Caravaggio (3 page)

After the horrors of the
1576
plague, Caravaggio vanishes from recorded history until April
6
,
1584
, when a contract was drawn up to certify the official beginning of his apprenticeship in the Milan studio of Simone Peterzano, a former pupil of Titian and a competent but unexceptional painter of religious scenes. Little is known about why young Michelangelo chose a career in art, nor is there much evidence about the earliest manifestations of his talent, though one anecdote relates how, as a small boy helping his father in his duties as a builder for the Colonna family, Michelangelo prepared glue for, and became fascinated with, a group of painters hired to fresco the palace walls. One biographer claims that he attracted attention when, as a child, he scrawled in charcoal on a wall. What does seem undeniable is that the young Caravaggio had plenty of opportunity to study great painting and sculpture in the churches of Milan and even in his hometown, where frescoes by Bernardino Campi decorated a local church.

According to the terms of Michelangelo Merisi's contract with Simone Peterzano, the thirteen-year-old apprentice agreed to live with the painter for four years, to work constantly and diligently, to respect his master's property, and to pay a fee of twenty gold
scudi
. In return Peterzano agreed to instruct his pupil in the necessary skills (presumably drawing, perspective, anatomy, fresco painting, and the transformation of pigment into paint) so that, at the end of his apprenticeship, he would be capable of making his living as an artist.

In
1588,
the apprenticeship ended. The next year, Caravaggio's mother died. For a brief time after that, Michelangelo shuttled back and forth between Milan and Caravaggio, settling, sorting out, and rapidly spending what remained of his inheritance.

The next thing we know is that he left Milan for Rome in the autumn of
1592
. Perhaps he sensibly realized that for a painter the opportunities for employment and advancement would be greater in the epicenter of ecclesiastical and aristocratic power. Or, like any ambitious young man, he resolved to follow his luck to the source of influence and wealth. He may have been tired of Milan with its painful associations, its gloomy history of misery, plague, and famine. Several of his biographers suggested that he murdered a man in Milan and had to leave town in a hurry. Possibly he had already begun the first of the successive cycles of violence, escape, flight, and exile that would recur, with increasingly disastrous consequences, throughout his life.

Mancini states that Caravaggio's hot temper frequently made him act in outrageous ways. Bellori reports that because of his turbulent and quarrelsome nature, and because of certain disputes, he left Milan and traveled to Venice, while a note on another manuscript mentions that he fled the city after killing a companion. Still another inscription on yet another manuscript, this one in an almost indecipherable scrawl, refers to an incident involving a whore, a slashing, daggers, a police spy, and a jail term.

Something happened. He left Milan. He decided to go to Rome.

 

In the Salone Sistine, at the Vatican, there is a fresco depicting the Piazza Santa Maria del Popolo around the time when Caravaggio first arrived in Rome. The scene suggests the main square of a prosperous rural town on a day when the farmers' market happens not to be in session. The animals—donkeys pulling overloaded carts, horses, a flock of sheep—nearly outnumber the humans. In the lower right-hand corner, a man is spreading an impressive quantity of laundry out to dry on grassy bank. In the background is the Church of Santa Maria del Popolo, where, less than a decade after Caravaggio arrived—from the north, through the Porta del Popolo, then the principal gateway into the city—he would paint the masterpieces that now adorn its Cerasi Chapel. Bisecting the fresco is the obelisk from the Circus Maximus, which Pope Sixtus V ordered erected in the square, and which remains the fixed point around which the street life of the modern piazza swirls. You can use these landmarks to orient yourself as you try to stretch your imagination far enough to encompass the fact that the semibucolic public space portrayed in the fresco is the same one that—swarming with pedestrians dodging buzzing
motorini
, surrounded by stylish cafés at which there is still an occasional movie-star sighting—occupies its site today.

Paradoxically, the tranquillity of the scene in the Vatican fresco was an indication of fresh energy, of recovery and resurgence. In
1527,
Rome had been entirely destroyed, looted and razed by the army of Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor. Churches and palaces were burned to ashes, citizens tortured into surrendering the last of their wealth. It was said that not a single window in Rome was left unshattered. Some
45
,
000
Romans—including many artists and cultural figures—fled their ravaged city, which promptly lapsed into ruin and decay.

Only in the last decades of the sixteenth century had the city begun to rebuild, largely under the direction of the visionary Pope Sixtus V, who launched an ambitious progam of urban revitalization, building monuments, reorganizing neighborhoods, replacing the tangles of alleyways with broad avenues connecting the major basilicas. But late-sixteenth-century Rome was still a long way from the urban paradise that Sixtus envisioned.

A wave of migration from rural areas—inspired less by the capital's attractions than by the hope of escaping the grim cycle of bad weather, crop failure, and famine—severely overtaxed the resources of a city in which there was virtually no industry except for the few wool and silk mills Sixtus helped to establish. As a result of the zeal with which new churches and palaces were being planned and constructed, the building trades provided the principal opportunities for employment. But still there were not nearly enough jobs for the poor who begged in the streets, their desperation increased by the plagues and famines of the
1590
s, their numbers swelled by the hordes of indigent pilgrims who flocked to the city's shrines.

Confraternities of priests and lay brothers were founded to aid beggars and pilgrims, and to bury the anonymous paupers who simply dropped dead on the street. Exemplary figures like Saint Filippo Neri sought to make the teachings of the church accessible to the common man, an ideal that would later guide Caravaggio as he conceived his great religious paintings. Meanwhile the rich—aristocrats, bankers, financiers, church officials—were actively setting new standards of ostentation and display, cultivating a taste for luxury and ornamentation that expressed itself in their jewels, clothes, carriages, daughters' dowries, and the decoration of their palaces. Under the reign of Clement VIII, who had been chosen pope earlier in the same year in which Caravaggio arrived in the Eternal City, the Roman cardinals became avid art collectors and patrons.

This was the world Caravaggio entered when he moved from Milan to Rome—poor himself, but possessing a skill that might prove useful and amusing to the rich. With its stark divisions between the indigent and the privileged, the culture provided him with the high contrasts that he observed meticulously and incorporated in his art. For among the qualities that made, and continue to make, his work so original and enduring was an acute power of observation: the ability to see how age and gender, social status and occupation, expressed themselves not only in gesture and dress but in tendon and knuckle, elbow and wrist, in the depth of a furrow and the droop of an eyelid.

Every social class makes at least a cameo appearance in his work, but in his final and greatest Roman paintings, the poor have claimed center stage. He lived with them and understood them. By the time he painted his
Madonna of Loreto
for the Church of Sant'Agostino—a scene in which a stately, graceful Madonna appears with her son in a doorway of an ordinary house that evokes so many doorways in Rome—the calloused, bare, filthy feet of the pilgrims who kneel before her strike us as being as familiar to Caravaggio as the back of his own hand.

In his choice of models he worked his way up from the demimonde to the world of the honest laborer and the pious, devoted poor. Near the start of his career he was drawn to portray cardsharps and thieves, criminals at work, pretty-boy musicians, and his Roman neighbors dressed up in the costumes and attitudes of saints. If his art depended on observing nature, on paying close attention to the visible world, there must have been plenty of opportunity to witness the full range of illicit activity in the taverns and streets around him, and to find visually arresting faces and characters that required only a costume change for their transformation from street whores into repentant Magdalenes and virginal Madonnas resting on the flight into Egypt.

According to a census taken in
1600
, the population of Rome was approximately
110
,
000
. It was a city of men, a fact that will become important when we consider Caravaggio's social and sexual life. Males outnumbered females, of whom there were
49
,
596
. Of that number
604
were prostitutes by profession. A decade before, it had been reported—apocryphally, it is now believed—that the courtesan population of Rome totaled
13
,
000
. Throughout the countryside, banditry had reached epidemic proportions, and in the city, crime was so rampant that Pope Sixtus V decreed that robbers should be beheaded and their lopped-off heads arranged on the bridge across the Tiber near the prison in the Castel Sant'Angelo. Public executions provided a popular form of free mass entertainment.

Gangs of toughs—the
bravi
—roamed the neighborhoods, looking for trouble, dueling (a practice that had been outlawed by papal decree), battling over obscure points of personal honor, frequenting brothels, and vying for the affection of the most desirable prostitute of the moment. The Italians' reputation for violence and banditry spread beyond their own cities and dangerous country roads. Just as Anglophones today can't seem to get enough of the misbehavior of the Corleone and Soprano Mafia families, British playwrights of sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—Caravaggio's contemporaries and near-contemporaries—mined Italian street life and exaggerated the sad histories of Italy's spectacularly dysfunctional and incestuous noble families for the plots of their gory dramas. Many of the revenge tragedies written by Tourneur, Webster, and Ford—plays that ended with the stage littered with corpses, the victims of poisonings, stabbings, swordfights, and garrotings—were set in Italy or on occasion in Spain, anyplace where a tempestuous Southern temperament and a Latin lack of impulse control could be guaranteed to satisfy the audience's taste for dashing swordplay and for ingeniously plotted (poison might be concealed in the pages of a Bible or in a bouquet of flowers) and cold-blooded murder. Indeed, the violent incident that initiates the dramatic action in
Romeo and Juliet
—the eruption of a street fight that ends in the death of Juliet's cousin and Romeo's banishment from Verona—was very much like the lethal brawl that forced Caravaggio to leave Rome.

Belligerent, contemptuous, competitive, Michelangelo Merisi would soon be drawn into the whirlwind of insults, attacks, retaliations, and vendettas that passed for nightlife in the Campo Marzio, the raffish neighborhood in which many artists, including Caravaggio, lived. And yet he somehow managed to stay out of trouble with the law until close to the end of the century. In the meantime, he had a career to begin and attend to. For one of the most remarkable things about Caravaggio was that, even when his private life was at its most chaotic and disordered, nothing (or almost nothing) prevented him from painting. While a number of his colleagues were famous for the extent to which they delayed and procrastinated, carousing in the taverns when their commissions were months overdue, Caravaggio generally succeeded in finishing his assignments on time.

New in Rome, living “without lodgings and without provisions,” he resisted the siren song of the sword and the street. He did what his contract with Simone Peterzano had promised he would be qualified for: He found work as a painter.

 

Despite the poverty, disease, and crime that were the daily lot of so many Roman citizens, it was not an inauspicious moment for an ambitious and gifted young artist seeking to make his mark in the capital. From a purely economic standpoint, the scores of new palaces and churches under construction meant that someone would have to be hired to paint and decorate them. Moreover, it was widely agreed—though of course not by the established painters—that art had grown tired, that the static formality and the conventions of high mannerism could use some revitalizing infusion of originality and passion. Important collectors complained publicly about the paucity of genuine talent.

Pope Clement VIII's ascension brought some measure of stability to the city. Previously the brief reigns of three short-lived popes had done little to control the sudden resurgence of banditry and crime. Flanked by his two nephews, Pietro and Cinzio Aldobrandini, who would become his closest advisers, Clement VIII—known for his asceticism and for the copious tears he shed during religious services—indulged his interest in philosophy, science, and literature. Under the auspices of Cinzio Aldobrandini, the famous poet Torquato Tasso was invited to Rome, where he remained to work on his epic,
Gerusalemme Liberata
.

Caravaggio's entry into the higher echelons of Roman social and cultural life was not nearly so seamless or smooth. Penniless, dependent on the hospitality of strangers, he moved frequently from cheap inns to spare rooms in the homes of acquaintances of his father's former employer and of his uncle, a church official. His departures rarely featured fond farewells and warm invitations to return. For a while, he stayed in the Palazzo Colonna, with Monsignor Pandolfo Pucci, a steward in the household of the sister of the former pope, Sixtus V. But Pucci forced the proud young artist to do work that he found degrading, and to make knockoff copies of devotional paintings. In addition, he nearly starved him on a frugal diet, so that later Caravaggio referred to Pucci as
Monsignor Insalata
.