A Name in Blood (2 page)

The Calling
portrayed five men at a table. Three youngsters wore showy doublets and cockaded hats; the other two were grey-haired. A plain room, its walls dun-coloured; one window, dirty
and lightless. But from the right, where a vivid sun illuminated the chapel itself, a shaft of warm yellow and brown tones angled as if cast through a high window into a basement. Just beneath that
soft beam, obscured by shadow, his hand reaching out to call his future disciple, the bearded face of Jesus.

‘What a brilliant stroke,’ Scipione said, ‘that Our Lord should be displaced from his usual position at the shining centre of the composition.’

‘And yet He still dominates the painting.’

‘Quite so, del Monte. The meaning of the work isn’t forced upon us by bright skies and radiant angels. We must search. Like St Matthew himself. Search within ourselves.’
Scipione pointed at one of the seated figures who seemed to be gesturing towards himself, questioning whether it was he whom Christ was calling.

‘When these were delivered to San Luigi five years ago,’ del Monte said, ‘I knew they’d transform painting forever. In any church in Rome now, you’ll see that every
new work of art is either a copy of Caravaggio’s style by one of his admirers or an angry rejection of it by someone who wants to stick to the manner of the last half-century. Caravaggio is
present in every work these days, whether painters admit it or not.’

He snapped his fingers. A manservant came from the rear of the church in del Monte’s turquoise livery, bowing low. ‘Command Maestro Caravaggio’s presence. I will receive him at
my gallery.’

‘Yes, my Lord.’ The manservant genuflected towards the altar and went into the piazza at a trot.

‘He paints without any of the usual preparation, you know,’ del Monte said. ‘No sketches. He works directly onto the canvas from life – from the models he positions in
his studio.’

‘The moment is simply captured.’ Scipione rolled his fingers across each other, like a thief limbering up to pick a pocket. ‘As Jesus passed forth from thence, He saw a man
named Matthew sitting at the customs house: And He said to him, “Follow me.” And he arose, and followed Him.’

Del Monte watched Scipione’s face transform with each detail he noticed on the painting, moving from perplexity to understanding and admiration.

‘Look here, do you see?’ Scipione touched del Monte’s sleeve. ‘It’s as though when Our Lord lifts his hand everyone holds their breath. It’s truly
alive.’

The two cardinals left San Luigi, their footmen going before them to part the crowd of Romans passing between the Piazza Navona and Santa Maria Rotonda, the church inserted within Emperor
Hadrian’s great Pantheon. They crossed the street to del Monte’s palace, named after the illegitimate daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor who had been known as the ‘Madama’.
They climbed the broad stairway.

Scipione paused at the landing so that he might recover his breath. ‘This painter didn’t train in the town of Caravaggio, I’m sure. I’ve been up that way. It’s a
backwater good only for producing the silk in my underwear.’

Del Monte measured his step to the younger man’s laboured ascent. They reached the floor where he kept his private apartments. ‘He apprenticed with Maestro Peterzano in
Milan.’

‘Milan, now I see it. You can find something in his work of other great artists of that region. I’m thinking of Savoldo’s use of light and dark. But an artist has to come to
Rome to make anything of his career.’

Del Monte inclined his head.
Come to you, you mean.
‘It wasn’t merely the grey skies of the north that compelled Maestro Caravaggio to quit Milan.’

Scipione opened his palm, questioning.

‘It was something to do with a whore disfigured and the wounding of her jealous lover, who also happened to be a policeman,’ del Monte said.

Scipione’s shrug indicated that such circumstances neither surprised nor perturbed him.

‘When he came to live at this palace,’ del Monte said, ‘Caravaggio was just a Milanese neckbreaker. In some ways he still is. His work changes more than he personally seems to
do. There’s something sweet and spiritual in his depths, and it’s there that he finds his art.’

‘He came directly to you when he arrived in Rome?’

‘He stayed for a time with a priest who kept him as a favour to his patrons in the Colonna family.’

Scipione’s eyes became distant. Del Monte saw that the Cardinal-Nephew was reckoning Caravaggio’s place in the calculus of influence and domain that a man in his position maintained
at all times. The Colonnas were among the most powerful of Roman families.

‘I see.’ Scipione’s movements slowed, as though he needed all his functions to estimate the political advantages he might contrive through the artist.

‘He came to me a decade or more past,’ del Monte said. ‘I gave him a room and a studio, and a place at table with the musicians and men of science who live at my
pleasure.’

‘The Tuscan embassy under your direction is renowned as a place of art and of reason par excellence. Does Caravaggio have no other protector?’

Del Monte barely restrained his smile.
He wants to know who else he must brush aside to take possession of Caravaggio? This man’s in even more of a hurry than I expected.
‘The
Mattei family has commissioned some works.’

Scipione’s arithmetic of prominence and prestige seemed to spread across his features as though he sketched out its equations in fresco. ‘Cardinal Mattei is—?’ He rolled
his wrist to suggest the question, as if it would be indelicate to speak it.

‘Not an art lover. But his brothers are great admirers of Caravaggio and are inclined to spend money on pleasures the honourable cardinal denies himself.’ Del Monte waited as
Scipione assessed the connections he might cement with the gift of a painting or whose gallery he might raid to sequestrate one of Caravaggio’s works.

I’ll allow him to discover for himself just how many other links Caravaggio has built in a dozen years here
, del Monte thought. Soon enough Scipione would learn about the
commissions from Marchese Giustiniani, from the banker Don Ottavio Costa, from Monsignor Barberini whom many believed would be pope one day. As for the works in the collection of the Lady Olimpia
Aldobrandini, he thought it best they remain unspoken. She was the niece of old Pope Clement, whose family Scipione was engaged in denuding of all influence and wealth now that his uncle controlled
the Vatican. ‘In spite of his range of admirers, Maestro Caravaggio has remained under my ultimate protection.’

Scipione twitched his moustache, as though deriding the value of such security as del Monte afforded the artist. ‘He needs you to vouch for him when he’s arrested and thrown drunk
into the Tor di Nona, I’ll wager.’

‘He has been known to call upon my guardianship on such occasions. As you said, these artists are rough sorts. His work, however, is incomparable.’ They came to the top of the
staircase. ‘My own collection is through here,’ del Monte said. ‘It includes seven canvases by our Maestro Michelangelo of Caravaggio. Please, Your Illustriousness, this
way.’

He drew Scipione into a wide gallery. The walls were hung almost to the ceiling with paintings. The best were at eye level, hidden behind green curtains to protect them from sunshine and fly
droppings. The cardinals crossed the room. Del Monte took hold of a yellow brocade cord to draw back one of the curtains.

A young maid scrubbed beeswax into the terracotta tiles of the palace as a man in his mid-thirties came to the head of the stairs. She sat back on her heels, wiped her forehead
and tucked a strand of red-brown hair behind her ear. Her features brooded with a resentment and resignation the man recognized well from his years living in the palaces of wealthy patrons, though
he sensed it wasn’t yet of the kind that betokened bitterness and collapse. From her olive skin, her sharp jet eyebrows and angular nose, he assumed she was from the south, where the people
were descended from early Greek settlers of the Italian peninsula. Grime darkened her hands. Each fingernail was framed by a black halo of dirt.

A statue of Hercules dug out of the Roman Forum guarded the head of the stairs. The man threw the end of his short black cloak over his shoulder and leaned against the stone figure. The habitual
set of his face was hostile, forceful and proud, so that when he smiled at her he saw that the girl hadn’t imagined it was possible for such features to allow themselves repose or gaiety. His
teeth were white between his black moustache and goatee. He took up a heroic stance at Hercules’s shoulder, ran his hand through his longish, wavy black hair, cleared his throat, and mimicked
the pagan god’s noble gaze.

‘How do I look?’ he said.

The girl laughed.

‘Who cuts the better figure? Me or this fellow?’ He tapped the statue’s muscular upper arm. ‘Come on, he’s been underground for fifteen hundred years. Surely I
don’t look so bad?’

‘You
do
look a bit sick, though.’

‘Yes, well, I was out late with the notable architect Maestro Onorio Longhi, dear girl, and much fun it was.’ He touched the tip of his moustache with his tongue and rubbed at the
pitted stone of Hercules’s hand. ‘Poor fellow, his limbs of ancient marble forbid him to reach out and caress the beauty before him.’

‘That’s a shame.’

His brows drew down over eyes of glowing brown, Indian red lightened with the warmth of russet, and he stepped towards her. ‘But I am no hero on a pedestal. I may touch.’

He bent his knees to crouch beside her, smelled the wax on her hands and the old sweat in her rough workdress, which she had tucked up at the side so that she might kneel. She regarded him with
neither the stupid incomprehension of an ordinary serving girl nor the lascivious complicity of the whores at the Tavern of the Moor. In her eyes he saw a quiet beauty of such calm that he briefly
forgot the seduction upon which he had embarked and wondered what to say next.

A footman came into the corridor and cleared his throat. ‘Maestro Caravaggio, His Illustriousness awaits your pleasure in the gallery.’

‘My pleasure.’ The man recovered his playfulness and winked at the girl. ‘
My
pleasure.’

She dabbed her brush in the beeswax. He watched her face a moment more. It was a little too wide, but her jaw was fine and it tapered to a chin of great delicacy.

Without looking up, she sensed his gaze and smiled. ‘I’ve work to do. Go and study His Illustriousness instead.’

He crossed the tiles, gleaming with the results of her earlier labours. As he entered the cardinal’s chambers he glanced back at her. The soles of her bare feet were turned upward as she
leaned forward on the brush. They were soiled in such striations of black, brown and grey that he could taste the dirt on his tongue.

Since Caravaggio’s last summons to the gallery in the Madama Palace, del Monte had expanded his collection. A spasmodic Francis of Assisi now adorned the wall beside a
version of the same saint by Caravaggio. Across the room an unfamiliar face turned to him, a cardinal, flattening his hand in expectation of a flunkey’s kiss. But Caravaggio’s eyes were
drawn to the new work. The saint’s head was thrown back, his eyes rolled up into his skull. His clumsy, stubby fingers splayed out. He seemed to be in the midst of a fit of the falling
sickness, rather than the ecstasy he was supposed to be experiencing. A fat cherub gestured towards a crown of thorns, though how he expected the saint to look at it in his present state was beyond
Caravaggio. It was just the kind of nonsensical gesture he hated to see on canvas. That it should hang at the side of his own Francis appalled him.
His
saint was breathless, gashed in his
side with the stigmata, cradled by an angel who shared Francis’s transport of divine love.

‘You’ve noticed my new acquisition from the studio of Maestro Baglione,’ del Monte said. ‘It’s exquisite, isn’t it?’

Caravaggio gave a low, scornful laugh.
I might’ve known this would be that fool Baglione’s work
, he thought. It had become hard to tell which of Rome’s artists had
executed any given imitation of his art, so many of them had committed themselves to thieving his style. None of them knew what was behind his use of light and shadow, his work with mirrors and
lenses, the choice of models from among his poorest acquaintances. To other painters, they were just a bag of tricks to make pretty decoration. Men like Baglione failed to see that what Caravaggio
did was profound – that he took the things everyone had seen countless times, the bar-room cheats and pretty boys on the make, the martyred saints and even the Lord Jesus, and he made people
see them as if for the first time.