Authors: Matt Rees
‘He has captured something of your style, Maestro Caravaggio,’ the new cardinal said.
Don’t say it,
cazzo mio, Caravaggio told himself.
Don’t say,
‘
What the hell do you know?’ If del Monte’s taking the time to introduce you, this
must be someone important.
‘My style?’
‘Quite so.’ The cardinal’s eyes glistened in his long, soft face. ‘The light, falling on the most revealing features of the subject. The close, intense focus. The lack of
a background. This is your accustomed device, isn’t it? Upon which your reputation is founded.’
My ideas, debased for a quick judgement by a man who pretends to be a connoisseur.
Caravaggio closed his eyes.
Del Monte clapped his hands. ‘So what do you think of my new
St Francis
?’
Caravaggio muttered something behind his hand.
‘What was that?’ del Monte said.
Caravaggio threw out his arm with disdain towards the painting. ‘I said, he needs to get laid.’
Del Monte covered his smile with his hand. The other cardinal rubbed a finger along the side of his nose. ‘I, too, have heard it said of Maestro Baglione that he’s a virginal man who
doesn’t give himself to the flesh.’ He ran his hands down his front to draw attention to his cardinal’s suit of red velvet. ‘Do you have something against a life dedicated
to celibacy?’
Caravaggio had seen painted streetwalkers come bruised and stumbling out of alleys jostled by gangs of drunken Spanish soldiers and they had still looked more celibate than this cardinal.
‘A life of such renunciation is one thing for a man of the cloth. But for an artist? How can you paint skin if you’ve never touched it?’
‘You’ve painted the skin of Our Lord, as I saw at the Church of San Luigi. Have you ever touched
that
? Or are you going to tell me you’ve tasted it in the form of the
Holy Communion?’
‘Skin’s skin. Whether it’s a bag for my bones or those of Our Lord Jesus Christ – or Your Illustriousness.’
The cardinal watched him long enough to know that Caravaggio, neither embarrassed nor disconcerted, wasn’t about to drop his eyes. ‘A heretic. I see why you get on so well with this
one, del Monte.’
Caravaggio’s old patron forced a smile and bowed. ‘Maestro Caravaggio, your presence was requested here by Cardinal Borghese.’
The new pope’s nephew, the man who now runs the Vatican.
Caravaggio touched the pulse in his neck, feeling the charge of adrenaline under his fingertip, thrilled by the prospect of
impressing the most powerful art lover in Rome and shaking at the thought of how close he had come to insulting him. He fell onto one knee. With his head low, he took the smooth pale hand which
Scipione eased forward from his soutane. He brushed it with his lips. It smelled of calfskin gloves and the ambergris used to scent them.
‘The divine Michelangelo used to say of a mediocre artwork that it hurts no one,’ Scipione said. ‘May we not say so of this
St Francis
by Maestro Baglione?’
‘It hurts
me
.’
‘Michelangelo’s formulation was a way of avoiding offence. I see this isn’t one of your objectives. Before an excellent work of art, he used to say that it was painted either
by a great scoundrel or a great rascal.’ Scipione tugged on the golden cord that drew the curtain back from Caravaggio’s
Musicians
. He went close, stilling the swinging viridian
taffeta with the palm of his hand. ‘Which are you, Maestro?’
Caravaggio hadn’t seen this canvas in months. Four youths wreathed in loose white shirts or draped in sheets, their shoulders and hairless chests exposed. Del Monte had commissioned
several like this. The young artists and musicians who lived at the Madama Palace called him Cardinal Madama, because of his discreet preference for pale, yielding boys. At the front of the
composition, pretty Pedro, the castrato singer, Caravaggio’s closest friend when he had first lived in del Monte’s palace, now returned to Spain.
Over the singer’s shoulder, a self-portrait. He couldn’t bear to look at it. He had made himself appear so innocent and wan, his lips parted in a tender, sensuous moan. He found it
hard to remember a day when you could have truly read such inexperience and freshness on his face.
Perhaps once,
he thought.
With Costanza and Fabrizio Colonna. In their palace, in my
hometown
–
before they sent me away.
‘A scoundrel or a rascal?’ He hooked his thumbs into his belt. ‘That depends on the night and how old the girl is.’
‘Or the boy?’ Scipione tapped his knuckle against the swooning features of Pedro, who tuned a lute at the centre of
The Musicians
as if he were caressing a lover’s
belly. ‘Don’t you agree, del Monte?’
The older cardinal flinched.
Well, well, Scipione knows about Cardinal Madama and his little peccadillo
, Caravaggio thought.
From the way he wrinkles his lips, I’d say he shares the same predilection.
Here’s the man who heads the Inquisition, making jokes about effeminate boys, when only last week a baker was burned to death by the Holy Office in the Campo de’Fiori for buggering a
street urchin.
‘But this is my favourite, Maestro Caravaggio. Her eyes follow me even through the curtain.’ Scipione ran back the material that covered
St Catherine of Alexandria
. ‘The
face is inescapable. Bravo, bravo.’
The saint leaned against the spiked cartwheel that had been the instrument of her torture and fondled the sword that had dealt her death and martyrdom. Kneeling on a red cushion, she was encased
in a billowing black silk dress of intricate embroidery. Her hair was red-blonde and tied in braids at each side. She looked out of the canvas directly at the viewer.
Fillide.
Caravaggio
smiled to himself.
She strokes that rapier like it was the stiff member of a high-paying client.
‘Since I saw her, I’ve barely been able to think of anything else. Her gaze is mesmeric. But why doesn’t she look to heaven as the saints do in their moment of
martyrdom?’ Scipione’s voice sharpened and Caravaggio saw that, despite his air of levity, the cardinal was to be addressed with care.
‘She stares out at you, because I wished to show that your relationship with the saint is more important than her connection to heaven,’ Caravaggio said. ‘Her martyrdom
isn’t a distant suffering for which we should feel only awe. I want you to sense her anguish as your own.’
‘Mine?’
‘Surely even a cardinal—?’
‘Oh, the afflictions are many, you’re quite right. Meetings and paperwork, requests for this and that, builders who don’t keep to the construction schedule for my palace. There
are criminals who want to be pardoned and supporters of this or that holy buffoon who absolutely must be granted sainthood to secure the faith of the people in some freezing Bavarian town.’
Scipione shared a look of resignation with del Monte. ‘But is it merely your superb technique that makes the saint’s face so compelling to me, Maestro? I feel there’s something
else. Perhaps I might be acquainted with the lady.’
‘Her? The model?’
Out of Scipione’s sight, del Monte lifted a hand in warning.
‘Quite so, her,’ the Cardinal-Nephew said.
‘I doubt it, Most Illustrious and Reverend Sire.’
‘Do you? Why?’
‘She’s a whore.’
Del Monte dropped his hand and moaned.
‘Your Illustriousness would never take his pleasures with a woman.’ Caravaggio rolled his tongue through his cheek. ‘A woman such as this, I mean.’
Scipione escaped the gaze of St Catherine for long enough to turn upon Caravaggio. His sybaritic features stiffened and Caravaggio saw something vindictive and inexorable in his weepy, little eyes.
Look out, Romans
, he thought.
This one has only as long as his uncle stays alive to tax you and rob you.
He’ll waste no time about it.
The cardinal examined the painter. His focus rested on each of the small tears and worn patches in the black velvet of Caravaggio’s jacket. Scorn burned through the scanty material to the
artist’s skin.
Caravaggio scratched the back of his neck.
Be nice, Michele
.
At least, try harder.
He considered mentioning that Fillide was no cheap street whore, though she was undoubtedly too
inexpensive a companion for Scipione. The illustrious cardinal would need a more accomplished musician and singer, a girl or a boy who could improvise a rhyme when they weren’t servicing him.
In the six years since he had painted her as St Catherine, Fillide had coupled with half the priests and minor nobility of Rome, but she had added no skills to her repertoire beyond those of a
purely carnal nature.
‘I like this work, Maestro Caravaggio.’ Scipione’s voice was quiet and sharp. ‘But I don’t like the black frame. I’d change it. I like a gilded
frame.’
Caravaggio was about to say that Scipione had better commission a painting to put in the frame first, but he caught his lip.
Silence, Michele.
‘Yes, a gilded frame would do best,’ Scipione said.
‘Do you think so, Your Illustriousness?’
The unforgiving eyes again. ‘That’s what I said. So you must assume that it’s also what I think. Though I can’t say that you may be
sure
of it.’
That was the trap set by the powerful for everyone around them, and for artists in particular. An undiplomatic word spoken by a courtier could be quickly corrected, but an aberrant painting hung
in a church or on the wall of a palace was an undeniable testament to the artist’s error and vice. Painters rehashed the work of Raphael and Michelangelo, because these departed masters
protected them against accusations of dangerous, innovative thinking. But Caravaggio painted according to his heart, his reading of the Scriptures, his hope of salvation, and he painted what he saw
in the world, not what Leonardo had seen a century before. Sometimes he decided to be careful and he checked his compositions against the guidelines for painters of religious subjects set out by
the Council of Trent. But now Scipione decided if a work was orthodox or impious, to be praised or condemned. Paint a canvas that doesn’t conform to the Cardinal-Nephew’s idea of the
order of the world and an artist might forfeit more than his commission. It would be the fire for him.
Del Monte crooked his hand around Scipione’s elbow and laid an insistent palm on Caravaggio’s shoulder. He manoeuvred both men to the high window overlooking the simple façade
of the Church of San Luigi. ‘His Illustriousness the Cardinal-Nephew was most admiring of
The Calling of St Matthew
when I showed it to him this afternoon.’
Goaded by a pressure from del Monte’s hand, Caravaggio made great show of bowing, his head low over his extended leg.
His knee appeared through his stocking.
Where did that tear come from?
he thought. He had an indistinct recollection of a tumble in the street the night before.
By the tennis courts
near the Piazza Navona. Someone shoved me. A lost bet which I didn’t want to pay, that’s right. To whom do I owe the money? The gamblers at the courts aren’t inclined to forgive a
debt.
He swallowed hard, an ominous queasiness in his stomach.
Scipione was talking about
St Matthew
. It was nothing Caravaggio hadn’t heard again and again in the five years since he painted it. The sensation around his style in
Matthew
had yet to subside. He had endured many expositions from connoisseurs on the originality with which he shrouded Our Saviour in the gloom of a basement and, in doing so, illuminated him more
lustrously than all the expensive ultramarine blue on a conventional painter’s palette could have done. He had suffered just as many curses and as much haughty derision, too.
But none saw it as Caravaggio did. They all thought the light fell on the grey-bearded figure at the table, that this was Matthew the tax collector, turning his finger towards himself as if to
ask whether Christ called to him.
They had the wrong man. The finger pointed beyond the bearded fellow to a youth with his head lowered over the dark tabletop. He shuffled his coins, sullen and dissatisfied with his career. Most
of those who saw the painting looked upon this young man as a symbol of the miserable life Matthew was about to leave behind him. But all the other figures on the canvas were content that there
should be nothing more in their world than a melancholy counting-house. That despondent young man at the end of the table saw the world through a veil of unfulfilment. He was the one waiting to be
called.
Caravaggio had painted the saint in the moment before he raised his head to see the darkness lift.
It had been so for me
, he thought. These paintings were the extended hand of Christ to
his art, calling him on to his vocation. He was still following it, wondering where it would lead – just as Matthew wasn’t saved when Christ called him; the saint had to wait years,
work hard at his faith and keep the light in his sight.
Until his martyrdom.
‘The darkness, Maestro Caravaggio. Yes, the darkness.’
He felt Scipione close, the cardinal’s breath on his cheek. It was sweet, like a woman’s.
‘We’re accustomed to biblical scenes with a delightful Tuscan landscape in the background,’ Scipione went on. ‘Yet when I saw your
Matthew
, enclosed in a basement
room, I was unable to escape from the spiritual intensity of the moment. My eye had no opportunity to wander away from it into the accompanying scenery.’
Caravaggio inclined his head to show himself gratified. The slash in his hose caught his eye again.
To whom do I owe?
‘May one find spiritual intensity in any subject?’ Scipione said.
‘It depends on one’s spirit, Your Illustriousness.’
‘Quite. Well, I’m sure you’ll find whatever there is to be uncovered in his face.’
To whom do I owe?
Caravaggio looked up at Scipione. ‘His face? I beg your pardon, Your Illustriousness?’
‘I’m commissioning you to do something to fill the nice gilded frame that, I notice, made you frown even at mention of it.’