Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (24 page)

A vivid picture of this confusing world, where scurrility often dressed itself in the clothes of virtuous indigence, is painted by a set of notarial documents dated February 1595 (probably only a year or so before Cardinal del Monte purchased
The Gypsy Fortune-Teller
and
The Cardsharps
), which record the interrogation of a young man in the prison on the Sistine Bridge, in the centre of Rome. ‘I am called Pompeo,’ the boy declared. ‘I was born in Trevi near Spoleto, I am about 16 years old, I have no occupation, I was arrested by your men in the church of S. Giacomo degli Spagnoli, because I was begging for alms during Mass.’ When he was asked if he knew anything about other beggars in the city, and whether they formed a single sect, or many, he gave the following answer: ‘Sir, among us poor beggars there are different confraternities [
compagnie
, a word normally used to refer to religious confraternities] . . . the first is called the Confraternity of the Grencetti, those who, while they are begging for alms in the churches in a crowd, cut purses . . . The second is called the Confraternity of the Sbasiti, and includes those who pretend to be ill and lie on the ground as if they were dying and keep groaning and demanding alms. The third is called the Baroni, who are healthy and upright, and are sturdy beggars who do not want to work.’ By the time he had finished, Pompeo had listed no fewer than nineteen groups of fraudulent beggars. They included the Formigotti, who pretended to be discharged soldiers; the Rabrunati, who faked epilepsy by eating soap and then foaming at the mouth; and the Pistolfi, who posed as priests to extract ‘donations’ from their victims.
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The same set of documents also contains the testimony of another man claiming familiarity with different groups of criminals at work in Rome in the 1590s. His name was Girolamo, and to Pompeo’s nineteen categories of villain he added seventeen more, including the Marmotti, who affected to have been struck dumb, and the Spillatori,
who – like Caravaggio’s
Cardsharps
– sought out the gullible in taverns
and inns and cheated them out of their money using marked cards and loaded dice. Girolamo disagreed with Pompeo’s (presumably) ironic comparison of such groups of criminal specialists with religious confraternities. ‘They are not confraternities [
compagnie
] but crafts [
arti
], like shoemakers, goldsmiths and so on.’

The exact status of these texts is questionable, and the precision with which they reflect actual criminal activity in Caravaggio’s Rome is open to debate. Peter Burke, who translated and republished them, notes that ‘these documents cannot now be found in the Roman archives, and are best known though a copy made a few years later, which used to be in the former Imperial Library in Berlin’, with ‘the rather literary title of the “delightful examination” of rogues, “
Il dilettevole essamine de’ guidoni, furfanti o calchi
” ’.

It is likely that the documents are altered transcripts of reported speech; and almost certain that they have been liberally ‘improved’ by the late sixteenth-century writer who gave them their present form. Many of the practices that they record, such as the use of soap to feign epilepsy, were (and still are) used by real fraudsters. They are part of an oral history of fraudulence that certainly has a basis in fact. But other elements seem to have been exaggerated. Analysis of the certain testimonies of known criminals that still
are
to be found in the Roman archives presents a less well-organized and significantly less colourful picture of criminal activity – gangs of crooks robbing at random when the opportunity presents itself, fencing stolen goods to the city’s Jewish pedlars and immediately eating and drinking away the proceeds.
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For all that, the tales told by ‘Pompeo’ and ‘Girolamo’ contain their own kind of truth, halfway between fact and fiction. What these stories reveal above all is a particular set of stereotypes about the seamy side of life in Rome, in which a certain sector of the city’s elite wished to believe: that criminals were so well organized as to constitute a dark, mirror-version of normal society, complete with ‘fraternities’ or ‘guilds’ of particular ill-doers; that they had, in effect, created a kind of inverted world of their own, a
mondo alla rovescia
, or ‘world upside down’ (a phrase of the time which anticipates the modern term ‘underworld’); that any apparently needy beggar might easily turn out to be a crook.

There was something of a craze for the classification of rogues in Caravaggio’s Italy. Tommaso Garzoni’s
La piazza universale di tutte le professioni del mondo
(
Universal Marketplace of the World
), a compendium published in 1585, had listed seventeen types of false beggar, including five that appear in the accounts of ‘Pompeo’ and ‘Girolamo’. There is strong evidence that such reports tended to multiply at times of genuine social crisis, especially when the existing structures of poor relief were being put under intense pressure by plague or famine. There were several occasions during the 1580s and 1590s – the plague of Caravaggio’s childhood, in 1576–7, being a prime example – when the sheer number of beggars and indigent p
eople at large threatened to overwhelm the ability of the Italian state
s to function. Tough measures against itinerant beggars and ‘vagabonds’ were periodically introduced throughout the late sixteenth century: in Florence in 1576, in Milan the following year, in Genoa in 1582, in Palermo in 1590 and in Rome throughout the 1590s. The stories that circulated about ‘fraudulent beggars’, the growing literature devoted to their typology and taxonomy, were partly a reflection of reality and p
artly a reflection of deep anxiety within the governing classes of societ
y. They multiplied in much the same way as stories about supposed illegal immigration or welfare fraud multiply in right-wing newspapers today, at times when the economy or social services come under strain.

The medieval Christian attitude to the poor had been essentially supportive. Every poor person was to be seen as the living image of the impoverished Christ himself, and helped accordingly. St Francis of Assisi had gone so far as to declare himself married to ‘Lady Poverty’. But by the late sixteenth century such attitudes had undergone a sea change. In many states – including the papal states – the poor were viewed with increasing distrust and hostility. In some places they were simply driven out by edict. Elsewhere the great
lazzaretti
, the plague hospitals of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, were converted into poor houses where the indigent were coralled and forced to do menial work.

The ruling and religious elites of the day were bitterly divided by the issue. The more authoritarian wing of the Catholic Church favoured rigorous means of social control and repression. But there were also those more sympathetic to the ancient medieval view – orders such as the Franciscans and Jesuits – who continued to plead for sympathy with the poor. There was, in other words, a form of right-wing / left-wing split in Caravaggio’s Rome over the treatment of poverty. One way to view the growing literature devoted to ‘roguery’ – whether the writings of Garzoni or the ‘improved’ trial transcripts attributed to ‘Pompeo’ and ‘Girolamo’ – is as propaganda for the right.

All this helps to clarify the most important questions that need to be asked about these two pivotal works in the painter’s career. Can the
Gypsy Fortune-Teller
and
Cardsharps
be seen as a plea for sympathy for those afflicted by poverty? Or are they simply a translation into painting of the sinister mechanisms of state control – a
visual
means (
pace
Burke) ‘of legitimating the repressive measures’ taken against those living on the margins of society?

Caravaggio’s pictures were certainly not painted for political ends. They were created to amuse and entertain an art-loving cardinal. But it may be significant that del Monte, who dared to hang these startlingly novel pictures of low-life characters on the wall of his palace, was a Medici supporter who publicly shared the Medici’s known sympathy for the ‘pauperist’ views – as they have been termed – of Filippo Neri and the Oratorians. In other words, he was a man who stood to the left in Rome’s divide on the issue of the poor.

Caravaggio was undoubtedly familiar with the overwhelmingly negative picture of the rogue or trickster presented in so much of the moralizing literature of his time. His depiction of the
Cardsharps
is so close to the accounts of card cheats in texts such as
A Manifest Detection
, or the seventeenth-century judge Antonio Maria Cospi’s book of advice to magistrates,
Il giudice criminalista
(1643), that he may actually have consulted such works when planning his composition. Cospi’s section on the marking of cards is a virtual gloss on the action in
The Cardsharps
:

I have seen those who have marked the edge of the corner of the card with ink, who bend with the right hand a suit towards the narrower part, and bend the other suit at the same angle, but on the longer side . . . Many other observations could be made, not all of which could be foreseen or imagined, but this is enough to awaken the mind of the magistrate, should some suspect cards come into his hands, to observe or discover if there is some other mark on them. This is as much as I can say as regards the eye. There are also those who know the cards by touch, and these make a little hole with a needle that stands out in relief on the underside of the cards. According to the place where they feel this slight relief, they know which card it is that goes to their opponent or that they take from themselves. Others play with thick cards with such thick colours that they have a certain relief. They keep the tip of the middle finger of the right hand well shaven, so that the skin there is very sensitive, and on touching the card with that finger, they sense those colours and know which card is underneath.
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This explains why the cheat’s accomplice in Caravaggio’s picture has two prominent holes in his glove. The glove has not been worn by use. Its stitching has been unpicked, so that the trained and sensitive middle finger and thumb of the sharper can do their work. But, despite such finely observed details, it would be a mistake to assume that Caravaggio’s picture is an overtly moralizing work of art. The artist might have drawn on texts such as Cospi’s book for magistrates, but he himself reserved judgement.

Despite Caravaggio’s vaunted reputation for realism, he emphatically
refused
to present his image of cardsharping as a slice of reprehensible reality. This is no snapshot from the scene of a crime. It is a
piece of lively, intriguing theatre. The gestures of the crooks – especially
the pantomimic semaphore of the accomplice’s hand signal – plainly come from the world of drama. In an actual gambling den, such overt gesticulation would soon be discovered. But imagine
The Cardsharps
as a scene from a play, performed for an audience happy to suspend disbelief, to enjoy the sense of superiority that comes from knowing that
they
can see everything that the gulled cardplayer is blind to – and the exaggerated body language of the figures makes perfect sense.

The Cardsharps
plays on the threat of
il mondo alla rovescia
, a world turned upside down, where wily guttersnipes win and aristocrats lose. But its message is not morally straightforward. The rich young man will no doubt return to his palace at the end of the game. The scruffy
bravi
robbing him blind – who may indeed be out-of-work mercenaries, to judge by the younger cheat’s sword – will no doubt drink their gains away and end up back in the gutter. But for this brief moment they are victorious.

Caravaggio’s painting is ambiguous, but contains a hint of where his sympathy – or, at least, his empathy – might lie. He paints the young gull with a form of smooth indifference, as a softly generalized figure of aristocratic insouciance. By contrast, the cheats themselves are live, lithe, fascinating. The older man’s concentration is absolute, and touched by a sense of desperation. The younger conman, gazing with fixity at his prey, is as tense and alert as a feral cat. Caravaggio paints his desperadoes like a man who feels
with
them, if not necessarily for them. He understands the deep seriousness of their desire to work their trick, to carry out their strategy without a hitch. When he painted the picture his own predicament was not altogether dissimilar to theirs.

The trickster in
The Gypsy Fortune-Teller
belonged to an even more reviled class of ‘vagabond’ than the cardsharps. For Cospi,
gypsies were the lowest of the low because their habits of thievery were
innate rather than learned. His entry on them in
Il giudice criminalista
is an undisguised racist diatribe – a nearly hysterical expression of burgeoning hatred for a people initially welcomed to Italy, in the early fifteenth century, as refugees and pilgrims:

They are thieves by nature, descended from Cus son of Ham, cursed son of Noah . . . They still feel this paternal curse, wandering dispersed around the world without being able to find a homeland or other permanent place . . . They sell their own sons for food . . . They come from the region between Egypt and Ethiopia and wander through the world, erecting their tents outside cities in fields and highways. They make deception, changes and prognostication from the lines of the hand, and earn their living by these amusing frauds . . . Like beasts, they consider marriage to their own sisters legitimate . . . The women steal chickens, and while they pretend to tell one’s fortune by the signs of the hand, rob the peasants and steal the women’s purses and handkerchiefs.
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English attitudes could be just as virulent. In Thomas Dekker’s pamph
let of 1608,
Lanthorne and Candle-light
, gypsies are described as: ‘a people more scattered than the Jewes and more hated: beggarly in apparell, barbarous in condition, beastly in behaviour and bloudy if they meete advantage. A man that sees them would sweare they all had the yellow Jawndis, or that they were Tawny Moores bastardes . . .’
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