by Walter Ellis
‘I should go all the same. You’re obviously busy.’
‘And you’re due to have lunch with Fräulein Studer – more entertaining company, I should imagine, than the Spanish Provincial. But thanks for dropping in. I appreciate it. It’s not often these days that I get the chance to discuss religion.’
‘I won’t even comment on that,’ Dempsey said.
O’Malley stood up and walked round his desk to embrace his nephew. ‘Next time let’s meet over a pint.’
‘Good idea. Just give me a call.’
Dempsey turned to go. Just as he reached the door, his uncle called out to him: ‘Oh, and give my regards to Maya. Tell her it’s been a while since I saw her at Mass.’
As he walked down the four flights of stairs towards the front hall, past endless photographs and lithographs of leading Jesuits from the previous two hundred years, Dempsey felt the walls closing in on him. He had never had much time for organized religion. It was one thing to talk theology with his uncle, who had a knack of combining faith and scholarship. But these days he could no more genuflect in front of the altar than he could kiss a bishop’s ring. At the bottom of the stairs, he found himself confronted by a portrait of St Ignatius Loyola, the Jesuits’ founder, looking both ascetic and scheming, as if there were no lengths to which he wouldn’t go to promote the power and privilege of God. The eyes, he noted, did not follow him, the way they did in some paintings he had seen. Instead, they stared behind him, almost through him, towards some higher truth to which he would never be privy. He shivered and turned away. Outside, in the real world, the sun was shining.
7*
August 1603
Caravaggio had just drawn his shirt over his head – the same one he had worn for the past three days – when he heard his front door open and footsteps on the stairs. He groaned. His lodgings, on the Vicolo dei Santi Cecilia e Baggio, in the heart of the Artists’ Quarter, were an open house for rebels of all kinds. Painters and poets, out-of-work soldiers, pimps and whores, popped in and out just to pass the time of day or to catch up on the latest gossip. But this time it was his pupil and sometime manservant Bartolomeo Manfredi, who in return for lessons on the art and science of chiaroscuro ran errands for him and, when it suited him, prepared his meals.
‘Bad news, master!’ the Lombard called out, pushing open the door of the bedchamber without knocking. ‘The Death of the Virgin has been turned down. They say you used a whore as your model and have scandalized the Church.’
‘What?’
‘They say you used a whore …’
‘I heard you the first time, Bortolomeo. What do you mean, they rejected it? Who rejected it?’
Manfredi, a swarthy figure whose leg muscles showed through his tights, sniffed loudly. ‘The Discalced Carmelites.’
‘The Discalced Carmelites? What the fuck do they know about art? What do they know about anything, come to that? They’re a charitable order – when they’re not buggering young boys, that is.’
Manfredi picked up a camel-hair brush and tested the bristles between finger and thumb. ‘But it’s their church. And it’s their altar it’s supposed to hang in. Perhaps if you’d read Cherubini’s instructions …’
Caravaggio looked blank. Laerzio Cherubini, a morbidly pious lawyer, with close links to the Curia, was the one who had commissioned the painting, intended as an alterpiece for the newly completed church of Santa Maria della Scala in Trastevere.
‘You must remember, Master. He wrote them out for you. Very explicit, as I recall – straight from the Council of Trent.’
The Council of Trent! Caravaggio was sick to the back teeth of hearing about the Council of Trent. It was like an albatross around the neck of thinking artists, laying out acceptable iconography and protocols while strangling genuine creativity. Caravaggio had flipped through Cherubini’s list and promptly stuck it under a candlestick, where it still lay.
By now, he had reached the stage of his toilette where he was rooting around for his shoes. He was down on his knees, extending his left hand beneath the bed as far as it would go. There was a lot of dust there, he soon discovered, and the remains of at least one dead mouse.
‘And I was supposed to tailor my vision according to his whims?’ he called out, mockingly. ‘Is that what what we’ve come to?’
‘I should have thought it was obvious. Cherubini’s one of the most devout bastards in Rome. Known for it. And he made it plain he wanted a Virgin he could live with, so to speak.’
‘Aaah! Gotcha!’ said Caravaggio, coming up triumphantly with the missing shoe and blowing off a thick film of dust. ‘So what is it about my Virgin that he can’t live with? – bearing in mind that I am your master and I do employ you.’
‘Simple. She’s a whore. Zoccola was the word I heard. Not only that, her legs and feet are bare. You’d never guess she was about to be raised up into heaven. Take one look at your Madonna and all you can say is, she’s dead, time to call in the mortician.’
‘But she is dead, Bortolomeo. That’s why it’s called Death of the Virgin.’
The manservant – he preferred to think of himself as an apprentice – was not to be moved. He had already placed the camel-hair brush in his pocket and was looking through a box of colours. ‘Yes, but in the contract you signed, “death” was intended to mean “dormition” or “transition”. The idea, as you must know, was that the Virgin would be seen on the cusp of her assumption. I don’t think she was meant to look as if she had just succumbed to the plague.’
Caravaggio pulled on his shoe, noting with dismay that his big toe peeked out the end. ‘Don’t be a cretin, Bortolomeo,’ he said. ‘You can search the Bible all you like and you won’t find any mention of the Assumption. I might as well do a painting of five hundred angels dancing on the head of a pin – come to think of it, that would probably sell. I asked a priest a couple of months back – a Jesuit, no less – where was the evidence that the Mother of God “transitioned” into heaven while half the characters in the New Testament looked on. And guess what?’ Manfredi shrugged. ‘He said there wasn’t any. There’s actually no mention of Mary after Pentecost. One minute the Church is telling us that the only biblical truths we can rely on are in the authorized version, the Vulgate, approved by the Pope, and the next they’re saying we should stick to myth when myth is better. Well, which is it?’
‘Don’t ask me,’ Manfredi said. ‘Not my department. I just know which side of my bread soaks up the olive oil.’
But Caravaggio was not to be mollified. ‘I’ll tell you what else I bloody did. I went to see Cardinal Baronio. He’s as orthodox as they come. For Christ’s sake, he’s the one writing the official history of the Church. And he says the Madonna had a fully human nature and, of necessity, underwent the same experience of death as everybody else.’
‘Yes, Master, I don’t doubt it. But was she a whore?’
‘What’s that go to do with it?’
‘Well, it’s obvious who your model was.’
Caravaggio pulled a scrap of cheese from his beard and swallowed it. ‘Anna Bianchini is a very beautiful young woman.’
‘Very true. And she charges five scudi for a screw.’
‘So?’
‘So she’s a prostitute.’
‘When do we ever get to meet a woman who isn’t? Fathers protect their daughters’ virginity like Cerberus guarding the gates of Hell.’
‘Yes … but that’s not the point, is it?’
‘It’s the truth. Come to that, I used Fillide Melandroni as Saint Catherine for Cardinal Del Monte. And she’s a whore … mind you, Del Monte would rather she’d been a boy. I used Fillide again as Mary of Cleophas in the Deposition of Christ. You remember that? Everyone from the Pope down described it as a masterpiece. So what is it they want from me? ’Cos I’m fucked if I know.’
Manfredi crossed the room to a small table and poured some water from a jug into a shallow basin. ‘Don’t ask me,’ he said. ‘But if you’re thinking of arguin
g the toss with Cherubini, I’d freshen up first. You know what a stickler he is for cleanliness. Next to godliness, he says.’
‘Like a fucking Lutheran.’
Manfredi snorted. ‘Just make sure you don’t tell him that.’
Twenty minutes later, after rinsing his face and hands and dragging a comb through his hair, Caravaggio set out for the Palazzo Cherubini on the Via di Giustiniani. His own lodgings were cramped and dark, but he had no need of light. Soon, though, as he turned the corner onto the Via della Scrofa, he could feel the world open up and the sun bore down on him from a sky the colour of stem irises. There were a lot of pilgrims out today – many of them from Genoa, by the sound of them. Must be a feast day or something. But then, when wasn’t it? Head down, he raced past the church of Sant’Agostino, averting his gaze from a group of whores on their way into Mass, led by the haughty figure of Fillide Melandroni, who, he remembered, had recently got herself arrested after cutting the face of one of her rivals. Someone else he avoided was the barber, Lucca, who called out to him from the doorway of his shop, snipping in the air with an outsized pair of shears.
‘Master Caravaggio! Long time no see. Just five minutes in my chair and you’d be a new man.’
‘Some other time, Lucca!’
He almost stopped at a colour seller’s next to the Albergo della Scrofa. He could do with some more reds. He’d rather taken a fancy to red of late and wanted to expand his range. Problem was, he owed him money – quite a lot of money, as a matter of fact. Then he heard a clock strike in the Piazza Navona and hurried on, stepping over a pile of ordure recently arrived, from the smell of it, from a window overhead.
The cobbles outside the larger houses were slick with shit and piss, except for a path outside each front door. Where did it all go? he wondered. Couldn’t be healthy. In classical times, they had drains. Not any more. If someone could come up with a proper sewage system, some wag had written, they’d clean up. Too true! By now he’d reached the church of San Luigi dei Francesi – the French church. He paused for a second, debating whether or not to go in. The church, run by a group of canons acting for the French ambassador to the Holy See, had recently installed the last of three of his paintings in the church’s Cantarelli chapel, depicting key moments in the life of St Matthew, and he wanted to check they’d got the lighting right. But there wasn’t time. After he’d settled with Cherubini, he was due to meet his friends, Onorio and Prospero, at the Turk’s Head. They’d drink some wine, set the world to rights, then slip off and play a game of racquetball or maybe just pass the time in the brothel. It depended. Either way, it would beat half an hour of pietistic talk with the priests of San Luigi. Previously, he had only dabbled in religious art as a kind of sideline, to give him respectability and up his fees. Rome was, after all, the centre of the Christian world. Now he knew why. His three renderings of the Apostle had taken him an age to complete – when he was working on them, that is, for he had other customers as well, looking for their card-players, or baskets of fruit or lewd depictions of boys and young men. ‘The dirtier, the better,’ one banker had said, commissioning a study of Bacchus. ‘Only don’t make him too well hung – wouldn’t want to give the wife ideas.’ As if they didn’t have ideas already! God preserve him from half-wits. One thing about ordinary people, though: they tended not to quibble. Very respectful, most of them. Not like the French bloody canons! They’d rejected his first version of St Matthew and the Angel, and if it hadn’t been for the banker Vicenzo Giustiniani, who snapped it up without batting an eyelid, then paid for its replacement, he would have been seriously out of pocket. According to the canons, the original was irreverent and ignoble. They didn’t like it that he had shown the saint with his bare legs and feet sticking out. A more ‘magisterial’ rendition was what they required, with Matthew robed as a senator, busy with his Gospel, his legs and feet lost in shadow. What was it about bare feet anyway? Did they think the Apostles didn’t have feet – or legs for that matter? Did they imagine they floated along, trailing decorous robes, never making actual contact with the ground? In the old days, he could paint what he liked and how he liked. But that was when he was new to Rome and worked without commissions. Now that he was ‘celebrated’, all such freedom was lost. Christ! Here he was, on his way to plead with Laerzio Cherubini, one of the most infuriating men in Rome, so hypocritical he’d come to believe his own lies. Onorio said he’d been born with a poker up his arse – and he wasn’t far wrong. It was just as well they both spoke Italian, for other than that they had no language in common.
Not far now. Which was just as well, for he was breaking into another of his sweats. Weaving in and out of the pilgrims and beggars and street traders and lines of nuns, he ignored the beckoning fingers of an ageing and decidedly ugly whore (while noting to himself that she might do for a St Anne he had in mind). He also put some distance between himself and Paolo Leone, his wine merchant, who called out to him, in the name of God and all his blessed saints, to settle his bloody bill. ‘Yes, yes, Paolo, this afternoon for sure! Don’t worry about it.’
Another he avoided on his journey was Ranuccio Tomassoni, whose family controlled the Campo Marzio. Ranuccio was a young bravo in search of a big reputation. He liked to take on Caravaggio at cards or racquetball, at which he hardly ever won, and failing that would outbid him in the brothel, using family money. If he’d had the time, he’d have given him a clip around the ear – or maybe run him through. But he was in a hurry.
And then, all at once, he had arrived. The Palazzo Cherubini, four storeys high, pink as a cherub’s arse, was new and still smelled of wet plaster. Its owner, once a common soldier, grown rich as a Church litigant, was impossibly tall, with a hook nose and bushy eyebrows. Why he hadn’t opted for a career in the Church was a mystery. In a city in which religious devotion was measured by the hundred-weight, Cherubini attended Mass every day of his life, twice on Sundays, and, when he wasn’t defrauding his clients, could usually be found in an attitude of prayer. Cynics pointed out that he had tried to shorten his time in Purgatory by forcing most of his children to join religious orders, which was probably true. Caravaggio didn’t give a toss either way.
He banged on the large, double-fronted door, embossed with the owner’s newly acquired coat of arms, which looked like three funeral urns against a sea of troubles. Eventually, a wizened maidservant drew back the bolt and peered out, suspiciously. With her warty nose and blackened teeth, she looked like she belonged in a portrait he’d once seen by Ghirlandaio.
‘Oh,’ she said, sensing trouble. ‘Master Caravaggio – it’s you.’
‘Is your master in?’
‘He’s busy.’
‘Don’t give me that.’
‘He’s talking to a bishop.’
‘All the better, then.’ And with that he pushed his way past the startled woman, who waddled after him flapping her arms, and strode straight into the main reception room at the end of the corridor.
Cherubini, wearing a burgundy-coloured doublet and hose, with a preposterous fur-lined hat on his head and two sticks for legs, was examining a technical drawing of a proposed addition to Santa Maria della Scala laid out for his approval on a brightly polished table. Next to him stood a short, fat bishop, as bald as a tennis ball, who looked as if he was no stranger to a good table.
Caravaggio bowed to the bishop, then got straight to the point. ‘What’s this about you turning down my Virgin?’
Cherubini turned around slowly. He had a long, thin neck and, with his skinny legs and bulbous clothing, put the artist in mind of a brochette on a chef’s spit. A lugubrious, world-weary expression clung to his face, which could have belonged to a mask from the commedia dell’arte. Realizing the source of the interruption, Cherubini groaned theatrically and clasped his hand to his forehead. ‘Master Caravaggio …’
‘The very same. You haven’t forgotten my name, apparently, but you do seem to have let it slip your mind that you still owe me the small matter of 230 scudi
.’
The lawyer grimaced, but stood his ground. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘this is not a convenient moment. As you can see, I am busy discussing church matters with His Grace. Do you mind calling back later?’
‘Busy? Busy? What do you think I’ve been these last three months? I’ve produced a painting for you that, in the opinion of many, is a masterpiece, fit to be compared to anything by Titian or Raphael. And now I hear that it’s been turned down by you and the canons because the Virgin has bare feet!
‘I assure you …’
‘And by the Discalced Carmelites, no less. Master Cherubini, may I ask you what “discalced” means?’
‘Why, it is Latin, of course. Dis calceus … without shoes.’
‘Without shoes! Exactly! They go about Rome without any shoes on, even in the dead of winter, just to show how bloody holy they are. But now, when I show the Virgin lying on her deathbed, they complain that I’m a blasphemer because she isn’t wearing shoes. Well, since when does anyone ever wear shoes in bed? For a quick five minutes in the local knocking shop maybe, but not, I suspect, if you’re about to meet your Maker.’
At this, the bishop couldn’t help laughing, which only added to Cherubini’s sense of insult. Drawing himself up to his full height, he narrowed his eyes and bared his teeth, which were a bright yellow. ‘Good God!’ he said. ‘This is unconscionable. They were right about you, Merisi. You are a blasphemer!’
‘In fact, Master Cherubini, I’m a Milanese. But let that pass. I did what was asked of me. I produced a finished canvas, on time, to specifications, and all I’ve got to show for it is a miserable advance of fifty scudi.’
Cherubini ran a veiny hand down the full length of his face, as if conjuring up a new expression fresh from the wreckage of the old. The truth was, he planned to sell the painting in the commercial market. Several experts, among them Vincenzo Giustiniani and the Flemish master, Rubens, had pronounced it first-rate, worth twice at least what Cherubini was paying for it. So it was just a matter of allowing a discreet interval to pass between saying no to it and realizing a handsome profit.
