Caravaggio: A Passionate Life

by Seward, Desmond

  A crony of Baglione, Mao (Tommaso) Salini, apparently a painter of still lifes, alleged at one hearing that a certain “Giovan Battista” was the bardassa of both Caravaggio and Longhi. The word means either a ne’er-do-well or a male prostitute. Clearly, Salini was trying to harm Caravaggio’s reputation by implying that he employed young criminals or had homosexual tastes. In response, Caravaggio said that he had never even heard of Giovan Battista, and the court ignored the allegation.

  The trial ended inconclusively with Caravaggio being released from the Tordinona on 25 September, after the intervention of the French ambassador, Philippe de Béthune, Comte de Selles. A Florentine Knight of Malta, the Commander Fra’ Ainolfo Bardi, gave a guarantee in writing to the governor of Rome, Monsignor Ferrante Taverna, that Caravaggio would do nothing to harm or insult either Baglione or Mao Salini. Even so, he was confined to his house for a time, under pain of being “sent to the galleys” if he left it without permission. It looks very much as though Béthune and Bardi each acted at the prompting of Cardinal del Monte, who did not care to see his favorite artist in prison and unable to paint. The king of France’s queen was a sister of the Grand Duke Ferdinand, so in consequence there were close links between France and Tuscany. Since del Monte was Tuscany’s representative at Rome, and one of the “French party” among the cardinals, both Béthune and Bardi must have been only too willing to oblige him.

  Caravaggio was placed under virtual house arrest because the authorities were desperately anxious to discourage quarrels, which might otherwise end in duels and potentially fatal bloodshed. In November, Onorio Longhi was arrested, Baglione having complained that Longhi was insulting himself and Salini. But on this occasion Caravaggio kept his head down and was left in peace.

  Baglione lived for another forty years, becoming president of the Accademia di San Luca and publishing two important books—an account of the new churches that had been built at Rome and a history of Roman artists in recent times. He took a long-delayed revenge on Caravaggio in acknowledging the beauty of his old enemy’s paintings, while enlarging on his failings as a human being. Nowhere, in either work, does Baglione make any mention of his quarrel with him.

  Meanwhile, the feud between Caravaggio and his old master Arpino simmered on. In 1600, delighted by the frescoes that Arpino had painted at San Giovanni Laterano, Pope Clement had made him a Knight of the Order of Christ, since when he had been styled the “Cavaliere d’Arpino.” It was a rare honor for a painter, and it appears to have made Caravaggio fiercely jealous. Joachim von Sandrart recounts how, when Caravaggio met the Cavaliere riding proudly to court, he challenged him to a duel. “Now’s the time for us to settle our quarrel, since we’re both armed,” he shouted, telling him to get down off his horse. The haughty Arpino replied that, as a Papal Knight, he could not possibly fight someone of inferior rank. “So courteous an answer wounded Caravaggio more deeply than any sword thrust,” writes Sandrart, who believed it was this exchange that first made him think of becoming a Knight of Malta, to put himself on the same level as Arpino.

  He managed to keep out of trouble for several months after the Baglione case, if only because he could not leave his house without permission or was away from Rome on business. Then, in April 1604, a waiter at the Albergo del Moro complained that Caravaggio had thrown a plate of hot artichokes into his face, endangering his eyes, and had threatened to draw his sword; he seems to have escaped with a fine. In October, walking home from dinner at the Torretta with two friends, a bookseller and a member of Cardinal Aldobrandini’s household, Caravaggio was arrested on a charge of throwing stones. His reaction was to ask the bookseller to tell del Monte he was back in jail. The arrest took place near the house of a certain “Menicuccia,” whose name sounds like a courtesan’s. (He has been romantically linked by historians with Menicuccia, unconvincingly identified as the Siennese prostitute Domenica Calvi.) In November, after insulting a sbirro who had demanded to see his license to carry weapons, he spent another spell in the Tordinona.

  The sbirri must have known “Michelangelo” (or “Michele”) only too well by now. The famous painter in his splendid if rumpled clothes had become one of the sights of Rome. Besides the blond servant carrying his rapier, he was always accompanied by a shaggy black dog with the alchemical name of “Cornacchia” (“Raven”), a performer of spectacular tricks.

  Unhappily, he kept on being arrested. In May 1605, caught with unlicensed weapons in the small hours of the morning, he went back to the Tordinona. In July, having grossly insulted a woman called Laura, he suffered a further spell in prison. He was bound over not to molest her or her daughter Isabella with verbal abuse or by singing scurrilous verses about them that had been set to music.

  At about this time, he tried to fight a duel with Guido Reni, who had replaced him as Cardinal Aldobrandini’s choice to paint another Crucifixion of St. Peter for the basilica of St. Peter’s. Enraged, he accused Guido of “stealing his style and his color.” The duel never took place, though Guido was certainly copying his style. Caravaggio later became furiously jealous of the Florentine Passignano (Domenico Cresti), whom he sometimes encountered in taverns. When Passignano was working on yet another Crucifixion of St. Peter for the basilica, Caravaggio destroyed his work tent in St. Peter’s, cutting it in pieces and shouting at everyone that Passignano’s picture was “terrible.”

  Sometimes, however, he went out drinking at taverns with Passignano’s great friend Ludovico Cardi, known as “Il Cigoli” after the castle where he had been born in Tuscany. A painter himself, Il Cigoli seems to have been terrified of upsetting Caravaggio, afraid of provoking his “persecutions and very strange temper.”

  In July 1605 Caravaggio quarreled over a girl with Mariano Pasqualone, a notary from Accumoli. A few days afterward, he attacked Pasqualone from behind as he was walking past the Spanish ambassador’s palace in the Piazza Navona, giving him a sword cut or a blow from a pistol butt on the back of his head. He then ran off and took refuge in the nearby Palazzo Madama. The police report described the girl as “Lena, who stands in Piazza Navona … who is Michelangelo’s girl.” It sounds as though she was a prostitute and Caravaggio was passionately in love with her. From the evidence of his paintings we know that he had acquired a beautiful new model. Professional female models were always prostitutes, and one historian believes Caravaggio attacked Pasqualone because “the notary had had commerce with her.” Another thinks she may have been Pasqualone’s former fiancée. It is likely, however, that she was Maddalena Antonietti, one of a family of dedicated Roman whores. She and her sister Amabilia were much in demand, their clients including a nephew of the late Pope Sixtus V and the chief of police.

  Caravaggio was frightened after attacking Pasqualone that the assault could be interpreted as attempted murder. If he was found guilty, it would mean the gallows. Early in August, he fled to Genoa, but he was back in Rome before the end of the month. Pasqualone settled out of court, no doubt in return for generous compensation. One wonders if del Monte’s famous comment on Caravaggio was provoked by the Pasqualone affair. In a letter of August 24, the cardinal was reliably reported as describing him as uno cervello stravagantissimo—“a wild, wild, spirit.”

  In September, Caravaggio’s former landlady, Prudenzia Bruni, complained to the authorities that he had thrown stones at her windows and broken her Venetian blind. He had not been back to the rooms he rented in her house since his flight to Genoa, so, as he owed her six months’ rent, she had obtained a warrant to seize the belongings he had left behind. She told the police she was convinced that he stoned her house in reprisal, “in order to upset me.”

  In October, the sbirri found him lying in the street with sword or dagger wounds in his throat and left ear. They took him to a friend’s house nearby, where he recovered. It was obvious that he had been fighting, but he insisted stubbornly that he had merely fallen on his sword. The authorities fined him five hundred scudi, once more placing him under house arrest.
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br />   Between 1598 and the end of 1605, he was brought before the magistrates not less than eleven times. Perhaps social ambition, the desire to behave as well as dress like a nobleman, had something to do with his behavior; looking for a fight, especially with the sbirri, was a fashionable amusement among the younger Roman nobles, who also enjoyed swaggering round the city pretending to be soldiers. Later, a desire to rise in the world socially was one of Caravaggio’s motives for wanting to become a Knight of Malta. Another possible reason for his belligerence is a weakness for the bottle; most of the incidents seem to have taken place after he had dined at a tavern. Even so, neither social climbing nor drunkenness can have been altogether responsible for his relentless brawling. All too clearly, the long history of repeated violence indicates grave inner disturbance. The mood swings hint at some form of depressive illness. Sandrart, another early writer, records how he and his cronies had chosen for their motto Nec spes, nec metu—“with neither hope nor fear”—a very peculiar motto for someone so passionate and emotional in his art. To a certain degree, the tension may have been soothed by painting, which would partly explain his prolific output and why he nearly always delivered on time.

  It is particularly unfortunate that there should have been so many frustrations in his professional life. Again and again he failed to obtain a commission for St. Peter’s, at that time the topmost pinnacle of every Italian artist’s ambition. Most unfairly, each of the cardinals who ran the Fabbrica di San Pietro preferred to choose a painter who came from his own part of Italy, instead of allotting the commissions according to talent. As time went by, Caravaggio became understandably infuriated that a succession of mediocre rivals should be rewarded, while he was invariably passed over. He was very conscious of his own genius, yet professional disappointment, however intense, cannot account for the baffling contrast between the spirituality of Caravaggio’s art and his squalid police record.

  XVIII

  “Wonderful Things at Rome,” 1603

  When Carel van Mander wrote of Caravaggio’s disreputable private life, he added that he was “doing wonderful things at Rome.” “He will not make a single brush stroke without a close study from life, which he copies and paints.” Undoubtedly, Caravaggio produced some of his finest work during this later Roman period. In January 1604, he went to Tolentino, not far from the Adriatic coast, where he had been invited to paint an altarpiece for the Capuchin church of the Crocefisso. No trace of such a picture survives. But having made the long journey from Rome to Tolentino it seems unlikely that he would have omitted to make a pilgrimage to Loreto, the Counter-Reformation Lourdes, which was only a few miles away.

  According to a widely believed tradition, during the thirteenth century, the house in Nazareth where the Blessed Virgin was born, and where Jesus spent his childhood, was carried away by angels through the sky, first to Dalmatia and then to Loreto. It was a tiny brick building, twenty-eight feet by twelve, and thirteen feet high. Countless pilgrims flocked to it in the hope of finding miraculous cures, or to pray for divine intervention. It was a place of last resort, when everything else had failed. It was also a place where sinners were sent by their confessors, to atone for their misdeeds.

  Quivering with horror at the “shamefull opinions of the Papists” and their “idolatry,” the daring Scots tourist William Lithgow came here in 1609, only six years after Caravaggio. As a Calvinist, he observed scornfully that when any of his Catholic companions approached the town gate, they pulled off their shoes and stockings, walking barefoot to the shrine, “many hundreds of bare-footed, blinded bodies, creeping on their hands and knees.” He also learned that every year these pilgrims offered “many rich gifts, amounting to an unspeakable value, as Chaines, & Rings of Gold and Silver, Rubies, Diamonds, Silken Tapestries, Goblets, imbrouderies, and such like.”

  In Loreto’s narrow streets Caravaggio saw the crippled and the palsied, the blind and the deaf, the fevered and the crazed. Courtiers came because the shrine had the power to render poison harmless; military men because it could deflect bullets or sword cuts; barren women because it could overcome infertility. Rich and poor, they prayed before the Holy House, which stood inside a church with a dome by Sangallo and side chapels by Bramante.

  The shrine had already cast its spell over another painter, Lorenzo Lotto, who had died there as a lay brother in 1557, and who may have influenced Caravaggio. There are paintings by him in the Apostolic Palace that must have been in the church in 1603. If Caravaggio came to Loreto on a pilgrimage, perhaps as a penitent, he is likely to have done so on the feast of the Nativity in September, or of the Translation (removal) of the Holy House in December. Apparently the simplest, humblest pilgrims made the most impression on him.

  Entering the church through bronze doors, Caravaggio found its walls covered by frescoes and paintings that told the story of Loreto. Seven massive silver lamps burned before the Santa Casa. Inside, there was an ancient, wonder-working Madonna and Child, carved from wood and black with age, dressed in silks and velvets, ablaze with jewels. Sometimes the statue seemed to come alive, electrifying the pilgrims.

  When Caravaggio returned to Rome, he was able to pay special tribute to the Santa Casa. A certain Ermete Cavalleti had bequeathed five hundred scudi to adorn a chapel with a picture of the Virgin of Loreto, and for this purpose his heirs had purchased the first side chapel on the left in the church of Sant’ Agostino. Probably during the latter half of 1603 they commissioned Caravaggio to paint a Madonna di Loreto. The altarpiece that resulted could have been painted only by someone who had felt the full impact of the Holy House, and who understood what it meant to the pilgrims.

  In this extremely moving picture, sometimes called the Madonna dei Pellegrini, Caravaggio shows the “standing Madonna holding the child in her arms in the act of blessing; kneeling in front are two pilgrims with hands folded in prayer, a poor man with bare feet and legs, with a leather cap and a staff resting on his shoulder, who is accompanied by an old woman with a cap on her head,” Bellori writes. Few modern observers appreciate that the couple’s feet are bare out of piety, not from poverty. A strikingly beautiful model with a very strong face posed for the Virgin. She was almost certainly Lena.

  Baglione sneers that one of the pilgrims has muddy feet, while the other wears a dirty, torn cap. But in trying to belittle the painting, he testifies to its popularity, reporting disdainfully how “the common people [popolani] made a great fuss [estremo schiamazzo] about it.” The picture was every simple pilgrim’s idea of Loreto, of the Virgin appearing miraculously with the child Jesus at the door of the Santa Casa, welcoming those who came in humble simplicity. This was the art envisaged by the Council of Trent.

  In fairness to Baglione, many educated people must have agreed with him. Nowadays, it is difficult for us to grasp just how much Caravaggio’s preference for ugly, shabby, lower-class humanity as models shocked contemporaries. Until Victorian times, artists generally depicted men and women as handsome, well groomed, and upper-class when painting scenes from Scripture or history. An Oratorian might have approved, but not many others, apart from common, illiterate folk.

  In 1605 Cesare d’Este, duke of Modena, commissioned a Madonna from Caravaggio as an altarpiece for a church at his capital. For once, the artist was late in finishing, or at least in delivering it. Cesare wrote to Cardinal del Monte, asking him to help. Del Monte warned the duke not to be too hopeful, adding that Caravaggio had recently declined six thousand scudi from Prince Doria to paint a fresco. Some years later, Caravaggio sold a Madonna of the Rosary, which may have begun as the picture ordered by the duke of Modena.

  Another altarpiece from about this time was the Madonna dei Palafrenieri, the Virgin and Child with a stern St. Anne (the Virgin’s mother). He used the same model for the Virgin as in the Madonna di Loreto. The figures are stamping on the head of a hissing serpent, which may be intended as an emblem of Protestantism. Ordered for the chapel of the Papal Grooms (Palafrenieri) at St. Peter’s, it was
just the sort of commission Caravaggio had been seeking. But although he was paid the stipulated price of seventy-five scudi, much less than his normal fee, in Baglione’s smug words “it was removed by command of the Lords Cardinal of the Fabbrica [di San Pietro].” The rejection must have made Caravaggio more bitter than ever and perhaps accounts for some of his violent misbehavior.

  He painted a St. John the Baptist for the Genoese banker Ottavio Costa, who gave a copy as an altarpiece for the church of a Ligurian village where he was feudal lord. It may have been painted during the artist’s very brief exile at Genoa in 1605, when he fled there after attacking the notary Pasqualone. If his mind was troubled, he worked with greater speed than ever. A banker in Rome, Costa, one of his warmest admirers, came from the gentry of the town of Albenga in Liguria. He was the first owner of Judith and Holofernes, eventually possessing five Caravaggios and leaving a clause in his will that his heirs were to sell none of them.

  Caravaggio continued to paint other pictures besides altarpieces, but these, too, were invariably religious. In a Crowning with Thorns, commissioned by Vincenzo Giustiniani, a pair of sadistic executioners are forcing thorns into Christ’s head, his blood pouring down, while an armored centurion looks on with perverted pleasure. An Ecce Homo, Christ presented to the Jews by Pilate, was painted in response to a request from a Monsignor Massimi. The patient Christ is almost excessively gentle and resigned. In contrast, Pontius Pilate is much more interesting. Ludicrously respectable and fussily bad-tempered, he could easily have been modeled on one of the detested police magistrates with whom Caravaggio had so often come in contact so unpleasantly. What he had not been told was that Monsignor Massimi had slyly commissioned several versions of the subject in a concealed competition between three artists, without telling any of them that they were competing. The version by Il Cigolo pleased the Monsignor best. It was another unfair and humiliating rejection.