Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (25 page)

But when Caravaggio painted his
Gypsy Fortune-Teller
he went against the grain of such crude stereotypes. His gypsy is a thief, for sure, but she is a far cry from the subhuman monster of Cospi and Dekker. She is a beautiful enchantress, an exotic swindler who steals her victim’s
heart as surely as she pilfers the ring from the hand he drowsily surrenders to her. Like Caravaggio’s cardsharps, she has stepped into his painting straight from the theatre – and emphatically not from the
p
ages of judges or journalists seeking to control a perceived social menace.

Three years before Caravaggio painted the picture, Cesare Ripa published an enormously influential guide to the symbolism of the post-Renaissance world, entitled the
Iconologia
. The book is a description, as its title page says, of ‘diverse Images of Virtues, Vices, Affections, Human Passions, Arts, Disciplines, Humours, Elements, Celestial Bodies, Provinces of Italy, Rivers and every region of the world’.
48
The gypsy appears twice in Ripa’s encyclopedia of imagery, each time as a woman. On the one hand, she is an emblem of poverty, shown ‘with a twisted neck’ in the act of begging for alms: ‘poverty is represented in the guise of a Gipsy,’ explains Ripa, ‘because a poorer folk than this is not to be found; for they have neither property nor nobility nor taste, nor hope of anything that can give a particle of that happiness that is the aim of political life.’ But she is also a symbol of comedy, of light-hearted resilience to the blows of fortune.

Under this aspect, Ripa notes, ‘her dress should be of various colours; in her right hand she should carry the horn which is used as a musical instrument; in her left hand she should have a mask, and she should wear socks on her feet. The diversity of colours signifies the varied and diverse actions dealt with by this sort of poetry, which delight the eye of the mind no less than variety of colours the eye of the body through their expression of the accidents of human life, of virtues, vices and worldly conditions, as found in every quality and kind of people, except those of princely blood.’
49
Here Ripa is distantly following the classical theory of theatrical genres propounded by Aristotle in his
Poetics
. Aristotle’s distinction between tragedy and comedy, much parroted by the more prescriptive literary theorists of sixteenth-century Italy, held that tragedy should focus on the actions of the elite – kings and princes – while comedy should concern itself with the behaviour of those at the very bottom of the social heap.

Caravaggio’s
Gypsy Fortune-Teller
is smiling poverty personified. But she is no mere emblem. With her turban-like headscarf and long cloak she is, in fact, dressed precisely as a real gypsy in late sixteenth-century Italy. Cesare Vecellio’s
Habiti Antichi et Moderni
, or
Costumes Past and Present
, published in 1590, contains a description that tallies more or less exactly with Caravaggio’s painting. Vecellio notes that gypsy women ‘bind a cloak of woollen cloth over the shoulder, passing it under the arm, and it is long enough to reach down to their feet’. The cloak, known in Italian as a
schiavina
, is defined by the writer as ‘a long garment of coarse wool, worn by gypsies and hermits’.
50

The ancestry of Caravaggio’s beautiful gypsy can be clearly traced –
in accordance with the assumptions behind Ripa’s
Iconologia
– to the world of comic theatre. The gypsy was a stock figure in the performances of Italian Commedia dell’Arte, the popular acting companies of the sixteenth century – so much so that the name
zingaresche
, derived from
zingara
, or ‘gypsy’, was given to a whole range of comic theatrical productions. A series of French prints known as the
Recueil Fossard
documents the performances of an Italian Commedia dell’Arte troupe given in France in the late sixteenth century. One of those prints, depicting the encounter of the brazen whore ‘Peronne’ with the louche aristocrat ‘Julien le Debauche’, bears a striking resemblance to Caravaggio’s own
Gypsy Fortune-Teller
.

The connections between Caravaggio’s painting and the theatre do not stop there. One of the more celebrated late sixteenth-century performances of a
zingarescha
can in fact be traced directly to the milieu of Cardinal del Monte. In 1589, when the cardinal’s Medici patron, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, married Christine of Lorraine, a theatrical festival was staged to celebrate their union. A play entitled
La Pellegrina
was performed, together with six extravagant intermedii involving all kinds of elaborate stage machinery and sets representing both a fiery hell and a cloud-capped Mount Olympus. Shortly after this, according to the diary of an eyewitness, the grand duke invited the Comici Gelosi – one of the leading Commedia dell’Arte troupes – to ‘act a comedy of their own choice’. The two leading ladies, Isabella Andreini and Vittoria Piissimi,

nearly came to blows, for Vittoria wanted to act
Zingara
and the other
wished to perform her Pazzia, entitled
La Pazzia d’Isabella
[
The Madness
of Isabella
] – given that Vittoria’s favourite part is Zingara and Isabel’s La Pazzia. However they finally agreed that the first piece to be acted would be
Zingara
, and that
La Pazzia
would be given another time. And so they performed the said
Zingara
with the same
Intermezzi
as were prepared for the great play; and indeed whoever has not heard Vittoria perform
Zingara
has neither seen nor heard something marvellous, and certainly all were very satisfied with the play.
51

Cardinal del Monte attended this actual performance, and it is quite conceivable that Caravaggio himself had first-hand experience of the Gelosi on stage. The company, which was the most prestigious in Counter-Reformation Italy, had close links with his home city of Milan, where its first recorded performance took place in 1568, just three years before the painter’s birth. During its forty-year existence it often played there and in the other principal towns of northern Italy: Florence, Ferrara, Genoa, Mantua and Venice.
52

It is possible that Caravaggio’s painting was actually inspired by the memory or repute of Vittoria Piissimi’s celebrated performance as the
Zingara
. In Artemio Giancarli’s comedy, written in 1545, the gypsy plays the role of kidnapper, temptress and wily thief. But those who saw Piissimi in the role remembered her, above all, as the temptress: ‘a beautiful sorceress of love, she entices the hearts of a thousand lovers with her words; a sweet siren, she enchants with smooth incantations the souls of her devout spectators.’
53
Caravaggio’s contemporaries praised his own, painted gypsy in strikingly similar language. In Mancini’s eyes, she might have been ‘false’ and ‘sly’, but above all she was beguilingly beautiful – the most ‘graceful and expressive figure’, indeed, that he had ever seen in art. The painter’s friend, the poet Gaspare Murtola, went even further. In Murtola’s madrigal in praise of Caravaggio’s painting, the gypsy is not only an enchantress, she is also the painter’s alter ego. Just as she deceives her fresh-faced admirer, so Caravaggio beguiles the world with the freshness and the beauty of his art:

Non so qual si piu maga,

O la donna, che fingi,

O tu che la dipingi

I don’t know who is the greater magician,

The woman, who deceives,

Or you, who paint her

The poet rhymes
fingi
with
dipingi
, cheating and painting. So Caravaggio is not merely the painter of rogues, crooks and the enchantresses of the street. He is the painter
as
vagabond. And suddenly all of his subtle counterfeiting has paid off. His illusions have worked their magic, his paintings have been sold – and he has been invited to live in the house of a cardinal. It is the autumn of 1595 and he is twenty-four years old.

PART THREE

Rome, 1595–9

FRANCESCO MARIA BOURBON DEL MONTE

Caravaggio’s patron looks out at posterity from a vivid drawing by the printmaker, painter and master-draughtsman Ottavio Leoni. He has kind but piercing eyes and a fully receded hairline. His thin lips and slightly weak mouth are disguised, not altogether successfully, by a wispy salt-and-pepper beard. Cardinal Francesco Maria Bourbon del Monte was approaching seventy when he sat for the likeness; twenty years had passed since he had taken Caravaggio into his home. But he was still the same inquisitive, thoughtful man whom the painter had known. His epitaph would stress above all that he had always done his best to support ‘the good arts’.

Ars longa, vita brevis
. The picture was done, in a single sitting of perhaps half an hour, in black chalk with white highlights on fine-grained paper the colour of a hazy blue sky. The cardinal seems to endure the ordeal of keeping still with patience and forbearance: unlike many powerful men, he does not frown and fidget his way through a sitting. There is a mixture of worldliness, compassion and curiosity in his gaze. The finishing touch is a tricorn hat, rendered in dense cross-hatching, perched on the smooth dome of his forehead. It makes him look a little bit like a chess piece come to life.

Francesco Maria del Monte may have been the first father-figure in Caravaggio’s life. Giovanni Baglione, terse as ever, described the artist’s time with del Monte as a rare idyll in his otherwise troubled existence. ‘In these quarters Michelangelo was given room and board, and soon he felt stimulated and confident.’
1
Stimulated and confident: such adjectives were not often applied to Caravaggio by people who actually knew him. This is the only passage in Baglione’s biography of Caravaggio where he appears as anything other than mad, bad and dangerous to know. We can sense the painter’s genuine relief at having found, at last, a refuge from the storms of his early life.

When Caravaggio met him, del Monte was in his late forties, one of the younger and more energetic cardinals. But, unlike most of those elected to the curia, he was neither particularly rich nor especially aristocratic. He owed his position to a combination of solid family connections, considerable charm and – so jealous contemporaries muttered – outrageous good fortune. Del Monte had been born in Venice, on the Fondaco dei Turchi, in 1549. It is a measure of his family’s importance to the city that the great Venetian painter Titian attended his baptism. So too did the notorious poet, pamphleteer and pornographer Pietro Aretino, a man who might be said to have embodied the deepest contradictions of his age. On the one hand, he encouraged Pope Paul IV to fig-leaf the genitalia in Michelangelo’s frescoes for the Sistine Chapel; on the other, he wrote such works as
Tales of Nuns
,
Wives and Courtesans
, the opening scene of which involves numerous nuns, their lubricious mother superior and a copious supply of glass dildos. Also present at the ceremony was the less colourful but widely celebrated architect Jacopo Sansovino.

Despite the pomp that attended his baptism, del Monte would not actually be brought up in Venice. Del Monte’s father, Renieri, is known to have been in the service of the dukes of Urbino. Ever since the days of the fifteenth-century soldier-intellectual, Federigo da Montefeltro, the rulers of Urbino had hired out their services as
battle-hardened mercenaries to the highest bidder. The Duke of Urbino
who employed del Monte’s father was particularly active on behalf of the Venetians during the years from 1539 to 1552. Since Renieri went by the title of ‘colonel’, it seems likely that he was a soldier, who had won the respect of the Venetians by fighting their enemies.
2

Del Monte was decidedly not a military man, but a student of law and humanities. He and his elder brother, Guidobaldo – later to become a distinguished mathematician and the author of a treatise on perspective – were educated at the courts of the della Rovere family in Pesaro and Urbino. They also studied at Padua, long established as a centre of humanist learning, which was where Prince Francesco Maria della Rovere himself received his education.
3
Del Monte had been named in honour of Prince Francesco Maria. But he later switched allegiances and eventually travelled to Rome, in 1572, in the service of a Sforza cardinal.

Del Monte switched allegiances again in the early 1570s. He won the patronage of Cardinal Ferdinando de’ Medici, younger son of Grand Duke Cosimo I, ruler of Florence and Tuscany. Groomed for the Church from an early age, Ferdinando had been made cardinal when he was just fourteen years old. He was a patron of music as well as a discerning art collector, who adorned the gardens of the Villa Medici with ancient Roman sculptures. Del Monte worked for many years as Ferdinando’s secretary and assistant. By the mid 1580s he had become his closest confidant. Then, in 1587, both men’s lives were transformed by news of a dramatic series of events in the Medici stronghold of Florence. Ferdinando’s elder brother, Grand Duke Francesco I, had died of a mysterious illness. The duke’s wife had succumbed to the same ailment. In Florence, with its long and murky political history of plot and counter-plot, foul play was inevitably suspected. With Medici power in the balance, Ferdinando felt compelled to renounce his vows and return to Tuscany. He became grand duke, and del Monte his right-hand man. A contemporary witness described the atmosphere at court in the immediate aftermath of Ferdinando’s accession. The new grand duke would dine alone, allowing no one save his trusted adviser to share ‘his most secret thoughts’. He considered del Monte a kindred spirit, the source added, because he was ‘knowledgeable in literature and other learned subjects’.
4

Ferdinando’s resignation from the curia left the ruling family of Florence without a voice in Rome. So in 1588 the new Grand Duke of Florence used his influence with Pope Sixtus V to have del Monte appointed in his place. Del Monte would remain a cardinal for almost forty years, reporting to his Florentine master on the twists and turns of papal politics and promoting the interests of Tuscany whenever he could. His umbilical connection to Florence, and to the court of
Ferdinando de’ Medici, would have numerous consequences for Cara
vaggio’s career.

The Medici had strong links with the pauperist wing of Counter-Reformation Catholicism. During his years in Rome, Ferdinando had been close to the charismatic churchman Filippo Neri, the dominant religious personality in the city during the second half of the sixteenth century and founder of an order of secular priests known as the Congregation of the Oratory. His style of teaching was informal and direct, inspired by a desire to return to the simplest and most direct forms of Christian belief. He preferred discussion to sermonizing, improvisation to the set text, and had a knockabout, down-to-earth sense of humour. Despite a profound difference in temperaments, Neri was greatly admired by Carlo Borromeo, who on several occasions in the 1560s and 1570s protected him from accusations of heresy. One of Neri’s ideals was pilgrimage, which he interpreted as a model for the Christian life itself, as a journey travelled in prayer. As well as the Oratory, he founded the Archconfraternity of the Most Holy Trinity of the Pilgrims and Convalescents – the Santissima Trinità dei Pellegrini – to care for the poor and the sick, and especially the many thousands of destitute pilgrims who travelled to Rome during Jubilee years. The Pellegrini would eventually have their own church, a some
what severe building constructed between 1587 and 1597 and designed
by Martino Longhi the Elder (the father, as it turned out, to one of Caravaggio’s most turbulent companions). But much of its energies were devoted simply to health care. For several years Ferdinando de’ Medici served honourably as protector of its hospital. Probably as a result of his connections with del Monte and the Medici, Caravaggio would himself develop close links with Neri’s Archconfraternity of Pilgrims, and with the Order of the Oratory. Two of his most impressive altarpieces,
The Madonna of Loreto
and
The Entombment of Christ
, would result.

The political alliances of the Medici would also shape the development of Caravaggio’s painting. Throughout Cardinal del Monte’s long Roman career, but especially during the early years, when he was closest to Caravaggio, the balance of European power was delicately poised between Spain and France. Like other members of the family before him, Ferdinando de’ Medici favoured France. He married the Valois princess Christine of Lorraine, the marriage celebrated with great pomp and ceremony in 1589. Just over a decade later the Medici’s links with France would become closer still. Ferdinando’s niece, Marie de’ Medici, would marry Henri IV and become Queen of France. That union could never have taken place without Henri IV’s acceptance into the Church of Rome. So throughout the early 1590s del Monte’s overriding concern, and the Medici’s greatest goal, was to ensure that Henri IV’s conversion from Protestantism went ahead as planned. Del Monte’s diplomatic style was subtle and self-effacing, but effective. In 1593, when the long-hoped-for event occurred, the Medici cardinal could congratulate himself on having played his part in one of the decisive political events of the age. Clement VIII was deeply grateful for del Monte’s help in winning the French king back to the Catholic faith. The cardinal’s position within the curia was strengthened as a result.

It was no coincidence that Caravaggio’s first major religious commission, secured for him by del Monte – ‘his cardinal’, as the jealous Baglione put it – would be for San Luigi dei Francesi, the church of the French in Rome. The paintings would be completed in 1600, the year of Henri IV’s marriage to Marie de’ Medici. The first of them,
The Calling of St Matthew
, showing the saint roused from spiritual slumber by the coming of Christ, probably alluded to the conversion of the French king. When del Monte looked at the picture, he could reflect on his finest hour as a servant of the Medici, and France.

The cardinal had two official residences in Rome, the Palazzo Firenze, near the old Roman harbour of the Ripetta, and the Palazzo Madama, around the corner from San Luigi dei Francesi. The Palazzo Madama was where he chose to live, and where he gave Caravaggio room and board – presumably on one of the attic floors of the palace, in the servants’ quarters. The painter’s new surroundings were visible proof of his sudden change of fortunes, a far cry from his mean lodgings with Monsignor Insalata and a world away from the ramshackle platform on which he had been compelled to sleep in the Cesari workshop. The Palazzo Madama was an imposing building in the heart of Rome, its broad façade emblazoned with the famous Medici coat of arms, a shield decorated with six round balls – often, apocryphally, said to symbolize pills, but actually emblematic of bezants, or coins, in allusion to the family’s origins as moneylenders. The state rooms of the palace were richly decorated with tapestries and oriental carpets, as well as a small but choice selection of classical sculptures and other hallowed relics of the distant Roman past. These included the most celebrated cameo-glass vessel to have survived from antiquity, the so-called Portland Vase.
5

Del Monte was forever buying and selling works of art, antiquities, precious stones, sculptures and curiosities. He kept a sharp lookout for anything that might interest his Medici patrons. In 1607 he excitedly reported his acquisition of some fragments of clothing, discovered on the Appian Way, that had once belonged to a Roman consul alive at the time of First Punic War. He was sending them to the grand duke as a gift, he wrote, so that he could study ‘the weaving of those times’ (as ruler of Florence, a city at the centre of the Italian textile trade, Ferdinando could reasonably be assumed to take an interest in such a find).

The cardinal was an insatiable accumulator of all kinds of things, but above all he accumulated paintings. His collection included allegories and narrative pictures as well as a number of still lives – and, of course, Caravaggio’s
Cardsharps
and
Gypsy Fortune-Teller
, those pioneering experiments in the painting of contemporary rogues and tricksters. Inventories show that at his death del Monte owned around 600 paintings, enough to furnish an entire museum. He possessed copies of celebrated pictures by masters of central Italian painting such as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael. But he was also drawn to the very different traditions of Venetian painting, owning no fewer than five pictures attributed – possibly with more optimism than accuracy – to Titian. The names of Palma Vecchio and Jacopo Bassano also figure in the lists, alongside that of Giorgione, an artist to whom Caravaggio was often compared in his youth.

The Venetian tradition valued
colore
above
disegno
, emphasizing the primacy of colour rather than design – whereas for the great painters of central Italy, the Tuscan–Roman axis of art for which Giorgio Vasari was such a vocal and persuasive spokesman, drawing was the foundation stone of all excellence. Caravaggio seems to have had almost no interest at all in theories of art. But he shared the Venetian preference for working on canvas, rather than in the medium of fresco. In the ages-old debate about the relative merits of
disegno
and
colore
he might have sided with the Venetians.
6
Not a single independent drawing survives by Caravaggio’s hand. Even X-rays of his finished work have failed to yield anything resembling a conventional underdrawing.

The nature of the collections in the Palazzo Madama may have reflected the cardinal’s roots in Urbino. Like Federigo da Montefeltro, whose
studiolo
was lined with portraits of famous men, del Monte made a point of collecting images of those whom he admired. By far the greatest part of his collection was made up of portraits, a pantheon of intellectual and spiritual heroes. A late inventory refers to ‘277 pictures without frames . . . of various popes, emperors, cardinals and dukes and other illustrious men and some women’.
7
In addition, the collection contained 67 paintings of saints. These too were portraits of a kind – images of those individuals from sacred history whom the cardinal especially venerated.