A Name in Blood (18 page)

The abbot of the Carmelite monastery pushed his hands into the sleeves of his cassock. ‘No beautiful ideas?’

‘Caravaggio depicts only the surface appearance of things.’ Baglione ran his disapproving glance over
The Death of the Virgin
. ‘My dear Father Abbot, what should be
shown in the death of Our Lady Maria? The corpse of a woman whose soul has left her?’

‘Not at all. She should be filled with grace.’

‘Because?’

‘Because she’s ascending to heaven. Lifted by a force beyond life and death.’

‘You’re right, of course. Her glorious assumption of the mantle of heaven.’

‘Though one might add that the Church has yet to rule on whether the Madonna died before her ascension, or if she was transported while still living.’

Baglione looked displeased. He touched the ends of his moustache. ‘Would the apostles stand around the cadaver of a bloated whore?’

The abbot swivelled towards the nave of the church. A few dozen people had come over the river to Trastevere to see Santa Maria della Scala’s newest artwork. It was only a day since it had
been hung. The abbot thought it a most impressive depiction, but Maestro Baglione didn’t agree. Recognizing the noted painter, the onlookers edged closer to hear his opinion. The abbot
thought Baglione was vain and pompous, even compared to other artists into whose company he was occasionally thrown by his duty to maintain the frescos and statues in his church. But Baglione had
received commissions from the Vatican. If he condemned a painting, it might cause trouble with the monastery’s patrons and endanger all the good work of his monks.

‘I’m not an expert on art, Maestro Baglione.’ The abbot hesitated. He couldn’t simply reject the work. That might offend the Cardinal-Nephew. Scipione had engineered the
commission for Caravaggio.

The artist arched his brow. ‘Go on.’

‘Your theological points are worthily made, too.’ The abbot bit at the corner of his lip.

‘Indeed.’ Baglione advanced to within a few feet of the canvas. He gestured towards the dark spaces around the Virgin. ‘See how Caravaggio cloaks all his mistakes in
shadow?’

‘Mistakes?’

‘There are many, here in the details.’ Baglione rose on his toes, as if he had just uncovered one more flaw in the painting. ‘The model, by the way, is a girl from the Evil
Garden who is his –’ Baglione lowered his voice, but his hiss was loud enough to draw a shocked breath from the eavesdroppers behind the abbot ‘– his whore, a fallen woman
to whom he is unmarried, though she recently carried his child.’

The abbot dropped down the single step beside the altar as if he had been shoved.

‘One of our great theologians wrote that prostitution serves the good of the public as do sewers, did he not, dear Father Abbot? It’s a conduit for wicked impulses which would
otherwise pollute respectable women.’

‘Yes, yes, I know the passage from Aquinas.’

Baglione acknowledged the crowd that had gathered now beneath the painting, solemnly inviting them to join him in righteous indignation. ‘I never thought to find that one of our holy
churches would be the cesspool into which such a sewer might deposit its filth.’

The abbot scratched his thin arms. He had brought a harlot into his church. He had befouled the house of God.

Something struck at his shoulder and clasped it. He moaned. Was divine vengeance already come down upon him? Quaking, he turned towards the altar and retribution. But it was Baglione, pinching
him with his gloved hand.

The abbot stammered, ‘Help me, Maestro Baglione.’

Del Monte scented himself with ambergris from the stomach of a sperm whale to counter the anticipated reek of the tavern on Caravaggio. He regretted what he had to tell him. He
had seen the sorrowing soul of his old protégé in every inch of
The Death of the Virgin
. That Holy Mother would never rise to glory beside Her Son; she was dead, and those
around her grieved like people without faith.
When will he be here?
the cardinal wondered.
How many inns can there be for my footmen to search?
He dabbed a few extra spots of the
scent along his lace collar and inhaled.

Caravaggio entered the study and weaved across the floor. It was evident that it cost him some effort to stay upright. His knee-length pantaloons were dusted with the lime innkeepers spread in
their privies. Olive oil and gravy smeared his doublet. His whole body pulsated with tiny, seemingly uncontrollable motions. Yet his jaw was clamped so tight that del Monte thought he might hear
the man’s teeth creaking like the boards of a ship in a storm. He caught a whiff of sweat as Caravaggio bent to kiss his ring. He inclined his nose to the ambergris on his collar.

‘I’m sorry to tell you that the Shoeless Fathers have rejected your painting, Maestro Caravaggio,’ he said.

Caravaggio grimaced and swayed. ‘Fine.’ He slurred even this briefest of utterances.

‘Maestro Baglione . . .’

A mumbled curse.

‘Maestro Baglione has been heard to say that you cover up your mistakes with shadows.’

A snort of contempt, his fist tight around the hilt of his sword.
He used to have a servant to carry that for him, like a gentleman
, del Monte thought.
Now he wears it, as if at any
moment he means to use it.

‘Cardinal Scipione has requested that I find a buyer for the rejected painting.’

‘Yeah?’ The artist’s lips barely moved.

I wonder he doesn’t belch at me
. ‘I’ve some hopes of the Flemish fellow Rubens, who’s acting as agent for the Duke of Mantua in certain purchases. He’s an
admirer of yours.’

To that, only a shrug and a queasy gulp, as if Caravaggio strove not to vomit in the cardinal’s study. Del Monte pursed his lips.
At least he still has that much respect for me.

‘Michele, you understand the seriousness of what has happened?’

‘You mean the pregnant whore thing?’

‘Exactly.’

‘She’s not a whore. She’s not pregnant either. Not any more.’

‘The Carmelites – encouraged by certain artists – suggest that it would’ve been more appropriate to depict the Virgin carried heavenward by angels.’

‘When I see people flying, it’s usually because I’ve been too long in the tavern.’ Caravaggio stretched out his arms, flapped them and let them fall. His smile was
forlorn.

‘For heaven’s sake, even Maestro Carracci painted the Virgin’s death as a joyful moment.’

‘I expect he regrets it. Anyway, Annibale’s good, but he’s not me.’

He has withdrawn from me before
, del Monte thought,
but never like this.
Caravaggio was shut away behind this roughhouse façade, as if he were locked up with a courtesan for
the weekend. Everything he painted aroused controversy – criticism of his work couldn’t be the only cause of this conduct.
It must be that girl.
‘The art in our churches is
not for our amusement. It’s supposed to be inspiring. If you don’t paint the Virgin ascending mystically into the sky, the worshippers at the church may fail to believe that it
happened.’

‘The body doesn’t ascend. Haven’t you heard about such a thing as a soul? That’s what goes to heaven.’ Caravaggio closed his eyes, looking inward. He opened them
suddenly, seeming to panic, scanning the room as if he feared his spirit had stolen away while he spoke. ‘What’s left is a bag of bones.’

Del Monte considered that Caravaggio may have deliberately presented himself in this condition, almost like a corpse, the living example of what he wanted people to see in
The Death of the
Virgin.
A body, abused and wasting, meaning nothing, and a soul that made of itself the purest art.

‘I have, indeed, heard of the soul,’ the cardinal said. ‘I very much fear for yours.’

At the Colonna palace, Caravaggio crossed the secret garden on a path of stone chips. The early sun evaporated the night’s damp in wisps of vapour from the mossy side of
the pines. A grove of mandarin trees made the air fragrant and spotted the stark light with bright winter fruit. His mouth dry from the last night’s wine, he craved their sweetness. But in
the palace some servant would be spying. He didn’t want to embarrass the Marchesa by picking the prince’s produce. Her man must be well behaved.
Here, at least
, he thought.

Costanza Colonna rose from a granite table set among the mandarins. She wore a dark scarf bound across her head, arranged a fraction above her hairline so that a few delicate curls might
protrude onto her brow. In front of her belly she held a flea fur, the pelt of a pine marten intended to lure vermin from her body.

She lifted her chin clear of the ruff at her neck and beckoned to Caravaggio. He kissed her hand, found it cold and, with a grin, rubbed her knuckles with his thumb to warm them. ‘My lady,
what news of Don Fabrizio?’

Her face floated insubstantially in the flat light.
Like the Virgin the Shoeless Fathers would’ve preferred me to paint
.

‘I grieve as if my son were dead already, Michele,’ she whispered.

‘My lady, I pray you don’t. I’ve spoken of Fabrizio to His Illustriousness, the Cardinal-Nephew.’

‘Does the Cardinal-Nephew give you hope?’

‘It’s complicated. The fight between the Colonnas and the Farneses . . . You know.’

‘He’s waiting to see who wins?’

Caravaggio touched the hilt of his sword. The sweetness of the mandarins on the air made him bilious now. He wanted a drink to settle his stomach.

‘I must trust that the Colonna will win, for my son’s sake,’ Costanza said. ‘But who’ll win the battle over your new work, Michele, now that the Carmelites have
decided it isn’t their kind of Virgin?’ She wrung her hands, her features taut and troubled.

‘Is it
your
kind of Virgin, my lady?’

Beneath its attempt at blitheness, his voice revealed a grim longing. Costanza frowned. He tried to reassure her with a smile, but he could only simper, his mouth bitter and crooked.

It was she who had set him on the path to art, when she observed him watching the painters fresco her hall in Caravaggio. He knew that she had recognized some light in his face that was
illuminated only then. He remembered the sensation of the brush in his hand as the master of the fresco had given him a chance to lay in some burnt umber and Indian red, for the boot of a saint.
The wooden brush handle had felt so natural in the crook of his thumb and index finger that it had seemed he had been cut from the same tree.

Costanza had come forward with Fabrizio and her eldest son Muzio, and the fresco master had pretended only then to notice her.

‘Your son is a natural painter,’ the master had said.

‘He’s not her son, you fool,’ Muzio had snapped.

The brush had shaken in Michele’s hand. The master, who had hoped to gain the lady’s favour by indulging her child, had glared at him, as though he had told a lie.

‘But he’s a natural artist, nonetheless,’ Costanza had said.

‘It looks just like a real boot, Michele.’ Fabrizio had crouched beside him. ‘It’s wonderful.’

Costanza had decided that he ought to be apprenticed to a painter in Milan. Michele had been seven years in Costanza’s house and he was fourteen years old. He couldn’t deny that the
career of an artist was an attractive prospect or that she had been generous in paying Maestro Peterzano in Milan to oversee him. But throughout his training, he had wished to be home with her and
Fabrizio. He had thought he might return as the steward of her household when he grew up. Yet that would have been to take the formal role of a servant, to confirm him in the lower status with
which Muzio taunted him. There had seemed no way home – or, as he now saw it, no home at all. In Milan, he had wondered if Costanza had sent him away to be rid of a boy she no longer wanted
in her house. He speculated that behind her warmth there was an inborn contempt for the low-bred, for the boy who had corrupted her darling Fabrizio. When he had drunk too much wine, Michele felt
confirmed in this belief. That was when he became helpless before his anger and he brawled and fought in the Milanese taverns. Costanza had sent him to Rome to escape the trouble he had caused in
Milan, but that had felt like another expulsion and he had become yet more volatile.