Caravaggio: A Passionate Life

by Seward, Desmond

  As a courtier, Caravaggio lived on an upper floor. According to the survey of 1595, the courtiers’ rooms were “in part of wood like friars’ cells, with walls at half-height”—cubicles with partition walls that did not reach the ceiling. He dressed in black, receiving two free suits a year. The fashion for black clothes was due to Spanish influence. “Hee is counted no Gentleman amongst them that goes not in black,” Thomas Nashe tells us. “They dresse theyr jesters and fooles only in freshe colours.”

  Historians often exaggerate the comfort of Caravaggio’s life at the Palazzo Madama, one writing of “the easy, sybaritic existence that he must have enjoyed in del Monte’s palace.” In reality, although food, clothing, and a bed were provided, his life was cramped and frugal. They also exaggerate his “friendship” with del Monte, distorting the relationship between patron and protégé in a hierarchic world. There was an unbridgeable gap between a cardinal and a gentiluomo. The latter never dared to forget that; if he had certain privileges, he was nonetheless an upper servant.

  Francesco Liberati, author of the Perfect Master of the Household, had once administered the establishment of an Illustrissimo. (Princes of the Church were called Illustrissimo instead of Eminenza until well into the next century.) He describes how the gentlemen of a cardinal’s household waited on him with an elaborate ceremonial, which bordered on the liturgical. They had to keep their hats on while attending him at table, so that they could doff them whenever he drank.

  There were, of course, comparatively informal moments, such as the entertainments for Cardinal del Monte’s guests, which would certainly have included concerts and plays. We know that the cardinal was very fond of music, especially madrigals, but we can only speculate about his taste in plays. The plays fashionable in Rome during Caravaggio’s time in the city included tragedies bloodier than anything in Elizabethan drama. In Giraldi’s Orbeche, the king of Persia, learning that his daughter has married beneath her, orders the heads and hands of her husband and children to be served up to her at a meal, whereupon she kills both the king and herself. The themes of Speroni’s Canace are incest and suicide. In Dolce’s Marianna, the heroine is blinded, her heart torn out and fed to the dogs. Decio’s Acripanda of 1590 has more horrors than all the rest put together.

  It is inconceivable that del Monte’s household did not hear regular readings from the Aminta and the Gerusalemme Liberata of Torquato Tasso, the most popular verse of the day. These two wonderfully elegant poems, one a pastoral and the other an epic, were perfectly attuned to court life, including that of a prince of the Church’s famiglia.

  The earliest known description of Caravaggio dates from July 1597, when he was cited as a witness in an assault case. According to a picture dealer, Costantino Spata, whose shop was near Maître Valentin’s, he was small, with a half-grown black beard, bushy eyebrows, black eyes, and long black hair hanging over his forehead. He wore an untidy black suit and torn black stockings, carrying a sword in his capacity as a cardinal’s “servitor.”

  Bellori says Caravaggio was “shown the most famous statues of Phidias and Glykon, so that he would be able to study them.” They were, of course, copies, but they could be seen only in the great private collections. The best were at the Palazzo Farnese and the Villa Medici, both of which also contained magnificent paintings. Even if Caravaggio soon discovered, as Bellori suggests, that he had not very much interest in Antique statuary, he must have appreciated the settings in which it was displayed, the enchanting galleries and gardens.

  He could stroll in the gardens of the Villa d’Este, the Farnese on the Palatine, the Orsini on Monte Cavallo, the Pincio, and the Aventine, those of the Sforza near Monte Testaccio, those of Papa Giulio at the Vatican, and many more. Fifteen years before, writing of the villas of the great Roman princes, Montaigne had marveled how “all these beautiful arbors are free, open to anybody who wishes to go in, or even to spend the night there with some dear companion, whenever the owners are away, and they are hardly ever in residence.” If ever the life of Michelangelo da Caravaggio, as he had begun to call himself, was free from shadow, it must have been during his first springs and summers at the Palazzo Madama. But who were the “dear companions” with whom he may, perhaps, have spent the night in the beautiful arbors?

  XI

  Homosexual or Heterosexual? 1596–1600

  Today, Caravaggio has become a homosexual icon, acclaimed as the greatest of gay painters, a view of him that owes a great deal to the late Derek Jarman’s immensely successful film Caravaggio. In 1986, in a book about his film, Jarman called the artist “the last sodomite of a dying tradition, parodying Michelangelo and stealing the dark from Leonardo.” Jarman was not, however, a historian. No less fancifully, in the film itself, he imagines one pope pawning the dome of St. Peter’s, and another arriving at an orgy “dressed as a hairy satyr, wearing the triple tiara.”

  The historical proof of Caravaggio’s homosexuality, Jarman might no doubt have said, lies in his association with Cardinal del Monte, in the “homosexual pinups” he produced for the cardinal, and in never painting female nudes. Others have used these arguments. But del Monte’s alleged sexual tastes are demonstrably a myth, while Caravaggio produced at least two female nudes, now lost: Susannah and the Elders and a Penitent Magdalen. There is also evidence that he had mistresses. So the question has to be asked: Was he really homosexual, or was he in fact heterosexual?

  Seventeenth-century ideas about sex were often very different from our own. “The elephant, not only the largest of animals, but the wisest, furnishes an admirable example for married couples,” François de Sales wrote in his widely read Introduction de la Vie Dévote of 1609. “It is faithful and loving to the female of its choice, mating only every third year, and then for no more than five days.” Sexual deprivation was a good thing. At the same time, affections that today would be thought homosexual were considered unremarkable, provided they did not involve sexual activity. Lack of documentary evidence makes Caravaggio’s orientation even harder to identify. All we know is what we see in his pictures.

  Among his first paintings for del Monte was the Concert of Youths, four half-naked young men communicating a secret message. The lutenist is sometimes said to be the artist’s friend Mario Minniti, but no proper likeness of him survives, while the horn player may be a self-portrait. One youth has wings, which, with Caravaggio’s attempts at classical drapery, shows it is an allegory. Many historians think that the picture represents some aspect of homosexual love. We know from an inventory that the cardinal hung the Concert in his gallery, and it has been suggested that Caravaggio was catering for del Monte’s homosexual love nest. Yet Baglione, who knew Caravaggio, and probably del Monte too, merely says, “He painted a music party of young men, from nature, and very well.”

  Another of Caravaggio’s pictures for the cardinal was the Lute Player, whose model was perhaps a Spanish castrato, Pedro Montoya, a member of the Sistine Chapel choir. The boy is so girlish that Bellori thought he was “a lady in a blouse.” On the table before him are a violin, a sheet of music, and some figs. The sheet of music reads Voi sapete ch’io v’amo (“You know I love you”), the opening lines of a madrigal set to music by Jacob Arcadelt. Yet another painting of an androgynous boy is the Bacchus in the Uffizi. Although not among del Monte’s collection, it is typical of Caravaggio’s work at this stage.

  Despite the prettiness of the concert players, it is most unlikely that they were meant to be homosexual pinups. The cardinal would have regarded them as images of platonic love and the transience of earthly happiness. A priest and a member of the Accademia degli Insensati, he probably saw an emphasis on the vanity of this world’s beauty, which would awaken sophisticated Christians to a realization of heavenly beauty. In any case, in del Monte’s gallery such pictures were heavily outnumbered by Christs, Madonnas, saints, and martyrdoms, together with portraits of the famous down the ages.

  No doubt, these so-called pinups look like homosexuals. Yet Carav
aggio cannot have been responding to the cardinal’s “tastes,” which never existed outside the imaginations of a single seventeenth-century journalist and a handful of modern scholars. In the pre-Freudian world of the Baroque, admiration of male beauty did not necessarily mean homosexuality; girlish, Adonis-like looks in a young man were often considered a sign of aristocratic breeding rather than effeminacy. Many of the Davids in Baroque art were pretty enough, and yet most of the artists who created them were heterosexuals. At least one of the youths in the Concert, if he really is Minniti, married twice.

  There is little evidence, except these early paintings, to suggest that Caravaggio was a homosexual. A vague allegation during a libel action in 1603, for belittling a would-be rival’s pictures, was not taken seriously by the court. In 1650, Richard Symonds, an English tourist visiting the Giustiniani collection, was told that the model for the laughing Cupid in Amor Vincit Omnia was “Cecco… his owne boy or servant that laid with him,” but this was mere hearsay. At about the same time, a guide to the Villa Borghese stated that the young David in the Borghese David and Goliath was modeled on the artist’s “Caravaggino,” by implication his boyfriend. This was probably a simple misunderstanding, since David is almost certainly an idealized self-portrait of Caravaggio in his boyhood. Nevertheless, a tradition that he had been a homosexual developed during the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

  On these very slender foundations, some modern historians have decided that he had physical relationships with his male friends. “Whether Caravaggio was essentially or exclusively homosexual is far from certain,” says Howard Hibbard. “Minniti, with whom he lived for some years, and who may have been the model for the lutenist in the Concert, eventually tired of Caravaggio.” But the only grounds for suspecting that there may have been a sexual relationship between them was their living together. And even Hibbard concedes that Minniti went off to marry a Roman girl by whom he had a family. He also admits that the homoerotic undertones in Caravaggio’s paintings are not necessarily “confessional,” accepting that a contemporary story of Caravaggio using a mistress for a model is “not a rumour about a known homosexual.”

  Caravaggio was strongly attracted by the opposite sex during the latter part of his time at the Palazzo Madama. “Around 1599 he also began to paint women who are desirable in our eyes and were, at least arguably, desired,” Hibbard concedes. They would certainly have taken more notice of a cardinal’s gentiluomo than of some hack painter living in the gutter.

  According to Montaigne, Roman women were unusually good looking. “As a rule, the women’s faces here are much prettier than those of French women, and you see far fewer uglier ones than you do in France … their countenances are stately, gentle, and sweet.” If he thought their loose dresses unflattering to the figure, he admired their clothes on the whole. “In raiment they are incomparably more sumptuous than our ladies, everything being covered with pearls and jewels.” They kept their distance from the gentlemen, “but during certain dances they mix freely enough, and find plenty of opportunity for conversation and holding hands.”

  There is nothing to suggest that Caravaggio was ever lucky enough to mix with noblewomen of this sort. Even if, in later years, he was sometimes admitted into the palaces of great Roman magnates, he could not expect to be thought fit company for their wives and daughters, despite being a famous artist. He remained a mere painter. But he met women further down the social scale, and there is every reason to think that he got to know some of them very well indeed. Montaigne thought the Roman courtesans were the most beautiful creatures he had ever seen. No doubt they flaunted their charms before an elegantly dressed young man like Caravaggio. In his black suit and white ruff, carrying sword and dagger, he must have begun to look as if he had money.

  The onus of proving what has become very nearly the traditional view, that Caravaggio was a lover of his own sex, rests on its supporters. Their case’s most obvious flaw is that the evidence for Cardinal del Monte’s allegedly homosexual tastes and his supposed love nest of boys at the Palazzo Madama will not stand up to examination; throughout the cardinal’s long career, none of the cardinal’s friends or close associates can be shown to have been a practicing homosexual. On the other hand, definite if sparse evidence exists to show that Caravaggio was a lover of women.

  Judging from his paintings, it is not impossible that he went through some sort of bisexual phase as a very young man, but as will be seen, it certainly looks as though he was a heterosexual by his midtwenties. In the last analysis, blasphemous as it may seem to our own age, it is quite possible he did not have much interest in sex; he willingly took a vow of chastity when he was in his thirties. Nonetheless, some people will always remain convinced that Caravaggio was essentially homosexual, although their view depends entirely on a subjective reaction to his pictures. A famous German composer, also a homosexual, has claimed, “Of course Schubert was gay—you can hear it in the music.” But the majority of Schubert’s admirers cannot hear it in the music. Similarly, most of Caravaggio’s admirers cannot see it in the pictures, certainly not in his later paintings.

  XII

  “Nature the only subject fit for his brush,” 1596

  Although Caravaggio no longer needed to support himself, he worked with ferocious energy. Nor did he have any intention of restricting himself to jeux d’esprit like the Concert or the Lute Player, produced in unusually sunny moments. A man of many moods, he suffered from the same overriding melancholy as his namesake Michelangelo.

  Caravaggio “thought Nature the only subject fit for his brush,” says Bellori, explaining that Caravaggio painted The Fortune Teller to make the point. He “stopped a gypsy as she was going down the street near his house, and, taking her home, painted her foretelling the future, as is the custom of the Egyptian race.” He was, however, by no means the first painter in Rome to reject Mannerism. In 1595 Cardinal Odoardo Farnese, nephew of Cardinal Alessandro, had brought Annibale Carracci from Bologna to work on frescoes at the Palazzo Farnese. Annibale and his two Carracci cousins were so eager to learn from nature that they made detailed anatomical studies of human corpses, while Annibale painted a Butcher’s Shop. Nothing could be more brutally realistic than the dead and bleeding Christ of the Crucifixion with its dreadful wounds, which Annibale took with him to Rome. This gruesome emphasis on Christ’s suffering reflects the Tridentine decrees on art, which urged artists to stress the reality of the Gospel story. It is unlikely that Caravaggio did not, at some stage, see Annibale’s frescoes and the Crucifixion. Ironically, Annibale would one day dismiss Caravaggio’s style as troppo naturale.

  Caravaggio must have been aware of naturalist painters of the past before he heard of the Carraci or saw their work. Now that he was being noticed, he rejected every current artistic theory in a way that many of his contemporaries thought verged on iconoclasm. He painted only what he could see in nature. Yet, like Annibale Carracci, and no doubt unconsciously, he was responding to the Counter-Reformation’s demand that simple people be able to understand any religious painting. Even before entering the Palazzo Madama, he had been attempting religious themes. The first example to survive may be the Penitent Magdalene at the Doria Pamphili Gallery. Scarcely one of his best pictures, it was admired by Bellori: “He painted a girl sitting on a little chair in the act of drying her hair, with her hands on her lap, and he shows her in a room on whose floor he has placed a little jar of ointment, with ornaments and jewels to signify that she is Mary Magdalene. She holds her head a little on one side, her cheek, neck and bosom being painted in clean, easy, honest colors, their simplicity emphasized by the whole figure’s sheer straightforwardness, with her arms covered by a blouse and with her yellow dress pulled up to her knee, revealing a white petticoat of flowered damask.” Bellori explains that he has described the picture at such length to demonstrate what a natural style Caravaggio had, and how he had been able to find exactly the right color.

  Another of Caravaggio’s early r
eligious paintings was the Rest on the Flight into Egypt, also at the Doria Pamphili Gallery, which was much admired by Bellori: “An angel stands on one side and plays the violin, while a seated St. Joseph holds open a book of music for him; the angel is very beautiful and, by graciously showing us his profile, displays his winged shoulders and the rest of his naked body, which is partly covered by drapery. On the other side sits the Madonna who, bending her head, seems as though asleep with her baby on her breast.”

  With its wonderful serenity, this is probably the happiest picture ever painted by Caravaggio. The gentleness and tranquility are most moving. Each face is full of kindness, even that of the donkey, whose brown eye is like a great gleaming jewel. The whole composition has been described by the historian Giorgio Bonsanti as “a miracle of peace and quiet.” Unaware of the artist’s identity, one could imagine that it was the work of a saint. The model for the serene Virgin was the same model who sat for the Magdalene, a not unappealing young woman. Since the Flight dates from just before Caravaggio’s del Montean period, or from its beginning, she makes an interesting contrast to the so-called “homosexual pinups” from the same period.

  Although painted at some time during the first half of Caravaggio’s stay at the Palazzo Madama, St. Francis in Ecstasy, now at Hartford, Connecticut, was not acquired by del Monte until many years after his protégé had left the famiglia. This is surprising in view of the cardinal’s close links with the Capuchin Franciscans of Sant’ Urbino, and given the likelihood that his friendship with them prompted his choice of subject. Del Monte’s delay in acquiring it was probably due to its novelty. Caravaggio seems to have started with the intention of painting St. Francis receiving the stigmata, a miraculous repetition on his own body of the wounds suffered by the crucified Christ. He then appears to have changed his mind. Instead of receiving the stigmata, Francis, portrayed as bearded like a Capuchin, has the wound on his right hand deliberately painted out and is shown swooning in an ecstasy of the sort later associated with Teresa of Avila or John of the Cross. It looks as if Caravaggio was aware of mystical prayer and the Via Negativa, the Dark Night of the Soul. The painting is so deeply felt that one almost wonders if it reflects the artist’s own experience. And, for the first time, he uses darkness and the chiaroscuro.