Caravaggio: A Passionate Life (3 page)
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Authors: Desmond Seward
B
ellori is generally regarded as a key source for Caravaggio’s life. He is not always accurate, but he preserves vital information found nowhere else. Born in Rome around 1615, he studied to become a painter, and, when still quite young, joined the Accademia di San Luca, which enjoyed considerable prestige. Instead of pictures, he began to write about artists. In 1671 he became the Accademia’s secretary, and when his
Lives of Modern Painters, Sculptors and Architects
was published the following year, it was greeted with applause.
Although he was unquestionably a dedicated scholar, he must be read with caution. “When Michele [Caravaggio] was employed at Milan with his father, who was a mason, while making glue for some painters working on a fresco, he was suddenly seized with a wish to become a painter himself and went off with them, devoting all his energy to painting,” Bellori informs us most inaccurately. Caravaggio’s father, Fermo, was not a mason, and Caravaggio is known to have at least begun a formal apprenticeship.
When Fermo Caravaggio died, his widow lost her social position and most of the presumably substantial income and perquisites from her husband’s post with the marchese. Unable to return to the Maestro di Casa’s apartment in the Sforza Palace at Milan, she had to stay at Caravaggio,
living on whatever came in from Fermo’s small estate. By no means reduced to poverty, she nevertheless found it hard to manage, falling into debt within a few years.
It is reasonable to suppose that, in her straitened circumstances, she was relieved to have Michelangelo taken off her hands and apprenticed to a respectable Milanese painter in April 1584, when he was about twelve and a half. He indentured himself to serve his master for four years, in both his house and his workshop at Milan, paying twenty-four gold scudi. In return, he was to be fed, clothed, and taught the painter’s craft.
His master, Simone Peterzano, may have been respectable, but by no stretch of the imagination could he be described as a great artist. Once a pupil of Titian, he ever afterward signed himself “Titiani Discipulus.” He had become what art historians call a “late Mannerist.” Several churches at Milan still contain his stiff and dreary works with only a faint dash of Titian’s color.
Surprisingly, Peterzano’s friends included extremely interesting painters. He obtained at least one commission by securing the approval of a genuinely distinguished Mannerist, Pellegrino Tibaldi. Architect as well as painter, Tibaldi had impressed Cardinal Borromeo, who employed him as his favorite church-builder. Among Tibaldi’s paintings was a fine
Beheading of St. John the Baptist
, a theme that would one day inspire one of Caravaggio’s greatest pictures. Tibaldi may have chosen it because of the cardinal’s close links with the Knights of Malta, whose patron saint was the Baptist.
Peterzano was also a friend of the blind Milanese writer and former painter Giovan Paolo Lomazzo, who, in the year Caravaggio was apprenticed, published a book in Milan explaining precisely what Lombard Mannerists hoped to achieve in their painting. Another friend was Antonio Campi, who painted in the “black” manner, emphasizing light and shadow and anticipating Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro. The boy could easily have seen Campi’s own
Beheading of St. John
at the church of San Paolo in Milan.
One guesses there was a good deal of friction between master and pupil.
Caravaggio had a violent temper. Peterzano came from Bergamo, in Venetian territory, and the Bergamaschi looked down on the Milanese. On the other hand, the inhabitants of the
Contado
, which at Milan meant Bergamo and the Bergamo Alps, were something of a joke among the Milanese. Many came from the mountains to work in the city, or in the plain of Lombardy, and a substantial number had taken over farms abandoned during the French wars. The sophisticated citizens of Milan laughed at them as clodhoppers and bumpkins.
Presumably Peterzano taught Caravaggio to stretch canvases, grind pigments, mix paints, and use beeswax for softening colors. But he never taught him to paint frescoes, which meant painting on a wall with watercolors on wet plaster. Since most of Peterzano’s commissions were for frescoes, he must have found his apprentice idle and unprofitable. Later, when frescoes were very much in fashion, Caravaggio nearly starved because his lack of proficiency in this field made him almost unemployable.
Mancini tells us that Caravaggio studied with diligence, if occasionally he did something odd from hot blood and high spirits. Mancini’s word
stravaganza
is associated with Caravaggio throughout his career. Bellori, too, believed that when Caravaggio was an apprentice at Milan he worked hard enough, but only at “painting portraits.” He seems to have visited picture galleries regularly in an eager quest for ideas. Historians can only speculate on where he went, but it looks as if he traveled as far as Brescia, Cremona, Lodi, and Bergamo.
Bellori was convinced that, as a very young man, Caravaggio had been to Venice, “where he was delighted by the colors of Giorgione, which he copied.” He also believed that Caravaggio derived his naturalism from Giorgione, who, in Bellori’s opinion, was, of all Venetian artists, “the purest and simplest in rendering the forms of nature with only a few colors.” But the accepted view among modern historians is that Bellori’s judgment was faulty, because of insufficient knowledge of Giorgione’s work, which he had never actually seen himself.
A visit to Venice, which Bellori thought took place when Caravaggio was on the run “after certain quarrels,” also seems unlikely. A penniless youth would have had difficulty finding money for the journey, and the earliest sources, Mancini and Baglione, make no mention of such a trip. But Bellori is certainly right about the quarrels. His belief that Caravaggio was “gloomy and quarrelsome by nature” is more than confirmed by Caravaggio’s behavior in later life. He may even have failed to complete his apprenticeship. In any case it would have come to an end in 1588. He did not arrive in Rome until 1592, and we have no information about how he spent the four years in between. There are, however, reasonably strong grounds for supposing that he had to leave his native city in a hurry, after a crime that may have been a murder.
T
he most important event in Milan while Caravaggio was an apprentice was the death of its archbishop, Carlo Borromeo, in November 1584. The entire population of the city gathered outside the Archbishop’s Palace opposite the Duomo, carrying lighted candles and singing litanies. When his passing was announced, such dreadful howls arose from the crowd that observers compared them to the roars of stricken wild beasts. For days afterward, long lines of mourners filed past his bier, thrusting rosaries and crucifixes through the choir railings to touch his feet. Even before the Church canonized him in 1610, Milan kept the anniversary with the solemnities for a saint. He was embalmed and enshrined in crystal in a crypt chapel at the Duomo, which Henry James saw in 1872: “The black mummified corpse of the saint is stretched out in a glass coffin, clad in his mouldering canonicals, mitred, croziered and gloved, glittering with votive jewels. It is an extraordinary mixture of life and death: the dessicated clay, the ashen rags, the hideous little black mask and skull, and the living, glowing splendour of diamonds, emeralds and sapphires.”
Carlo Borromeo influenced Caravaggio’s art profoundly, although it is most unlikely that Caravaggio ever realized it. At the Council of Trent, the
archbishop had been one of the leaders who reshaped Catholicism and harnessed the arts in the service of the Counter-Reformation. He had defined Caravaggio’s choice of subjects before he was born, by stressing those that were suitable for a Catholic artist.
The Counter-Reformation was far more than a crusade to save the Church of Rome from Protestantism. It was a revolution within the Church for the renewal of Catholic Christianity. The Council of Trent, which sat between 1545 and 1563, produced a series of extraordinarily influential decrees, dealing with every aspect of life affected by religion. The Counter-Reformation’s success in southern Europe, and in much of northern, was assured by the support of the Hapsburgs, the Bourbons, and the Polish kings, who all identified themselves with it.
There is a tradition that the council considered removing all forms of music except Gregorian chant from church services, until the composer Giovanni Palestrina supplied what was wanted. His Masses and anthems were performed constantly at Milan’s churches during Caravaggio’s childhood and apprenticeship, and at Rome when he was working there. Trent was determined to banish “everything ‘lascivious’ or impure” from religious art.
Long before the council, during the 1520s, Pope Adrian VI had planned to redecorate the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel because its naked figures scandalized him. Mercifully, he was prevented by his premature death. In 1549 Cirillo Franco complained in a letter to a friend of “that posturing of limbs and all those nudes” in Michelangelo’s art. Andrea Gilio’s 1564
Dialogo
against errors in painting attacked contemporary artists for their obsession with the naked body, and criticized them for distorting it in the cause of elegance. He harked back to the time before Michelangelo, urging a combination of the latest technique with true religion, which would produce a purified sacred art. Bishop Franco and Gilio agreed that, as the former put it, “all art in the service of worship should be functional.” In the bishop’s words, “Everything must be appropriate to its subject.”
The fathers of the council trenchantly expressed their decrees. They insisted
that it was the duty of all painters to proclaim and explain the truths of the Catholic religion, and, by inference, concentrate on doctrines attacked by the Protestant reformers. In the future, all religious painting and sculpture must stop cultivating art at the expense of devotion. The decrees amounted to a manifesto against Mannerism, rejecting “superfluous elegance,” excessive displays of nudity, and paganism.
What gave the council’s decrees such force, and ensured that they would have an enormous impact on artists, was the Counter-Reformation’s success in bringing about a deep and sustained religious revival. Caravaggio grew to manhood in an age of renewed faith in which, for most people, the redeemed world was more real than the natural. As a result, throughout Catholic civilization, especially in Italy, the decrees were taken very seriously by artists and art lovers. Eventually they would start a cultural as well as a spiritual revolution, with a new art that would one day become known as the Baroque.
An alternative program for painters and sculptors was contained in the preaching of Carlo Borromeo, who emphasized the two Catholic dogmas to which Protestantism was most hostile: good works and transubstantiation, the belief that the bread and wine changed into Christ’s body and blood during the Mass. He was equally determined to defend other doctrines rejected by Protestants and stressed the importance of the cults of the Virgin Mary and the saints and of prayers for the dead. Acts of charity and mercy, the Last Supper, the Madonna, and martyrdoms became the proper subjects for painters.
At the same time, the archbishop was eager to see as much beauty as possible in the basilicas of his diocese, which he often rebuilt completely to make them more splendid and impressive. He advocated the most sumptuous pomp for the ceremonies of the Church, and he wanted to adorn his basilicas with noble paintings. No paintings could have been more in accord with the council’s decrees than Caravaggio’s during his maturity. Despite their occasional brutality, his naturalism and total lack of affectation or of elegance for
its own sake were the looked-for response to the decrees’ demand for functional art. He seldom used pagan imagery. He seems to have had little interest in the art of classical antiquity. In his later years, his painting was wholly religious. The Counter-Reformation had created a climate to which Caravaggio responded absolutely as an artist.
W
e do not know why Caravaggio left Milan, but he left as a very young man and never returned. Mancini, in a barely legible note scrawled in his
Considerations
, says that Caravaggio was in a brawl involving “a nobleman and a whore,” during which a
sbirro
(policeman) was killed, and that he then spent a year in prison and was forced to sell his patrimony. Bellori seems to confirm the note, writing that “because of some sort of strife he fled from Milan.” In his copy of Baglione’s
Lives of the Painters
he amplified this, scribbling in the margin that Caravaggio had been forced to escape from the city after killing someone.
Bloodshed was an everyday occurrence in sixteenth-century Milan. The streets were dangerous because they were so narrow. Pious Milanese boasted that by the time Archbishop Borromeo died, crimes of violence had almost ceased in the city. If so, they seem to have been revived very quickly. A man might be robbed or murdered in broad daylight by an ordinary footpad, a starving Spanish soldier, or a
bravo
, one of the hired killers with whom every rich nobleman surrounded himself for his own protection.
Except for lawyers or clerics, any man with the slightest pretension to status wore a rapier and a long dagger. The swarming slum-dwellers also
went armed, with knives, which they were ready to use at the least provocation. The ragged, venal
sbirri
(policemen) with their rusty halberds and cumbersome muskets were more of a menace than a safeguard. Much of the violence stemmed from the example set by the Spaniards, the Lombard nobility adopting
hidalgismo
, the outlook of the Spanish aristocrat, or would-be aristocrat, and becoming much haughtier and readier to take offense. Milanese merchants and bankers copied their arrogance, although well aware that a true nobleman regarded anyone connected with trade with the utmost contempt.
Montaigne once observed that everybody went to Italy to learn how to fence. Duelling was fashionable all over Lombardy, especially at the capital. Caravaggio’s contemporaries associated a rapier with him as much as they did a paintbrush. Made by renowned swordsmiths, Milanese rapiers were famous. When fighting, a swordsman crossed his fingers round the base of the three-foot blade to guide his aim, the newly invented
botta lunga
, or lunge, giving him an incredibly long reach. Normally a
pugnale
, or dagger held in the left hand, was used to deflect an opponent’s blade, but sometimes a cloak was held instead, to whirl into his face.
In November 1588, Caravaggio sold a plot of land for 350 imperial lire, with the option of redeeming it in five years for the same sum. The most likely explanation is that he was out of work, and the widow Caravaggio could no longer afford to support him; judging from what we know of his later years, expensive clothes, gambling, and taverns may have been responsible. In July 1590, and again in March 1591, he and his brother Giovan Battista, the future priest, sold more land, which suggests that the family was increasingly short of money. Apparently the other brother, Giovan Pietro, was dead by now. Their mother died at about the same time. In May 1592, Caravaggio, Giovan Battista, and their sister Caterina divided their parents’ estate among them, Caravaggio taking his share in cash. He received 393 lire, which he spent within a very short period, perhaps to pay his jailers. Obviously he kept enough to finance his flight from Milan.
He appears to have left Lombardy toward the end of 1592. The fact that he never went back seems to confirm Mancini’s and Bellori’s statements that he had to leave quickly after getting into serious trouble with the law. His destination was Rome, and in the document dividing up the family property, mention is made of an uncle, Lodovico Caravaggio, who lived there. But it seems unlikely that he ever intended to live with Lodovico, or that Lodovico wanted him to. According to Baglione, his motive for going to Rome was his wish “to study diligently the noble art of painting.” He may also have been encouraged by the knowledge that a fair number of people from Caravaggio had settled in the city, working as artisans, shopkeepers, sword makers, notaries, and papal officials.
The cheapest, quickest, and, on the whole, safest way of reaching Rome was to go to Genoa and travel down the coast by boat. Almost certainly, Caravaggio took this route. He would have gone by felucca, the universal ship-of-all-work until well into the present century. It was an uncomfortable voyage, lasting over a week, probably during autumn or early winter, when the Mediterranean was prone to sudden storms, and wind and rain were commoner than sunshine.
His arrival at Ostia must have been something of an anticlimax. To discourage Muslim raiders, there was no proper port for Rome, and, a day’s march southwest, this was the nearest landing place, accessible to only the very smallest ships. Although Ostia had once been the harbor of ancient Rome, it had silted up, so that the town had become a small, miserable village in the middle of a malarial, reed-fringed lagoon. After going ashore, Caravaggio had to travel another fifteen miles over land. At last, he came to the Eternal City and entered through the crumbling gate that, long before, had been the Porta Ostienses but was now the Porta San Paolo.
