Caravaggio: A Passionate Life

by Seward, Desmond

  Five minutes of swordsmanship, probably less, had ended not only in the death of Caravaggio’s challenger but in his own ruin. Few turning points in the career of a great artist have been so dramatic. The idol of Rome’s younger artists, the favorite of cardinals, the man who had painted the pope’s portrait, had suddenly become a hunted murderer with a price on his head.

  XXI

  Outlaw in the Roman Hills, Summer 1606

  Caravaggio spent the summer of 1606 in the hills east of Rome. He was perfectly safe, hidden away in the strongholds of people who could be trusted. But he dared not forget for a moment that he was an outlaw on the run and a bounty would be paid for his head.

  There is no record of where he first found shelter’ after escaping from Rome at the end of May. He seems to have gone north, though not in the direction expected by the sbirri. Leaving no trace, he disappeared northeastward into the Sabine Hills, staying in impregnable mountaintop castles, and then, quite soon, moved farther south. Probably, he was never more than thirty miles from Rome. The Marchesa di Caravaggio, or someone close to her, had swiftly found secure refuges for him, in particular at her Colonna kinsmen’s hill towns of Palestrina, Zagarolo, and Paliano. It is also likely that some of his patrons—del Monte, the Giustiniani brothers, Ottavio Costa, and perhaps even Scipione Borghese—provided him with money.

  Luckily, he had had plenty of opportunity to renew his acquaintance with the Marchesa Costanza. Since the jubilee of 1600, she had often been in Rome, staying with her family at the Palazzo Colonna in the Piazza Santi Apostoli, where he must have visited her. If she was away at the time of the Tommasoni duel, in Lombardy or at her new palace in Naples, her family could be relied on to help him, fulfilling a feudal obligation to the son of a valued retainer.

  Modern roads have brought the Colonna hill towns within a short drive of Rome, but in those days they were dauntingly remote, approached with difficulty along steep mountain paths. During his summer in exile, a forlorn Caravaggio must have ridden from one to another. Naturally, he took very good care to conceal his tracks, so that no record of his itinerary survives. What little we know about his movements has been confused by Mancini and Bellori, who both claim, mistakenly, that he began by hiding at Zagarolo. In reality, his first refuge was probably Palestrina, where his host may have been the new bishop, Cardinal Ascanio Colonna, the marchesa’s nephew.

  An English tourist, Augustus Hare, visited Palestrina in the 1870s, when it still looked much the same as it had in Caravaggio’s day. The huge castle where he stayed was high on a bare hillside where, says Hare, “the sun beats so pitilessly upon its white rocks that it is best to put off the ascent till near sunset.” From the summit, Rome and the sea could be seen. Just below the castle was a squalid village, where, according to local legend, St. Peter had lived for a while as a hermit. The town beneath was full of Roman remains, with fragments of classical pillars in every house. It had a minute piazza and a small cathedral. The plain below, Hare recalled, was so rich that it looked like a vast garden of fruit trees. Baglione tells us that Caravaggio painted a Mary Magdalene at Palestrina. Only copies survive. They show the Magdalen as penitent and exhausted, rather than ecstatic, no doubt the painter’s own frame of mind.

  Zagarolo, a mere twenty-one miles from Rome, sounds more comfortable. Only a few years before, the palace had hosted a papal commission working on the text of the Vulgate. Mancini says that here Caravaggio “was secretly entertained by the Prince.” This was the marchesa’s cousin, Don Marzio Colonna, Duke of Zagarolo. Although a great Roman noble who lived in splendor, he was bankrupt, a victim of inflation. His reputation was slightly sinister. He had had close links with the Cenci; the castle where Count Francesco was murdered belonged to him, while Giacomo Cenci’s decision to kill his father may have been prompted by being in debt to the duke. He was also a man of taste, a collector of Antique sculpture. He may be the donor in his guest’s Madonna of the Rosary, bald, wary-eyed, and commanding. To produce such a likeness, Caravaggio must have met him several times.

  Mancini and Bellori state that while Caravaggio was at Zagarolo he painted his second Christ at Emmaus. Subtler than the first version, the wise and sensitive Christ is most impressive, while the old woman holding a dish is almost as memorable. Nobody seeing her at the Brera in Milan can deny Caravaggio’s compassion for the poor and weak. Mancini believed that the Supper at Emmaus was bought by Ottavio Costa, who somehow kept in touch.

  It is possible that Caravaggio painted other pictures during his time in the hills. Painting was his only cure for loneliness. Apart from one or two Colonna retainers, the company consisted of peasants, whom Hare described two and a half centuries later as “savage, lawless, violent and avaricious.” Ahead lay the dismal prospect of autumn rain and winter snow. He had to move on, and the obvious place to go was Naples.

  Even before his flight from Rome, he may have discussed entering the Order of Malta with a senior knight, Fra’ Ippolito Malaspina, Prior of Naples. Fra’ Ippolito had come to Rome in 1603, to take command of the pope’s galleys, and became a prominent figure at the papal court, his dress as a Grand Cross making him an eye-catching figure. Another contact among the Knights was Fra’ Ainolfo Bardi, who acted as Caravaggio’s surety after the Baglione case. The Giustiniani brothers had a cousin in the Order, Fra’ Orazio Giustiniani, while the Marchesa Costanza had a son who was a knight.

  More than mere social climbing was involved in Caravaggio’s decision to enter the order. Joining meant becoming a monk as well as a knight, and he must have known that he would have to make real sacrifices. It is quite possible he was moved by a desire to atone for his disreputable life, a desire reinforced after the killing of Ranuccio Tomassoni.

  His ambition to become a Knight of Malta was apparently his main reason for going to Naples, where he could discuss the idea further and, hopefully, take ship for Malta. He may have heard that Fra’ Ippolito was leaving Rome and returning to his priory. He would also be able to find commissions for pictures, ammassing funds to finance his new life in the order.

  Reaching Naples would not be easy. The usual route from Rome went along the Via Appia, through the Campagna with its ruined aqueducts and haunted tombs, through the malarial Pontine marshes to Terracina, and from there through Formia, Gaeta, and Capua. But although it was the main road and the most used, it was notoriously unsafe. Fynes Moryson, who went this way in 1594, says that for fear of the banditti, no one would risk making the journey alone but rode beside the mail coach, which was always escorted by sixty mounted musketeers. Travelers had to rise before dawn, not daring to go any faster than the coach and the mule train that accompanied it. When an inn came in sight, the musketeers let them gallop ahead and “eat a morsell, or rather devoure it,” but as soon as the coach caught up, they had to remount. Captured bandits were beheaded and quartered on the spot; while their heads were sent to Rome to get the bounty, their quarters were hung from trees by the roadside, a sight that added nothing to the gaiety of the journey. More than once, banditti managed to overwhelm the musketeers, robbing and killing the travelers.

  At the end of September or beginning of October, 1608, Caravaggio left his final refuge in the Roman hills. This was the castle at Paliano, even more inaccessible than Palestrina and Zagarolo, whose walls made it seem still grimmer when seen from far below. The town’s feudal lord was the young Don Filippo Colonna, Duke of Paliano, another of the marchesa’s nephews. Caravaggio may have traveled to Naples with the mail coach; he could have done so in disguise, joining the coach after it had left Rome. It is more likely, however, that he took some lonely road through the hills, although he would have been in scarcely less danger from banditti, who were everywhere. Anxious to be rid of such a well-known fugitive, Don Filippo or his steward may have given him an escort of Colonna men at arms.

  Despite managing to avoid the bandits, Caravaggio had every reason to feel apprehensive when he came in sight of the largest and most sinister city in Christendom
. Just what sort of a welcome was an outlaw going to receive? Although he had powerful friends in Naples, the Neapolitans might arrest and execute him as a murderer, and claim the money for his head.

  XXII

  Interlude at Naples, 1606–1607

  According to a report from Modena, Caravaggio was still at Paliano on 28 September 1606, supposedly waiting for a pardon. But on 6 October he was paid two hundred ducats at Naples for a new commission. A Roman friend may have reminded him of Pope Paul’s sternness toward those who had shed blood, warning that, for the moment, there was no hope of forgiveness. In any case, his plans did not include returning to Rome, while he may have had an invitation from the Marchesa di Caravaggio to come to Naples.

  The marchesa had acquired a palace on the Chiaia, on the seafront, presumably to be as near as possible to her second son, Fabrizio Sforza Colonna, a Knight of Malta. Formerly prior of Venice, he had spent four years in prison at Valletta for killing a man in a duel, before being released in 1606 and appointed Captain-General of the Galleys. His mother could scarcely avoid knowing the prior of Naples. Understandably inclined to be sorry for the runaway painter, she could easily have put in a good word for him. Caravaggio may also have heard of the imminent arrival of his old patron, Cardinal del Monte, who came at the end of October, accompanied by a group of Roman nobles, including one of the marchesa’s Colonna kinsmen. He stayed until March of the following year and, although there is no evidence, it seems likely that Caravaggio called on the cardinal.

  On the great bay beneath Vesuvius, Naples was by turns beautiful and squalid. A population estimated at three hundred thousand, increased daily by migrants, made it three times as big as Rome or Milan. It had hordes of beggars, some so destitute they went about stark naked. The Neapolitans were crammed into an area eight miles square, twelve if the suburbs were included. Their city was a checkerboard of straight, narrow streets laid out on the ancient Greek pattern, with houses six stories tall to make extra space, when at Rome they were seldom as high as three. The people, who looked more Levantine than Italian with their dark skins, were noticeably small. They lived on pasta, which had recently supplanted bread and vegetables as their staple diet. In manner, they were “merry, witty and genial,” though the upper classes looked, or tried to look, like Spaniards, affecting a haughty gravity. Everyone spoke a clipped, nasal Italian, very different from Roman or Milanese. To Caravaggio, it must have sounded like a foreign language.

  This was the capital of the Two Sicilies, the Regno, since the twelfth century the only kingdom in Italy. It had become part of the Spanish empire in 1504, southern Italians accepting Spanish rule largely from fear of being conquered by the Turks. A Spanish viceroy ruled at Naples, attended by a truly regal court. When he processed through the city on foot, a cloth-of-gold canopy was held over his head. Among the disadvantages of a Spanish regime were the troops, not just Spaniards or Walloons but Italians, many of them pardoned banditti, underpaid and underfed, who robbed in order to keep alive. The Neapolitans took their revenge, frequently leaving at the crossroads the bodies of soldiers they had stabbed in the back.

  The viceroys forced the great nobles to live in the capital, where they built enormous palazzi. “There be in this City very many Pallaces, of Gentlemen, Barons and Princes,” noted Fynes Moryson. “Whereupon the City is vulgarly called Napoli Gentile.” The great families—Carafa, Caracciolo, Ruffo, Minutolo, Sangro, and the rest—were no less respected than the Massimi or Orsini at Rome. There was an exuberant social life, with lavish balls and masquerades. The Genoese were much in evidence and heartily disliked, the Neapolitans blaming them for the crushing taxation, sometimes attacking them in the streets. Naples should have been very rich, but it was bled white by the duties on such staples as grain and flour.

  Yet George Sandys, who saw it in 1611, thought Naples the pleasantest of cities. “Their habit is generally Spanish,” he tells us. “The Gentry delighteth much in great horses, whereupon they praunce continually thorow the streets. The number of carossess [coaches] is incredible that are kept in this City, as of the segges [sedan chairs] not unlike to horse-litters, but carried by men. These waite for fares in the corners of streets, as Watermen doe at our wharfes; wherein those that will not foote it in the heate are borne (if they please unseene) about the City.” He admired the beauty of the women and their elegant clothes, observing that “silke is a worke-day weare for the wife of the meanest artificer.”

  Sandys writes of soldiers constantly marching through the streets, so that the Neapolitans’ ears were “inured to the sound of drum and fife, as their eyes to the … glistering of armours.” For Naples, even more than Milan, was a bulwark of Spanish rule in Italy. There was a garrison of four thousand troops, with a further sixteen hundred in the other cities of the Regno, and thirty-seven war galleys.

  Caravaggio must have been interested in the courtesans as the main source of models. “The women are generally well featured but excessively libidinous,” remarked John Evelyn, who visited Naples in the 1640s. He noted that there were thirty thousand registered prostitutes. One of their tricks during the Carnival was to throw eggshells filled with scented water from their windows, while some were even credited with using witchcraft to ensnare clients. Living mainly in an area near the Porta Capuana, they plied their trade everywhere, not just in the famous Ciriglio tavern, but during Mass at the fashionable churches, by the booths on the Largo del Castello, where the Commedia del Arte was played, in the gardens at Poggioreale, or on the pleasure boats bound for Posillipo.

  Youth with a Basket of Fruit

  Painted in 1594, when Caravaggio was working for the Cavaliere d’Arpino, who bought it from him

  St. Francis in Ecstasy

  Painted about 1596, this was the first realistic representation of a mystical ecstasy, so novel that Caravaggio’s patron, Cardinal del Monte, feared it would be given a sexual interpretation.

  St. Catherine

  The model for St. Catherine, painted for Cardinal del Monte in 1598 or 1599, was a famous prostitute, Fillide Melandroni.

  Rest on the Flight into Egypt

  Caravaggio’s most serene painting, this picture from the 1590s may have been painted for Cardinal del Monte.

  Judith and Holofernes

  Painted toward the end of 1599, and perhaps inspired by the execution of the Cenci that September. Fillide Melandroni was the model for Judith; Holofernes is a self-portrait.

  Martyrdom of St. Matthew

  Painted in 1599–1600, this is one of the two pictures in the Contarelli Chapel that established Caravaggio’s reputation. The bearded King Hyrcanus in the background is a self-portrait.

  Basket of Fruit

  Owned by del Monte’s friend, Cardinal Federigo Borromeo. Caravaggio said that as much patience was needed for a good painting of flowers as for a painting of people.

  Conversion of St. Paul

  In this painting, done in 1600–1601 for the Cerasi Chapel, Caravaggio used light to convey the vision that blinded the Apostle.

  The Madonna di Loreto

  The model for this virgin, painted about 1604, was probably Caravaggio’s mistress, the prostitute “Lena, who stands in Piazza Navona … Michelangelo’s girl.”

  Supper at Emmaus

  Painted in 1601–1602 for Marchese Ciriaco Mattei. The beardless Christ shows that Caravaggio was aware of the fashionable new interest in early Christian art.

  Portrait of a Knight of Malta

  Painted in 1607–1608 during Caravaggio’s novitiate at Valletta, the Knight has recently been identified as Fra’ Antonio Martelli, Prior of Messina.

  Alof de Wignancourt, Grand Master of the Order of Malta

  Painted in 1607—1608 when Caravaggio was a novice. Fra’ Alof had a high opinion of the artist’s “burning zeal” for the order, and helped him escape after his arrest.

  St. Jerome

  Painted in 1607—1608, either in Naples or on Malta, for Fra’ Ippolito Malaspina, Prior of Naples, who
se head was the model for St. Jerome’s and who played a key role in helping Caravaggio to become a Knight of Malta.

  Beheading of St. John

  Painted on Malta during the summer of 1608, this was Caravaggio’s “passage money,” paid on becoming a Knight. His only known signature is written in blood: “F. Michel A——”—Fra’ Michelangelo. Grand Master de Wignancourt rewarded him with a gold chain and two slaves.

  Raising of Lazarus

  Painted at Messina in 1609, when Caravaggio was on the run in Sicily after fleeing from Malta. He made two workmen hold up a corpse for him to paint, by threatening them with his dagger.

  David with the head of Goliath

  A double self-portrait painted while hiding in Naples in 1609–1610. A young, redeemed Caravaggio holds up the head of a sinful, middle-aged Caravaggio.

  Despite its gaiety, life at Naples had sinister undertones. When roused, the mob could be one of the most savage in Europe. There was also a slave market, dealing mainly in North Africans or Turks, though Christians, too, might become slaves. Down by the seafront, Fynes Moryson saw “a stone upon which many play away their liberty at dice, the King’s officers lending them money, which, when they have lost and cannot repay, they are drawne into the gallies, for the Spaniards have slaves of both sexes.” Girls were sold into prostitution by starving parents, boys for emasculation as castrato singers. Those who could afford it mummified their relatives when they died and visited them in the catacombs on feast days.