Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (10 page)

PART ONE

Milan, 1571–92

DARKNESS AND LIGHT

Caravaggio’s art is made from darkness and light. His pictures present spotlit moments of extreme and often agonized human experience. A man is decapitated in his bedchamber, blood spurting from a deep gash in his neck. A man is assassinated on the high altar of a church. A woman is shot in the stomach with a bow and arrow at point-blank range. Caravaggio’s images freeze time but also seem to hover on the brink of their own disappearance. Faces are brightly illuminated. Details emerge from darkness with such uncanny clarity that they might be hallucinations. Yet always the shadows encroach, the pools of blackness that threaten to obliterate all. Looking at his pictures is like looking at the world by flashes of lightning.

Caravaggio’s life is like his art, a series of lightning flashes in the darkest of nights. He is a man who can never be known in full because almost all that he did, said and thought is lost in the irrecoverable past. He was one of the most electrifyingly original artists ever to have lived, yet we have only one solitary sentence from him on the subject of painting – the sincerity of which is, in any case, questionable, since it was elicited from him when he was under interrogation for the capital crime of libel.

Much of what is known about him has been discovered in the criminal archives of his time. The majority of his recorded acts – apart from those involved in painting – are crimes and misdemeanours. When Caravaggio emerges from the obscurity of the past he does so, like the characters in his own paintings, as a man
in extremis
.

He lived much of his life as a fugitive, and that is how he is preserved in history – a man on the run, heading for the hills, keeping to the shadows. But he is caught, now and again, by the sweeping beam of a searchlight. Each glimpse is different. He appears in many guises, moods and predicaments. Caravaggio throws stones at the house of his landlady and sings ribald songs outside her window. He has a fight with a waiter about the dressing on a plate of artichokes. He taunts a rival with graphic sexual insults. He attacks a man in the street. He kills a man in a swordfight. He and a gang of other men inflict grievous bodily harm on a Knight of Justice on the island of Malta. He is himself attacked by four armed men in the street outside a low-life tavern in Naples. His life is a series of intriguing and vivid tableaux – scenes that abruptly switch, as in the plays of his English contemporary William Shakespeare, from comedy to tragedy, from low farce to high drama.

Anyone attempting a biography of Caravaggio must play the detect
ive as well as the art historian. The facts are rarely straightforward and the patterns of intention that lie behind them often obscure. The artist’s life can easily seem merely chaotic, the rise and fall of an incurable hot-head, a man so governed by passion that his actions unfold without rhyme or reason (this was, for centuries, the prevailing view of him). But there is a logic to it all and, with hindsight, a tragic inevitability. Despite the many black holes and discontinuities in the shadowplay of Caravaggio’s life, certain structures of belief and certain habits of behaviour run through all that he did and all that
he painted. The evidence has to be decoded using guesswork, intuition,
speculation and above all a sense of historical imagination – a willingness to delve as deeply as possible into the codes and values that lie behind the words and deeds of a far distant past.

A lot has been made of Caravaggio’s presumed homosexuality, which has in more than one previous account of his life been presented as the single key that explains everything, both the power of his art and the misfortunes of his life. There is no absolute proof of it, only strong circumstantial evidence and much rumour. The balance of probability suggests that Caravaggio did indeed have sexual relations with men. But he certainly had female lovers. Throughout the years that he spent in Rome he kept close company with a number of prostitutes.

The truth is that Caravaggio was as uneasy in his relationships as he was in most other aspects of life. He likely slept with men. He did sleep with women. But he settled with no one. From a very young age, and with good cause, he suffered from a deep sense of abandonment. If any one thing lay behind the erratic behaviour that doomed him to an early death, it was the tragedy that befell him and his family when he was still just a little boy. The idea that he was an early martyr to the drives of an unconventional sexuality is an anachronistic fiction.

To understand the emotions that drove him and the experiences that most deeply shaped him, it is necessary to begin where he was born: in the town of Caravaggio, in Lombardy, from which he would later take his name. He lived both there and in the nearby city of Milan for the first twenty-one years of his life. His youth is the least documented period of his existence – the darkest time, in every sense, of this life of light and darkness. But in its shadows may be found some of the most important clues to the formation of his turbulent personality.

FACTS AND FICTION

There are three early biographies of Caravaggio. All were composed after his death, and each is unreliable for different reasons. The first was written during the second decade of the seventeenth century by Giulio Mancini, a physician from Siena who met Caravaggio in Rome, probably in about 1592, and who knew him well between 1595 and 1600. The second was published in 1642 by Giovanni Baglione, a rival painter who had competed and quarrelled with Caravaggio during his years in Rome, in particular between 1601 and 1606, on one occasion suing him for libel in response to some scabrous verses, on
another going so far as to accuse him of hiring paid assassins to kill him. The third was written, three decades later, by an antiquarian
and art theorist named Giovanni Pietro Bellori, who had never known
Caravaggio and who based his own account on those of the two earlier authors.

Mancini is sporadically informative but frustratingly brief. Baglione is more circumstantial and surprisingly objective, given that he was writing the life of a man whom he suspected of having plotted to murder him. As a rule of thumb, Baglione is the most trustworthy early source. His biography has been shown to be extremely accurate in its presentation of the bare facts. Many later discoveries of original documents concerning Caravaggio have simply confirmed the truth of his original account. Baglione is only really unreliable in his smug, moralizing conclusions, which are plainly coloured by
Schadenfreude
. This is particularly evident in the mean-spirited passages that tell the story of Caravaggio’s various falls from grace.

Bellori wrote his life of Caravaggio considerably later. It was published in 1672, more than sixty years after the painter’s death. Bellori plainly drew much of his material from Baglione. But he did glean some new facts. He also went to much trouble to see the painter’s works
in situ
. He was seduced by their power and their drama, and fascinated by the novelty of Caravaggio’s technique. Bellori wrote about the painter’s art with far greater sensitivity than either Mancini or Baglione. Yet he was also fundamentally appalled by it. Caravaggio’s vivid capturing of poverty and violence – his depictions of Christ and the Virgin Mary as barefoot paupers, his bloodily realistic portrayals of Christian martyrdom – went directly against Bellori’s own most cherished beliefs. Bellori upheld the academic principle that art should not represent the world as it is, but as it should be, sweetened and idealized. So although he responded instinctively to Caravaggio’s captivating realism, he felt bound to condemn him all the more strongly for it. Bellori crystallized what would remain for centuries the standard academic objection to the painter’s work:

Repudiating all other rules, [Caravaggio] considered the highest achievement not to be bound to art. For this innovation he was greatly acclaimed, and many talented artists seemed compelled to follow him . . . Such praise caused Caravaggio to appreciate himself alone, and he claimed to be the only faithful imitator of nature. Nevertheless, he lacked
invenzione
, decorum,
disegno
[draughtsmanship], or any
knowledge of the science of painting. The moment the model was taken
from him, his hand and his mind became empty.

Bellori went on to say that ‘Just as certain herbs produce both beneficial medicine and most pernicious poison, in the same way, though he produced some good, Caravaggio has been most harmful and wrought havoc with every ornament and good tradition of painting.’
1
In other words, the painter might have had a gift for mimicking reality, but there was no depth to him. If Bellori were to be believed, he was little more than a machine for producing optically convincing images – a kind of human camera, with his workshop a prototypical photographer’s studio, long before the invention of photography itself. In this way was the myth of Caravaggio as an untutored, thoughtless virtuoso, the master of a debased and pernicious brand
of naturalism, attached like an anchor to his posthumous reputation.
2
In fact, he was an extremely thoughtful, inventive painter, a close and careful reader of the texts that he was called to dramatize and to embody in the form of images. But how and where he got his education remains unknown, partly because his three biographers have so little to say about his early life.

MODEST ORIGINS, NOBLE CONNECTIONS

Caravaggio was born three years after the publication of the second, revised edition of Giorgio Vasari’s pioneering anthology of artists’ biographies,
The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects
. Vasari’s book was the model on which later writers such as Baglione and Bellori based their own collections of artists’ lives. In it, he confirmed and sought to extend a great rise in the status of artists within the Italian peninsula during the period now known – also largely thanks to Vasari’s efforts – as the Renaissance. Previously the profession of art had been ranked low because it involved work with the hands and was therefore classed as a form of manual labour, a craft rather than a liberal art. But implicit throughout Vasari’s thousand and more pages is the belief that the greatest artists deserve to be ranked with poets and philosophers as men of true genius, rightful companions of kings and princes.

As well as raising the reputation of his own profession, Vasari established certain formulae for writing the life of an artist. Particularly famous painters and sculptors, such as Giotto or Michelangelo, are established as miraculous prodigies from an early age: the brilliance of Giotto, for example, is said to have been discovered by the older artist Cimabue, who came upon the young man when he was still a callow shepherd and found him drawing perfectly upon a stone. But no such uplifting fables are attached to the youth of Caravaggio by his biographers. Mancini compresses his early life to just two sentences, and Baglione to a paragraph. Bellori has a tale to tell about the young Caravaggio, but it runs counter to the kind of prodigy stories favoured by Vasari because it is designed to stress the artist’s principal failing, as Bellori saw it – his supposed
lack
of intellect, which meant that his work could never rise from mere craft.

Bellori’s story tells of Caravaggio’s origins as the son of an artisan. Since the painter ‘was employed in Milan with his father, a mason, it happened that he prepared glue for some painters who were painting frescoes and, led on by the desire to paint, he remained with them, applying himself totally to painting. He continued in this activity four or five years . . .’ Bellori may have meant to imply that this imitative, unreflective training predisposed Caravaggio to his great mistake – that of recognizing ‘no other master than the model, without selecting from the best forms of nature’.
3
His moral is certainly blunt: once a craftsman, always a craftsman.

The story is not exactly true but like many stories about Caravaggio it contains elements of the truth. He could never have been employed in tasks such as preparing glue or plaster for his father, because his father died when Caravaggio was only five years old. But the record shows that Fermo Merisi was indeed a mason. This might suggest that the artist’s origins were, as Bellori implies, rooted in the humble world of the artisan. But the sources hint at a more complicated truth. There is room for ambiguity because Fermo Merisi’s job of mason could encompass different ways of working with stone, and possibly even the vocation of architect.

Baglione’s brief account broadly agrees with that of Bellori – he simply says that the artist, ‘born in Caravaggio in Lombardy, was the son of a mason, quite well off’.
4
But Mancini makes the artist’s background sound considerably grander. According to him, ‘He was born in Caravaggio of honourable citizens since his father was majordomo and architect to the Marchese di Caravaggio.’
5
Mancini may have got the gist of his account from the artist himself, in particular the idea that Caravaggio was of better than merely common birth. A number of incidents in the painter’s later life indicate that he believed that he came from good stock, and deserved respect on account of that. It is important to establish the truth, because Caravaggio’s elevated sense of his own status would lie at the root of many of his future troubles.

Most of the known facts about Caravaggio’s youth were published by the scholar Mina Cinotti in 1983.
6
One of the more revealing documents to emerge from her research records the wedding of the artists’ parents. On 14 January 1571 Fermo Merisi married a woman called Lucia Aratori. Fermo was born in about 1540 and was a widower, with a daughter named Margherita by his first marriage. Lucia was some ten years younger than him and had not been married before. Fermo was recorded as resident in Milan, but the marriage took place in the town of Caravaggio, where both his bride and the rest of his family lived. It would have been an unexceptional wedding had it not been for the presence, among the witnesses, of the Marchese Francesco I Sforza di Caravaggio. The marchese was a member of one of the leading noble families of Italy, the Sforza, who were former lords of Milan. His wife, the young Marchesa di Caravaggio, was from the enormously powerful Colonna family. These were the most important people in the neighbourhood.