Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (11 page)

The presence of nobility at the nuptials of the Merisi family turns out to have had precious little to do with Caravaggio’s father. Fermo Merisi was just an ordinary stonemason, perhaps reasonably well off but with no great social pretensions. He was certainly
not
an architect. In a number of documents relating to him he is referred to as a
mastro
, designating him as a qualified artisan with the right to set up his own workshop and hire apprentices. He ran this modest business in Milan. His probate inventory lists ‘some old iron mason’s tools’, but does not include any books or instruments that would indicate a knowledge of the theoretical aspects of architecture. His retention of an independent workshop makes it unlikely that he was in the direct employ of the Marchese di Caravaggio. Caravaggio’s paternal grandfather, Bernardino Merisi, was himself no higher up the social scale. He too had run a small business. He was a wine merchant and vintner based at the family home in Porta Seriola, in the north-east quarter of Caravaggio.

There were in fact close links between Caravaggio’s family and the noble Colonna dynasty, but all on the side of the painter’s mother.
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Her father, Giovan Giacomo Aratori, was an
agrimensor
, or ‘surveyor’, whose job it was to help resolve disputes over land ownership. He was also involved in buying and selling land. His work brought him directly into contact with the Colonna, who owned much property in the region. Whereas Caravaggio’s father and paternal grandfather worked with their hands, Giovan Giacomo was a professional rather than an artisan. His work required more literacy than that of a mason, as well as a knowledge of geometry and arithmetic. In 1570, a year before the birth of his grandson, the future painter, he was made a member of the college of land surveyors of the Duchy of Milan.

Giovan Giacomo Aratori also played his part in the religious life of Caravaggio. The most celebrated event in the history of this sleepy little agricultural town had occurred in 1432, when a peasant girl working in the fields was reputed to have had a vision of the Virgin Mary. According to legend a freshwater spring had miraculously gushed from the spot where she experienced her vision, and a shrine had been subsequently erected to the honour of the wonder-working ‘Madonna della Fontana’. By the second half of the sixteenth century, the shrine of Santa Maria della Fontana had become the most significant religious institution in Caravaggio. It was administered by a body of
scolari
, to which Giovan Giacomo was elected at various times from the mid 1560s onwards.

In addition, he held important positions in the local
comune
, as councillor, treasurer and emissary to the Spanish authorities (the Duchy of Milan, including the town of Caravaggio, was at that time part of the vast Habsburg empire, controlled by Philip II of Spain from the Escorial, his palace and monastery outside Madrid). Giovan Giacomo’s many responsibilities meant that he was a familiar figure among the local nobility. He acted directly as an agent for the Marchese Francesco Sforza I di Caravaggio, served as a legal witness for the Sforza family and collected rents on their behalf. Some documents connect him directly to the marchese, others to the marchese’s wife, Costanza Colonna.

There were yet more intimate links between the Colonna family
and the Aratori clan. Giovan Giacomo’s daughter Margherita, Caravag
gio’s maternal aunt, was wet-nurse to the Sforza children. She lived in the Colonna household for many years and breastfed Costanza Colonna’s sons, including the future adventurer and sometime mili
tant Knight of the Order of St John, Fabrizio Sforza Colonna. In 1584,
as a reward for her service, Costanza gave Margherita a small estate in Fara d’Adda, near the town of Caravaggio. As late as 1601 Margherita was still in regular touch with the marchesa, writing letters to her in Rome – at a time when Caravaggio, elsewhere in the city, was receiving some of his most important commissions.

Costanza Colonna would be called on many times by Caravaggio. Always she would respond. She would be a constant support to him in times of crisis, giving him shelter when he was on the run and shielding him when he was under sentence of death. Yet, unlike any of his other noble allies or protectors, she would never try to acquire a painting by his hand. All the evidence suggests that she genuinely cared for him, perhaps even loved him as a child of her own. Her influence and that of her family, with its tentacular network of feudal and familial alliances, reaching right across the Italian peninsula, can be sensed throughout Caravaggio’s life
–
but especially during his later and more troubled years.

Social class, in particular questions of ‘nobility’ and ‘virtue’, would be at issue in many of Caravaggio’s future disputes and quarrels. These were matters of intense debate in medieval and Renaissance Italy. In northern Europe the aristocracy took its own pre-eminence for granted and assumed that nobility was a quality that could only truly inhere in those fortunate enough to be born into the upper, landed classes. There, a nobleman was easily identified: a man of virtue and pure blood, who had the right to bear arms in the service of his monarch, who was a skilled swordsman and horseman and would never dirty his hands with trade. In Italy the situation was more ambiguous, because Italian society was more fluid and its ruling elites more diverse, made up of imperial knights, communal knights, magnates and other types of feudal lord. It was also an increasingly urbanized society, and that too led to the blurring of social distinctions. From the second half of the fourteenth century onwards, urban patriciates sought to tighten their hold on government. The men who made up those bodies, which included merchants, moneylenders, textile manufacturers and other drivers of early capitalism, were themselves intensely class conscious. They founded their own dynasties, staked their own claims to
nobilit
à
– so much so that the very term itself became, in Italy, shifting and unstable. As early as the fourteenth century, writers ranging from the poet Dante to medieval jurists had struggled to define the concept. Legal definitions based purely on titles conferred by the monarchy or the church were countered by those who preferred to regard nobility as a moral quality to which, in theory, almost anyone could aspire.
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What position did Caravaggio’s maternal grandfather occupy within this world of subtly shaded social distinctions? Giovan Giacomo Aratori is referred to in the documents of the time as
signor
,
messer
or
dominus
. While his social status was certainly higher than that of anyone on the Merisi side of Caravaggio’s family, neither he nor his descendants possessed any actual titles. He was a member of what might be called the upper, professional bourgeoisie, while the likes of Bernardino and Fermo Merisi belonged to the petty, trade bourgeoisie. Mancini’s statement that Caravaggio was born into a family of ‘very honourable citizens’ –
cittadini
is the word he uses in Italian – was entirely accurate.

But in the small world of Caravaggio, where the artist spent much of his youth, his status may to him have seemed grander than that. As we have seen, his maternal grandfather was a highly respected man, but other factors may have conspired to make him feel that both he and his family were blessed by aristocratic favour. Maybe Costanza Colonna showed particular favours or kindnesses to Caravaggio’s mother, Lucia, sister to her own children’s wet-nurse. Lucia’s early years of motherhood were hard indeed, marked by bereavement and loss. Costanza Colonna too had suffered a difficult time during the
early years of her marriage to Francesco I Sforza. She had been married
off, as the custom then was among the nobility, at the age of thirteen. The duties of a wife had at first been abhorrent to her, so much so that she had at one point threatened suicide. Did Costanza Colonna feel a particular sympathy for Lucia and her young children during the harsh years of their early upbringing? It is impossible to know for sure, but she certainly took a particular interest in Caravaggio’s
wellbeing later in his life. Perhaps the date of his birth had something to do with it too, because as far as anyone in Christendom was concerned – but especially a Colonna – he was born at an auspicious time.

THE ANGEL WITH SWORD AND SHIELD

Caravaggio grew up as Michelangelo Merisi. It was an evocative name for a future artist – the same Christian name as that of the most famous Italian sculptor and painter of all, Michelangelo Buonarrotti, who had died just seven years earlier. But Caravaggio’s parents did not have that in mind when they named their son. They called him Michelangelo for reasons of faith and superstition. He came into the world on 29 September 1571. His parents named him after the Archangel Michael, whose feast day it was.

This was a charged and momentous time in the history of Christendom. Throughout the 1550s and 1560s the Christian powers of the western Mediterranean were threatened by the forces of Islam – led first by the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman ‘The Magnificent’, and then by his successor, Selim II. The bitter and bloody conflict between Muslim and Christian reached a climax at exactly the moment of Caravaggio’s birth. In 1570–71 Christian Cyprus, a strategically vital island fortress long controlled by the Venetians, fell into Ottoman hands. The garrison stationed at Famagusta, the last Christian stronghold in Cyprus, fought bravely before being forced to surrender. The survivors of the siege were cruelly massacred. Churches and cathedrals were converted into mosques, their stained glass smashed, their paintings and sculptures destroyed, their belltowers turned into minarets. Pope Pius V was appalled not only by the atrocity and its immediate consequences, but also by the possibility that the Ottomans might gain control over the principal trade routes of the Mediterranean. He joined forces with the Venetians, and together the allies sought additional support wherever they could find it. Missions were sent to Spain, to Portugal and to all the independent states of Italy. The princely families of southern Europe rallied together and thousands of soldiers were pressed into service. The result was no mere political alliance, but a self-styled Holy League for the defence of Christendom against the infidel.

Under the command of Don Juan of Austria, illegitimate brother of Philip II of Spain, a vast fleet of galleys – most of them constructed, in record time, within the great dockyard-cum-factory production-line that was Venice’s Arsenale – set out to humble the Turkish navy. Eight days after Caravaggio’s birth, on 7 October 1571, the two sides met in the Greek Gulf of Corinth, then known in the west as the Gulf of
Lepanto. The result was the last great sea battle fought between galley-
rowed ships. Both sides suffered heavy casualties. Eight thousand Christians died, and many more Turks. But, while the fleet of the Holy League survived the battle all but intact, the Ottoman fleet was destroyed and its commander-in-chief killed. One of the heroes of the battle was the commander of the papal forces, Marcantonio Colonna, father to Costanza Colonna, father-in-law to Francesco I Sforza, who had been witness at the wedding of Fermo Merisi and Lucia Aratori. After the victory, the pope declared that the Virgin Mary herself had interceded with God on behalf of the Holy League. Henceforward, the day of the victory was to be remembered as the Feast of Our Lady of Victory. Marian cults across Catholic Europe received a huge boost to their popularity. In Venice the day was declared a permanent
festum solemnis,
to be marked every year by a procession led by the doge, and by celebratory masses. All across Italy, churches were built in honour of Santa Maria della Vittoria. Devotion to the Rosary reached a new pitch of intensity.

The Battle of Lepanto was a triumph to salve the wounds of a Christian world that had been sundered by the Reformation some half a century before. The Protestant king of faraway Scotland, James VI, was so carried away by the news that he wrote an epic poem to celebrate the great Catholic victory (though he felt compelled to add a prefatory disclaimer that Don Juan of Austria, hero of his verses, should still be regarded as ‘a foreign papist bastard’). Meanwhile, Costanza Colonna’s father, Marcantonio, made his triumphal entry into Rome. He rode into the city on a white horse, a modern-day Mark Antony stealing the glory of the caesars of old. But he also had the decorum to temper that show of pride with a spectacular display of humility. Having processed in triumph, he exchanged the armour of victory for rags and set forth on a pilgrimage to give thanks to Our Lady of Loreto.
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Michelangelo Merisi had been born on a day full of promise for zealous Christians, whose world was under threat. Archangel Michael had been the guardian angel of the Hebrew nation, and was associated with the protection of the faithful from harm. He had also been adopted, in Christian times, as the principal saint of the Church Militant. In depictions of the Last Judgement, he weighs the souls of the blessed and the damned, separating good from evil. In such paintings he is commonly shown wearing chain-mail and armed with a sword and shield, symbols of the archangel’s ancient association with knights and crusades, and holy wars against the infidel.

Michelangelo was a fitting Christian name for any child within the sphere of the Colonna family, defenders of the faith and warriors against heresy – but all the more so in the case of a child born not just on the saint’s name day, but on the eve of a great battle between Christian and Muslim in which the head of the Colonna family himself would take a leading role. When victory at the Battle of Lepanto followed within just over a week of his birth, the hopes and prayers attendant on his baptism were answered. Perhaps he was thought of as a child who had brought good luck. Perhaps that was another reason why, despite his difficult personality and frequent lapses into criminal behaviour, Costanza Colonna would always stand by him.