Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (76 page)

Towards the end of the nineteenth century Caravaggio’s work did fall somewhat out of fashion. His paintings attracted relatively little attention from those pioneering the still embryonic discipline of art history, whose attentions were biased by the market. (The purpose of much early art historical research was to establish the provenance and therefore the value of pictures coming to auction, but, since nearly all of Caravaggio’s major pictures were immovable altarpieces, very few of his works ever came up for sale.) Neither did his pictures seem especially interesting to painters of the early Modern period, such as Cézanne or, later, the Cubists and Futurists, because it was their stated ambition to flatten, distort and destroy the conventions of post-
Renaissance illusionist painting. Caravaggio was too much of an ‘opti
cal
’ painter for their taste. They preferred the so-called Italian ‘primitives’, painters such as Giotto and Duccio, whose disregard for
conventional perspective seemed closer to a Modernist aesthetic. They might have been interested in Caravaggio’s late Sicilian pictures, which responded to powerful strains of primitivism in Counter-Reformation thought, but those paintings had fallen into neglect and were all but unknown by the early twentieth century. It is symbolic of this one period of genuine neglect that the young Picasso, for all his magpie eclecticism and positively Oedipal obsession with the art of the past, never showed the slightest interest in reworking or pastiching the art of Caravaggio. It was only when Picasso grew older that his attitude changed. In 1937, while working on
Guernica
, his agonized frieze of suffering inspired by the horrors of the Spanish Civil War, he told Salvador Dalí that he wanted the horse at the centre of the painting to have the same presence as the horse in Caravaggio’s
Conversion of St Paul
: ‘I want it to be so realistic – just like in Caravaggio – that you can smell the sweat.’
162

Caravaggio’s reputation was decisively rehabilitated for the twentieth century by the gifted and eloquent Italian art historian Roberto Longhi, who put on an extremely influential retrospective of the painter’s work in 1951. Since then Caravaggio has become perhaps the most widely popular of all the Old Masters. In many respects he is the perfect painter for an age pruriently obsessed with the lurid private lives of famous people. His fame has never been greater, and his private life was nothing if not lurid. His many sins and misdemeanours, his irregularities and eccentricities, so long used to blacken his name, have now made him a posthumous celebrity. But the deeper pull is still that of his art.

Since Longhi staged his ground-breaking exhibition, Caravaggio’s influence has continued to spread. But his work seems to have been less of an inspiration to those ploughing the increasingly conceptualist fields of fine art than to those working with photography and film. One of the few painters to have had a profound impact on disciplines other than painting itself, he may fairly be considered as a pioneer of modern cinematography. Pier Paolo Pasolini, who made some of the most powerful Italian films of the 1960s, was profoundly influenced by Caravaggio’s sense of light, by his narrative directness, and by his casting of poor and ordinary working people in leading roles. Martin Scorsese, one of the most gifted American directors of the last forty years, has been disarmingly explicit about the depth of his own admiration for Caravaggio. He was introduced to the painter’s work in the late 1960s by screenwriter Paul Schrader when they were working on
Taxi Driver
, his film about a vigilante killer taking on New York’s underworld of drug dealers and whores. He sees Caravaggio very much with the eyes of someone looking for things he can use, borrow, adapt. In Scorsese’s words, the long tradition of Caravaggio as a true artist’s artist is both reincarnated and refreshed. It is worth quoting him at length:

I was instantly taken by the power of the pictures, the power of the compositions, the action in the frames, the way he designed the composition and the subject matter . . . there was no doubt it could be taken into cinema because of the use of light and shadow, the chiaroscuro effect . . .

Initially I related to the paintings because of the moment that he chose to illuminate in the story.
The Conversion of Paul
,
Judith Beheading Holofernes
: he was choosing a moment that was not the absolute moment of the beginning of the action, it’s during the action, in a way. You sort of come upon the scene midway and you’re immersed in it. It was very different from the composition of the paintings that preceded it, the Renaissance paintings. It was like modern staging in film. It was as if we had just come in the middle of scene and it was all happening. It was so powerful and direct. It was startling, really. He would have been a great film-maker, there’s no doubt about it. I thought, I can use this too . . .

So then he was there. He sort of pervaded the entirety of the bar sequences in another film I made around then,
Mean Streets
. There’s no doubt about that. He was there in the way I wanted the camera movement, the choice of how to stage a scene. It’s basically people sitting in bars, people at tables, people getting up, that sort of thing.
The Calling of Matthew
, but in New York! Making films with street people was what it was really about, like he made paintings with them. They weren’t like the usual models from the Renaissance. They were people who were really living life. That’s why it played into my mind in
Mean Streets
. . .

Then that extended into a much later film,
The Temptation of Christ
. Why couldn’t we have people who lived on the street play apostles? They had been fishermen, Jesus was a carpenter. Caravaggio takes the Virgin Mary and has a prostitute play the Virgin Mary. She’s a woman and the Virgin Mary’s a woman. It’s shocking and provocative. It doesn’t judge the person. It doesn’t make judgement on the prostitute when making her the Virgin and this is something very powerful and compassionate . . .

So in doing
The Last Temptation of Christ
the idea was that Jesus was going to be Jesus Christ on Eighth Avenue and 49th Street in New York, where we shot
Taxi Driver
those years ago. It hasn’t changed much since then, it’s a little better now, but really you might as well be in a den of iniquity most of the time. It was quite a place, especially at three and four in the morning. This is where Jesus would go. He wouldn’t be hanging out on Park Avenue in New York. He’d be in the street with the crack addicts and the prostitutes. The idea was to do Jesus like Caravaggio.
163

Epilogue

Caravaggio’s contemporaries would doubtless have been amazed by the extent of his posthumous fame. Few of those who knew him could ever have imagined that he and his work would survive so far into the future, that he would be remembered so long after they had all been forgotten.

But it was true. Hardly any of the artists with whom Caravaggio had been close made any mark at all on posterity. His Sicilian friend Mario Minniti lived into his sixties, turning out quantities of mediocre altarpieces and making himself a small fortune, but no great reputation, in Messina. His old assistant Cecco Boneri established something of a career for himself as Cecco del Michelangelo, but soon slipped into near-total obscurity. The hot-headed architect Onorio Longhi, who had been his second in the duel, returned to Rome a year or so after Caravaggio’s death, only to die himself five years later of syphilis.

Caravaggio’s old enemy Giovanni Baglione lived long and prospered, winning numerous grand commissions from popes as well as princes and aristocrats. When he died he was nearly eighty, a Knight of Christ and a wealthy man. But he too would soon be forgotten – or at least remembered mostly for being Caravaggio’s adversary and biographer. Orazio Gentileschi, who had once laughed along with Caravaggio at ‘Johnny Baggage’, was the only one of his close acquaintances to amount to much as an artist. A painter of considerable power and invention, he ended his career as a court painter to Charles I, dying in London in his mid seventies in 1639 just a few years before the start of the English Civil War. Orazio’s daughter, Artemisia, who had been raped by Agostino Tassi, also became a gifted and successful painter in her own right.

And what of those with whom Caravaggio drank and dined, quarrelled and fought? What of those whom he loved and hated? What of the waiter with the cut face, the sharp-eyed barber-surgeon, the disgruntled notary? What of all the pimps and soldiers and the boys and girls who lived by selling their bodies? Some survived in his paintings, whether as villains or martyrs, torturers or apostles. Most disappeared without trace. But one fragment has survived: the last will and testament of Fillide Melandroni.

Fillide had been Caravaggio’s first model. She was the disconcertingly sexy
St Catherine
, as well as the girl holding the flower up to her breast and gazing out with a smouldering, coquettish stare in the portrait he had painted of her in 1598. She was Fillide the courtesan, who perhaps won the heart and certainly lightened the purse of the Florentine aristocrat Giulio Strozzi.

In the summer of 1618, Fillide was thirty-seven or thirty-eight years old, close to the same age as Caravaggio when he died. She was still living in Rome, but by now she had her own house. She had clearly gone up in the world. But she was mortally ill, perhaps with the same form of venereal disease that had cut short the life of Caravaggio’s friend Onorio Longhi. On 3 July she died.

Soon after, an inventory was made of her now considerable possessions. Her main reception room was decorated with gilded leather panels. At its centre stood a table covered with a Turkish carpet, and around the table there were eight leather-covered chairs. In the bedroom she had a large gilded four-poster bed with a green taffeta canopy and a chest containing some lengths of luxury fabric. She had books, vases, plants, an inkwell of silvered copper, a pearl necklace, twenty gold buttons and two gold pendants with pearls.

On 19 November her estate was settled and division was made of her goods. The will that she had made four years earlier was read out. It seems that she was happy for all her property to be sold and the proceeds parcelled out, in specified fractions, to her chosen legatees. But she wanted one particular object to go to one particular individual: ‘Item: she states and declares that she has in her house a painting or portrait by the hand of Michelangelo da Caravaggio that belongs to Giulio Strozzi. She wishes it to be restored and consigned to Sr Giulio.’

Fillide’s portrait by Caravaggio, the picture that would be consumed four centuries later by the flames of the Second World War, was the most precious thing that she had. She wanted it to go to Strozzi, her protector, who had allowed her to keep it for so long. Perhaps she liked the thought of being with him, in surrogate, after she died. Perhaps she still loved him.

From the inventory of her possessions and the terms of her will we may think that Fillide was not quite the same woman she had been when Caravaggio knew her. Once, she had shamelessly touted for business as a prostitute in the very shadow of the monastery of the Convertites, the religious foundation for the reform of prostitutes, and had assaulted her rival, Prudenza, in her house directly next door to it, screaming as she did so: ‘You dirty whore! I want to cut you! I want to cut you!’ Now, as well as the portrait by Caravaggio, her house contained three small devotional paintings: of the Nativity, of the Virgin Mary and of the Penitent Magdalen, the prostitute who mended her ways. Her will specified that she wanted to be buried in her parish church. At the end, as death approached, she left several legacies to religious institutions dedicated to the Virgin, so that Masses would be said for her soul after she had died, and a fifth of her entire legacy to the Convertites. The bequest was stipulated in the penultimate clause in her will, set down by the notary in black and white.

But who knows what Fillide really felt, or what she really believed. Like the dark-haired painter she had once known, she moved in that uncertain realm, ‘between the sacred and the profane’.

Notes

PART ONE: MILAN, 1571–92

1.
See Helen Langdon (ed.),
The Lives of Caravaggio
(London, 2005), pp. 89, 81.

2.
The very structure of Bellori’s
Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors and Architects
consigns Caravaggio to darkness. In arranging the engraved portraits that illustrated his book, Bellori made sure that the artists whom he truly valued be given dignifying attributes such as books or paintbrushes to hold. So for example Nicolas Poussin, one of Bellori’s heroes, holds a book fixed with a fine clasp and gazes out with an expression of grave calm on his face. Caravaggio, by contrast, has his hand on the hilt of a sword and glares nervously sideways with the furtive and guilty eyes of a criminal. One of just twelve artists singled out for inclusion, he has been allowed his place at the table of art history. But he sits on the wrong side, a Judas among the true apostles. For an arresting interpretation of some of the fictional elements of the early biographies see ‘Caravaggio’s Deaths’ by Philip Sohm,
Art Bulletin
, vol. 84, no. 3 (Sept. 2002), p. 452.

3.
See Helen Langdon,
The Lives of Caravaggio
, p. 57.

4.
Ibid., p. 41.

5.
Ibid., p. 27.

6.
See in particular M. Cinotti,
Novita sul Caravaggio
(Milan, 1983).

7.
For the importance of Caravaggio’s maternal relations and their contacts, Giacomo Berra, ‘Il Giovane Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio: la sua famiglia e la scelta dell’ars pingendi’,
Paragone
, vol. 53 (2002), pp. 40–128, is the invaluable source.

8.
See Richard A. Goldthwaite,
Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy 1300–1600
(Baltimore, 1993): ‘Generally speaking . . . the argument got shifted from the nature of nobility to the behaviour of the noble; and along the way, most of the essential elements of the traditional definition – arms, service, virtue, blood, economic activities – were qualified.’ So many different ideas were ‘bandied about the concept’, the writer adds, ‘that one could have it just about any way he wanted it’.

9.
See Diarmaid MacCulloch,
Reformation: Europe’s House Divided 1490–1700
(London, 2003), pp. 330–32.

10.
See C. Hughes (ed.),
Shakespeare’s Europe: Unpublished Chapters of Fynes Moryson’s Itinery
(New York, 1967), p. 49; see also D. E. Zanetti, ‘The Patriziato of Milan from the Domination of Spain to the Unification of Italy: An Outline of the Social and Demographic History’,
Social History
, no. 6 (Oct. 1977), pp. 745–60.

11.
See D. E. Zanetti, ‘The Patriziato of Milan’, pp. 750–52.

12.
See Thomas Coryate,
Coryat’s Crudities
(London, 1611), p. 102.

13.
See ‘Instrucciones de Carlos-Quinto a Don Felipe su hijo’, in C. Weiss (ed.),
Papiers d’Etat du Cardinal de Grenvelle
, vol. 3 (Paris, 1842), pp. 267–318. My attention was brought to this document by John Hale, who cites it in his
The Civilisation of Europe in the Renaissance
(London, 1993), pp. 95–6.

14.
See Agostino Borromeo, ‘Archbishop Carlo Borromeo and the Ecclesiastical Policy of Philip II in the State of Milan’, in John M. Headley and John B. Tomaro (eds.),
San Carlo Borromeo: Catholic Reform and Ecclesiastical Politics in the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century
(Washington, London and Toronto, 1988), pp. 85–111.

15.
See Ludwig von Pastor,
The History of the Popes
(London, 1951), vol. 15, p. 108.

16.
See Wietse de Boer,
The Conquest of the Soul: Confession, Discipline and Public Order in Counter-Reformation Milan
(Leiden, Boston and Cologne, 2001), p.73; Paolo Prodi, ‘San Carlo Borromeo e il Cardinale Gabriele Paleotti: due vescovi della Riforma Cattolica’,
Critica Storica
, 3 (1964), pp. 135–51.

17.
See Agostino Borromeo, ‘Archbishop Carlo Borromeo’.

18.
See Diarmaid MacCulloch,
Reformation: Europe’s House Divided
, pp. 411–12.

19.
See E. Cecilia Voelker, ‘Borromeo’s Influence on Sacred Art and Architecture’, in John M. Headley and John B. Tomaro (eds.),
San Carlo Borromeo,
p
p. 17
3–87.

20.
Ibid., p. 178.

21.
See Wietse de Boer,
The Conquest of the Soul
, p. 43.

22.
Ibid.

23.
Ibid., p.122.

24.
See
Diarmaid MacCulloch,
Reformation: Europe’s House Divided
, pp. 406–7.

25.
See Wietse de Boer,
The Conquest of the Soul
, pp. 62–3: ‘Confessors thus became quite literally law enforcement officers, who were to use their privileged access to the soul to assist in the application of church law. Having dispensed with such matters, they turned to the confession proper. But they continued to wear their uniforms as agents of discipline, constantly weighing the need to deny absolution to those considered unwilling to mend their sinful ways . . . if obstinacy was undeniable, the refusal of absolution was to be no empty threat. The Milanese confessor was to display the same combination of holy zeal and legal spirit that was characteristic of his bishop.’

26.
See Ludwig von Pastor,
The History of the Popes
(London, 1930), vol. 19, p. 108.

27.
See David Freedberg,
The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response
(Chicago and London, 1989), p. 179. Freedberg’s excellent account of traditions of visualization in Christian meditation gives passing mention to Borromeo (but not Caravaggio).

28.
Ibid., p. 171.

29.
Ibid., p. 168.

30.
See Michael Baxandall,
Painting
and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style
(Oxford, 1972), p. 45: ‘The painter was a professional visualizer of the holy stories. What we now easily forget is that each of his pious public was liable to be an amateur in the same line, practised in spiritual exercises that demanded a high level of visualization of, at least, the central episodes of the lives of Christ and Mary.’

31.
Cited in Roger Fry, ‘Flemish Art at Burlington House. I’, Burlington magazine 50, 287 (Feb. 1927), p. 68.

32.
See Michael Baxandall,
Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy
, p. 46.

33.
See David Gilmore,
Aggression and Community: Paradoxes of Andalusian Culture
(New Haven, 1987), p. 161.

34.
See Wietse de Boer,
The Conquest of the Soul
, p. 113.

35.
Ibid., p. 114.

36.
See M. Cinotti,
I pittori bergamaschi
(Bergamo, 1983), p. 235.

37.
Ibid. Giovan Pietro, who is first mentioned in a document of 1578, died in childhood.

38.
See Ann G. Carmichael, ‘The Last Past Plague: The Uses of Memory in Renaissance Epidemics’,
Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences
, vol. 53, no. 2, (Apr.1998), p. 143.

39.
Ibid., p. 137.

40.
See Paolo Bisciola,
Relatione verissima del progresso della peste di Milano, qual principio nel mese d’agosto 1576
(Ancona and Bologna, 1577). The translation here is that of Ann G. Carmichael in ‘The Last Past Plague’.

41.
See Ann G. Carmichael, ‘The Last Past Plague’, pp. 137, 141.

42.
See Paolo Bisciola,
Relatione verissima del progresso della peste di Milano
.

43.
See Fra Paolo Bellintano,
I due Bellintani da Salò et il dialogo della pesta di Fra Paolo
, F. Odorici (ed.), in Francesco Colombo (ed.),
Raccolta di cronisti e documenti storici lombardi inediti
(Milan, 1857), vol. 2, p. 296.

44.
See ibid.; the story is singled out in Ann G. Carmichael, ‘The Last Past Plague’.

45.
See Paolo Bisciola,
Relatione verissima del progresso della peste di Milano
.

46.
See M. Cinotti, ,
I pittori bergamaschi
, p. 203.

47.
For this document and the division of land, see ibid., pp. 235, 250, 206.

48.
See Giacomo Berra, ‘Il Giovane Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio’.

49.
See
The Age of Caravaggio
, Royal Academy exhibition catalogue (London, 1985), p. 73.

50.
The contract is quoted in M. Gregori, (ed.),
Gli affreschi della Certosa di Garegnano
(Turin, 1973), p. 10; I have used the translation offered in Helen Langdon,
Caravaggio: A Life
(London, 1998), p. 24.

51.
Ibid., p. 57.

52.
See Walter Friedlaender,
Caravaggio Studies
(Princeton, 1955), p. 233.

53.
See Helen Langdon,
The Lives of Caravaggio
, pp. 89, 27.

54.
The passage was first detected and deciphered by the art historian Maurizio Calvesi, author of a book aptly entitled
Le realtà del Caravaggio
(
The Realities of Caravaggio
) (Turin, 1990). I am grateful to him for sharing his insights with me.

PART TWO: ROME, 1592–5

1.
‘
Bugiaronaccia poltrona puttana de tio te voglio tirare una pignatta de merda sul mostaccio . . . fatti fottere dal boia e ho in culo te con quanti n’hai
’: my attention was called to this passage by Alexandra Lapierre, who very kindly allowed me to examine her personal collection of transcripts from criminal archives concerning the activities of artists in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Rome. She quotes the document, in a slightly different translation, in her historical novel
Artemisia
(London, 2000), p. 16, where it appears in the mouth of Agostino Tassi, a protagonist in her story – artistic licence, because it was actually uttered by another, now long-forgotten painter. The original document is dated 1602. She specifies its location in a note to her book; see pp. 369–70.

2.
See James Fenton, ‘Bernini at Harvard / Chicago Baroque’, in
Leonardo’s Nephew
(London, 1998), for a concise retelling of the story, which is rehearsed at fuller length in Charles Avery,
Bernini: Genius of the Baroque
(London, 1997).

3.
See Helen Langdon,
The Lives of Caravaggio
, p. 57.

4.
See
The Complete Works of Montaigne
, D. Frame (trs.) (London, 1958), p. 1,163.

5.
Ibid., p. 1,164.

6.
Ibid., p. 1,172.

7.
Ibid., p. 1,143.

8.
Ibid., pp. 1,142, 1,150.

9.
Ibid., p. 1,142.

10.
Ibid., p. 1,150.

11.
See Helen Langdon,
Caravaggio: A Life
, p. 34; and Walter Friedlaender,
Caravaggio Studies
, p. 59.

12.
See
The Complete Works of Montaigne
, p. 1,148.

13.
I am grateful to Opher Mansour for allowing me to read his unpublished doctoral dissertation for the Courtauld Institute in London, ‘Offensive Images: Censure and Censorship in Rome under Clement VIII 1592–1605’, from which this information about Clement’s Visitation is drawn.

14.
This figure necessarily involves guesswork, but, given the sheer amount of artistic activity in Rome at the time, and given the size of many painters’ and sculptors’ workshops, it is likely to be on the low side.

15.
Quoted
in John Hale,
The Civilisation of Europe in the Renaissance
, p. 53.

16.
See Giovanni Botero, ‘
The Reason of State’ and ‘The Greatness of Cities’
,
trans. by Robert Peterson 1606, P. J. and D. P. Waley (trs.) (London, 1956), p. 38.

17.
See
The Complete Works of Montaigne
p. 1,168.

18.
My thanks again to Alexandra Lapierre for guiding me through the history of the artists’ quarter and for sharing the fruits of her own research so generously in conversation.

19.
See Helen Langdon,
The Lives of Caravaggio
, p. 41.

20.
Ibid., p. 27.

21.
The suggestion is made by Bellori in notes written while he was preparing his life of Caravaggio.

22.
See Helen Langdon,
The Lives of Caravaggio
, p. 58.