Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (46 page)

The full title of Baglione’s painting, now in the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, is
Divine Love Overcoming Earthly Love, the World, the Flesh and the Devil
. It is no masterpiece but it is a clever and vicious painting, carefully calculated to try to wound Caravaggio and cloud his reputation. Inverting both the moral and the message of
Omnia vincit amor
, Baglione shows love conquered by virtue. A saint in armour subdues a cowed and cowering Cupid, while the devil skulks in darkness to one side. Although armed with a thunderbolt rather than shield and sword, the figure of
Divine Love
evokes traditional images of Archangel Michael trampling Satan underfoot – a detail that can only have been intended to sharpen Baglione’s satire. Caravaggio’s own holy namesake is shown exorcizing the erotic and demonic
spirits
of Caravaggio’s art. The resemblance to St Michael may also have been meant as a sideswipe at Gentileschi and his own ‘picture of
St Michael the Archangel
’. But Caravaggio was the primary target. Baglione’s parody is completed by the emphatically Caravaggesque lighting that flashes across the vengeful angel and the prone, flaccid form of Cupid below.

Not content with satirizing Caravaggio and his art, Baglione even dared to offer his own picture to Vincenzo Giustiniani’s brother, Cardinal Benedetto Giustiniani. Yet more galling, it was accepted, and Baglione given the traditional painter’s reward of a gold chain. Gentileschi, who would tell this part of the story too in court, was distinctly unamused by the whole affair. He tried to get his own back by telling Baglione that his avenging angel should have been naked and childlike, perhaps deliberately misunderstanding the figure’s pointed and satirical resemblance to the Archangel Michael: ‘[Baglione] had dedicated
Divine Love
to Cardinal Giustiniani and although said picture was not liked as much as the one by Michelangelo – all the same, that Cardinal gave him a neck chain. That painting had many flaws. I told him he had done a grown-up man in armour who should have been nude and putto, so he did another that was completely nude.’

That last remark is only half true. Baglione did paint another
Divine Love
, the version now in the Palazzo Barberini in Rome, but he completely ignored Gentileschi’s advice. The second and equally grown-up angel is certainly no naked putto. He still wears armour, albeit modified this time to a breastplate and some wisps of drapery. The most important change has been made elsewhere, at the bottom of the picture. The devil, previously shown lurking in obscurity, now wheels round with an expression of startled guilt on his face. Despite his staring eyes, his fangs and his pointed ears, he is unmistakably a portrait in caricature of Caravaggio, caught
in flagrante
with a flushed and furtive Cupid. Baglione’s second
Divine Love
went beyond satire. It was a visual accusation of sodomy.

Baglione repeated that charge verbally, and in public. He and his friends talked openly about Caravaggio keeping company with a
bardassa
– vulgar Italian slang derived from a Turkish word for a young man who took the female part in sexual encounters with other men. Rome’s artists gossiped, so people may have begun to look at Caravaggio’s
Omnia vincit amor
in a different light. The identity of the boy who had
modelled
for Cupid was known. He was Cecco di Caravaggio, who prepared the artist’s paint and his canvases.
53
If Baglione was to be believed, not only was he Caravaggio’s assistant and model, he was also his catamite.

Half a century later, the story was still current. In about 1650 an English artist called Richard Symonds was shown round the Giustiniani collection in Rome. He made notes on the pictures, writing down any anecdotes that struck him. He obviously spent a while in front of
Omnia vincit amor
. The
custode
told him that it was one of the most precious pictures in the collection, that it had cost 300 scudi, and that both the Cardinal of Savoy and a member of the Crescenzi family had offered 2,000 ducats for it. But the punchline of the spiel, no doubt regularly trotted out to tourists visiting the palace, was the scandalous relationship between artist and model. Here is a full transcription of the entry in Symonds’s travel journal:

Cupido di Caravaggio / Card di Savoya profe. / 2 milia duboli p[er] / il Cupido di Caravaggio / Costo 3 cento scudi. / Checco del Caravaggio tis / calld among the painters / twas his boy – / haire darke, 2 wings / raie, compasses lute / violin & armes & laurel / Monsr Crechy vuolle dare / 2 milia dubole / Twas the body & face / of his owne boy or servant / that laid with him.
54

From the readiness with which the story was believed and then accepted into local legend, it seems that nobody had been particularly surprised to hear about Caravaggio’s alleged homosexual proclivities. He was known to be an impetuous man who followed his passions. He kept company with whores and courtesans, such as Fillide Melandroni, and on the evidence of his paintings he was equally alive to the physical charms of men. Caravaggio and Francesco Boneri, alias Cecco, were close: Cecco stayed with him even after he was obliged to leave Rome in 1606. There is a good chance that the rumours were true and that Caravaggio did indeed have a sexual as well as a working relationship with ‘his owne boy or servant’.

Whatever the reality, Baglione’s accusations were damaging and dangerous. Sodomy was a capital crime in Clement VIII’s Rome, and though the authorities were unlikely to investigate the well-connected Caravaggio’s sexual behaviour, as long as he was reasonably discreet, the potential harm to his name and prospects was immense. Once an artist had been smeared as a pederast, his work was smeared too. People were liable to stop taking it seriously, seeing it only through the lens of its creator’s presumed sexual aberration. This had happened half a century before, notoriously, to an artist named Giovanni Antonio Bazzi. Bazzi had offended the famous chronicler of artists’ lives, Giorgio Vasari, who had taken his revenge in print: ‘since he always had about him boys and beardless youths, whom he loved more than was decent, he acquired the by-name of Sodoma.’
55
This was all a pure fabrication on Vasari’s part, first started perhaps by Bazzi’s rival, the Sienese painter Domenico Beccafumi. But the mud stuck, and to this day the artist is known as Il Sodoma, ‘the Sodomite’.

Caravaggio was deeply sensitive about his reputation. He never knowingly allowed the least slight to go unpunished. His nocturnal assault on Girolamo Spampa, the art student from Montepulciano, was proof of that. Spampa had probably been recycling Federico Zuccaro’s criticisms of Caravaggio’s Contarelli Chapel paintings, which he had most likely heard from Baglione in the first place. Either way, Baglione must have been aware of the beating that Caravaggio had given Spampa, which had taken place just eighteen months before. He knew that his satires and smears would not be forgotten. Sooner or later, Caravaggio would retaliate.

The autumn and winter of 1602 passed without incident, as Caravaggio bided his time. Only in spring of the following year did he give vent to his simmering anger. He was stung into retaliation by the unveiling of Baglione’s largest work yet,
The Resurrection
, an altarpiece for the principal Jesuit church in Rome, the Gesù. That work is now lost, but, to judge by Baglione’s preparatory study in the Louvre, it was a clumsy and grandiose essay in the same proto-Baroque idiom as Carracci’s
Assumption of the Virgin
. In the sketch Christ stands heavily on a stage-flat cloud as angelic choirs hymn his heavenward ascent. Below on earth, one of the soldiers guarding the tomb gets drowsily to his feet, while others snooze or look on in laboured poses of amazement.

Baglione could carry off the mock sublimity of a parody like the
Divine Love
. But when he strove for effects of awe-inspiring transcendence, he was undone both by his lack of skill and by the essentially prosaic nature of his imagination. His shortcomings can only have been magnified by the scale of the altarpiece for the Gesù: eight metres high and nearly five across.
56
The picture was in its allotted place by Passiontide 1603, but kept under wraps until Easter Sunday itself, the day of the Resurrection. It seems never to have been much loved. Caravaggio and his friends set the tone for its reception by poking fun at it from the moment it was unveiled. There would be no protests when it was quietly removed from the church towards the end of the seventeenth century, following alterations to the transept altars.

Caravaggio observed (and probably helped to orchestrate) the picture’s unfavourable reception with rancorous pleasure. He was already annoyed that Baglione had been given such a prestigious assignment – and all the more irritated because he suspected that Baglione had won the job through the ruse of offering his satire, the
Divine Love
, to Benedetto Giustiniani. Cardinal Giustiniani was a Jesuit and had probably intervened with the general of the order, Claudio Acquaviva, to obtain the commission for Baglione. So when his rival produced his monumental flop, Caravaggio decided that it was the moment to take his revenge. What better time to kick a man than when he is down?

Shortly after Easter Sunday 1603 a couple of newly composed satirical poems caused something of a sensation in the artists’ quarter of Rome. Copies were passed round. Impromptu recitals were held. The verses were aimed at ‘Gioan Bagaglia’ or ‘Gian Coglione’, ‘John Baggage’ or ‘Johnny Testicle’. They were not the most ingenious nicknames for Giovanni Baglione, but they were effective. One of the poems also included a swipe at ‘Mao’, the alias of Tommaso Salini, who was a minor still life painter and Baglione’s closest associate.

The first poem is crude and makeshift, a mock-sonnet with all the subtlety of a punch in the face:

Gioan Bagaglia tu no[n] sai un ah

le tue pitture sono pituresse

volo vedere con esse

ch[e] non guadagnarai

mai una patacca

Ch[e] di cotanto panno

da farti un paro di bragesse

ch[e] ad ognun mostrarai

quel ch[e] fa la cacca

portela adunque

i tuoi disegni e cartoni

ch[e] tu ai fatto a Andrea pizzicarolo

o veramente forbete ne il culo

o alla moglie di Mao turegli la potta

ch[e] libelli con quel suo cazzon da mulo pi
ù
non la fotte

perdonami dipintore se io non ti adulo

ch[e] della collana ch[e] tu porti indegno sei

et della pittura vituperio
.
57

John Baggage you don’t even know

That your pictures are mere woman’s-work

I want to see

That you won’t even earn a counterfeit penny from them

Because with as much canvas

As it would take to make yourself a pair of breeches

You can show everyone

What shit truly is

Therefore take

Your drawings and cartoons

That you have made, to Andrea the grocer’s shop

[so he can wrap fruit and veg in them]

Or wipe your arse with them

Or stuff them up the cunt of Mao’s wife

Because he isn’t fucking her anymore with his donkey cock

Pray pardon me, painter, if I do not worship you

Because you don’t merit that chain you wear round your neck

And your painting deserves only vituperation.

Benedetto Giustiniani’s award of a gold chain to Baglione evidently still rankled. Rubens, Van Dyck and Rembrandt would all paint themselves wearing chains of gold, symbols of accomplishment and courtly patronage. It was a mark of intellectual distinction, a sign of honour, but it had been conferred on Baglione for painting a picture that explicitly
dishonoured
Caravaggio.

The second poem was rather more carefully constructed, in regular hendecasyllabic lines. Its attacks on Baglione were slightly less sexually graphic, at least until the last line:

Gian Coglione senza dubio dir si puole

quel ch[e] biasimar si mette altrui

ch[e] può cento anni esser mastro di lui.

Nella pittura intendo la mia prole

poi ch[e] pittor si vol chiamar colui

Ch[e] no[n] può star p[er] macinar con lui.

I color no[n] ha mastro nel numero

si sfaciatamente nominar si vole

si sa pur il proverbio ch[e] si dice

ch[e] chi lodar si vole si maledice

Io no[n] son uso lavarmi la bocca

ne meno di inalzar quel ch[e] no[n] merta

come fa l’idol suo ch[e] è cosa certa.

Se io metterme volessi a ragionar

delle [s . . . re] fatte da questui

no[n] bastarian interi un mese o dui.

Vieni un po’ qua tu ch’[e] vo’ biasimare

l’altrui pitture et sai pur ch[e] le tue

si stano in casa tua a’ chiodi ancora

vergogna[n]doti tu mostrarle fuora.

Infatti i’ vo’ l’impresa aba[n]donare

ch[e] sento ch[e] mi abonda tal materia

massime s’intrassi n[e] la catena

d’oro ch[e] al collo indegnamente porta

ch[e] credo certo [meglio] se io non erro

a piè gle ne staria una di ferro.

Di tutto quel che ha detto con passione

per certo gli è p[er] ché credo beuto

avesse certo come è suo doùto

altrime[n]te ei saria un becco fotuto
.