Caravaggio: A Passionate Life

by Seward, Desmond

  Since Francesco and Costanza spent most of their time in Milan, Caravaggio may have been born in the city, in the Sforza di Caravaggio Palace, in the parish of Santa Maria della Passerella—“Our Lady of the Footbridge.” Brought up here, the little boy would certainly have been very much aware of the Marchesa Costanza.

  Located at the junction of the Alpine passes, Milan was as wealthy as Florence or Venice, using rivers, lakes, and canals to export its merchandise. “Milan is a sweet place, and though the streets are narrow, they abound in rich coaches, and are full of noblesse,” the diarist John Evelyn recorded in 1646. It must have been like this in Caravaggio’s boyhood. Coryate says the suburbs were “as bigge as many a faire towne, and compassed around with ditches of water.” Enclosed by a network of canals, notably the Naviglio, which linked it to Padua, its population of over 100,000 was enormous for the age. There were more than 150 churches, many of them magnificent, and a citadel “of an incomparable strength,” the Castello Sforzesco.

  The duchy of Milan had been ruled by Spain since 1535, through governors who imposed savage taxation. At the same time, a constant flood of gold and silver from Spanish America devalued the currency, so that prices were rising enormously, impoverishing all classes. The regime was deeply unpopular. In April 1572 the governor, Don Luís de Zúñiga y Requeséns, reported to King Philip II at Madrid, “One cannot trust any of the subjects of this state, since many of them are much more sympathetic to France.” He was warning Philip that an uprising against the Spaniards might break out at any moment. Even so, Spain was determined to keep the duchy, the expense of a large garrison and the hostility of the Milanese being small prices to pay for its military and strategic advantages. Occupying Milan not only enabled the Spaniards to control the entire plain of Lombardy but it guarded against any threat of a French invasion of Italy from across the Alps.

  This was the city of Caravaggio’s earliest childhood. When he was five years old, it experienced one of the most terrifying calamities in its entire history.

  II

  Carlo Borromeo and the Plague, 1576–1578

  Tall, painfully thin, with piercing eyes, Cardinal Borromeo was one of the sights of Milan, celebrating Mass in gorgeous vestments at the Duomo’s high altar, tramping through the meaner streets to visit the sick and the dying. Accessible to all, he was a father to the city’s poor, selling his furniture to feed them, and an uncompromising ascetic who slept on straw and lived on bread and water. His sole luxury was music, in the service of the Church.

  Borromeo embodied the new Catholicism of the Counter-Reformation. He has been called the first modern bishop, because he was the first to found seminaries for training parish priests and because he never left his diocese. Besides re-creating the Milanese clergy, he initiated a massive program of church-building all over Lombardy. As Pope Pius IV’s nephew, he was cardinal secretary during the last session of the Council of Trent, and he was present on 4 December 1563, when the council issued its edict on the visual arts. Caravaggio must have often heard his parents talking about the saint who played such an important part in the lives of their Sforza patrons, and who fascinated everyone in the city.

  As archbishop of Milan, he made many enemies. Alarmed by the extent of his influence, the Spanish governor asked King Philip to remove him as “the most dangerous rebel Your Majesty has ever had,” but Philip wisely refused. Borromeo’s most violent foes were the Humiliati, a degenerate group of Benedictine oblates, or part-time monks, who lived in scandalous luxury on the vast revenues of ninety abbeys. When the archbishop told them to reform, one of the brethren shot him as he knelt at prayer in his chapel, but the bullet merely grazed his spine, and the Pope ordered the immediate dissolution of the Humiliati.

  In August 1576, bubonic plague broke out in Milan, spreading across Lombardy and not coming to an end until 1578. Instead of escaping with the governor and the rich, Borromeo stayed and organized a nursing service and shelters for the sick. He also visited lazar houses, which no one else dared to enter. “He fears nothing,” said a Capuchin who knew him. “It is useless trying to frighten him.” Convinced that the epidemic was a punishment sent by God, he went every day on processions of atonement, through streets littered with putrid corpses and dying men and women, barefoot, with a rope around his neck and carrying a life-sized crucifix.

  Throughout his life, Caravaggio can have known nothing more ghastly than the “Plague of San Carlo,” whose symptoms were shivering, shortness of breath, and a sense of unease, followed by a burning fever, purple tumors, and finally delirium. Fermo’s family lived in daily fear of being dragged off to a lazar house and ending in a plague pit. There were officials, robed in dingy scarlet, whose job it was to remove the sick and the dead, their carts heaped high with naked bodies and preceded by men who rang bells to warn of their approach. Throughout the stricken city, greasy smoke rose from the bonfires of infected clothes, dirty bedding, and discarded bandages. Houses were nailed up and marked with crosses to show that there were corpses inside. Everywhere was the all-pervading stench of putrefaction.

  It was later believed that seventeen thousand died at Milan, and at least another seven thousand in the surrounding countryside. Agriculture and commerce collapsed. No one dared to work in the fields or the shops for fear of meeting the infected. A severe famine broke out. The archbishop sold what was left of his gold and silver plate to buy food for the starving, ordering his servants to make clothes for the naked out of his tapestries.

  Many of Fermo’s friends and neighbors must have been among the dead. During the summer of 1577 Fermo and his family finally managed to escape to their house at the Porta Folceria in Caravaggio, but the plague followed them. Presumably most of the town’s inhabitants ran away to live in the open country, but unfortunately the Merisi were not among them. Fermo died of the pestilence on 20 October 1577, without even time to make a will. Besides his father, Caravaggio lost his grandfather and his uncle, struck down on the same day as Fermo.

  Caravaggio was six. All the men in his family had died, suddenly and horribly, after fourteen months of terror. The child can never have forgotten the doleful warning rung by the bellmen, or the sound made by the wheels of the dead cart as it trundled past his parents’ house in Milan, or when it came to take away his father’s corpse. Death appeared very early in Caravaggio’s life. He was shaped by the plague.

  III

  Apprenticeship, 1584–1588

  Bellori is generally regarded as a key source for Caravaggio’s life. He is not always accurate, but he preserves vital information found nowhere else. Born in Rome around 1615, he studied to become a painter, and, when still quite young, joined the Accademia di San Luca, which enjoyed considerable prestige. Instead of pictures, he began to write about artists. In 1671 he became the Accademia’s secretary, and when his Lives of Modern Painters, Sculptors and Architects was published the following year, it was greeted with applause.

  Although he was unquestionably a dedicated scholar, he must be read with caution. “When Michele [Caravaggio] was employed at Milan with his father, who was a mason, while making glue for some painters working on a fresco, he was suddenly seized with a wish to become a painter himself and went off with them, devoting all his energy to painting,” Bellori informs us most inaccurately. Caravaggio’s father, Fermo, was not a mason, and Caravaggio is known to have at least begun a formal apprenticeship.

  When Fermo Caravaggio died, his widow lost her social position and most of the presumably substantial income and perquisites from her husband’s post with the marchese. Unable to return to the Maestro di Casa’s apartment in the Sforza Palace at Milan, she had to stay at Caravaggio, living on whatever came in from Fermo’s small estate. By no means reduced to poverty, she nevertheless found it hard to manage, falling into debt within a few years.

  It is reasonable to suppose that, in her straitened circumstances, she was relieved to have Michelangelo taken off her hands and apprenticed to a respectable Milanese painte
r in April 1584, when he was about twelve and a half. He indentured himself to serve his master for four years, in both his house and his workshop at Milan, paying twenty-four gold scudi. In return, he was to be fed, clothed, and taught the painter’s craft.

  His master, Simone Peterzano, may have been respectable, but by no stretch of the imagination could he be described as a great artist. Once a pupil of Titian, he ever afterward signed himself “Titiani Discipulus.” He had become what art historians call a “late Mannerist.” Several churches at Milan still contain his stiff and dreary works with only a faint dash of Titian’s color.

  Surprisingly, Peterzano’s friends included extremely interesting painters. He obtained at least one commission by securing the approval of a genuinely distinguished Mannerist, Pellegrino Tibaldi. Architect as well as painter, Tibaldi had impressed Cardinal Borromeo, who employed him as his favorite church-builder. Among Tibaldi’s paintings was a fine Beheading of St. John the Baptist, a theme that would one day inspire one of Caravaggio’s greatest pictures. Tibaldi may have chosen it because of the cardinal’s close links with the Knights of Malta, whose patron saint was the Baptist.

  Peterzano was also a friend of the blind Milanese writer and former painter Giovan Paolo Lomazzo, who, in the year Caravaggio was apprenticed, published a book in Milan explaining precisely what Lombard Mannerists hoped to achieve in their painting. Another friend was Antonio Campi, who painted in the “black” manner, emphasizing light and shadow and anticipating Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro. The boy could easily have seen Campi’s own Beheading of St. John at the church of San Paolo in Milan.

  One guesses there was a good deal of friction between master and pupil. Caravaggio had a violent temper. Peterzano came from Bergamo, in Venetian territory, and the Bergamaschi looked down on the Milanese. On the other hand, the inhabitants of the Contado, which at Milan meant Bergamo and the Bergamo Alps, were something of a joke among the Milanese. Many came from the mountains to work in the city, or in the plain of Lombardy, and a substantial number had taken over farms abandoned during the French wars. The sophisticated citizens of Milan laughed at them as clodhoppers and bumpkins.

  Presumably Peterzano taught Caravaggio to stretch canvases, grind pigments, mix paints, and use beeswax for softening colors. But he never taught him to paint frescoes, which meant painting on a wall with watercolors on wet plaster. Since most of Peterzano’s commissions were for frescoes, he must have found his apprentice idle and unprofitable. Later, when frescoes were very much in fashion, Caravaggio nearly starved because his lack of proficiency in this field made him almost unemployable.

  Mancini tells us that Caravaggio studied with diligence, if occasionally he did something odd from hot blood and high spirits. Mancini’s word stravaganza is associated with Caravaggio throughout his career. Bellori, too, believed that when Caravaggio was an apprentice at Milan he worked hard enough, but only at “painting portraits.” He seems to have visited picture galleries regularly in an eager quest for ideas. Historians can only speculate on where he went, but it looks as if he traveled as far as Brescia, Cremona, Lodi, and Bergamo.

  Bellori was convinced that, as a very young man, Caravaggio had been to Venice, “where he was delighted by the colors of Giorgione, which he copied.” He also believed that Caravaggio derived his naturalism from Giorgione, who, in Bellori’s opinion, was, of all Venetian artists, “the purest and simplest in rendering the forms of nature with only a few colors.” But the accepted view among modern historians is that Bellori’s judgment was faulty, because of insufficient knowledge of Giorgione’s work, which he had never actually seen himself.

  A visit to Venice, which Bellori thought took place when Caravaggio was on the run “after certain quarrels,” also seems unlikely. A penniless youth would have had difficulty finding money for the journey, and the earliest sources, Mancini and Baglione, make no mention of such a trip. But Bellori is certainly right about the quarrels. His belief that Caravaggio was “gloomy and quarrelsome by nature” is more than confirmed by Caravaggio’s behavior in later life. He may even have failed to complete his apprenticeship. In any case it would have come to an end in 1588. He did not arrive in Rome until 1592, and we have no information about how he spent the four years in between. There are, however, reasonably strong grounds for supposing that he had to leave his native city in a hurry, after a crime that may have been a murder.

  IV

  The Counter-Reformation

  The most important event in Milan while Caravaggio was an apprentice was the death of its archbishop, Carlo Borromeo, in November 1584. The entire population of the city gathered outside the Archbishop’s Palace opposite the Duomo, carrying lighted candles and singing litanies. When his passing was announced, such dreadful howls arose from the crowd that observers compared them to the roars of stricken wild beasts. For days afterward, long lines of mourners filed past his bier, thrusting rosaries and crucifixes through the choir railings to touch his feet. Even before the Church canonized him in 1610, Milan kept the anniversary with the solemnities for a saint. He was embalmed and enshrined in crystal in a crypt chapel at the Duomo, which Henry James saw in 1872: “The black mummified corpse of the saint is stretched out in a glass coffin, clad in his mouldering canonicals, mitred, croziered and gloved, glittering with votive jewels. It is an extraordinary mixture of life and death: the dessicated clay, the ashen rags, the hideous little black mask and skull, and the living, glowing splendour of diamonds, emeralds and sapphires.”

  Carlo Borromeo influenced Caravaggio’s art profoundly, although it is most unlikely that Caravaggio ever realized it. At the Council of Trent, the archbishop had been one of the leaders who reshaped Catholicism and harnessed the arts in the service of the Counter-Reformation. He had defined Caravaggio’s choice of subjects before he was born, by stressing those that were suitable for a Catholic artist.

  The Counter-Reformation was far more than a crusade to save the Church of Rome from Protestantism. It was a revolution within the Church for the renewal of Catholic Christianity. The Council of Trent, which sat between 1545 and 1563, produced a series of extraordinarily influential decrees, dealing with every aspect of life affected by religion. The Counter-Reformation’s success in southern Europe, and in much of northern, was assured by the support of the Hapsburgs, the Bourbons, and the Polish kings, who all identified themselves with it.

  There is a tradition that the council considered removing all forms of music except Gregorian chant from church services, until the composer Giovanni Palestrina supplied what was wanted. His Masses and anthems were performed constantly at Milan’s churches during Caravaggio’s childhood and apprenticeship, and at Rome when he was working there. Trent was determined to banish “everything ‘lascivious’ or impure” from religious art.

  Long before the council, during the 1520s, Pope Adrian VI had planned to redecorate the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel because its naked figures scandalized him. Mercifully, he was prevented by his premature death. In 1549 Cirillo Franco complained in a letter to a friend of “that posturing of limbs and all those nudes” in Michelangelo’s art. Andrea Gilio’s 1564 Dialogo against errors in painting attacked contemporary artists for their obsession with the naked body, and criticized them for distorting it in the cause of elegance. He harked back to the time before Michelangelo, urging a combination of the latest technique with true religion, which would produce a purified sacred art. Bishop Franco and Gilio agreed that, as the former put it, “all art in the service of worship should be functional.” In the bishop’s words, “Everything must be appropriate to its subject.”

  The fathers of the council trenchantly expressed their decrees. They insisted that it was the duty of all painters to proclaim and explain the truths of the Catholic religion, and, by inference, concentrate on doctrines attacked by the Protestant reformers. In the future, all religious painting and sculpture must stop cultivating art at the expense of devotion. The decrees amounted to a manifesto against Mannerism, rejec
ting “superfluous elegance,” excessive displays of nudity, and paganism.

  What gave the council’s decrees such force, and ensured that they would have an enormous impact on artists, was the Counter-Reformation’s success in bringing about a deep and sustained religious revival. Caravaggio grew to manhood in an age of renewed faith in which, for most people, the redeemed world was more real than the natural. As a result, throughout Catholic civilization, especially in Italy, the decrees were taken very seriously by artists and art lovers. Eventually they would start a cultural as well as a spiritual revolution, with a new art that would one day become known as the Baroque.

  An alternative program for painters and sculptors was contained in the preaching of Carlo Borromeo, who emphasized the two Catholic dogmas to which Protestantism was most hostile: good works and transubstantiation, the belief that the bread and wine changed into Christ’s body and blood during the Mass. He was equally determined to defend other doctrines rejected by Protestants and stressed the importance of the cults of the Virgin Mary and the saints and of prayers for the dead. Acts of charity and mercy, the Last Supper, the Madonna, and martyrdoms became the proper subjects for painters.

  At the same time, the archbishop was eager to see as much beauty as possible in the basilicas of his diocese, which he often rebuilt completely to make them more splendid and impressive. He advocated the most sumptuous pomp for the ceremonies of the Church, and he wanted to adorn his basilicas with noble paintings. No paintings could have been more in accord with the council’s decrees than Caravaggio’s during his maturity. Despite their occasional brutality, his naturalism and total lack of affectation or of elegance for its own sake were the looked-for response to the decrees’ demand for functional art. He seldom used pagan imagery. He seems to have had little interest in the art of classical antiquity. In his later years, his painting was wholly religious. The Counter-Reformation had created a climate to which Caravaggio responded absolutely as an artist.