Caravaggio

by Andrew Graham-Dixon

  He and his brothers were all three armed with swords, daggers and prohibited pistols. Some of the militiamen were armed with arquebuses, some with halberds, and some with other weapons. Their captain Francesco said to me, ‘Hey! What prisoners are these?’ I told him they were prisoners who had been fighting in Piazza della Trinità, where there had been people hurt, and someone may have been killed. He replied that I should stop, and that he wanted the prisoners himself, and that I should hand them over to him, because they were taken in his rione, and that he wanted to know what was going on, because it was up to him to account for these things. I replied: ‘Captain Francesco. Don’t get in my way. Let me go, and talk with Captain Girolamo, who is on his way. Don’t make [trouble]. These prisoners fought with us, and we can’t hand them over to you. Let us take them to prison, then go and talk to the Governor, and get satisfaction.

  The said Captain Francesco answered me: ‘I want you to leave them with us,’ and put his hand to the pistol he was carrying, and his brothers also took their pistols, saying, ‘Leave them here! Leave them here, or we’ll cut you all into pieces, you fucking pricks!’ and their militiamen shouted, ‘To arms! To arms! Beat the drum!’ One of them pointed his halberd at my chest, saying: ‘Get away from here! What are you doing here? Get out of here!’ Finally, having surrounded us, the said Francesco, his brothers and the militiamen took the prisoners away from the sbirri and led them away themselves. Then they let us go, and I came straight here to the office to give my account.

  The next, unnamed witness, another officer under the command of the bargello, was asked to identify the participants. He could only indicate Francesco and his brothers. His account differs little from that of the lieutenant, until he comes to the aftermath of the event:

  And while we were waiting [at the ‘office’ where they had gone to report the incident] the caporione Captain Francesco Tomassoni came and said, ‘Go to the Heavens. The prisoners are mine.’ And we said, ‘Take them,’ but also that he would have to give us an account of it. Then he said, ‘Do us a favour, take us to the militia [Tomassoni’s own headquarters].’ And so we escorted him to his house in Piazza S. Lorenzo in Lucina. When we were inside we told him to make a list of the prisoners with their names and surnames, and someone who was dressed in long clothes began to write it. While they were being written down, I told him to make out the receipt saying that we had consigned them to him, and he replied: ‘I don’t want to make out a receipt, etc.’ Ranuccio, the caporione’s brother, came towards me and said: ‘I’ll talk with my brother Gian Francesco, who’s here in a house where the prisoners are, etc.’ Then the caporione and his people forced us to halt, saying, ‘Stop there! Stop there!’ and putting their hands to their swords and pointing them at us sbirri and prisoners. I know two of them, one of whom was Captain Ranuccio, and another one, an old man who is his relative.78

  Giovanni Baglione was also a caporione during the period of the two Vacant Sees. His area of jurisdiction was the district of Castello. Perhaps his civic duties brought him into contact with the Tomassoni clan. Baglione would later describe Ranuccio Tomassoni as an honourable young man, which suggests that they may have been friends. Honourable or not, Ranuccio and his family were certainly well connected in Rome. When his brother Alessandro died later in the year of an unspecified illness, he was accorded the signal honour of burial in the Pantheon.79

  On 29 May 1605 Camillo Borghese was elected as Pope Paul V. The new Borghese pope, considerably less severe than his predecessor, allowed the revival of the traditional nepotism of the papal court, ensuring that his nephew Scipione was elected to the cardinalate. The papal nephew loved food and art in equal measure and would soon become an acquisitive collector of Caravaggio’s pictures. But private and public domains were very different. The official religious style of the Borghese papacy would be far removed from Caravaggio’s simplicity and austerity. For major commissions, the graceful manner of an artist such as Guido Reni was preferred. The ground was being prepared for the soaring majesty of the full-blown Baroque style.

  On the eve of Paul V’s coronation, Caravaggio was back in jail. He had been stopped yet again for bearing arms. When he failed to produce a licence for his weapons, he was taken to prison – not the Tor di Nona this time but the governor’s jail. The name of the arresting officer was Captain Pino. His testimony was brief:

  Last night about seven hours after nightfall [3 a.m], as I was on patrol with my constables at Sant’Ambrogio on the Corso, there came a man by the name of Michelangelo, wearing a sword and dagger. Stopped and asked whether he had a licence to carry the said weapons, he said he had not. I had him arrested and brought to jail, and I now make my report, as is my duty, that he may be punished according to justice.

  In the margin of his report, Captain Pino drew a little sketch of the offending sword and dagger. The questioning of Caravaggio followed. The court notary took down his responses and made a note of the outcome:

  I was seized on the street of the Corso in front of the Church of Sant’Ambrogio. It may have been eight hours after nightfall [4 a.m.] for it was light, and I was seized because I had a sword and dagger.

  I have no written licence to carry a sword and dagger. However, the Governor of Rome had given oral orders to the captain and his corporal to let me carry them. I have no other licence.

  He recognized the weapons taken from him by the constables.

  He was allowed to go at large, with three days’ time to prepare his report.80

  Just what Caravaggio had been doing in the middle of the night is anyone’s guess. He is unlikely to have been up to much good. Six weeks later, on 19 July 1605, he was back in the Tor di Nona, having been cautioned for the crime of deturpatio portae, or defacing doors. A woman called Laura della Vecchia and her daughter Isabella lodged the complaint.

  Deturpatio was a specific legal term that can be translated as ‘house-scorning’.81 It was invariably a response to a perceived slight or injury. House-scorners generally operated in the dead of night, when they were less likely to be disturbed by the police. They often made a lot of noise, shouting insults or singing lewd songs as a prelude to the vengeful assault itself. Then they would throw stones, damaging shutters and blinds. Sometimes they would also hurl animal bladders filled with blood or ink to leave other visible marks of shame. Excrement was often smeared on to doors and door handles. Doodles were drawn, scurrilous graffiti in the shape of erect phalluses or cuckold’s horns.

  The charges levelled at Caravaggio by Laura della Vecchia and her daughter do not specify which of these methods the painter had employed. The wording of the complaint against him suggests that the worst damage was done to the door of the house. That may in itself suggest the nature of the painter’s grievance. House-scorning was an almost exclusively male activity, and the most common perpetrators were men whose amorous attentions had been rejected by women. Had Isabella della Vecchia led Caravaggio on in some way, only to change her mind? Had Laura della Vecchia shut the door of her house – and therefore, metaphorically, the door of her daughter’s chastity – against the infuriated painter? Or perhaps Isabella was just one of the many whores with whom the abrasive Caravaggio mingled, and quarrelled. There is reason to believe that sex, in some form, lay at the root of the argument. As the spring turned to summer in the troubled year of 1605, even the painter’s relationships with women were going badly.

  A CACKLING OF GEESE

  Caravaggio did manage to start work on at least one picture in the heat of the Roman summer of 1605: The Madonna of Loreto, commissioned for the Cavalletti Chapel in the Roman church of Sant’Agostino some eighteen months earlier. Caravaggio’s painting was clearly shaped by his experience of visiting Loreto and its Holy House, which was said to have flown miraculously from Nazareth to Italy in the Middle Ages, eventually touching down in Loreto one night in December 1294. Protestants, predictably, dismissed the cult of Loreto as a sham. Even the credulity of many devout Catholics was strained by a legend
according to which the childhood home of Jesus Christ himself had been aerially projected, by the force of miracle, from Nazareth to an obscure wood in the eastern Marches of Italy. The popularity of the shrine was sustained by its dramatic popular appeal, and by the persuasive rhetoric of its promoters. Louis Richeome’s influential tract Le Pelerin de Lorette was originally published in French in 1604, the year before Caravaggio painted his picture. Soon translated into Latin, Italian and a number of European vernacular languages, Richeome’s text was a bestseller that brought thousands more pilgrims to the doors of the Holy House.

  Richeome placed great emphasis on the miracle of the Incarnation and eloquently made the case for regarding Loreto as the holiest of all holy shrines. The following passage is taken from The Pilgrime of Loreto, the English translation of his book:

  when we shall have reckoned up by name, the most renowned places of all the world, as well out of profane Writers, as out of the sacred Scriptures, the Chamber of Loreto exceedeth them all in this condition, in having been the closet, where the marriage of the Sonne of God with our humane Nature was celebrated in the B. Virgin’s womb, the most high and mysterious worke, that the holy Trinity maker of all things, did ever accomplish; for therein God was made man; the Creator, a creature; the supreme cause, an effect; the Word, flesh; the spirit did take a body; the first is become last, and Alpha, Omega …82

  By Caravaggio’s time there were two basic conventions for depicting the shrine of Loreto. The Madonna and child might be shown sitting on the roof of the Holy House, as they had been said to do during its magic carpet-like flight from Nazareth to Italy. Or the Madonna might simply be shown standing, holding the Christ child, in a pose derived from an ancient cult statue said to have been carved by St Luke himself that was housed on the altar of the shrine.

  Departing from the limited conventions of existing Lauretan imagery, Caravaggio depicted two poor modern pilgrims kneeling at the entrance to the famous shrine. They are husband and wife, or perhaps mother and son. They have come in all humility, as every pilgrim was advised to do, to pray to the Queen of Heaven. Their feet are bare and dirty, their clothing begrimed, patched and poor. They have been rewarded for their honest piety and their weeks on the pilgrimage trail with a vision. The Virgin has chosen to appear to them, in the very doorway of the Holy House of Loreto itself. The infant Christ appears with his blessed mother, clasped in her arms, a finger of his right hand raised in the gesture of benediction. Haloed by a filigree circle of gold, Mary cranes her neck towards the pilgrims, as if to make sure that she catches every last word of their prayers.

  In Caravaggio’s time, it was the custom for pilgrims to enter Loreto barefoot, wearing simple clothes. Their immediate destination was the simple dwelling of the Holy House itself, which, like the modest barn of Francis of Assisi’s first church, had been shoehorned into a splendid marble architectural casing, itself contained within the vast nave of a later cathedral. Once arrived, the pilgrims were to circle the holy dwelling three times, on their bare knees. Having made this slow crawl towards the hope of salvation, they were finally allowed to enter the shrine.83

  All this is the implied prelude to Caravaggio’s gentle fantasy of a painting. The work is a tour de force of naked religious populism: spare to the point of banality, blatant in its appeal to the masses. The gratification that it offers is instant, the idea that it embodies too good to be true. It is the realization, in art, of every pilgrim’s dream. At the end of the barefoot, knee-scraping journey, a vision. The door to the Holy House has become the door to Heaven itself. The two weary pilgrims are greeted by the Virgin and Child and implicitly welcomed towards another, better place. They will have no further need of their walking sticks, now they have come this far.

  Such is the sheer directness of its appeal to popular piety, The Madonna of Loreto has often been regarded as something of an embarrassment – a saccharine, sentimental picture, the only work in Caravaggio’s entire œuvre with something of the chocolate-box about it. But in its time it was unusual and daring. No artist had ever given such prominence, in a major religious altarpiece, to two such nakedly proletarian figures as the pair of kneeling pilgrims.

  There was an old tradition of including portraits of men and women who had paid for certain altarpieces within the work themselves. Such donor portraits, as they have become known, often place the kneeling figures of such pious benefactors to either side of the Virgin and Child. They are included within the scene, yet they are also apart from it, witnesses rather than participants. In The Madonna of Loreto, Caravaggio turned this convention on its head, first by making the kneeling figures central to the sacred story (the story’s catalyst, even, since it is their faith that has called forth the vision of the merciful Madonna and child), and secondly by depicting them not as wealthy donors but as poor pilgrims who have circled the shrine at Loreto three times on their bare knees. The man’s filthy naked feet, turned towards the viewer, emphasize this shockingly complete inversion of an old pictorial tradition.

  What might the true donors of the picture, the Cavalletti, have made of all this? Might they not have been disconcerted by Caravaggio’s substitution of their images by those of the two poor pilgrims? It would only have required a relatively minor adjustment to the picture for the normal proprieties to be observed. He could easily have painted the standing Madonna and Child with the kneeling figures of Ermete and Orinzia Cavalletti to either side, in the manner of traditional donor portraits. Yet he did not, and no such alteration was asked of him.

  Ermete Cavalletti was of course dead by the time Caravaggio finished The Madonna of Loreto. But he would most likely have approved of the painter’s innovations. Ermete’s dedication to the Santissima Trinità dei Pellegrini is proven: as a member of that lay confraternity, he, a rich man, had abased himself in imitation of Christ and washed the feet of poor pilgrims. Caravaggio’s painting no less dramatically asserted the pauperist values of that institution. In fact the painter might be said to have repeated that act of self-abnegation, on Cavalletti’s behalf, by putting poor pilgrims in place of his rich patrons. The replacement may even imply a kind of wishful metamorphosis, with the kneeling pilgrims as metaphorical portraits of Ermete and Orinzia Cavalletti themselves – transformed, through their humility of heart, into honorary members of the blessed poor.

  Whether that too was part of Caravaggio’s meaning, there is every indication that the family approved wholeheartedly of his picture. Not only was it accepted without demur and without alterations, but Orinzia Cavalletti arranged for her own burial beneath the floor of the same chapel.

  Once again, Caravaggio had painted a monumental altarpiece aimed squarely at the poor and the hungry. The location of the church for which he painted the picture was also part of its message and part of its significance.84 With the completion of The Madonna of Loreto, Caravaggio now had major works on display in two of the most frequently visited churches on the principal pilgrimage axis through northern Rome. Every year wave after wave of pilgrims would enter the city from the north at the Porta del Popolo. Immediately on their left was the church of Santa Maria del Popolo, for which Caravaggio had painted The Conversion of St Paul and The Crucifixion of St Peter. The main pilgrimage route from there towards St Peter’s then led directly along the Via di Ripetta and its continuation, the Via della Scrofa, to the corner of the Via dei Coronari. Turning right on to that street, in the direction of the Tiber and the Ponte Sant’Angelo, the pilgrim would find himself in one of the most congested thoroughfares in all Rome. The church of Sant’Agostino lay at the start of the Via dei Coronari, so named after its multitude of Rosary-makers’ shops, thronged by pious tourists buying Rosaries and other devotional souvenirs of their visit to the Eternal City. Caravaggio knew that he was guaranteed a vast audience of the pious and the humble by virtue of Sant’Agostino’s prominent place on the city’s Christian itinerary. To the pilgrims who entered the church and walked into the Cavalletti Chapel, he offered a perfected mi
rror image of their own travels, one in which they could see themselves reaching the wished-for end of every pilgrim’s journey.

  It was this direct appeal by Caravaggio to the poor, and the central role he gave them in his theatre of Christianity, that most shocked his critics. Writing from the perspective of the later seventeenth century, when the pauperist ideals of the early Counter-Reformation lay in ruins, Bellori cast Caravaggio in the role of a seditious revolutionary. With pictures such as The Madonna of Loreto he had opened a Pandora’s Box of vulgarity: ‘Now began the imitation of common and vulgar things, seeking out filth and deformity, as some popular artists do assiduously … The costumes they paint consist of stockings, breeches, and big caps, and in their figures they pay attention only to wrinkles, defects of the skin and exterior, depicting knotted fingers and limbs disfigured by disease.’85

  Bellori’s disgust for Caravaggio’s ‘popular’ art, his lazar-house realism, was echoed by Giovanni Baglione. Unlike Bellori, Baglione was a contemporary of Caravaggio, and had gone to see the picture soon after it was installed. His predictable dislike of the work was only intensified by the huge crowds that it drew: ‘In the first chapel on the left in the church of Sant’Agostino, he painted the Madonna of Loreto from life with two pilgrims; one of them has muddy feet and the other wears a soiled and torn cap; and because of this pettiness in the details of a grand painting the public made a great fuss over it.’86