Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (19 page)

The French king’s conversion was a tremendous coup for the Catholic Church and would come to be considered the greatest triumph of Clement’s reign. (The pope also courted James I of England, whose queen, Anne of Denmark, was already a convert to Catholicism, but to no avail.) At home he did his utmost to restrict the powers of the aristocracy, reining in the feudal barons of the Papal States at every opportunity. In 1597, when the venerable Este dynasty failed due to the lack of a male heir, he promptly claimed title to the family’s fiefdom of Ferrara and incorporated it into the papal states. Clement revised the Vulgate, promulgated a new edition of the
Index librorum
prohibitorum
and took his duties as Bishop of Rome no less seriously than his role as supreme pontiff. He curbed prostitution, introduced a general ban on the carrying of weapons in public, outlawed duelling, made libel a capital offence and sought to enforce the strict celibacy of his clergy. The papal
sbirri
, the constabulary, were a vital tool in his control of the city. They were the equivalent of the Bishop of Milan’s
famiglia armata
, but even more numerous. They were given wide-ranging powers, including the power to stop and search anyone suspected of heresy, of bearing arms or of being out after curfew without good cause. They did much of their work at night and were known for the dark cloaks that they wore to conceal themselves as they tailed their suspects, or paid unannounced visits to the houses of witnesses and potential informers.

Punishment, by contrast, took place in broad daylight. Death by execution was a grim public spectacle, a theatre of retribution designed to instil fear and the spirit of penitence into all who witnessed it. In 1581 Montaigne had observed the last moments of ‘a famous robber and bandit captain’ by the name of Catena:

they carry in front of the criminal a big crucifix covered with a black curtain, and on foot go a large number of men dressed and masked in linen, who, they say, are gentlemen and other prominent people of Rome who devote themselves to this service of accompanying criminals led to execution and the bodies of the dead; and there is a brotherhood of them. There are two of these, or monks dressed and masked in the same way, who attend the criminal on the cart and preach to him; and one of them continually holds before his face a picture on which is the portrait of Our Lord, and has him kiss it incessantly. At the gallows, which is a beam between two supports, they still kept this picture against his face until he was launched. He made an ordinary death, without movement or word; he was a dark man of thirty or thereabouts . . .
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After the criminal’s death, his body was cut into pieces. At this point, Montaigne notes, ‘Jesuits or others get up on some high spot and shout to the people, one in this direction, the other in that, and preach to them to make them take in this example.’ Such executions were still very much part of life in the Rome that Caravaggio knew.

Religious observance was not a matter of choice. At Easter everyone living in Rome was obliged to take Communion and procure a ticket of evidence from the priest who administered the sacrament. Procuring the ticket – proof of orthodoxy, and necessary to pass muster with the police – was itself part of a system of surveillance and involved a separate visit to the priest, who was obliged to write down the name and address of each communicant. But he also had to write down other details, noting for example who lived where and with whom, and listing their servants. It was, in effect, an annual census. It is because Counter-Reformation Rome was such an intensely controlled society that so much is known about those who lived there.

As in the Milan of Caravaggio’s youth, great importance was attached to the question of what people should see, or be allowed to see. In a world where even the death of a criminal could be orchestrated as a grisly spectacle, religious art was inevitably subject to all kinds of supervisions. At the very start of his pontificate (1592–1605, therefore coinciding almost exactly with Caravaggio’s years in Rome) Clement proved particularly keen to establish himself as a ruthless
enforcer of the doctrines laid down by the Council of Trent. On 8 June
1592, some four months after his election, he issued the papal Bull
Speculatores domus Israel
, declaring a ‘Visitation’ of all churches of the city of Rome. The clergy would be inspected and so would the fabric and decoration of their churches, including works of art.

It was to be no comprehensive survey. The churches Clement actually visited are listed, in order, in the so-called Secret Vatican Archives (Archivio Segreto Vaticano). He started at the top, with St Peter’s itself on 3 July 1592. He then went on to Santa Maria Maggiore, followed by San Giovanni in Laterano. By the time the Visitation had finally petered out, four years later, only twenty-eight churches had been covered. The reason was not dilatoriness but Clement’s meticulous attention to detail. He insisted on visiting every church himself, and interrogating any suspect members of his clergy personally. Even though he surrounded himself with an entourage of four cardinals and three bishops – including Audwyn Lewis, the Bishop of Cassano, a Welsh Catholic who had left England in 1579 – the work of inspection was painfully slow. Its eventual abandonment may be taken as further proof of Clement’s common sense.
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Although deeply concerned for the well-being of the Church, Clement was not a man in the same obsessive mould as Carlo Borromeo. He stopped, perhaps knowing that his point had been made. The mere threat of the Visitation had reminded the Roman clergy to pay close attention to the works of art in their churches, and to use their powers of censorship if necessary. Caravaggio’s career would be directly affected as a result. Several times during his years in Rome he would experience the humiliation of having a painting intended for the altar of a Roman church rejected on the grounds of indecency or impropriety.

IN THE ARTISTS’

Like his immediate predecessors, the new pope was determined both to stabilize the foundations of the Catholic Church and to reassert the Eternal City as the radiant centre of Christendom. The beauty of Rome’s churches must compel faith and crush heresy. That is why the city was filled with artists. Painters, sculptors and architects throughout Italy, and further afield, knew that there was more than enough work to go round in Rome. As Florence had been during the fifteenth century, and as Paris would be at the peak of Louis XIV’s power, Rome under Clement VIII was the artistic capital of Europe. The artists of the city were so numerous – at a rough estimate, there were 2,000 of them, out of Rome’s total population of around 100,000
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– that they had their own quarter.

This was an area of a little more than two square miles situated, roughly, between the Piazza del Popolo and the Piazza di Spagna. Artists tended to arrive in groups – whether from Naples or Bologna, Lombardy or Emilia-Romagna, Flanders or France – and to board together to save money; it was not unusual for two or three to share a room, using the space both as bedroom and workshop. Rome could be stiflingly hot, which placed a premium on the lower, cooler floors of rental accommodation. But that suited the traditionally hard-up community of painters, who preferred the less expensive upper floors anyway, because there was more light there to paint by. They particularly favoured houses backing on to the Pincio, the hill perched above the Piazza del Popolo.

Different national groups of artists ran in gangs and swapped racial insults with their rivals. There were stereotypes to fit all. Germans were crude, the Flemish were drunks, and the French were violent thugs hiding behind a veneer of fake refinement. The Italians themselves, according to the exiled English earl encountered in Rome by the hero of Thomas Nashe’s novel of 1594,
The Unfortunate Traveller
, were addicted to ‘the art of epicurising, the art of whoring, the art of poysoning, the art of sodomitry’.
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An Englishman like Nashe grouped all Italians together, but for them the matter of national belonging was less clear cut. Italians had some sense of communal identity but an even sharper feeling for the distinctions that set them apart from one another. The Bolognese were known to hate the Tuscans, while most Romans treated Sicilians as if they were little better than peasants. Neapolitans were said to be obsessive about horsemanship. The Milanese, as we have seen, were famously keen swordsmen, and naturally unruly – although ‘Lombards’ as a group were often stereotyped as sluggish provincials, heavy of mind and body thanks to their rustic diet.

In 1589 the writer Giovanni Botero went so far as to propose a north–south fissure in the Italian temperament: ‘Those who live in northern countries but not in the extreme north, are bold but lack cunning; southerners on the other hand are cunning but not bold . . . They are as the lion and the fox; whereas the northerner is slow and consistent in his actions, cheerful and subject to Bacchus, the southerner is impetuous and volatile, melancholy and subject to Venus . . .’
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The personality of Caravaggio would be hard to locate on this particular map. He does not fit either profile, and in fact he would make his sense of his own singularity the subject of one of his earliest paintings – a self-portrait
as
Bacchus, but a Bacchus who is suffering
and full of melancholy.

CITY OF MEN, CITY OF WHORES

The chronology of Caravaggio’s early years is impossible to establish with precision, although we can work out that he changed his address frequently – ten times or so between 1592 and 1595. The houses changed but the milieu was always the same: the dark network of alleyways clustered around the Piazza del Popolo; the narrow streets bordering the Palazzo Firenze, home of the Medici’s ambassadors to Rome; the Piazza Navona, which had once been the stadium of Domitian and still preserved its ancient double-horseshoe outline; the Campo de’ Fiori, the marketplace.

This artists’ quarter was a dangerous area of the city. Fights were common and fists were not the only weapons used. In an attempt to deter armed violence, the papal police made a public example of anyone caught wielding a
pugnello
, the short-handled dagger that was so often Exhibit A in the cases brought before Rome’s criminal tribunals. At the corner of Via del Corso and Via dei Greci, in full shaming view of the city whose laws he had violated, the arrested suspect would be subjected to the
strappado
, an excruciating form of rope torture. The victim’s hands were tied behind his back, with another loop of rope passed beneath his joined arms. He was then hauled into the air and left dangling for half an hour, the full weight of his body gradually pulling his arms further and further back and behind him. The inevitable result was dislocation of both shoulders. Victims eventually recovered but they did not forget the pain in a hurry. A painter subjected to the
strappado
could not work for weeks.

At night Caravaggio, his friends and his enemies shared the streets with the city’s prostitutes. Rome’s whores and courtesans had long been one of the sights of the city. In the early 1580s Montaigne had noted a craze for open-topped carriages especially adapted for the purpose of erotic ogling: ‘One preacher’s joke was that we turned our coaches into astrolabes . . . To tell the truth, the greatest profit that is derived from this is to see the ladies at the windows, and notably the courtesans, who show themselves at their Venetian blinds with such treacherous artfulness that I have often marvelled how they tantalise our eyes as they do; and often, having . . . obtained admission, I wondered at how much more beautiful they appeared to be than they really were . . .’
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By Caravaggio’s time the prostitutes were so numerous that they
had been coralled by papal edict into their own enclosure by the Tiber,
the Ortaccio di Ripetta – a name which joked that the place was a kind of reverse Eden, since the literal meaning of
ortaccio
was ‘evil garden’. But they would escape after dark to ply their trade in the ill-lit streets around the Piazza del Popolo. They were an embarrassment to the authorities because their very presence in such great numbers represented a blatant betrayal of Christian ethics at the very heart of the Catholic world.

Rome was not just an overwhelmingly male city; it was a city full of young and unattached men competing desperately with one another for favours. The city’s whores were a much needed outlet for the accumulated sexual energy of this male-dominated, testosterone-fuelled society. But they were also, often, an occasion for violence in themselves. Some girls offered certain services for free to clients whom they liked, which could easily breed resentment. For an artist, the service might be posing naked for a picture (painting the nude model was officially illegal and this was one way of getting around the rules). But if the girls’ pimps discovered such an arrangement, there was generally trouble.

The young artists who came to Rome to make a name for themselves lived on top of each other, competed for the same work, drank in the same taverns, frequented the same restaurants and bought their materials – paints, canvases, stretchers – from the same artists’ supplier. His name was Antinoro Bertucci and he had a street stall on the Corso. Painters and sculptors of all nationalities would meet there, to buy what they needed for the next day’s work and to discuss the latest gossip and news – to find out about workshop vacancies, to learn who was in and who was out with this or that influential prelate or cardinal. A visit to Antinoro’s in the evening was also a good way to dodge the curfew regulations, because the paint-seller kept a fire burning at all hours. Going out for heat and light was a legitimate excuse for breaking curfew, so if a gathering should be interrupted by the police everyone would say they had gone to Antinoro for that reason. ‘We were at Antinoro’s because our fire had gone out’ is a phrase that recurs in the witness statements of Rome’s artists.