Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (14 page)

‘EGO TE ABSOLVO’

For Carlo Borromeo, confession was the Church’s greatest weapon in the war on sin and evil. His highest priority was to regularize and control the administering of the sacrament of penance – which he believed could be used not only to mould the individual conscience but to redesign society. In Borromean Milan the hearing of confession was restricted to trained teams of diocesan confessors, who were allowed to operate only under direct licence from the archbishop himself. Each confessor was obliged to attend weekly classes to hone his confessional technique and receive the latest instructions from Borromeo. The archbishop told his confessors that they were even more important than the parish priests when it came to the saving of souls; he told them that they ‘have the souls in their hands’ and ‘speak to Jerusalem’s heart’.
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In 1566 a new Roman Catechism had been composed, under Borromeo’s supervision, in which the sacrament of penance had been described as ‘the fortress of Christian virtue’. It had preserved the
Roman Catholic Church from the attacks of the devil and his heretical
minions, and it was to be considered responsible for ‘whatever today’s Church has preserved in holiness, piety and religiosity’.
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Borromeo went to great lengths to ensure that ‘the fortress of virtue’ remained pure of carnality or corruption. He popularized a new article of furniture for the administering of the sacrament, the confessional box, to create a physical separation between confessor and penitent – and thus avert any danger of unclean thoughts polluting their necessarily intimate relationship. It placed the confessor in his own kind of indoors fortress, making him invisible to the penitent and, it was hoped, immune to temptations and blandishments.

The archbishop’s suspicious view of human nature extended to his own priests and confessors. In the late 1570s, when a woodworker named Rizzardo Taurini was commissioned to build five confessionals for the new Jesuit church of San Fedele in Milan, he provoked Borromeo’s rage by fractionally curtailing one of the partitions at the bottom of the standard double sentry-box design. The Jesuit provost of San Fedele recalled the archbishop’s outraged protest – ‘the confessor can easily touch the woman’s feet with his own.’ Borromeo repeated the objection several times, to the evident exasperation of the provost, who found the archbishop’s insistence on the moral dangers inherent in a proximity between two people’s feet more than faintly absurd. ‘He greatly insisted on this,’ the provost remembered, ‘as if lust enters the body through one’s shoes, and he is unaware that in his confessionals the woman’s mouth is close to the confessor’s ear.’
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The Jesuit knew a truth that Borromeo did not want to acknowledge: no matter how strong the grilles and walls of any confessional box, nothing could absolutely prevent priests and penitents from harbouring feelings for one another. The partitions intended to separate man from woman might even enhance the illict thrill of such emotions. This exchange between the worldly provost and the archbishop reveals the paranoid fear of sinfulness – and the corresponding desire to close off almost every avenue of human sensuality – that lay at the heart of Borromean piety.

Borromeo believed that confession was nothing less than an instrument, given to him by God, to purify the world. The sacrament of penance already gave the confessor a fearsome weapon for the discipline of each soul – the power to grant or withold absolution. But Borromeo enhanced that power by putting checks in place to ensure that penance was true and not merely a matter of words and assurances. He insisted that confessors make enquiries about their penitents with their parish priests. Those priests in turn were instructed to tell confessors of any conditions that might disqualify a particular penitent from absolution – adultery, for example, or cohabitation outside wedlock. If absolution were not granted, the penitent would soon find himself or herself before the episcopal magistrates, and under the threat of imprisonment.

Borromeo also ordered his confessors to interrogate their penitents for any knowledge they might have of heretics, or of anyone harbouring prohibited books. This cast the net wide, since such was the repressive cultural effect of the Counter-Reformation that the list of banned books – the Index – included many of the works now considered part of every Italian’s intellectual heritage: Boccaccio’s
Decameron
, the poetry of Petrarch and Ariosto, the political theory of Machiavelli, to name just some.
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Anyone who made too public a display of owning any of those books was likely to find themselves given away to the authorities.

The situation in Milan was not unique, in that harsh measures against heresy were being taken in cities all across Italy, but it was extreme. For example, when the Roman Inquisition recommended that Catholic confessors should encourage their penitents to inform on heretics, Borromeo applied the condition with particular severity. In Milan any confessor too fastidious to enquire about heresy was summarily excommunicated; and if a penitent
did
confess to knowledge of heretical activities, he or she was immediately sent to higher authorities to give further information about these enemies of the faith – to supply names and addresses, to give details of what they had done or might be planning to do. Only then might the penitent return to their confessor to hear the consoling words, ‘
Ego te absolvo
.’
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Borromeo did not entirely succeed in his efforts to turn Milan into a model Tridentine police state. Even though he had the firm support of the pope and, eventually, Philip II of Spain, some of his attempts to redesign the Milanese way of life met with angry resistance. He tried
in vain to ban dancing on feast days and Sundays, and in 1579 he even
attempted to kill off the exuberantly joyful pre-Lenten tradition of Carnival.
To the disgust of many Milanese citizens, he prohibited all jousts, tournaments, masquerades, plays and dances, and declared the automatic excommunication of all those participating in or attending
such spectacles. Borromeo regarded Carnival as the devil’s work, a dis
solute
rite lodged like a parasite at the beginning of the holy season. His prohibition was backed up by the threat that his confessors would exploit their information-gathering networks to identity those who had taken part in the celebrations. But this time he had gone too far. Borromeo’s attempt to shut down the festive life of the city was met with panic by the civic authorities and rage by the people. Rome and Spain both had to intervene to prevent a popular uprising and Borromeo was forced, reluctantly, to acknowledge that there were limits to his power. In the end, the Milanese were content to fall short of spiritual perfection.

THE POWER OF THE IMAGE

For all his inflexibility, Borromeo was an immensely charismatic and transformative individual. He changed his world, and has been rightly remembered as one of the most dynamic figures in the history of the Roman Catholic Church. In the words of Ludwig von Pastor, author of
The History of the Popes
, ‘he stands as a milestone in the history of the Church, at the boundary line between two epochs, the dying Renaissance and the triumphant Catholic reform.’
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As the first resident Archbishop of Milan for nearly a century, he cast a giant shadow over the city throughout the 1570s and early 1580s.

There is good reason to believe that the acts and ideas of Carlo Borromeo played a profound part in the formation of Caravaggio – an artist whose greatest gift would be an unprecedentedly stark and vivid naturalism, deeply attuned to the ideals of Counter-Reformation piety that permeated the city of his youth. Borromeo embodied more than just a particularly direct and messianic form of piety. His faith was rooted in an intense, spectacularly visual imagination. Borromeo’s way of believing in Christ – which involved putting Christ at the centre of his life not in an abstract way, but as actually as possible – depended essentially on a process of mental projection identical to that required in painting pictures.

In early life Borromeo had been strongly influenced by the founder of the Jesuits, St Ignatius Loyola. He had read and followed Loyola’s
Spiritual Exercises
, a work that placed great emphasis on the role of visualization in Christian meditation. Loyola specifically advised his readers to visualize Christ’s sufferings, insisting that the necessary prelude to any deep and serious meditation on Christ’s Life and Passion was a mental process that he termed ‘composition, seeing the place’. What that involved was, in effect, a kind of internalized version of the act of painting itself: ‘In contemplation or meditation on visual things, as in contemplating Christ our Lord, who is visible, composition will be to see by the eye of the imagination a physical place where that thing is found which I wish to contemplate. By a physical place I mean, for example, a temple or mountain, where Jesus Christ, or Our Lady is found, according to that which I wish to contemplate.’
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The Ignatian belief in the power of visualization carried within it the implication that if worshippers can see the image of Christ in their mind’s eye, then they can empathize with his sufferings all the more fully – opening themselves to that emotional involvement which leads to the deeper forms of meditative experience. But the idea was not new to Loyola. It goes back to the Middle Ages, and finds especially powerful expression in the writings of the early followers of St Francis of Assisi. A good example is an early Franciscan tract entitled the
Little Book on the Meditation on the Passion of Christ Divided According to Seven Hours of the Day
, which describes the exercise thus: ‘It is necessary that when you concentrate on these things in your contemplation, you do so as if you were actually present at the very time when he suffered. And in grieving you should regard yourself as if you had our Lord suffering before your very eyes, and that he was present to receive your prayers.’
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A late thirteenth-century guide to prayer entitled
Meditations on the Life of Christ
, probably written by a Franciscan friar from Tuscany, vividly demonstrates how such practices developed. The process involved ever more complicated and detailed visualizations, so that a succession of almost cinematic images would follow, one after another, in the mind:

reflect on the benignity of the Lord in having to sustain persecution so soon and in such a way . . . He was carried to Egypt by the very young and tender mother, and by the aged saintly Joseph, along wild roads, obscure, rocky and difficult, through woods and uninhabited places – a very long journey. It is said that couriers would take thirteen or fifteen days; for them it was perhaps two months or longer. They are also said to have gone by way of the desert, which the children of Israel traversed and in which they stayed forty years. How did they carry food with them? And where did they rest and stay the night? Very seldom did they find a house in that desert. Have pity on them, for it was a very difficult, great and long exertion for them as well as for the Child Jesus. Accompany them and help to carry the Child and serve them in every way you can . . . Here there comes a beautiful and pious, compassionate meditation . . . These and other things about the boy Jesus you can contemplate. I have given you the occasion and you can enlarge it and follow it as you please.
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The rise of this form of popular devotion was closely linked to the development of painting, from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries and beyond. Throughout Western European Christendom, and especially in Italy and the Low Countries, artists competed with each other to create convincing illusions of actual presence, developing new techniques such as mathematically calculated perspective to paint ever more convincing images of the life and sufferings of Christ. Painters made their pictures as realistic as they could in order to assist worshippers in their own acts of mental picture-building. The common goal was to summon up the events described in the New Testament as vividly as possible, so that devout Christians might imagine themselves present as actors at the scene – mourning the dead Christ, for example, or helping to tend him as an infant on the Holy Family’s flight to Egypt, as the author of
Meditations on the Life of Christ
had written. Religious painting and religious meditation were, in fact, branches of the same activity.
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But by the middle years of the sixteenth century the relationship between art and religious contemplation in Italy had become less straightforward. In the more sophisticated artists’ circles, the idea of appealing to the popular devotional imagination with images of painstaking realism was regarded with disdain. Art became seen instead as an idealized, generalized language for the expression of higher thought. Michelangelo, the outstanding painter-sculptor of the High Renaissance, deliberately distanced himself from the pious
naturalism of earlier religious painting, which he associated above all with the oil painting traditions of Flanders: ‘They paint in Flanders,’ he contemptuously remarked in the 1540s, ‘only to deceive the external eye, things that gladden you and of which you cannot speak ill. Their painting is of stuffs, bricks and mortar, the grass of the fields, the shadows of trees, and bridges and rivers, which they call landscapes, and little figures here and there. And all this, though it may appear good to some eyes, is in truth done without
reason
, without symmetry or proportion, without care in selecting or rejecting.’ It was a form of painting, he concluded, fit only for ‘young women, monks or nuns, or certain noble persons who have no ear for true harmony’.
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But Michelangelo’s subtle, poetically allusive and metaphorical ideal of art seemed, to many in the Roman Catholic Church, to be increasingly out of tune with the times. His use of the idealized nude figure was considered scandalous and his famous cycle of paintings for the Sistine Chapel ceiling was systematically censored in the late 1550s with the addition of a multitude of decorously placed fig leaves. Religious art was a highly controversial subject. Protestant reformers had attacked religious images altogether, on the grounds that they violated the Second Commandment (‘Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven image’). The Catholic clerics who assembled at the Council of Trent had their own counter-argument, based on centuries of Church tradition. They resoundingly defended religious paintings and statues as divinely ordained tools for transmitting the messages of the Bible to the illiterate poor. But, at the same time, they acknowledged that many religious artists had forgotten their fundamental role to aid and assist devotion. It seemed clear to most of the leading formulators of Counter-Reformation policy that artists had become so caught up in abstruse ideas, so concerned to demonstrate their own ingenuity and originality, that they had forgotten the humility required of them as servants of the will of God. Not only was the Sistine Chapel ceiling censored, but the Venetian artist Paolo Veronese was publicly castigated for including all kinds of irrelevant details in a painting of
The Last Supper
. The Venetian Inquisition, which called Veronese to account for himself, was outraged by the presence in that picture of parrots, dwarfs, buffoons and, worst of all, Germans (regarded with detestation throughout Italy ever since Charles V’s army led by Lutheran
Landsknechts
had sacked Rome in 1527). The painter was forced to find an ingenious solution to the dilemma, which he did by changing both title and subject: Veronese’s
Last Supper
became instead a depiction of
Christ in the House of Levi
.