait of one of Tuzia’s children for my own pleasure, when Agostino came by. He was able to get inside because there were masons in the house and they had left the door open. When he found me painting he said, ‘Not so much painting, not so much painting,’ and he took the palette and brushes out of my hand and threw them around, saying to Tuzia, ‘Get out of here.’ When I said to Tuzia to stay and not leave me with him as I had motioned to her before, she said, ‘I don’t want to stay and argue, I want to be off.’ Before she left Agostino put his head on my breast and after she had gone he took me by the hand and said, ‘Let us walk about a bit because I hate to be sitting down.’ As we walked up and down the room some two or three times I told him that I felt unwell and that I thought I had the fever, and he answered, ‘I have more fever than you,’ and after walking up and down two or three times, each time going past my bedroom door, when we came to the door of the bedroom he pushed me inside and locked it.
Once it was locked, he pushed me on to the edge of the bed with one hand on my breast, and he put one of his knees between my thighs so that I could not close them, and he lifted my clothes, doing so with much difficulty. He placed one of his hands with a handkerchief over my throat and my mouth so that I could not scream … and with his member pointed at my vagina he began to push it into me, having first put both his knees between my legs. I felt a terrible burning and it hurt me very much, but because of the gag on my mouth I could not cry out, though I tried as best as I was able to scream and call Tuzia. And I scratched his face and pulled his hair and before he could put it inside me again I grabbed his member so tightly that I even removed a piece of flesh. But none of this deterred him and he continued what he was intent upon, staying on top of me for a long time and keeping his member inside my vagina. And after he had finished his business he got off me.
Seeing myself free I went to the table drawer and took out a knife and moved towards Agostino saying, ‘I want to kill you with this knife because you have dishonoured me.’ And he opened his tunic saying, ‘Here I am,’ and I threw the knife at him; he shielded himself otherwise I would have hurt him and might easily have killed him. The outcome was that I wounded him slightly on the chest and he bled little because I had scarcely pierced him with the point of the knife. Then the said Agostino fastened his tunic and I was weeping and lamenting the wrong he had done me and to pacify me he said, ‘Give me your hand and I promise to marry you as soon as I am out of the mess I am in.’ He also said to me, ‘I warn you that when I take you as a wife I want no foolishness,’ and I answered him: ‘I think you can see whether there is foolishness.’
One of the most persistent trouble-makers in Caravaggio’s own immediate circle was the architect Onorio Longhi. He was just two years older than the painter and they had much in common. Onorio was from Viggiù, near Varese in Lombardy, close to where Caravaggio himself had been brought up. Longhi’s family had links with the Colonna dynasty. Onorio’s father, Martino, also an architect, had been called to Rome to work for the Colonna family. After Martino’s death in 1591, Onorio took on the family architectural practice, overseeing the completion of the church of Santa Maria in Vallicella in Rome, among other significant commissions. In between, he found plenty of time to get into trouble with the law. He was constantly in court, charged with disturbing the peace and a variety of other offences. G. P. Caffarelli, whose four-volume The Families of Rome was written between 1603 and 1615, described Onorio as ‘a little lawless leader for the youth’ (‘e un poco scapo scelerato per la gioventu’).59 He certainly seems to have been the ringleader of the group or gang that included Caravaggio. The architect and the painter were often seen together. Longhi was brash and talkative and generally took the lead, while Caravaggio
tended to be more taciturn and veiled.
‘I am a gentleman … and I don’t care about anything, I just go to eat and drink.’ That was how Onorio defiantly introduced himself in a witness statement given in court on 4 May 1595.60 Like Caravaggio, he was all the more dangerous because he had connections with a powerful household. As a servitore of the Colonna family, he too could defy the general ban on carrying weapons issued by Pope Clement VIII. ‘I don’t carry a sword by day or by night,’ Longhi declared in a witness statement of 1595. ‘Instead my servant, who accompanies me, carries it.’61 Two years earlier, in 1593, a prostitute named Margarita Fanella had testified that Onorio was armed at least part of the time – ‘sometimes yes and sometimes no I have seen him carry it [his sword] in the street when he goes around with other gentlemen.’ Also according to Margarita, ‘he has a little blonde beard, that he grows quite thick … he goes dressed in rich dark velvet.’62 It comes as no surprise to learn that he too was one of those who dressed in black after the sounding of the Ave Maria.
One cause for his many court appearances was a festering dispute with his brother Stefano, which broke out into actual violence on more than one occasion. Onorio had been away when their father had died, and he believed that Stefano had failed to pay over his full share of the inheritance. In 1599 Onorio succeeded in having Stefano imprisoned for four or five months for non-payment of the debt. In the autumn of 1600 Stefano issued a counter-suit, in which he claimed that on 7 July 1598 Onorio had come to his lodgings with three armed companions, possibly including Caravaggio, and had tried to break down the door, shouting, ‘You cuckolded thief, I want you to die by these hands!’63
That was by no means the only accusation levelled against Onorio. The investigators who looked into Stefano’s counter-suit of 1600 also examined evidence linking him to a number of other unsavoury incidents. They were particularly interested in a long-standing grievance between Onorio and a certain widow called Felice Sillano. Under questioning, Onorio told them that he knew her and that she was a respectable woman. But he denied that he had once tried to beat her door down while shouting, ‘You whore, you slut, you coward!’64 That interrogation itself went back to an older, unresolved case. Another set of transcripts, from 1599, reveal that Felicita Silano (sic) had already sued Onorio – together with ‘Claudio, the stone-cutter’ – for threatening behaviour:
It is now two nights ago that the said Onorio came to my doors saying: ‘Open, you baggage and slag.’ Having left, he came back and wanted to kick down the door, threatening me with further insults. He said that if I spoke he would beat me over the head with his sword. This same Claudio came and did the same thing five or six months ago, inciting others, and particularly Onorio, to cause trouble at my door. I am not a woman to put up with such treatment, and therefore I am now bringing the matter before the court.65
The record of the outcome does not survive; probably, the case petered out.
One of Longhi’s biographers said of him that ‘he was naturally bizarre and had a head that smoked.’66 The quarrel with his brother and the dispute with Felice Sillano were a fraction of his misdemeanours, which ranged from the extremely serious to the utterly trivial. He would be present when Caravaggio committed murder. But he was just as likely to be found getting into fights with passers-by who made the mistake of bumping into him in the street, or shouting insults at tradesmen for showing him insufficient respect. Case transcripts for 1595 record a scuffle in a cake-maker’s shop, after he had gone in to buy ‘a certain type of soft white meringue’.67
The violent words and deeds of Caravaggio and his contemporaries may now seem random and chaotic. In fact, the behaviour recorded in Rome’s criminal archive conformed to a particular set of codes. To attack a woman’s house, to threaten to break down her doors, was also to insult her honour, because, according to the mores of the time, people’s dwellings represented the occupants themselves. A common way to cast aspersions on someone’s name was to commit the crime of deturpatio: daubing paint – or sometimes excrement – on to the doors or windows of their home. In such cases the front of the house metaphorically represented the face. But the locked home also represented the human body, secure in virtue, hence Artemisia’s emphasis, in her account of being raped, on the carelessness of the masons who had been working on her house. By insisting that it was they, not she, who had left the door open, she was emphasizing that Agostino’s violation of her home and her body was none of her doing.
Even an act as apparently gratuitous as Longhi’s attack on a maker of meringues had its own significance. It was Longhi’s way of asserting that he was a valent’huomo, a cut above the common herd. Deportment books of the time encouraged gentlemen and aristocrats to cultivate a deliberate air of insolence towards the lower orders. In 1616 Giovanni Bonifacio published a manual on deportment entitled L’arte de’ cenni, in which he argued that gesture and facial expression themselves amounted to a language as complex as that of human speech. Bonifacio devoted fifty-eight sections to the eyes alone, itemizing different types of wink and squint, differentiating between the promise of a raised eyebrow and the threat of a frown. He also went into some detail about the significance of the out-thrust elbow. To walk with arms akimbo gave the impression of strength, he noted, it being the demeanour of someone prepared to thrust through the mass of ordinary people, to ‘push their way through crowds’.68 Anthony Van Dyck captured this modishly insouciant arrogance in his portraits of swaggering English aristocrats at the court of Charles I. Van Dyck’s portraits were painted in London in the 1630s and 1640s, but they evoke an aggressive air of sharp-edged hauteur that had been fashionable among ‘gentlemen’ throughout Europe for decades – the same style of threatening superiority that was being aped by men such as Onorio Longhi, and indeed Caravaggio himself, in Rome at the turn of the seventeenth century. They too were men who walked around with their elbows – and often their swords – out-thrust.
It would however be a mistake to regard Longhi as a simple thug. He was a man of learning, a poet as well as an architect, who used his literary skill to curry favour with the great and the good. When Ferdinando de’ Medici’s first son was born, Onorio marked the occasion with a witty poem full of satirical jibes against the Spanish. He associated with writers and musicians, as well as the likes of Caravaggio. Men working in the liberal professions, who could dream of rising through the social hierarchy, were attracted to the mock-chivalric ethos of his circle. Some of his companions were genuinely high-born, the sons of Rome’s leading families. Others were simply out-of-work soldiers. Most lived around the Campidoglio, between the Piazza dei Sant’Apostoli and the Piazza Montanara.
But Longhi was also undoubtedly dangerous. Perhaps the most telling detail in descriptions of him in the archive is the fact that he often went around the streets of Rome on horseback, as if he were a knight and his servant were his page. Onorio and Caravaggio and those who ran with them – or against them – did not just copy the clothes and the manners of the aristocracy. They behaved like modern, debased versions of the ‘veray parfit gentil knights’ of the old romance tradition. Instead of wandering through the forests of Arthurian legend, doing battle with monsters and saving damsels in distress, they frequented the streets and taverns of Rome, picking fights with pimps and vying for the favours of whores.
This topsy-turvy translation of courtly manners and codes of honour, from high-flown literature to the most ordinary milieux of modern life, was by no means restricted to Italy. It became a leitmotif of seventeenth-century prose, poetry and drama across Europe. The misapplication of chivalric codes of honour to the circumstances of modern life is the great theme – the essential running joke – around which the whole of Cervantes’s picaresque novel Don Quixote revolves. The Don might be aged, Sancho Panza fat and ridiculous, and they might inhabit a gentler and more absurd world than the Rome of Pope Clement VIII; but their escapades are none the less close parodies of the scrapes and adventures in which Caravaggio, Onorio
Longhi and their companions were habitually embroiled. A man with a barber-surgeon’s basin on his head is mistaken for a rival knight, and beaten by Don Quixote until he bleeds. The action takes place on a dusty road in provincial Spain – but events very much like it took place every day in Caravaggio’s Rome.
Tommaso Garzoni’s Piazza universale of 1585 includes a vivid characterization of Rome’s ragged army of self-appointed knights errant, marauding through the city:
Every day, every hour, every moment, they talk of nothing but killing, cutting off legs, breaking arms, smashing somebody’s spine … For study, they have nothing other than the thought of killing this or that person; for purpose, nothing more than to avenge the wrongs that they have taken to heart; for favour, nothing more than serving their friends by butchering enemies …69
The author goes on to describe a day in the lives of such ‘dregs-of-knaves … scum-of-scoundrels’. Armed with an improbably extensive arsenal of weaponry, they sally forth into the city to do their worst. Despite, perhaps, some element of caricature, Garzoni paints a convincing picture of Caravaggio’s life, as it must have been, during his Carnival months, when he would ‘swagger about … with his sword at his side … ever ready to engage in a fight or argument’.
The day begins in the piazza and ends, more often than not, in the whorehouse:
In the morning they get out of bed and straightaway pull on their hose, put jacket and breastplate on their back, hats on their heads, gauntlets or hunting gloves on their hands, sword and dagger at their side, arquebus in a bag and its iron balls in their breeches. And thus, armed like St George, they swagger out of the house, make a circuit of the piazza and, with four companions, make themselves master of the field …