Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (52 page)

Richeome placed great emphasis on the miracle of the Incarnation and eloquently made the case for regarding Loreto as the holiest of all holy shrines. The following passage is taken from
The Pilgrime of Loreto
, the English translation of his book:

when we shall have reckoned up by name, the most renowned places of all the world, as well out of profane Writers, as out of the sacred Scriptures, the Chamber of
Loreto
exceedeth them all in this condition, in having been the closet, where the marriage of the Sonne of God with our humane Nature was celebrated in the B. Virgin’s womb, the most high and mysterious worke, that the holy Trinity maker of all things, did ever accomplish; for therein God was made man; the Creator, a creature; the supreme cause, an effect; the Word, flesh; the spirit did take a body; the first is become last, and Alpha, Omega . . .
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By Caravaggio’s time there were two basic conventions for depicting the shrine of Loreto. The Madonna and child might be shown sitting on the roof of the Holy House, as they had been said to do during its magic carpet-like flight from Nazareth to Italy. Or the Madonna might simply be shown standing, holding the Christ child, in a pose derived from an ancient cult statue said to have been carved by St Luke himself that was housed on the altar of the shrine.

Departing from the limited conventions of existing Lauretan imagery, Caravaggio depicted two poor modern pilgrims kneeling at the entrance to the famous shrine. They are husband and wife, or perhaps mother and son. They have come in all humility, as every pilgrim was advised to do, to pray to the Queen of Heaven. Their feet are bare and dirty, their clothing begrimed, patched and poor. They have been rewarded for their honest piety and their weeks on the pilgrimage trail with a vision. The Virgin has chosen to appear to them, in the very doorway of the Holy House of Loreto itself. The infant Christ appears with his blessed mother, clasped in her arms, a finger of his right hand raised in the gesture of benediction. Haloed by a filigree circle of gold, Mary cranes her neck towards the pilgrims, as if to make sure that she catches every last word of their prayers.

In Caravaggio’s time, it was the custom for pilgrims to enter Loreto barefoot, wearing simple clothes. Their immediate destination was the simple dwelling of the Holy House itself, which, like the modest barn of Francis of Assisi’s first church, had been shoehorned into a splendid marble architectural casing, itself contained within the vast nave of a later cathedral. Once arrived, the pilgrims were to circle the holy dwelling three times, on their bare knees. Having made this slow crawl towards the hope of salvation, they were finally allowed to enter the shrine.
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All this is the implied prelude to Caravaggio’s gentle fantasy of a painting. The work is a
tour de force
of naked religious populism: spare to the point of banality, blatant in its appeal to the masses. The gratification that it offers is instant, the idea that it embodies too good to be true. It is the realization, in art, of every pilgrim’s dream. At the end of the barefoot, knee-scraping journey, a vision. The door to the Holy House has become the door to Heaven itself. The two weary pilgrims are greeted by the Virgin and Child and implicitly welcomed towards another, better place. They will have no further need of their walking sticks, now they have come this far.

Such is the sheer directness of its appeal to popular piety,
The Madonna of Loreto
has often been regarded as something of an embarrassment – a saccharine, sentimental picture, the only work in Caravaggio’s entire
œuvre
with something of the chocolate-box about it. But in its time it was unusual and daring. No artist had ever given such prominence, in a major religious altarpiece, to two such nakedly proletarian figures as the pair of kneeling pilgrims.

There was an old tradition of including portraits of men and women who had paid for certain altarpieces within the work themselves. Such donor portraits, as they have become known, often place the kneeling figures of such pious benefactors to either side of the Virgin and Child. They are included within the scene, yet they are also apart from it, witnesses rather than participants. In
The
Madonna of Loreto
, Caravaggio turned this convention on its head, first by making the kneeling figures central to the sacred story (the story’s catalyst, even, since it is their faith that has called forth the vision of the merciful Madonna and child), and secondly by depicting them not as wealthy donors but as poor pilgrims who have circled the shrine at Loreto three times on their bare knees. The man’s filthy naked feet, turned towards the viewer, emphasize this shockingly complete inversion of an old pictorial tradition.

What might the true donors of the picture, the Cavalletti, have made of all this? Might they not have been disconcerted by Caravaggio’s substitution of their images by those of the two poor pilgrims? It would only have required a relatively minor adjustment to the picture for the normal proprieties to be observed. He could easily have painted the standing Madonna and Child with the kneeling figures of Ermete and Orinzia Cavalletti to either side, in the manner of traditional donor portraits. Yet he did not, and no such alteration was asked of him.

Ermete Cavalletti was of course dead by the time Caravaggio finished
The Madonna of Loreto
. But he would most likely have approved of the painter’s innovations. Ermete’s dedication to the Santissima Trinità dei Pellegrini is proven: as a member of that lay confraternity, he, a rich man, had abased himself in imitation of Christ and washed the feet of poor pilgrims. Caravaggio’s painting no less dramatically asserted the pauperist values of that institution. In fact the painter might be said to have repeated that act of self-abnegation, on Cavalletti’s behalf, by putting poor pilgrims in place of his rich patrons. The replacement may even imply a kind of wishful metamorphosis, with the kneeling pilgrims as metaphorical portraits of Ermete and Orinzia Cavalletti themselves – transformed, through their humility of heart, into honorary members of the blessed poor.

Whether that too was part of Caravaggio’s meaning, there is every indication that the family approved wholeheartedly of his picture. Not only was it accepted without demur and without alterations, but Orinzia Cavalletti arranged for her own burial beneath the floor of the same chapel.

Once again, Caravaggio had painted a monumental altarpiece aimed squarely at the poor and the hungry. The location of the church for which he painted the picture was also part of its message and part of its significance.
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With the completion of
The Madonna of Loreto
, Caravaggio now had major works on display in two of the most frequently visited churches on the principal pilgrimage axis through northern Rome. Every year wave after wave of pilgrims would enter the city from the north at the Porta del Popolo. Immediately on their
left was the church of Santa Maria del Popolo, for which Caravaggio had painted
The Conversion of St Paul
and
The Crucifixion of St Peter
. The main pilgrimage route from there towards St Peter’s then led directly along the Via di Ripetta and its continuation, the Via della Scrofa, to the corner of the Via dei Coronari. Turning right on to that street, in the direction of the Tiber and the Ponte Sant’Angelo, the pilgrim would find himself in one of the most congested thoroughfares in all Rome. The church of Sant’Agostino lay at the start of the Via dei Coronari, so named after its multitude of Rosary-makers’ shops, thronged by pious tourists buying Rosaries and other devotional souvenirs of their visit to the Eternal City. Caravaggio knew that he was guaranteed a vast audience of the pious and the humble by virtue of Sant’Agostino’s prominent place on the city’s Christian itinerary. To the pilgrims who entered the church and walked into the Cavalletti Chapel, he offered a perfected mirror image of their own travels, one in which they could see themselves reaching the wished-for end of every pilgrim’s journey.

It was this direct appeal by Caravaggio to the poor, and the central role he gave them in his theatre of Christianity, that most shocked his critics. Writing from the perspective of the later seventeenth century, when the pauperist ideals of the early Counter-Reformation lay in ruins, Bellori cast Caravaggio in the role of a seditious revolutionary. With pictures such as
The Madonna of Loreto
he had opened a Pandora’s Box of vulgarity: ‘Now began the imitation of common and vulgar things, seeking out filth and deformity, as some popular artists do assiduously . . . The costumes they paint consist of stockings, breeches, and big caps, and in their figures they pay attention only to wrinkles, defects of the skin and exterior, depicting knotted fingers and limbs disfigured by disease.’
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Bellori’s disgust for Caravaggio’s ‘popular’ art, his lazar-house realism, was echoed by Giovanni Baglione. Unlike Bellori, Baglione was a contemporary of Caravaggio, and had gone to see the picture soon after it was installed. His predictable dislike of the work was only intensified by the huge crowds that it drew: ‘In the first chapel on the left in the church of Sant’Agostino, he painted the Madonna of Loreto from life with two pilgrims; one of them has muddy feet and the other wears a soiled and torn cap; and because of this pettiness in the details of a grand painting the public made a great fuss over it.’
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The word Baglione used for public was
popolani
, which specifically denoted the lower classes: peasants,
hoi polloi
. To convey the kind of fuss they made over the picture, he used
schiamazzo
, which means a din of chattering, but can also be used to describe the cackling of geese.

Bellori and Baglione represented the values of the academy, of idealized classical style. But they spoke not only for a particular notion of decorum in art: they spoke also for power and for wealth, and for forms of religious art that spoke down to, rather than for, the mass of Christian believers. Caravaggio had not painted
The Madonna of Loreto
for them. He had painted it for the
popolani
, and whether they cackled like geese or not, the
popolani
took it to their hearts. Not for nothing is the picture commonly known by its ‘popular’ title – which is, simply,
The Madonna of the Pilgrims
.

LENA WHO STAYS ON HER FEET IN THE PIAZZA NAVONA

Precisely when Caravaggio finished and delivered the altarpiece to Sant’Agostino is unknown. It may not have been until the autumn of 1605, or even later: he was probably still working on the picture at the end of July, but could have done no work on it at all in August, because for the whole of that month he was again in trouble with the law.

On 29 July 1605 a junior notary called Mariano Pasqualone accused Caravaggio of assault and grievous bodily harm. The young man arrived, still bleeding, in the legal offices of a certain Paolo Spada, where a clerk of the criminal court took his statement under oath:

I am here in the office because I have been assaulted by Michelangelo da Caravaggio, the painter, as I am going to relate. As Messer Galeazzo and I – it may have been about one hour after nightfall [8.30 p.m.] – were strolling in Piazza Navona in front of the palace of the Spanish ambassador, I suddenly felt a blow on the back of my head. I fell to the ground at once and realized that I had been wounded in the head by what I believe to have been the stroke of a sword. As you can see, I have a wound on the side of my head. Thereupon, the aggressor fled.

I didn’t see who wounded me, but I never had disputes with anybody but the said Michelangelo. A few nights ago he and I had words on the Corso on account of a woman called Lena who is to be found standing at the Piazza Navona, past the palace, or rather the main door of the palace, of Messer Sertorio Teofilo. She is Michelangelo’s woman. Please, excuse me quickly, that I may dress my wounds.
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After Pasqualone’s departure from the office, his companion, Galeazzo Roccasecca, who gave his profession as a writer of apostolic letters, added his own witness statement:

I saw a man with an unsheathed weapon in his hand. It looked like a sword or a small pistol. He turned round at once and made three jumps and then turned towards the palace of the Illustrious Cardinal del Monte, which was nearby down the little street where we were. He wore a black cloak on one shoulder only. I said to Messer Mariano, ‘What is it? What is it?’ and he replied to me, ‘I have been assassinated and I am wounded.’ I saw that he had a wound in the head and he said, ‘I am assassinated . . . it could not have been anyone other than Michelangelo da Caravaggio.’ And that is the truth.
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Some seventy years later Giambattista Passeri wrote a long and circumstantial account of what might have been behind the trouble between Caravaggio and Pasqualone. Passeri was a painter, poet and author of artists’ lives, who had clearly been told some version of the story while he was doing his research in the artists’ studios of Baroque Rome. Having applied a liberal coat of literary polish to the original anecdote, he included it, as an entertaining diversion, in the first edition of his life of the painter Guercino:
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In the first chapel to the left of the entrance in S. Agostino, Caravaggio painted the Holy Virgin with the Child in her arms and two pilgrims adoring her. At that time he lived in the House of the Eight Corners, in one of the little streets behind the Mausoleum of Augustus. Nearby lived a lady with her young daughter, who was not at all unattractive; they were poor but honest people. Michelangelo wished to have the young girl as a model for the Mother of God which he was to paint in this work, and he succeeded in this by offering them a sum of money which was large enough, considering their poverty, to enable him to carry out his wish.