Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (26 page)

The breadth of del Monte’s interests was reflected not only in the various rooms of his palace, which contained a well-stocked library and an extensive collection of scientific instruments, but also in the wide circle of his acquaintances. Del Monte collected remarkable men in real life as well as in art. He knew writers, bibliophiles and collectors of rare manuscripts. He knew musicians and composers. He knew alchemists, astronomers and others working on the ill-defined border between medieval belief and modern enquiry.

Inspired by the researches of his own brother, Guidobaldo, del Monte took a lively interest in scientific discovery. He was an early and enthusiastic supporter of Galileo, and played a crucial role in the astronomer’s career by helping him to secure the patronage of the Medici. Without the powerful support and protection of Florence’s ruling dynasty, some of Galileo’s most important work might never have been done. The Palazzo Madama contained a tangible symbol of the scientist’s gratitude: the gift of a telescope. Del Monte’s views on the controversial hypothesis of a heliocentric universe are unrecorded. But he might have agreed with Cesare Baronio, a prominent member of Filippo Neri’s Order of the Oratory, who famously remarked that ‘the scriptures teach us how to move to heaven, not how the heavens move.’

Del Monte’s interest in science extended to experiment as well as study. He dabbled in alchemy and had a fully equipped laboratory in the Palazzo Madama. Within a year of Caravaggio’s arrival in his household, the cardinal acquired a third residence, a country retreat at Porta Pinciana, up in the hills above the western edge of the city, not far from the Villa Borghese. Here del Monte established a pharmaceutical distillery. The distillation of drugs, whether from plants, metals or other substances, was something of a fad in the elite circles of Roman society at the time. In his
Epistolae medicinales
, the Sicilian physician Pietro Castelli (1590–1661) noted that the apothecaries of the day worked not only in their own shops but also in the private households of virtuosi.
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The efficacy of the resulting cures could be questionable. The German taxonomist and doctor Johannes Faber publicly boasted that the celebrated ‘Cardinal Dal [
sic
] Monte’ had given him the recipe for a highly effective drug made from the meat of a poisonous snake. But he did not specify whether he had actually put the medicine to the test. Another of del Monte’s supposed remedies was rumoured to have killed a man.

Faber’s story suggests that the cardinal took an interest in the activities of the Hospital of Santo Spirito, one of Rome’s largest and most important institutions for the care of the poor and the sick. Faber was himself a physician of the hospital, which, in his estimate, provided more than 12,000 people with food, shelter and medical care every year. Del Monte was friendly with another doctor working at the Santo Spirito, Giulio Mancini, Caravaggio’s future biographer. Mancini, born of humble Sienese parents, had trained in medicine in the city of Padua. He got his job at the hospital in 1595 and probably met the painter in del Monte’s house in that same year. That would explain why Mancini knew so much more than the other early biographers about Caravaggio’s dark deeds in Milan and his very first years in Rome.

The Hospital of Santo Spirito was closely connected to the papal court. A post there was often the prelude to a successful career in medicine at the highest level, and so it proved in the case of Mancini, who eventually rose to become physician by appointment to the pope.
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But Mancini’s commitment to the relief of the poor seems to have been genuine, rather than just place seeking. When he died he left his considerable fortune to be distributed among the impoverished students of his native Siena. He was known for his unconventional behaviour and beliefs: a French obituarist wrote that Mancini was an amateur astrologer and
un Grand Ath
é
, ‘a great atheist’. Del Monte probably befriended him because of his reputation as an experimental chemist and connoisseur of art. The two men seem to have shared an essentially philanthropic approach to life.

Del Monte was a philanthropist but he was certainly no firebrand of Counter-Reformation piety. In one of his letters he describes an evening spent gambling at the game of hazard at the Farnese Palace, in the company of the cardinal-nephew Pietro Aldobrandini. Having lost heavily – ‘I more than he’, del Monte noted ruefully – both men finished the evening in the company of a pair of courtesans, listening to music. Overall, the pattern of del Monte’s friendships and alliances suggests that he was a worldly, benevolent, diplomatic, curious, open-minded and socially adept man, with a rare sensitivity to genius in other people and a strong sense of Christian charity.

But a considerably more negative picture of him was painted by his contemporary Dirck van Amayden, who composed the principal early biography of del Monte. Amayden’s text, which has had a definite influence on the cardinal’s posthumous reputation, is so hostile that it amounts to a thinly veiled character assassination. The author’s method was a form of devious insinuation. This involved the recounting of various scurrilous tales about the cardinal, followed by half-hearted protestations on the part of the author to the effect that such dreadful things – surely – could not have been true.

The pattern is set by Amayden’s discussion of Ferdinando de’ Medici’s patronage of del Monte. He begins with the phrase ‘It is said’, eternal refrain of the unreliable reporter. In this case, ‘it is said’ that del Monte wormed his way into Ferdinando’s affection by arranging clandestine trysts between the young Medici buck and the wife of another man, ‘the bride of one Cesarino’. The double calumny is followed up instantly by a sly denial of which Shakespeare’s Iago would have been proud: ‘this nevertheless I would not believe, knowing perfect friendship arises out of virtue, not vice.’
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Not only is Amayden’s del Monte an accomplice to adultery. He also turns out, at the end of the biography, to be a closet homosexual with a particular fondness for young men. The author’s explosion of this bombshell inevitably casts something of a shadow over his earlier, flatly dutiful assertion that del Monte was an intellectually enlightened patron of the arts and sciences who ‘was very liberal to painters, chemists and similar’. The scandalized reader is naturally inclined to wonder whether the cardinal might have asked for certain favours, from certain young men, in return for his support. The very last paragraph of Amayden’s life of del Monte addresses the question in the author’s characteristic style and leaves the matter open:

He was of unusual sweetness of behaviour, and loved to be familiar with youths, not, however, for a criminal reason, but from natural sociability. This is presumably connected with the fact that he prudently hid it before Urban was elected. When Urban was made pope he threw off all restrictions; in the longed-for reign he indulged his inclination openly, and, though aged and almost blind, more a trunk than a man and therefore incapable of allure, a young man of short stature got a benefice from him.
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The image of del Monte in old age as an absurd and enfeebled pederast is hardly flattering. It is also, in all probability, a fiction. Amayden spent his life in the service of Spain, promoting the cause of the mighty Habsburgs with unwavering constancy and taking every opportunity to blacken the names of their enemies. The pro-French faction at the papal court was anathema to him and he had a professionally ingrained hatred of the Medici. So this was a man with every motive to slander the memory of del Monte, whose curial vote had always been cast in favour of the Medici and their French allies. Amayden’s story about del Monte belatedly coming out of the closet in 1623, on the accession of Urban VIII, should also be read as a slander aimed at the pope himself. The subtext is that Urban’s reign was so licentious that every sin suddenly dared to show its face. This too fits with the hispanophile Amayden’s anti-French agenda, since Urban VIII had shown great favour to Cardinal Richelieu, Governor of France under Louis XIV.

Despite its implausibility, Amayden’s text has insidiously shaped the legend of Caravaggio. It has fostered a deeply fanciful view of del Monte’s household as a louche pleasure palace, subversively lodged at the heart of Catholic Rome. Through the rooms of this imaginary Palazzo Madama passes a parade of freethinkers and sexual outsiders, mostly exquisite young men. The shadowy figure of del Monte, libertine masquerading in a cardinal’s robes, looks on with a mischievous twinkle in his eye. Viewed through the lens of this seductive fantasy, many of the pictures that Caravaggio painted during his sojourn with del Monte are correspondingly distorted. They become thrillingly decadent and disappointingly flimsy at one and the same time – mild exhalations of homoerotic yearning, shot through with an abiding spirit of perversity.

The best corrective to Amayden’s sweet-tongued libel is an eyewitness description of Cardinal del Monte’s household as it actually was in the 1590s, published for the first time in 1991. The recipient of the description was Grand Duke Ferdinando de’ Medici. Its author
was a musician and gentleman called Emilio de’ Cavalieri.
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It presents
a thoroughly believable, down-to-earth picture of the milieu in which Caravaggio, in his mid twenties, found himself:

Del Monte amazes me in regard to spending that he can live on what he has and do it so honourably. It is true that for his clothing he doesn’t spend a
giulio
; he has had only one livery made; his coach is also the first he has had; he makes the best of what he has; he has bought himself a carriage and with this he keeps himself; the mouths he feeds in all don’t amount to fifty; he doesn’t keep horses or gentlemen but his servants are treated well and given good meals – all that is seen through your highness’s favour of a beautiful home, [the fitting out and decoration of ] which is now finished; as a cardinal of Rome, he formally receives at table in the morning with his silverware; and he is courted by more Romans than cardinals for his great trafficking, which is all honest, with his metalworkers; and his antechamber is always filled with people; there are no high-ranking clergy. The reason for this is that he is not involved in important transactions and those that come do so only to visit . . . I have made this speech so that you will know the truth . . .
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This account is just as partisan in its way as that of Amayden (Cavalieri was a close friend of the cardinal and would later name him as one of his executors), but it has the disorderly ring of truth about it. Del Monte was anything but well off by the standards of most Roman cardinals. His residences were Medici property, not his own. His recorded income was approximately 12,000 ducats a year, by no means a great deal of money for a man in his position, so Cavalieri’s sympathetic description of the household’s thrifty but somewhat threadbare imitation of late Renaissance courtly pomp tallies well with the known facts. The reference to del Monte’s ‘trafficking . . . with all his metalworkers’ suggests necessary financial dealings conducted on the side. The insistence that ‘he is not involved in important transactions’ with the pope or his fellow grand clerics may have been meant to reassure the grand duke that del Monte was sticking purely to Medici-approved business.

Cavalieri was from an old Roman family associated both with the arts and with artists. The legendary Michelangelo had been close to his father, Tommaso de’ Cavalieri, and had given him a highly finished presentation drawing – possibly
The Rape of Ganymede
of 1532, now in the Royal Collection at Windsor – as a token of his affections.
Emilio himself was a composer and impresario, principally employed
at the Medici court from the late 1580s as master of ceremonies for the elaborate entertainments known as
intermedii
, dramatizations of myth and legend, set to music.

Del Monte and Emilio de’ Cavalieri probably met when the latter was orchestrating the unusually lavish spectacles that marked Grand Duke Ferdinando’s marriage to Christine of Lorraine in 1589. By the early 1590s they had become firm friends. Del Monte was in Florence in 1595 to see a production of Cavalieri’s
Gioco della Cieca
, an early experiment in musical drama inspired by antiquity.
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Over the next ten years the composer often visited the cardinal in Rome. Cavalieri’s letters back to Florence are a valuable source of information about del Monte’s deep immersion in the musical culture of his time, illuminating his tastes and responses to the music that moved him. They also shed some oblique shafts of light on the very first picture that Caravaggio painted for his new benefactor: a compellingly ambiguous depiction of a group of musical performers, about to give a concert.

‘IF MUSIC BE THE FOOD OF LOVE’

Painted around the end of 1595,
The Musicians
is one of the artist’s most puzzlingly unorthodox creations. Four young men wearing classical drapery have been crowded into an airless interior. The central figure meets the spectator’s gaze with a languorous, distracted look, absent-mindedly fingering the strings of the lute that he cradles in the crook of his right arm. Behind him, a dark-haired boy holding a barely visible cornetto – a hybrid instrument of the Renaissance, with a trumpet-like mouthpiece and the fingerholes of a recorder – looks up in a way that suggests the troupe has been disturbed while rehearsing.

A third young man, pressed so close to the foreground that he might almost be on the point of falling out of the picture, studies a sheaf of music. He is presumably the singer, and therefore the star attraction. But he looks as though he is still learning his song and his back is conspicuously turned to the viewer. He wears his costume carelessly, as if he knows that nothing much is going to happen for a little while yet. The folds of white cloth in which he is draped have fallen off his shoulder and become ruched up under the purple silk bow meant to hold them in place, leaving him almost naked from the waist up. The somewhat ragged group is completed by a curly-haired boy, sitting to the lutenist’s right, who has a pair of Cupid’s wings strapped to his back and a quiver full of arrows hanging at his right shoulder. But firing darts of love is plainly the last thing on his mind. He looks down and helps himself to some grapes, as much out of boredom as hunger.