A Name in Blood (15 page)

‘Quite a cry of horror. I often evoke that reaction, Maestro Caravaggio. But do calm down,’ he said.

Caravaggio swung his legs off the bed.

‘Stay as you are.’ Scipione gave his hand for a kiss. He wrinkled his nose and pulled his arm back after the briefest of touches. ‘My dear, you are a mess.’

‘I fell down some stairs. I hurt myself on my own sword . . .’

Scipione sucked in his breath. ‘I’m not investigating you, Caravaggio. ’

‘Yes, Your Illustriousness.’

Scipione sat carefully, as though he didn’t trust the chairs in a commoner’s house. ‘It wasn’t many days ago that I told you not to make trouble with the Tomassoni
boys.’

‘Yes, Your Illustriousness.’

‘I remind you that the head of the Tomassoni family is the chief of the guards at Castel Sant’Angelo. In times of trouble, that castle is the refuge of the Holy Father. That means
Tomassoni is someone on whom the Holy Father himself must depend.’

Caravaggio winced, lifted a hand to his throat.

‘If the Holy Father were to go to Castel Sant’Angelo and find the doors barred or the guard –’ Scipione brushed his moustache with his thumb ‘– unwelcoming,
it would be a catastrophe for all Christians.’

‘I’m always deeply indebted to the Holy Father and to Your Illustrious Lordship.’

The cardinal steepled his plump fingers. ‘I dined at Cardinal del Monte’s palace last night. I conversed with a man of science who informed me that humans are the only species that
carries on vendettas. I thought of you.’

Naturally.

‘Vendetta, it seems, is the thing that distinguishes us from the animals,’ Scipione went on.

‘And belief in the true God, My Lord.’

‘There’re many who don’t share that belief, and of course they shall die like animals. But you’re making fun of me. Don’t. Your conflict with Ranuccio is human. I
ask you to be a little divine – to rise above it.’

‘Are you never vengeful, Your Illustriousness?’

‘Don’t compare yourself to me. In my case, vengeance
is
divine. It has the sanction of the Holy Father.’ Scipione stretched to touch Caravaggio’s arm.
‘I’m trying to help you with the issue of Don Fabrizio Sforza Colonna. I wish to show you my regard, as your patron. I wish to secure the happiness of the Marchesa Costanza
Colonna.’

Caravaggio would have taken the cardinal’s hand and kissed it, but Scipione restrained him with surprisingly easy force. He was stronger than he looked.

‘I have to buy off the Farnese to get them to overlook the killing of their cousin by Don Fabrizio. It doesn’t help me to have you brawling in their courtyard.’

‘There were a lot of men there. Not just me.’

‘I have no dealings with those other fools. Whereas from you I have commissioned a picture – of the Holy Father. And I wish to have more.’

‘But Tomassoni impugns my honour and—’

Scipione’s tone went in one moment from his customary languid smoothness into the high-pitched frenzy of a thwarted child. ‘You’re my man, damn it. Behave like one on whom I
can rely.’

He rose from the chair, listened to its joints creaking back into place. He went to the door. ‘When you’ve recovered, go and see the family of Cavalletti the merchant, may his soul
rest in peace. They’ve bought a chapel in his memory at Sant’Agostino.’

Scipione went down the stairs. He was out of sight when he added, ‘They want a Madonna.’

‘From me?’

‘From Scipione’s man.’

The house where the Virgin had heard she would bear the son of God arrived from Nazareth in the time of the Crusades. Angels bore it away from the threat of destruction at the
hands of the Mohammedans. They set it down in Loreto, a town in the Marches overlooking the Adriatic. Many great artists painted the transport of the Holy House through the skies, always showing
Maria alongside her old home, flying with the seraphim. In his will, the merchant Cavalletti left a bequest for an altarpiece, an image of the Madonna of Loreto.

The merchant’s brother-in-law, Girolamo de’Rossi, held the contract towards Caravaggio.

‘I won’t paint the Madonna flying like a bird, you know,’ the artist said.

De’Rossi rubbed the sheet of paper between his thumb and forefinger. ‘I could ask Maestro Baglione to do it.’

‘Baglione will certainly give you a Virgin no one can believe in.’

‘Do you mean you don’t take the miracle of the Holy House seriously?’

‘I take everything seriously. But I’m not like any other artist. That’s why I’ve gained such a reputation.’

De’Rossi tried to smile.

‘Don’t worry, Signore.’ Caravaggio took the contract. ‘I believe in the Madonna. When I paint her, I’ll be in her very presence.’

He leaned over the table, took the quill, and signed.

Lena stood on a box with her sister’s boy on her hip. Caravaggio brought in a pair of old beggars he had hired on the street outside the Tavern of the Moor and had them
kneel in supplication.

‘You’re bathing the boy and someone calls you to the door, Lena. You want to get back to the bath, but you also feel compassion for these simple pilgrims before you. Look into their
faces.’

‘That’s how it was when you came along to my house the first time,’ she said. ‘But aren’t I supposed to be the Virgin?’

‘Don’t try to imagine how the Virgin would behave.’ He knelt behind the beggars. ‘Look at them, Lena. I want to know what
you
feel when you see them.’

‘They seem like good, old people.’

‘They walked all the way from their home to see you, endured robbery and hunger – just to look into your face. Would you turn away?’

‘No. Except I remember that Domenico started to feel a bit cold.’

‘Right, the Virgin wouldn’t forget the child either. So swing a little on your toes just as you are, because you’re thinking of the boy and that you need to get away. But look
into their faces too.’

She let her chin rest almost on her shoulder, shy of the responsibility he gave her to be a channel for the Virgin, yet filled with pity for the beggars.

He stepped back to his booth, slipped inside the black curtain, and saw the projection of his models on the canvas. He dragged the easel forward to make the image sharper. When he had them in
focus, the figures were vivid before him. A flurry of joy made him clench his fists and bite at his lip. The painting wouldn’t be done for months, but here he had already seen it.

In the reddish brown ground he had laid over the canvas, he took the handle of a brush and carved the positions of his models. The old man’s dirty feet pushing out towards the viewer; the
beggar woman’s cheekbone, sharp from age and hunger; the child’s hand gripping the crimson velvet of the dress Caravaggio had bought for his Madonna; Lena’s foot, arched on her
toes, and the line of the collarbone where her chin reached down.

A few more cuts into the underpaint to mark the models’ positions, and he left the booth. He chalked around Lena’s feet so he would know where she was to stand for his next session,
and did the same each side of the old people’s knees. Then he let the child go to the courtyard to play with the beggars, while he built the skin tone of Lena’s face and shadowed her
nose and eyes. After a while he heard a small groan. ‘Your neck aches?’

She smiled. ‘Yes. Can I have a look?’

‘There’s nothing much to see yet.’

She swayed at her hips. ‘What does the Holy House of Loreto look like?’

‘It looks like your house.’

She turned her head to the side, smiling and wary, expecting some trick. He watched her image where it was projected onto his canvas. He wanted to bring her inside the curtain.
Where no one
would see us. Except my Madonna.

‘You’re the Virgin. You live exactly where you live. Right down to the plaster falling away from the wall and the chips in the doorframe,’ he said. ‘It’s the place
where Christ grew up. Do you think he lived in a palace? Or a church? Was he a prince?’

‘He was a carpenter.’

‘Where do carpenters live? In the Quirinale Palace?’

‘There’s one on our street.’

He put down his brush and his palette and came to her. He took her hands. She rubbed at the oils in his palm with her fingertips. He caught his breath.
This is how it’d feel to receive
a message from Heaven. It wouldn’t be in Italian or Latin. It’d come as a sensation and you’d comprehend it instantly. The same way I feel before a great work of art. I
sense
everything, before I
know
it.

He folded back the curtain so that the basic elements of the composition were visible to her on the canvas. ‘I’m not doing this painting the way others have done the Madonna of
Loreto. I don’t want people to say, “Ah, the Virgin can fly and, oh, what a nice house she had.” I want them to know all the purity of the Madonna’s soul and to be filled
with the love she gave the world through her son.’ He came closer to her. There was expectation on her face.
She knows what I’m going to say. She feels the same thing.
She’s
with
me.
‘To paint such a thing, I must feel those emotions. And I do feel them. Because I love you.’

Lena’s eyes flickered between the image of herself on the canvas, incomplete and still, and the animated face of the man beside her.

‘If I ever paint anything worth looking at again, it’ll be because I’m thinking of you.’

She lowered her glance and let her shoulder touch his. ‘But I’m not, you know . . . There’ve been one or two gentlemen . . .’

‘I didn’t say that you
are
the Virgin.’ He raised her chin with one finger. ‘I see the idea of her in you, and you make that idea real. Without you, she
doesn’t exist.’

He touched her mouth with his lips.

Del Monte watched him highlight the edge of the dirty step on which the Virgin twirled with her child. The cardinal lifted his beret and scratched his scalp.

‘Baglione and the Academy won’t like it,’ he said.

‘I’d cut it to shreds with my dagger if they did.’ Caravaggio leaned close to the canvas.

Del Monte took in the whole painting, as tall as two men. ‘It’s magnificent,’ he murmured.

‘But?’

‘The Church has guidelines for the portrayal of religious subjects.’

‘Since when did
you
care about such things?’

‘Don’t misunderstand me. Some say I may one day be Pope – but I prize art as the greatest reflection of God’s light on earth.’

Caravaggio put his brush crosswise between his teeth so that he could take another from a pot at the foot of his easel. ‘So?’

‘Your Madonna has dirty toenails, Michele. Her skin has some flaws around the eyes. The Holy House, on which successive popes have expended enormous sums, is portrayed here as a slum
dwelling.’

‘Christ was a poor man.’

‘But the Holy Father is not.’

Caravaggio stretched his back. He kept his eyes on his last few strokes of paint, assessing them.

‘If Our Virgin Lady lives in poverty, Michele, why should anyone venerate a rich man who wears expensive robes and pads around his palace in red slippers?’ Del Monte examined the
painting, his face aglow with an admiration no doctrinal quibbles could suppress. ‘Will you at least give her a halo?’