by Michael Hone
Caravaggio worked alone, had no assistants, no workshop. He strode through the streets of Rome in the company of a wild bunch such as he, looking for action in the form of fights, his sword by his side and his dagger reassuringly in his belt. His eyes were wide-open and seeing, mean and blasé, his lips ridged. His motto was said to have been nec spe nec metu, without hope or fear. The truth of Caravaggio is that once all we know about him is boiled down, is reduced like a gallon of alcohol and a basketful of roses that pass through a distiller, what we’re left with is the scent emitting from a few residual drops.
He lost nearly every male member of his family to the plague while still very young--his father at age 5, the rest at age 6--the plague that had killed over half of the population of Italy one or two generations earlier, around the 1350s, but reappeared from time to time to claim the survivors. This might have instilled a sentiment of abandonment, a child’s first and greatest fear, a scar on the mind that pushes one incessantly from place to place, person to person, never at ease, never satisfied, always angry, violent, physically and sexually aggressive. Perhaps only a man of such unhinged and brutal appetites could create the works of this totally unique individual, stark, aggressive and sexually explosive segments of human life. This may partially explain the brutality of his nature, as well as the fact that the times in which he lived were in themselves ultraviolent, where even if a man looked at another for a nanosecond too long he might be challenged and put to death by sword.
Three versions of Caravaggio’s John the Baptist (please excuse the poor quality of the images).
Caravaggio was a man of great strength and a first-class swordsman. That he was also an artist whose delicate strokes created works of genius must not mask the fact of his indomitable virility, capable of downing a man with a blow--temporarily if done with the fist, life-threatening at the end of his sword. The proof of this was his slaying of the handsome Ranuccio Tomassoni in a sword duel. Caravaggio ran with a pack of toughs, armed to the hilt in a city where arms were forbidden. He and his goons drank and whored, pushed fellow revelers aside as they made their way through the alleys from tavern to tavern. They were constantly picked up by the Roman police, held the night and then freed as they had powerful friends, friends like cardinal del Monte who was smitten by boys and who appreciated homoerotic art, bringing much of it into the Vatican. Del Monte provided lodging for Caravaggio and his lover Cecco, a boy of only ten when he appeared as a prepubescent St. John the Baptist, a beautiful, brooding lad when painted a handful of years later in another St. John. Caravaggio and his ruffians broke windows, sang bawdy songs, hurled animal bladders filled with blood or ink at buildings, smeared excrement on door handles and, naturally, drew erect, usually discharging phalluses on walls. An unknown source had this to say at the time: ‘’After a fortnight’s painting he swaggers about for a month or two with a sword and like-minded friends at this side--Prospero Orsi, Orazio Gentileschi, Mario Minniti and Onorio Longhi--ever ready to engage in a fight or an argument, so that it is awkward to get along with him.’’ To say the least. Another of his acquaintances, Agostino Tassi, was accused by a father of ‘’repeatedly deflowering’’ his daughter! (Perhaps, like Aphrodite, her virginity continually rejuvenated by bathing off the shores of Cyprian Paphos.) For every outrage that I’ll recount, there may have been a hundred others unknown to us or too little known to relate or were covered up by the people looking out for Caravaggio, the most important of which was del Monte. We known that Caravaggio lived for his art, but it can be said that he lived too to impose himself, violently, on others.
Sacrifice of Isaac
He whored, but his preference was men, a choice far from unknown in the Florence of his epoch where men chose freedom over marital bondage, where one could take one’s pleasure when and where one desired, with a boy or a man, free of nagging and the expense of buying a woman a meal. This is what Andrew Graham-Dixon says in his wonderful Caravaggio: ‘’Caravaggio was capable of being aroused by the physical presence of other men. He could not have painted such figures in the way that he did if that were not so. Caravaggio’s painting suggests an ambiguous sexual personality. On the evidence of his paintings he was neither heterosexual nor homosexual, terms that are in any case anachronistic when applied to his world. He was omnisexual.’’
Boys at that time loved to dress to kill. Churches abounded in Renaissance Italy, and especially in Florence and Milan, perfect stages for a young sire to show off his splendid forms, silk-adorned chest, form-fitting trousers, elegance out to swoon the fair sex, a dagger at the belt and a sword ever handy, a youth’s tools. For the daily, reliable and rapid purging of one’s lust, there were bordellos, taverns with frisky and economically cheap servers, as well as back alleys where, indeed, all cats were grey in the absence of light, and a lad had only to pull the strings attached to the cloth that covered his private parts to take his pleasure with whomever engorged his manhood, or when he simply wished to relieve himself against a wall.
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was born around 1571. Famous while he lived, he was immediately forgotten after his death, to be rediscovered in the twentieth century. He was blessed with two beautiful names, Michelangelo which evoked the famous Florentine genius, although Caravaggio’s first name had been chosen after the feast day on which he had been born, Archangel Michael, and Caravaggio, the site of his birth. His father, Fermo Merisi, was the chief architect of the Colonna family household, a family known for its military glory, and he directed its staff. (More about the Colonna in a chapter dedicated to them and the Orsini.) Some say Fermo was a mason, which may have been the case before the Colonna opened wider horizons. He was responsible for the servants, cooks, valets, coachmen, among others. One person especially stands out during Caravaggio’s youth, Constanza Colonna, who took an interest in the son of her servant. We’ll meet her later when she comes to the rescue of Caravaggio, but for the moment she weds, at age 12, Francesco Sforza, 17, a marriage that starts off so poorly that she threatens to kill herself if her father doesn’t free her: ‘’If you don’t get me out of his house I’ll kill myself and my lost soul be damned!’’ As the Colonna carried weight, the pope allowed her to enter a nunnery where she gave birth to a son. Five other sons followed, perhaps signifying that she had somehow found her husband less boorish than at first. Two of her boys would turn out to be as uncontrollable as Caravaggio, but without his artistic gifts, all would be valiant warriors.
A two-hour ride from the stiflingly dead town of Caravaggio brought one to the big city, Milan, under Spanish rule at the time, the bustling center of commerce and manufacturing, 100,000 souls--as many as London and Paris--and the epicenter of the silk industry as well as the finest workmanship in swords and daggers in Italy. Gold from the New World caused a rise in prices in Milan that impoverished the majority of the Milanese, and what had been considered a miracle of riches would soon lead to the bankruptcy of Spain. Milan was inhabited by the young Caravaggio until he went to Florence, later in our story, at the age of 21. Florence was the capital of art, and da Vinci and Michelangelo, soon followed by Raphael, were its kings. What a change Caravaggio would bring to all this. Already Michelangelo was known for his nudes, the genitals of which would be later painted over. But how different were his nudes from Caravaggio’s. Michelangelo’s muscular lads looked as fresh and scrubbed as if they’d just stepped out of an hour-long shower. Caravaggio’s boys were so realistic that one could nearly whiff the pheromones from the lads’ beautiful but slightly rank bodies, and in his Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto we have a full under view of Neptune’s pubic bush, scrotum and penis with its full prepuce. I insist on this point: the boys in Caravaggio’s pictures are totally alive, and even when just sitting, surrounded by fruit or flowers, their shirts open over their naked chests, one has the impression that they’ve just left a bed after making sweet love, and, as I’ve said, that unwashed sperm still coats their bellies. And their eyes; look into their eyes--the ultimate erogen
ous zone. As far as realism goes, nothing is more ghastly than the blood spurting from the jugular vein of a tyrant, sectioned by a sword in his Judith and Holofernes. The realism in his paintings was such that he even showed the dirt under the toenails! But all this is in the future. For the moment he’s 13 and apprenticed to Simone Peterzano, a painter of mediocre repute who taught the boy little except for a smidgen of drawing, stretching canvases and the art of grounding colors. Caravaggio is thought to have been rowdy even at that age, controlled with difficulty. He ran around with gangs as he did later in life, and he certainly had his first sexual stirrings with boys and whores. And as Milan was noted for its violence he may have done more, he may have killed someone, as is suggested in several texts, but at any rate he left the city, never to return, and headed south to his destiny in Rome.
The city he entered, Rome, where he would spend the next 14 years, had once been like Caravaggio in a new array of the best clothes, it had been the center of the ancient world and had reigned supreme for half a millennium, but now it was decrepit, the buildings crumpling among fields of mud, rats and stench, with only a few favored islets inhabited by the rich and powerful. During the Cesares there had been 2,000,000 souls, now there were 100,000. Then as today the Romans rose early, slept the sweltering afternoons away and spent the nights in earthly amusement. The city was violent, the streets unsafe, men carried stilettos and swords, and the most vile could poison an enemy through the prick of a death ring.
Caravaggio spent much time with his friends roaming the vicinity of the Piazza Navona and, if they wanted sex, the Piazza del Popolo where women and boys plied their trade in ill-lit alleys or behind the parted curtains from their lodgings where they appeared naked, enticing men who often found that what they were buying was far more sordid than what they could get for free among their own sex. Caravaggio was an earthy realist. His paintings show dirty feet, soiled hands and filthy fingernails, rigorous right down to their grooves. Caravaggio makes one think of an animal, with an animal’s spontaneity and boldness; there was nothing shy or hesitant about him. If he had to kiss his masters’ feet and hands it was with the awareness that he could just as easily bite and, if need be, go for the jugular with the dagger he was never without. Reality in painting, reality in life: this was Caravaggio’s creed.
Caravaggio had met many of his friends when he first arrived in Rome and slept rough in the vicinity of the Campo Marzio. Not all the religious leaders gorged themselves on the pleasures of life, some religious orders existed that cared for the poor by offering food and medical care. Caravaggio arrived at a time of famine and literally may have escaped death by starvation. Thanks to the Colonna he found a room with a Monsignor Pucci whom he called Monsignor Salad as that was the extent of his nourishment, in exchange for shopping and keeping the dwelling in order. Caravaggio was given additional employment by Lorenzo Siciliano, specialized in the heads of the ancients that he sold cheaply to those who wanted to decorate their homes with the portraits of the Caesars. It was here he met another painter, Mario Minniti, first his lover, then a friend, and finally a benefactor at the end of Caravaggio’s life.
With Mario he moved on to the workshop of Cavaliere d’Arpino. D’Arpino was an arrogant tyrant who mistreated him, and if this were not enough, Caravaggio was kicked by a horse and forced to spend several weeks in a free hospital, Santa Maria della Consolazione. He had placed some paintings with an art dealer, Costantino Spata, who sold one, the wonderful Cardsharps, to Cardinal del Monte who took him in. The palace housed as many as fifty boys, artists like Caravaggio, actors who took part in plays dressed as women when the role demanded it, rent-boys when out of work, and castrati. Caravaggio came with his luggage: a tormented mind, a character as unruly as his hair, violent fists and a sword and dagger at his side, despite their interdiction in the holy city famed for its bordellos. Rome’s clergy lived in palaces and needed architects, sculptors and playwrights to fill their theaters, painters like Caravaggio, and warm bodies to span their nights. One Englishman described Italians as being addicted to ‘’the art of Epicureanism, the art of whoring, of poisoning and of sodomy.’’
One of his early biographers, Giovanni Bellori, describes Caravaggio as being dark, dark in his looks, in his temperament and in his art, an extremely apt insight. Another description of Caravaggio’s place in Rome and Roman violence comes from Tommaso Garzoni, relayed to us by Graham-Dixon: ‘’Every day, every hour, every moment, they talk of nothing but killing, cutting off legs, breaking arms, smashing somebody’s spine … For study, they have nothing other than the thought of killing this or that person; for purpose, nothing more than to avenge the wrongs that they have taken to heart; for favor, nothing more than serving their friends by butchering enemies…’’ With Caravaggio we will continually go from summit to summit, one in blazing light--that of his art, the other in princely dark--his intimate nature.’’ Caravaggio was Alex in Clockwork Orange.
Caravaggio painted The Boy with a Basket that came into the possession of Scipione Borghese. The importance of Scipione Borghese to us is the combination of several factors: Born Scipione Caffarelli he was turned over to Camillo Borghese, the future Pope Paul V, because his father, fallen on hard times, didn’t have the funds to educate and bring him up in a noble manner. Paul V changed the boy’s name to Borghese and made him a cardinal and his secretary. Scipione guarded the door to the pope, thanks to which he amassed an immense fortune, making him perhaps the wealthiest man in Rome. To these factors were added his gift of extreme intelligence and passion for art and the collection of art, turning the Palazzo Borghese into an incomparable museum, while assuring the material comfort of Caravaggio and Bernini, among others.
Boy with a Basket
Caravaggio had known Cecco as a child, one who grew into an exquisite young man. Sodomy was punished by death, but as it was practiced often, rare were the persons tried for the crime, rare, at any rate, among the nobility and, even more, among the clergy. None of this stopped Caravaggio who at all times satisfied his sexual lust and his lust to fight. He attacked a young man, a notary, from behind as he walked along the Piazza Navona, in plain daylight, because the boy had somehow insulted him, perhaps over one of Caravaggio’s girls. Profusely bleeding, the boy got to the police to tell his story, before rushing off, unaided, to the hospital. The painter wound up paying a large indemnity. Then came another episode in a restaurant where Caravaggio had ordered some artichokes, half cooked in oil, half in butter. When he asked the server which was which, the lad answered that the man had only to smell them to find out. Caravaggio took this as arrogant disrespect and hit him with the porcelain plate used to serve the artichokes, severely cutting him. He then reached for his sword but the boy had the presence of mind to bolt. Here too he had to pay up. Stopped by a policeman for carrying a sword, he had, exceptionally, a permit to do so on him (permits given to high officials and their bodyguards). The policeman bid him ‘’Goodnight,’’ but as he walked away Caravaggio, perhaps unhappy that an artist like himself, who knew so many great men, had been detained by a redneck officer, called him, to his back, a cocksucker, and invited the gentleman to shove his ‘’Goodnight’’ up his bloody ass. He was thrown in jail but was released the next day, as he knew he would be.
Then came the Ranuccio affair. Ranuccio Tomassoni had a stable of women he put on the streets. Known for his extreme good looks and for being well-endowed, his women were jealous of whom he chose to bestow his favors, to the point of attacking one another with daggers, hoping to scar a pretty face, or splash it with acid. The Roman police were called in numerous times to bring calm to the domestic situation. Ranuccio was always armed despite its unlawfulness, but invariably defended himself by stating that in his business being armed was necessary due to the girls’ rowdy clients. At the same time, it appears that Caravaggio might also have had girls who disputed their places in the streets with those of Ranuccio, the basis of an explosive situation that would lead to Caravaggio’s attem
pt to knife the boy, perhaps aiming at his genitals but striking instead the femoral artery, a place certain to cause nearly instant death. Both Caravaggio and Ranuccio had been accompanied by three men each. Onorio Longhi was there on Caravaggio’s side and a captain of the guards was with Ranuccio. The captain too was run through but whether he died or not is uncertain. Caravaggio was put out of action with a blow to the head. The surviving six men stated that the incident had been over an unpaid wager on a tennis match although, most probably, it was a duel over prostitution, but as dueling in Rome carried the death sentence…. Caravaggio fled before his trial and was therefore sentenced to death, duel or no duel. A bounty was put on his head, a head that could literally be presented, severed from the body, in order to claim it.
Other sources give a hightly different version of the story. In one version Ranuccio Tomassoni was described as a sweet bird of youth whose innocence was cut short by a fatal sword blow to the boy’s private parts, a deliberate attempt by Caravaggio to emaciate the virginal lad. Others have him as a well-hung pimp whose girls vied with each other for his charms, turning tricks with the view of the boy’s bedding them as recompense for the girls putting out.
Concerning Caravaggio, he is painted as a trouble maker--which no one could deny--but one who simply found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. Others maintain that he was fucking Renuccio’s favorite whore, or, in still another version, that Caravaggio was trying to get the whore to work for him as he too, in his free time, was a blasé, world-wise pimp. One thing is nonetheless certain, Caravaggio used whores for his models, the reason for which his Madonnas and Magdalenas were banned from churches and chapels by priests, and why he had to forgo commission after commission when it became known that he used them. (Even so, a painting refused by a church was instantly snapped up by a private buyer, often at far higher prices, and those accepted by priests often found their value quadrupled nearly overnight.) But the models, whores or not, were most often gorgeous, possessing a virginal aura known normally only to nuns--all of Caravaggio’s paintings attest to their exceptional beauty.
