Getting on with his life turned out to be more difficult than Caravaggio might have hoped. While he was away in Genoa, his infuriated landlady had taken advantage of his absence to seize his possessions in lieu of rent, and change the locks on the house in Vicolo dei Santa Cecilia e Biagio. This occasioned the inventory of its contents, which was made on 26 August (see p. 271). ‘Two large pictures to paint’ were included on the list. Perhaps one of them was the half-painted canvas of The Madonna of Loreto, still in his studio but now frustratingly inaccessible. The other, most probably, was the incomplete and long-overdue Death of the Virgin, which had been commissioned by the jurist Laerzio Cherubini, to serve as the altarpiece for a chapel that he had acquired in the church of Santa Maria della Scala in Rome, all the way back in 1601.
Caravaggio decided to vent his rage on the landlady who had locked him out with another deturpatio. Just four days after he had signed his peace with Mariano Pasqualone, he was being prosecuted yet again, for throwing stones at her windows. The attack took place in the small hours of 1 September and later that day Prudentia Bruni was airing her grievances in court:
Last night at about the fifth hour [1 a.m.], the said Michelangelo came and threw so many stones at the shutters of my windows that he broke them all down one side, as Your Lordship sees.
[The notary adds: then she showed the wooden shutter broken in one part, and also some stones that were in the said window, which was noted down as evidence.]
And a little after this he came back with some others, playing a guitar; they stopped on the corner of the alley, and he talked with his companions, but I couldn’t hear the exact words they were saying.
The said Michelangelo did this because he rents a house of mine, which is beside my [own] house. Some days ago he wounded a notary of the Vicariate and left. I was owed rent for six [the notary adds: correction, four] months, and he had broken a ceiling of mine in the said house, so I had obtained a mandate … to take the things that were left in the house, giving a security in the form of the deposit, which I did. Because of this he broke my shutters in order to spite me. There were three others in company with him. So I am making this complaint, and demand that they be punished in conformity with justice …101
Four days later the magistrate examined two of the landlady’s neighbours, a woman called Francesca Bartoli and a lady called Lucretia, who was the widow of a certain Ferdinando, from Perugia. Each separately denied that she had seen or heard a thing on the night in question. But as Caravaggio’s recent neighbours, they of course knew what he was like.
Prudentia Bruni had referred to a damaged ceiling in the rented house. Might it have been caused by the painter’s unorthodox working methods? Caravaggio’s proto-cinematographic fondness for powerfully directed downlighting must have involved some ingenious studio set-ups. As we have seen, Bellori wrote that he placed ‘a lamp high so that the light would fall straight down’. Sandrart echoed Bellori’s remark, saying that Caravaggio liked to work in a dark space with a single source of light from above. In practice this might have involved a powerful flame, perhaps a torch made of pitch, the light from which might have been directed by the use of one of the mirrors in the studio. That would certainly have been enough to char the studio ceiling. Or Caravaggio may simply have taken advantage of the powerful, raking sunlight beating down on the roofs of the houses in his street. Perhaps he had got the effect he wanted just by blacking out his windows and smashing a hole in the ceiling to let the sunlight in.
The painter’s latest prosecution did nothing to lighten the mood of Cesare d’Este’s agent. On 7 September he sent yet another gloomy missive to his master in Modena. Neither of the two required pictures had even been started. There was no hope of getting anything from Annibale Carracci, who was completely incapable of working because of his depression. As for Caravaggio: ‘last Saturday, his contempt of court for wounds given to a notary was settled, but now there’s some other affair he’s involved in.’102
Five weeks later, on 12 October, in a desperate bid to stir Caravaggio into action, Masetti gave him an advance of 12 scudi. By that time the painter had managed to find a new place to live, and had probably retrieved his possessions from Prudentia Bruni (though we do not know how the case between them was settled). He had moved into the house of Andrea Ruffetti, a lawyer with an interest in art and literature, in the Piazza Colonna, almost next door to the palace of Caravaggio’s very first protector, the Marchesa di Colonna.
The new lodging brought about no more ordered a life. Towards the second half of October, Caravaggio was injured in a fight with a person or persons unknown. The affair was serious enough to warrant investigation. But when the law came calling on him, the bedridden painter was decidedly incommunicative. The investigating officer’s report is dated 24 October 1605:
I, the notary of warrants, etc., visited the painter Michelangelo Caravaggio who was lying in bed in the house of Sr Andrea Ruffetti in Piazza Colonna, wounded in the throat and left ear. Because of the bandages placed on it, this wound could barely be seen, but it is noted here. He was sworn to tell the truth and interrogated by me as to where, by whom and for what reason he was wounded. He replied: ‘I wounded myself with my own sword when I fell down these stairs, I don’t know where it was and there was no one there.’ Although I exhorted him several times to tell the truth, he replied, ‘I can say no more.’ And I got no other response from him.103
Throughout the winter, the Este agent continued to chase Caravaggio for the duke’s painting. On 5 November 1605 he reported that ‘Caravaggio says the picture is almost ready and that he needs money; I replied that once the appointed thing has been done there will be no want of the money.’104 But by 16 November, Masetti had capitulated to Caravaggio’s demands. On that day he noted paying the artist another 20 scudi ‘because the painting will definitely be finished by this coming weekend’.105
But it was not ready by the coming weekend. Nor the next. Nor the one after. After a long silence Fabio Masetti wrote one more exasperated letter on 18 January 1606: ‘I have given Caravaggio 32 scudi for this thing. He goes red when he sees me.’ Cesare d’Este never would get his painting.106
‘SO MUCH TROUBLE’
Caravaggio is unlikely to have felt any regret over the unfinished and most probably unstarted picture for the ducal palace of Modena, or any embarrassment at taking money for it. By the beginning of 1606 he had already begun work on a far more prestigious commission. He had finally been asked to paint an altarpiece for St Peter’s, the central church of Catholic Christendom.
The wheels of papal influence had turned in the painter’s favour. Scipione Borghese, pleased with his new picture St Jerome Writing, had praised Caravaggio to the pope. According to Bellori, the papal nephew personally ‘introduced Caravaggio to Pope Paul V, whom he portrayed seated, and by whom he was well rewarded’.107 That portrait is lost, although a hamfisted copy of it still survives in the collections of the Palazzo Borghese. With papal favour came papal preferment. Paul V had plans for St Peter’s. Caravaggio now became part of them.
In September 1605 the new pope had ordered the final demolition of the ancient nave of Old St Peter’s, which still survived beneath the great dome of the new cathedral begun by Bramante and completed by Michelangelo. Seven altars lost in the destruction of the old basilica were moved to the new transept. One of these was owned by the Confraternity of the Palafrenieri, or ‘papal grooms’, whose patron saint was Anne. By the end of October the members of the confraternity had resolved to commission an altarpiece for their ‘altar of St Anne in St Peter’s’.108 Within a month they had been steered towards Caravaggio.
On 1 December 1605 Antonio Tirelli, deacon, gave the painter a down payment of 25 scudi. Caravaggio would receive only another 50 scudi in total, a low fee for such an important work, but the painter was in no position to bargain. He was recently evicted, deeply in debt, scarred by a swordfight and in trouble, yet again, with the law. The commission must have seemed li
ke a God-given chance for him to paint his way out of trouble. The altarpiece was finished and delivered in less than four months.
The Madonna of the Palafrenieri, sometimes known as The Madonna of the Serpent, is an unsettling picture. Monumental in scale, almost ten feet tall and more than six across, it shows three figures in a tall room, absorbed in a confrontation with pure evil. The Virgin and the infant Christ together crush the head of a serpent beneath their feet. As the foul creature writhes in its death agonies, St Anne, frail and bent by age, looks on in solemn contemplation. By God’s grace, the devil is defeated.
Raven-haired Lena, ‘donna di Caravaggio’, was required once again to play the part of the Virgin. Wearing a coral-coloured dress with a deep décolletage, she leans to support her son as he steps forward, his foot upon hers, hers upon the snake. He is a curly-haired, red-headed boy of about four years old. Were it not for the presence of the animal, they might just be mother and son playing a game of walk-on-my-feet as grandmother watches.
The mood of the picture is still and strange. There is no sense of drama, because instead of telling a story Caravaggio was obliged to embody an allegory. The result is like an image from an emblem book staged as a tableau vivant by flesh-and-blood human beings. The voluptuously full-breasted Virgin holds her smooth-skinned son under his arms. St Anne, half lost in the shadows, has corded sinews around her neck and collarbone, while the skin of her lined face looks as dry as autumn leaves.
The theme prescribed for the picture was calculated to make a specific theological point. Its origin lay in a much debated passage in the biblical Book of Genesis, in which God curses the serpent that has tempted Eve to eat from the Tree of Knowledge: ‘I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel’ (Genesis 3:15). There was a long tradition of regarding this as a prophetic reference to the Virgin Mary, the so-called ‘Second Eve’. By giving birth to Jesus Christ, she would redeem mankind from Original Sin and undo the evil done by the treacherous snake in the garden of Eden – bruising the head of the serpent, as had been predicted in Genesis. But Protestants, suspicious of the cult of the Virgin Mary and concerned that it detracted from the proper worship of Jesus Christ, disputed this interpretation. Martin Luther declared that Christ, and Christ alone, could redeem mankind. The Catholic Church had reaffirmed its position, in a papal Bull of 1569 that proclaimed ‘the Virgin crushed the head of the serpent with the aid of him to whom she had given birth.’
Caravaggio’s picture was intended to translate word into image, to embody this article of Catholic faith as a vivid picture that all could understand. He was careful, at every point, to emphasize the underlying significance of his allegory. The serpent writhes in uneven, broken coils, while Christ forms a perfect circle with the thumb and forefinger of his outstretched left hand, a circle mirrored by the floating haloes of his mother and grandmother. The serpent is death. Christ is eternal life, perfection incarnate. The humble figure of Anne is there not only because her presence was decreed by the spiritual allegiance of the Confraternity of Palafrenieri, but to reinforce the idea of the Immaculate Conception, the belief that her daughter, Mary, was preserved from Original Sin. In Caravaggio’s painting, Anne is shrouded in darkness, while her daughter is bathed in light. That is because Anne’s virtue, great as it had been, was only a dim prefiguration of Mary’s radiance.
The Virgin and Christ child seem tense and alert, as they concertedly crush the serpent. Caravaggio himself seems to have approached his task of painting in a mood of wary circumspection, deliberately curbing the aggressive side of his originality and softening the rougher edges of his style: there were no horses’ rumps here, no grimy feet thrust in the face of the viewer, no red rags to conventional piety or decorum, or so he hoped. He did his utmost to produce an unimpeachably correct endorsement of the Marian orthodoxy laid down by the Counter-Reformation Church – which can only have made what happened next all the more painful. The story of the picture’s reception is told in three prosaic documents in the archives of the Palafrenieri.
On 8 April, Caravaggio delivered the painting and gave a certificate to the deacon of the confraternity. It is the only known example of a statement by the artist written in his own handwriting: ‘I, Michelangelo da Caravaggio, am content and satisfied with the picture that I have painted for the Company of St Anne, in faith I have written and underwritten this 8th day of April 1606.’109 On 14 April the picture was put on display in the confraternity’s chapel. The record shows that 1 scudo was paid on that day to a carpenter named Pierfrancesco, for installing the painting on the altar of St Anne in St Peter’s. On 16 April, two days later, the picture was removed. Orders were given that it should be taken away and stored in Sant’Anna dei Palafrenieri, the church of the papal grooms. The confraternity records ‘payment to two porters to carry the painting of St Anne from St Peter’s to their church’. On a spring morning, Caravaggio’s monumental altarpiece was loaded into a mule-driver’s cart and drawn slowly along the cobbled streets of the city.
To a painter so sensitive about his honour, the humiliation of this sudden reverse must have been deeply wounding. Why was the painting rejected? At around the time when Caravaggio delivered his picture, a dispute had arisen over the Palafrenieri’s rights to the altar in St Peter’s, but even after its resolution in early May the Palafrenieri made it clear that they still did not want the painting. By the middle of June 1606 they had sold it to Scipione Borghese for 100 scudi. The arrangement suited both parties: the Palafrenieri disposed of the picture that displeased them, clearing a small but tidy profit on their original outlay, and Borghese acquired a new work by the painter he most admired at a knockdown price.
It is possible that the Palafrenieri had simply taken exception to Caravaggio’s portrayal of their beloved patron, St Anne, as a withered old lady thrown into deep shadow. The theology behind it allowed her to represent all the ancient generations before the coming of Christ, who had lived in darkness – but the Palafrenieri still might not have liked the overall effect. Their main objections, however, probably centred on the portrayal of the other two figures. The most plausible account of the picture’s rejection is given by Bellori, who baldly states that it was taken out of St Peter’s ‘because of the offensive portrayal of the Virgin with the nude Christ child’.110
The infant Christ’s nudity may have been thought improper but a wisp of drapery could easily have been added. It was surely Caravaggio’s embodiment of the Virgin as Lena in a low-cut dress that really caused the difficulty. Appealing once more to the mass of ordinary Catholics – and especially women, among whom the cult of Mary was strongest – Caravaggio had painted her as the kind of mother with whom real mothers might identify. He had stressed her tenderness, leaning down over the child with gentle solicitude, but in the process he had revealed quite a lot of her cleavage. It is not difficult to see why such a voluptuous Virgin Mary might have caused misgivings. Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti, whose Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images was a widely consulted book of rules for the Counter-Reformation artist and patron, wrote that a picture of the Madonna with even the slightest hint of lasciviousness made him ‘sick to my stomach’.111
There is no reason to doubt Caravaggio’s pious intentions. He probably called attention to the Madonna’s full breasts to stress her maternal aspect and posed her as he did to impart the touching awkwardness of actual life. But, if so, he miscalulated. The woman in red, leaning forward with her skirts hitched up, was just too real to be allowed into St Peter’s. In the eyes of the Counter-Reformation Church, Mary was pure and perfect, the Queen of Heaven. Caravaggio’s Mary was just not like that. As Roberto Longhi memorably remarked, she might almost be ‘a peasant woman killing a viper in a barn’.112
The hellfire Dominican preacher Savonarola had once declared that artists should depict the Virgin as a pauper, not a queen, but that had been in Florence a hundred years before Caravaggio’
s time, when collective repentance was in the air along with smoke from Savonarola’s bonfires of the vanities. In Rome under Pope Paul V such views were not widely held. The Borghese papacy was characterized by a return to pomp and magnificence, a decisive rejection of the austerity that had marked the age of Carlo Borromeo and, to a lesser degree, that of Clement VIII. Caravaggio, whose approach to religious painting had been shaped so powerfully by Borromean ideals of piety, found himself in a difficult position. In one sense his work was favoured by those in power. But in another and more important sense it was deemed entirely unacceptable.
Scipione Borghese, who ended up buying The Madonna of the Palafrenieri, clearly liked Caravaggio’s powerfully dramatic style. But he did so as a connoisseur. As a cardinal, he looked at it differently. Caravaggio may have had friends among the elite clerics of the Borghese papacy, but they were not prepared to put the weight of the Church behind his visions of holy poverty. The rejection of his altarpiece for St Peter’s, and its acquisition for the Borghese collection, fundamentally altered its nature as a work of art. It was secularized, and in the process was also neutered.
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