by Matt Rees
‘It’s a matter of honour, Lena.’
She was crying. He reached for her shoulder, a hesitant touch, but she allowed his hand to remain.
‘What’d you have me do? Be a spineless peasant? I’m a gentleman. Better than a gentleman, because I have skills beyond the use of my sword. Yet the nobility talks down to me as if I were paid to spread whitewash by the yard. I must be taken seriously.’
‘By men?’
‘What’s life without a little danger?’ He tried a laugh, but it was halting and sour.
‘Isn’t it a dangerous enough world in which we live?’
‘Dangerous, yes. But disease and accidents are like the food we eat every day. Danger that’s actively sought has the savour of a dish of rare delicacy.’
Lena’s hazel eyes probed him. He was sure she had heard the hollowness of his words. He felt as though he had been quoting Onorio.
‘What brings honour to men always involves the suffering of others. Eventually you’ll suffer for it, too. I fear for you, Michele.’ Lena drew her hands down her face as though she were wiping away the dirt of the day. ‘There was a shooting star last night. Its tail pointed towards the Holy Father’s fortress as it fell. Everyone says it’s a sign that evil times are coming.’ Her eyes were full of regret. Their frankness disconcerted Caravaggio. Fillide and Menica wouldn’t have allowed their heartbreak to be so visible. Lena didn’t conceal hers.
It occurred to him that he was more like Lena than he had known, because he lacked the faculty of his friends in the Evil Garden to disguise what they knew. It was all there in his paintings. The deaths witnessed in street brawls and the pitiful fear in the eyes of his self-portraits. He raised his head. His mouth opened in surprise.
‘What is it, Michele?’ Lena said.
A curious, slow smile. Lena was dangerous, because she didn’t carry her shame like the bandages on a leper’s sores, concealing but not curing. Menica and Fillide or gentle dead Anna would have comprehended the honour which compelled him to attack Baglione. They might even have admired him for it. Lena saw it only as something that came between them.
‘I want to paint you again,’ he said.
She sniffed and wiped her nose on her wrist.
‘Lena, I painted The Death of the Virgin that way because I felt it deeply, when you lost the baby.’
She shook her head. A woman bore her scars buried beneath the skin – not as the livid mark of a blade, but like the soft fontanelle of a child’s skull before the bone bonds. An unseen vulnerability that could only be detected with gentle exploration.
‘I saw you when you were almost dead,’ he said. ‘I felt responsible for the way those Tomassoni women attacked you. By loving me, you came close to death. People tell me I’m a troublemaker who’ll end up killing someone. When I saw you, I wanted to keep all the dangers of my life away from you. Ranuccio hates me. He’ll try any way he can to hurt me.’
‘There’re so many ways to die, Michele. Can’t we expect to be loved first?’
He dropped to his knees, held her waist, and put his head in her lap. He breathed as though he had just come from under the surface of water.
Domenico laid his head beside him, smiling, and put his thin arm across his back.
5
The Madonna with the Serpent
He painted them as a family. Lena as his Madonna, her skirts hitched up for work around the house, leaning forward to support Domenico, her bare foot on the head of a serpent, demonstrating how to kill it. The naked boy represented Christ, and the viper crushed under his weight was the image of evil. Caravaggio set Lena’s mother beside them as St Anne, the Saviour’s approving grandmother, pausing in her housework to watch the destruction of wickedness.
When he had painted Lena as the dead Virgin, Caravaggio had done with her as he wished. As if she were a whore, he thought. Perhaps I behaved towards every woman I’ve known that way. The love between them seemed pure, cleansed now. She did things to please him, unbidden.
He had never been so happy. Something had been freed in him. He ascribed this to the liveliness the Antognettis brought to his studio and his love for them. The way Lena tickled the boy when Caravaggio wasn’t watching, the boy’s fascination with the painter’s mirrors, the old woman’s pride in the talent of her daughter’s man. He could see his own contentment in the paint too, feel it in his brush. On the canvas, every fold in the women’s skirts seemed entirely true to him. He wanted to step into the painting. He knew the Madonna would welcome him. In spite of all the wrong he had done in his life, she would draw his head to her breast, just as Lena did every night.
He seldom stopped working or even left the house. He was glad that he didn’t. Onorio informed him of the tension in the streets, the crowds gathering outside the palaces to brawl or throw stones. The conflict continued between the Farnese and the Colonna, the Pope prevaricating between the two sides. Each morning dogs chewed on the corpses in the open sewers.
‘I stand at the edge of these battles,’ Onorio said, one day when he had come with news of another street fight.
‘That doesn’t sound like you.’ Caravaggio glanced down from his stepladder, where he was texturing the ceiling above his Madonna, a rough green like oxidized copper.
‘Once in a while, someone just asks to have his head split open and I oblige. But mostly I don’t bother with it all. It’s no fun without you.’ The shame that racked Caravaggio after his rages was alien to Onorio. He accepted his own furies. They were in the nature of things and confirmed that life was neither more nor less immoral than him. He was in tune with the imperfect world. Those who believed in a better existence or who restrained what flowed through them were, he believed, the same blockheads who would sacrifice themselves for a lost cause. He tossed back a mouthful of wine and swirled what was left in the bottom of his cup. ‘Ranuccio’s always there, when the trouble starts.’
Caravaggio put his brush between his teeth and worked at the paint with his fingers. ‘Is he?’
‘He asked me about you.’
‘Give him my regards.’
‘I shall insult him with grace and tell him it’s from you.’
Caravaggio bowed. ‘You’re too kind.’
‘He hasn’t forgotten the ten scudi you owe him.’ Onorio refilled his wine. ‘Or the duel you had at the Farnese palace.’
Caravaggio came down from the ladder. I haven’t forgotten either, he thought. But the memory makes me quake with all that I have to lose now. He nodded towards his canvas. ‘What do you think?’
He had done Lena’s hair with a touch of red in it that he hadn’t noticed when he painted her for the Madonna of Loreto. It made her look less Greek, gentler. Her face was wide and delicate, tapering to the small chin he loved to hold between his thumb and forefinger. The skin around her eyes was grey with the exhaustion of hard labour. Her jaw was tinted to a shade of charcoal too. Though she never complained about her health, he wondered how strong she was.
‘A commission for St Peter’s, the centre of Christendom.’ Onorio paced before the canvas. ‘Appropriate really, because you’ve been behaving like a monk since you had that run-in with Baglione and the night patrol.’
Caravaggio shrugged.
‘But at the same time you’ve been preparing to drop your pants to the entire Church.’ Onorio pointed to the Madonna’s fingernails. They were ridged black with dirt. ‘Your work is amazing. Truly, I can smell the stinking little hovel where these peasants live. But how do you think the cardinals will like that? With their perfumed beards and their clean linen every week?’
‘I expect it to elevate them.’
Onorio laughed and shook his head. ‘Come and have some fun. There’s boar-baiting outside the Colonna Palace.’
‘Also very elevating. But no, thanks.’
Shoving back the shutters, Caravaggio watched Onorio descend the narrow street to the Piazza of the Sainted Apostles. Beyond the end of the alley, a crowd was building. Its murmur of excite
ment caught him and he almost cried out for his friend to wait. In the piazza four men climbed into the ring, their heads and torsos armoured. A massive boar scuttled through a trapdoor and sized them up. One of the men dodged towards it in his bare feet and clubbed it on the side of the head. The crowd bellowed as the boar charged.
Caravaggio bound his arms across his chest. He was alone with his work, while the men below in the crowd were joined in camaraderie. He had been apart from others just like this ever since things had gone wrong with Fabrizio. He thought of the moment when Costanza’s husband had heard the accusation of sodomy against Fabrizio and the young Merisi boy. He had demanded that Fabrizio deny the lust and sin in which he had engaged with Michele. But Fabrizio had been silent. Michele had seen that this would be too much for the furious man and that his friend was about to be disowned. He had been without a father and he wouldn’t allow Fabrizio to share that fate, so he had spoken up. ‘I made Fabrizio do it,’ he had said. The Marchese had beaten Fabrizio for succumbing, but Michele had known that it was a cleansing punishment. Soon enough, the Marchese would act as if Fabrizio were unstained – and Michele would be gone.
In the piazza, the boar upended one of the armoured attackers. The others beat the beast into the corner of the ring, while the fallen man scrambled to his feet.
After his Madonna with the Serpent had hung two days in the Pope’s basilica, Caravaggio received a message from Cardinal del Monte that it may be removed. He hurried across the Tiber and elbowed through the Easter pilgrims in St Peter’s Piazza. Threading between the piles of building materials laid by for its final construction, he entered the greatest church in Rome.
He crossed the nave to the altar of St Anne. A sombre group of men surrounded his painting. He recognized them as the members of the Fabbrica, the committee charged with overseeing works commissioned for St Peter’s – rich men and prelates, some of them his patrons and admirers. They greeted him with embarrassment, as though he were a troublesome relative arriving drunk for a funeral.
Del Monte intercepted him. Someone was addressing the others. Caravaggio went onto his toes to see who it was. ‘What the fuck is Baglione doing here?’ he said.
The cardinal put a scented finger to Caravaggio’s mouth.
‘He’s talking down my work again, isn’t he?’
‘Michele . . .’
The men averted their eyes. They know my work and they’ve told me they love it, he thought. What’re they doing here with Baglione?
His rival went up a step to the altar, so that he was directly in front of the painting. At the height of his head, Lena’s foot crushed the snake.
‘Gentlemen, what are we to make of this ugly Madonna?’ Baglione saw Caravaggio and flinched.
Del Monte laid a hand on Caravaggio’s sleeve, holding tight.
‘She’s not ugly.’ Caravaggio’s voice echoed through the basilica. ‘Hers is the most beautiful face in all art.’
Baglione drummed on the canvas with his knuckles. ‘She’s a dirty little peasant woman. Her features are fine for a whore from the Evil Garden, but they lack the dignity of the Madonna.’
‘Even Christ wouldn’t be worthy of a mother as perfect as her,’ Caravaggio shouted. ‘Whoever wants to see a Virgin more beautiful must go to heaven.’
Del Monte put his hand to his forehead. He blew out a long, resigned breath and turned his sad, grey eyes on Caravaggio. The men of the Fabbrica murmured in indignation. What’re they going to do with my painting? Caravaggio turned about him, pleading and apologetic and outraged.
‘You’re here to destroy painting.’ Baglione declaimed like a man who had learned his lines well. ‘You rob art of all its dignity and you drag it through the filth of Rome’s lowest quarters. Look at St Anne, the mother of the Virgin. You portray her as an old crone, a repulsive slattern – in our holiest church. It is an insult to the tomb of St Peter, to the skull of St Andrew, and to all the other sacred relics.’
‘Call yourself an artist?’ Caravaggio yelled. ‘You’re not fit to grind my pigments.’
‘And Our Lord himself, naked. Naked. What a disgusting sewer your imagination is, Merisi, that it should conjure such a disrespectful image of Our Saviour.’
Warm perfumes wafted from the rich men’s clothing. From his own body, Caravaggio detected a miasma of sweat and dirt and rage. What had he brought into their church anyway? Was it the love he believed he had painted? Or had he truly perpetrated the outrage of which Baglione accused him? There was no tranquillity in his head, no way for him to think through what he had created. His brain spun and desperation pulsed through all his limbs. The silence of the wealthy connoisseurs shocked him. Couldn’t they see what he had intended?
‘This painting isn’t from my imagination,’ he said. ‘Only from my eyes. I saw this woman walking with her nephew’s feet resting on her own feet. A game, you see? They were laughing. They were full of love. Don’t you think the Virgin loved her son?’
Del Monte spoke in a reassuring tone, measured for the benefit of the men around him. ‘This composition, Maestro Caravaggio, implies a physical element to the Virgin’s love.’
‘Between mother and son.’
‘Of course, but this isn’t just a mother and son. This is the Virgin and Our Lord.’
‘It’s the same thing.’
Cardinal Ascanio Colonna, the head of the Fabbrica, lifted a hand for quiet. My Marchesa’s brother, Caravaggio thought. He’ll back me. I’m a Colonna man.
‘As a senior member of the Sacred Office of the Inquisition,’ Ascanio said, ‘I’m charged with the maintenance of the Index of Prohibited Books, the list of immoral works whose theological errors corrupt the faithful. Works subject to destruction wherever they’re found. You may count yourself lucky, Maestro Caravaggio, that the Holy Father never commissioned such an index of paintings.’
Caravaggio reached out, as if to hold del Monte’s hand, but he withdrew his arm and tensed it against his thigh. I’m alone. He looked up at his painting. Lena, just watch Lena. She won’t forsake you the way these men have done.
Baglione sauntered past Caravaggio. He tried to look grave, but the ragged triangle of beard beneath his bottom lip twitched with triumph. The patrons watched Baglione with impatience. They’re unimpressed with him. But I went too far, Caravaggio thought. I made it impossible for them to defend me and I gave my enemy the chance to disgrace me. He had been so busy reacting to meaningless slights against his honour in the inns and on the tennis courts that he had forgotten to guard the only thing that really mattered: his art. He turned to his Madonna. Lena’s face was patient and compassionate.
Cardinal Ascanio moved towards the door. Baglione and most of the Fabbrica went with him. Del Monte remained.
Caravaggio spread his arms wide over his canvas and laid his hands on the skirts of the Madonna and St Anne, as though clutching at their legs for support.
The door of the church slammed shut.
‘It’s my fault. I admit that I saw this coming a long time ago,’ del Monte said. ‘I should’ve warned you.’
Caravaggio pushed the heels of his hand hard against his eyes. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Your private commissions for me are one thing. You’re granted all the freedom I may give your genius.’ Del Monte raised his arms as though in supplication. ‘But your public commissions have become more and more daring. Since St Matthew, you’ve needled the artists of the old style, like Baglione, until they’ve come to hate you. You threaten everything they’ve ever worked for.’
‘I don’t care about them.’
‘But you need other artists on your side. Cardinal Ascanio knows nothing about art – any more than he understands the works he consigns to his Index of Prohibited Books. He takes his lead from well-known artists and collectors. I’ve spoken up for you, but all the major artists in Rome are against you.’
‘Not all. Most of them steal my style – even Baglione.’
‘Wouldn’t they like their more
talented rival removed from the scene? They won’t defend you. They produce work that has elements of your style, but without the provocative ideas.’ He came close to Caravaggio. ‘Our friend Signor Giustiniani keeps your Love Victorious behind a curtain in the last room of his gallery. When he unveils it, his guests are shocked, delighted – even titillated. Do you think that’s what the Fabbrica wants people to feel here as the Holy Father says mass before them? This Madonna is too forceful for the Church. You must show more respect.’
‘For what? For art as Baglione sees it?’
‘I’m sorry to tell you, but yes. For art.’
‘Art is a whore who’s being treated like a boring, old housewife,’ Caravaggio said. ‘Her husband always does it to her the same way. It’s time someone threw her against a wall and gave her —’
Del Monte shouted, ‘Michele, remember where you are.’
‘— the hard fucking she deserves.’
Del Monte looked up at the Madonna. ‘Of course, you’re the one to do this.’
‘Yes, I’m the one,’ Caravaggio said. ‘I’ve had some experience of whores.’
Del Monte stroked his moustache. His anger had been momentary. Now he was solicitous. ‘If Art is such a lady, do you think this treatment will be pleasing to her?’
‘That’s the point. I don’t care what this strumpet called Art likes or dislikes. I’m ready to pay for it, so I’ll take my pleasure as I wish. Even if she goes around telling people I have no delicacy or finesse. A whore treated like a lady is unbearable.’
Del Monte blew out a low whistle. ‘Believe it or not, your strange soul holds the key to other people’s spirits. The followers of the heretic Luther want people to hear God speaking directly to them. The Roman Church believes people ought to experience God only in its basilicas. There, they must witness Him in your paintings. Your soul must experience God, so you can show Him to us.’
‘I thought my soul was important so that I could complete commissions for Cardinal Scipione.’
‘That just keeps you out of jail. Perhaps one day it’ll save your head from being separated from your shoulders.’ The cardinal examined the Madonna. ‘She’s magnificent, Michele. You’ve mistaken the boundaries of art within the Church. But you’ve done something perfect, nonetheless. Unfortunately, that isn’t the point.’
