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First published by Allen Lane 2010
Published in Penguin Books 2011
Copyright © Andrew Graham-Dixon, 2010
Maps copyright © Alan Gilliland, 2010
The moral right of the author has been asserted
The acknowledgements on pp. ix–xii constitute an extension of this copyright page.
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ISBN: 978-0-14-196294-8
List of Illustrations and Illustration Acknowledgements
Maps: Milan, c. 1590; Rome, c. 1600; Valletta, c. 1607; Naples, c. 1610; Italy, c. 1610
Preface and Acknowledgements
Part One: Milan, 1571–92
Part Two: Rome, 1592–5
Part Three: Rome, 1595–9
Part Four: Rome, 1599–1606
Part Five: The Alban Hills, Naples, Malta, Sicily, Naples, Porto Ercole, 1606–10
Epilogue
Illustrations
Notes
Further Reading
For more than twenty-five years, Andrew Graham-Dixon has published a weekly column on art, first in the Independent and more recently, the Sunday Telegraph. He has written a number of acclaimed books, including A History of British Art and Renaissance, and is twice winner of the Hawthornden Prize, Britain’s top prize for writing about art. He is one of the leading figures in broadcasting in the UK, having presented seven major television series on art for the BBC.
PENGUIN BOOKS
‘The author’s insights into the individual paintings are remarkable, but what really gives the book its pep is the author’s picking apart of the scanty evidence about Caravaggio’s private life, the prostitutes and friends who people his paintings, and the seedy world of late-Renaissance Rome through which he swaggered’ Andrew Holgate, Sunday Times, Books of the Year
‘Remarkable … Sheds fresh light on the painter whose hot temper was as renowned as his work … uncovers details on pivotal events during the artist’s turbulent career’ Roya Nikkhah, Sunday Telegraph
‘Highly readable … thorough and elegant … Caravaggio has done the artist proud’ Ian Thomson, Spectator
‘Andrew Graham-Dixon’s absorbing biography leaves no stone unturned … he is an entertaining art historian’ Economist
‘Graham-Dixon’s excellent new book … the complexity of Caravaggio’s character as well as his art is vividly evoked by Graham-Dixon throughout this book … Graham-Dixon’s biography will surely quickly establish itself as the outstanding introduction to Caravaggio’s life and art’ Brian Allen, Standpoint
‘Andrew Graham-Dixon brings the bad-boy genius of the seventeenth century to life as vividly as if he were one of today’s pop stars. His book is scholarly, perceptive and very well written’ John Richardson
‘An entertaining read … an engaging and well-written account of Caravaggio’s life’ Sheila McTighe, Art Quarterly
‘A beautifully paced narrative … its tremendous narrative drive … steers the story fluently and plausibly between the pitfalls of academic dryness and overdone speculation. As a human story it is ultimately tragic’ Charles Nicholl, Sunday Times
To the memory of my mother, Sue, who first awoke my love of reading, writing and looking at art
This book has taken me a shamingly long time to write, more than ten years in total. My excuse is that I have had a lot of other things to do at the same time. For the first five of those ten years I was responsible for two weekly articles for the Sunday Telegraph (latterly reduced to one, to make life workable); in 2007 I had to stop work on Caravaggio almost completely to finish a book about Michelangelo’s paintings in the Sistine Chapel; and throughout the past decade I have spent at least five months of every year writing and presenting various television series about the history of art for the BBC.
While often frustrating, the many delays and interruptions have, overall, worked to the book’s advantage. Had I delivered my manuscript more quickly, I might have caused my miraculously patient and long-suffering publisher, Stuart Proffitt, considerably less stress. But I would not have been able to take advantage of numerous recent archival discoveries – a set of remarkable finds that cumulatively have transformed our knowledge of Caravaggio, particularly of his later years. Because those discoveries have emerged piecemeal, often in out-of-the-way academic journals or private publications, I have found myself in the unusual and fortunate position of writing about one of the greatest artists ever to have lived fully four centuries after his death, yet able to draw on fresh and important documentary material unavailable to previous biographers.
As a result, I believe I have been able to shed light on aspects of Caravaggio’s life that have until now remained shrouded in mystery to all except the scholars most closely involved – including the painter’s sexuality, the circumstances that led him to commit the murder of 1606 that cast such a long shadow over the rest of his life, and the events surrounding his imprisonment on the island of Malta. In addition I publish here for the first time some hitherto overlooked descriptions of the Osteria del Cerriglio, the establishment in Naples where he was badly assaulted near the end of his life in a vendetta attack. By returning to other previously discovered documents I believe I have also been able to offer a convincing solution to the riddle of how Caravaggio met his death in the summer of 1610.
My principal focus throughout is on the artist’s paintings. I dwell on them at length because they are the main reason to be interested in Caravaggio, notwithstanding the tempestuous drama of his life. Attentive readers will notice that I am less generous in my attributions than many other scholars of Caravaggio’s work: I prefer to be too rigorous than over-inclusive. It may be assumed that if I do not mention a particular picture, for example the frequently proposed Narcissus from the Barberini Collection, it is because I am not satisfied that Caravaggio painted it. The main exception to this is The Annunciation in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nancy, which is indeed a Caravaggio, but one so badly damaged as not to be worth discussing here.
I have incurred many debts in writing this book, above all to the community of scholars whose researches have yielded so much new information over the past half-century or so, especially in recent years. I am deeply grateful to Sandro Corradini for helping to guide me through the labyrinth of Rome’s criminal archive and for sharing the fruits of his twenty years and more of research there. Maurizio Marini took me on a memorable tour of Caravaggio’s old haunts in the artist’s quarter of the city and made interesting suggestions, which I have developed, about the significance of damage done to the ceiling of a particular room in a house in the present-day Vicolo del Divino Amore. Maurizio Calvesi generously communicated his insights into the painter’s ‘pauperist’ religious orientation, and the role that members of the Colonna family may have played in the various events of his life. In Naples, Vincenzo Pacelli showed me his archival discoveries concerning Caravaggio’s last painting, The Martyrdom of St Ursula, and shared some speculations about the painter’s final days.
My thanks are also due to Peter Robb, who met me in Naples and sent me on what proved to be anything but a wild-goose chase on the island of Malta. On Malta itself I profited from conversations with Fr John Azzopardi and Keith Sciberras, who have between them shed much light on Caravaggio’s ill-fated attempt to join the Order of the Knights of St John. John T. Spike, who received me at his home in Florence, allowed me to see an advance copy of the CD-ROM catalogue and bibliography that accompanied his monograph on Caravaggio: an invaluable guide to the vast literature on the artist. My old friend Mary Hersov, former Head of Exhibitions at the National Gallery in London, has talked and walked Caravaggio with me far beyond the call of duty.
Helen Langdon, whose own biography of Caravaggio appeared in 1998, has also been extremely supportive throughout the writing of this book. In particular, she generously allowed me to profit from the time-consuming work that she put into combing through Riccardo Bassani and Fiora Bellini’s sporadically fascinating but deeply flawed book of 1994, Caravaggio assassino – the curate’s egg of recent Caravaggio studies – sifting the true not only from the false but also from the outright invented. Helen also set me straight at a particular crossroads in my research into the painter’s second and final stay in Naples, for which I am very grateful.
I have not spoken to Sir Denis Mahon in the course of writing my book, but, like everyone engaged in serious study of Caravaggio, I have benefited enormously from his pioneering work. The shades of Walter Friedlaender and Roberto Longhi have given me much assistance along the way, as has that of my old tutor at the Courtauld Institute, Michael Kitson, whose wisdom I sought to absorb along with the smoke of many amiably shared packets of cigarettes. I have drawn rather more lateral inspiration from the work of John Michael Montias, whose Vermeer and His Milieu of 1989 is a truly remarkable work. The shape of my own book has been certainly influenced by his, as well as by a meeting with Montias at his home in New Haven in the autumn of 2001. Without laying any claim to Montias’s eminence as an archival scholar, I have myself tried to spin a ‘web of social history’, to use his phrase – to convey, through an account of one man’s life and milieu, some sense of an entire lost world, in this case the civilization of Italy at the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth. Charles Nicholl’s books about Marlowe and Shakespeare, The Reckoning and The Lodger, have been among my other touchstones.
Writing about Caravaggio has been an intellectual challenge, but it has also been an adventure, one which has led me into some fairly unusual situations. With John Azzopardi’s generous help and the loan of a slightly rickety ladder, I have inspected the stone well, or guva, in which Caravaggio was imprisoned on Malta (I can now laugh at the practical joke of his pretending to lock me in and leave me there, although it seemed less funny at the time). I have duelled (after a fashion) with master-swordsman Renzo Musumeci Greco in his Roman fencing school, in an attempt to understand the sort of manoeuvres that might result in the emasculation of a man during a swordfight. I have walked along the quays of the old port at Valletta with the Maltese naval historian Joseph Sciberras, to learn about transport by felucca in Caravaggio’s time. I have been allowed to inspect the book of the dead in the parish of Porto Ercole by local historian Giuseppe La Fauci. I have spent some happy hours poring over Caravaggio reproductions with the film director Martin Scorsese, who generously gave his time to open my eyes to the artist’s importance for modern cinema. To these and all the others who have gone out of their way to help me – the boy who lowered that ladder down the guva on Malta, the sacristan who got the keys to the church of Santa Lucia in Syracuse, the librarians and archivists in London, Rome, Naples, Milan and Malta who found so many books and documents – a heartfelt thank you.
Closer to home, I would like to thank my producer Silvia Sacco for devising a schedule for my television and other work that made the seemingly impossible possible. Without her constant encouragement, moral support and ruthless deadline-setting, I really might never have written the book at all. Without the help of my researchers, I would certainly never have been able to finish it. Opher Mansour did a first-rate job of translating Corradini’s essential anthology of archival documents, Materiali per un processo, from a mixture of legalistic Latin and often difficult sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italian vernacular slang. Opher also allowed me to read his enlightening doctoral thesis about censorship in Caravaggio’s Rome and unearthed several eyewitness accounts of the plague that ravaged Milan in the mid 1570s. In the very final stages of the book, Nicholas Stone Villani took time away from his own thesis to travel to Italy on my behalf, where he found out the seedy truth about the Osteria del Cerriglio. My principal researcher throughout has been Eugénie Aperghis-van Nispen tot Sevenaer, who has been unfailingly helpful, resourceful and thorough in carrying out what must sometimes have seemed a daunting series of tasks. She also did the picture research for the book and secured the reproduction permissions. While running her marathon, Eugénie was ably assisted by Kasja Berg, who on more than one occasion responded to my plaintive demands for particular texts or documents with exemplary calm and efficiency. My mother and father, far more knowledgeable about music than I ever will be, kindly brought their considerable erudition to bear on Caravaggio’s early paintings of musicians and lute-players, greatly to my advantage.
I will always remain affectionately grateful to Roger Parsons, with whom I first began to explore the complexities of Caravaggio’s world such an absurdly long time ago. Stuart Proffitt has made extremely valuable suggestions concerning style, structure and approach. Donna Poppy, my copy editor, has improved my original manuscript immeasurably with her rigorous and unsleeping eye for sense, proportion, perspective and detail. Finally I would like to thank my wife, Sabine, who must have read this book ten times while I was writing it once, for contributing so many emendations, corrections and indeed fresh ideas – and also my whole family, for helping me to keep my sanity and managing to keep their own while enduring the difficult birth of this long-gestated child.
London, February 2010
Caravaggio’s art is made from darkness and light. His pictures present spotlit moments of extreme and often agonized human experience. A man is decapitated in his bedchamber, blood spurting from a deep gash in his neck. A man is assassinated on the high altar of a church. A woman is shot in the stomach with a bow and arrow at point-blank range. Caravaggio’s images freeze time but also seem to hover on the brink of their own disappearance. Faces are brightly illuminated. Details emerge from darkness with such uncanny clarity that they might be hallucinations. Yet always the shadows encroach, the pools of blackness that threaten to obliterate all. Looking at his pictures is like looking at the world by flashes of lightning.
Caravaggio’s life is like his art, a series of lightning flashes in the darkest of nights. He is a man who can never be known in full because almost all that he did, said and thought is lost in the irrecoverable past. He was one of the most electrifyingly original artists ever to have lived, yet we have only one solitary sentence from him on the subject of painting – the sincerity of which is, in any case, questionable, since it was elicited from him when he was under interrogation for the capital crime of libel.
Much of what is known about him has been discovered in the criminal archives of his time. The majority of his recorded acts – apart from those involved in painting – are crimes and misdemeanours. When Caravaggio emerges from the obscurity of the past he does so, like the characters in his own paintings, as a man in extremis.
He lived much of his life as a fugitive, and that is how he is preserved in history – a man on the run, heading for the hills, keeping to the shadows. But he is caught, now and again, by the sweeping beam of a searchlight. Each glimpse is different. He appears in many guises, moods and predicaments. Caravaggio throws stones at the house of his landlady and sings ribald songs outside her window. He has a fight with a waiter about the dressing on a plate of artichokes. He taunts a rival with graphic sexual insults. He attacks a man in the street. He kills a man in a swordfight. He and a gang of other men inflict grievous bodily harm on a Knight of Justice on the island of Malta. He is himself attacked by four armed men in the street outside a low-life tavern in Naples. His life is a series of intriguing and vivid tableaux – scenes that abruptly switch, as in the plays of his English contemporary William Shakespeare, from comedy to tragedy, from low farce to high drama.
Anyone attempting a biography of Caravaggio must play the detective as well as the art historian. The facts are rarely straightforward and the patterns of intention that lie behind them often obscure. The artist’s life can easily seem merely chaotic, the rise and fall of an incurable hot-head, a man so governed by passion that his actions unfold without rhyme or reason (this was, for centuries, the prevailing view of him). But there is a logic to it all and, with hindsight, a tragic inevitability. Despite the many black holes and discontinuities in the shadowplay of Caravaggio’s life, certain structures of belief and certain habits of behaviour run through all that he did and all that he painted. The evidence has to be decoded using guesswork, intuition, speculation and above all a sense of historical imagination – a willingness to delve as deeply as possible into the codes and values that lie behind the words and deeds of a far distant past.
A lot has been made of Caravaggio’s presumed homosexuality, which has in more than one previous account of his life been presented as the single key that explains everything, both the power of his art and the misfortunes of his life. There is no absolute proof of it, only strong circumstantial evidence and much rumour. The balance of probability suggests that Caravaggio did indeed have sexual relations with men. But he certainly had female lovers. Throughout the years that he spent in Rome he kept close company with a number of prostitutes.
The truth is that Caravaggio was as uneasy in his relationships as he was in most other aspects of life. He likely slept with men. He did sleep with women. But he settled with no one. From a very young age, and with good cause, he suffered from a deep sense of abandonment. If any one thing lay behind the erratic behaviour that doomed him to an early death, it was the tragedy that befell him and his family when he was still just a little boy. The idea that he was an early martyr to the drives of an unconventional sexuality is an anachronistic fiction.
To understand the emotions that drove him and the experiences that most deeply shaped him, it is necessary to begin where he was born: in the town of Caravaggio, in Lombardy, from which he would later take his name. He lived both there and in the nearby city of Milan for the first twenty-one years of his life. His youth is the least documented period of his existence – the darkest time, in every sense, of this life of light and darkness. But in its shadows may be found some of the most important clues to the formation of his turbulent personality.
There are three early biographies of Caravaggio. All were composed after his death, and each is unreliable for different reasons. The first was written during the second decade of the seventeenth century by Giulio Mancini, a physician from Siena who met Caravaggio in Rome, probably in about 1592, and who knew him well between 1595 and 1600. The second was published in 1642 by Giovanni Baglione, a rival painter who had competed and quarrelled with Caravaggio during his years in Rome, in particular between 1601 and 1606, on one occasion suing him for libel in response to some scabrous verses, on another going so far as to accuse him of hiring paid assassins to kill him. The third was written, three decades later, by an antiquarian and art theorist named Giovanni Pietro Bellori, who had never known Caravaggio and who based his own account on those of the two earlier authors.
Mancini is sporadically informative but frustratingly brief. Baglione is more circumstantial and surprisingly objective, given that he was writing the life of a man whom he suspected of having plotted to murder him. As a rule of thumb, Baglione is the most trustworthy early source. His biography has been shown to be extremely accurate in its presentation of the bare facts. Many later discoveries of original documents concerning Caravaggio have simply confirmed the truth of his original account. Baglione is only really unreliable in his smug, moralizing conclusions, which are plainly coloured by Schadenfreude. This is particularly evident in the mean-spirited passages that tell the story of Caravaggio’s various falls from grace.
Bellori wrote his life of Caravaggio considerably later. It was published in 1672, more than sixty years after the painter’s death. Bellori plainly drew much of his material from Baglione. But he did glean some new facts. He also went to much trouble to see the painter’s works in situ. He was seduced by their power and their drama, and fascinated by the novelty of Caravaggio’s technique. Bellori wrote about the painter’s art with far greater sensitivity than either Mancini or Baglione. Yet he was also fundamentally appalled by it. Caravaggio’s vivid capturing of poverty and violence – his depictions of Christ and the Virgin Mary as barefoot paupers, his bloodily realistic portrayals of Christian martyrdom – went directly against Bellori’s own most cherished beliefs. Bellori upheld the academic principle that art should not represent the world as it is, but as it should be, sweetened and idealized. So although he responded instinctively to Caravaggio’s captivating realism, he felt bound to condemn him all the more strongly for it. Bellori crystallized what would remain for centuries the standard academic objection to the painter’s work:
Repudiating all other rules, [Caravaggio] considered the highest achievement not to be bound to art. For this innovation he was greatly acclaimed, and many talented artists seemed compelled to follow him … Such praise caused Caravaggio to appreciate himself alone, and he claimed to be the only faithful imitator of nature. Nevertheless, he lacked invenzione, decorum, disegno [draughtsmanship], or any knowledge of the science of painting. The moment the model was taken from him, his hand and his mind became empty.
Bellori went on to say that ‘Just as certain herbs produce both beneficial medicine and most pernicious poison, in the same way, though he produced some good, Caravaggio has been most harmful and wrought havoc with every ornament and good tradition of painting.’1 In other words, the painter might have had a gift for mimicking reality, but there was no depth to him. If Bellori were to be believed, he was little more than a machine for producing optically convincing images – a kind of human camera, with his workshop a prototypical photographer’s studio, long before the invention of photography itself. In this way was the myth of Caravaggio as an untutored, thoughtless virtuoso, the master of a debased and pernicious brand of naturalism, attached like an anchor to his posthumous reputation.2 In fact, he was an extremely thoughtful, inventive painter, a close and careful reader of the texts that he was called to dramatize and to embody in the form of images. But how and where he got his education remains unknown, partly because his three biographers have so little to say about his early life.
Caravaggio was born three years after the publication of the second, revised edition of Giorgio Vasari’s pioneering anthology of artists’ biographies, The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects. Vasari’s book was the model on which later writers such as Baglione and Bellori based their own collections of artists’ lives. In it, he confirmed and sought to extend a great rise in the status of artists within the Italian peninsula during the period now known – also largely thanks to Vasari’s efforts – as the Renaissance. Previously the profession of art had been ranked low because it involved work with the hands and was therefore classed as a form of manual labour, a craft rather than a liberal art. But implicit throughout Vasari’s thousand and more pages is the belief that the greatest artists deserve to be ranked with poets and philosophers as men of true genius, rightful companions of kings and princes.
As well as raising the reputation of his own profession, Vasari established certain formulae for writing the life of an artist. Particularly famous painters and sculptors, such as Giotto or Michelangelo, are established as miraculous prodigies from an early age: the brilliance of Giotto, for example, is said to have been discovered by the older artist Cimabue, who came upon the young man when he was still a callow shepherd and found him drawing perfectly upon a stone. But no such uplifting fables are attached to the youth of Caravaggio by his biographers. Mancini compresses his early life to just two sentences, and Baglione to a paragraph. Bellori has a tale to tell about the young Caravaggio, but it runs counter to the kind of prodigy stories favoured by Vasari because it is designed to stress the artist’s principal failing, as Bellori saw it – his supposed lack of intellect, which meant that his work could never rise from mere craft.
Bellori’s story tells of Caravaggio’s origins as the son of an artisan. Since the painter ‘was employed in Milan with his father, a mason, it happened that he prepared glue for some painters who were painting frescoes and, led on by the desire to paint, he remained with them, applying himself totally to painting. He continued in this activity four or five years …’ Bellori may have meant to imply that this imitative, unreflective training predisposed Caravaggio to his great mistake – that of recognizing ‘no other master than the model, without selecting from the best forms of nature’.3 His moral is certainly blunt: once a craftsman, always a craftsman.
The story is not exactly true but like many stories about Caravaggio it contains elements of the truth. He could never have been employed in tasks such as preparing glue or plaster for his father, because his father died when Caravaggio was only five years old. But the record shows that Fermo Merisi was indeed a mason. This might suggest that the artist’s origins were, as Bellori implies, rooted in the humble world of the artisan. But the sources hint at a more complicated truth. There is room for ambiguity because Fermo Merisi’s job of mason could encompass different ways of working with stone, and possibly even the vocation of architect.
Baglione’s brief account broadly agrees with that of Bellori – he simply says that the artist, ‘born in Caravaggio in Lombardy, was the son of a mason, quite well off’.4 But Mancini makes the artist’s background sound considerably grander. According to him, ‘He was born in Caravaggio of honourable citizens since his father was majordomo and architect to the Marchese di Caravaggio.’5 Mancini may have got the gist of his account from the artist himself, in particular the idea that Caravaggio was of better than merely common birth. A number of incidents in the painter’s later life indicate that he believed that he came from good stock, and deserved respect on account of that. It is important to establish the truth, because Caravaggio’s elevated sense of his own status would lie at the root of many of his future troubles.
Most of the known facts about Caravaggio’s youth were published by the scholar Mina Cinotti in 1983.6 One of the more revealing documents to emerge from her research records the wedding of the artists’ parents. On 14 January 1571 Fermo Merisi married a woman called Lucia Aratori. Fermo was born in about 1540 and was a widower, with a daughter named Margherita by his first marriage. Lucia was some ten years younger than him and had not been married before. Fermo was recorded as resident in Milan, but the marriage took place in the town of Caravaggio, where both his bride and the rest of his family lived. It would have been an unexceptional wedding had it not been for the presence, among the witnesses, of the Marchese Francesco I Sforza di Caravaggio. The marchese was a member of one of the leading noble families of Italy, the Sforza, who were former lords of Milan. His wife, the young Marchesa di Caravaggio, was from the enormously powerful Colonna family. These were the most important people in the neighbourhood.
The presence of nobility at the nuptials of the Merisi family turns out to have had precious little to do with Caravaggio’s father. Fermo Merisi was just an ordinary stonemason, perhaps reasonably well off but with no great social pretensions. He was certainly not an architect. In a number of documents relating to him he is referred to as a mastro, designating him as a qualified artisan with the right to set up his own workshop and hire apprentices. He ran this modest business in Milan. His probate inventory lists ‘some old iron mason’s tools’, but does not include any books or instruments that would indicate a knowledge of the theoretical aspects of architecture. His retention of an independent workshop makes it unlikely that he was in the direct employ of the Marchese di Caravaggio. Caravaggio’s paternal grandfather, Bernardino Merisi, was himself no higher up the social scale. He too had run a small business. He was a wine merchant and vintner based at the family home in Porta Seriola, in the north-east quarter of Caravaggio.
There were in fact close links between Caravaggio’s family and the noble Colonna dynasty, but all on the side of the painter’s mother.7 Her father, Giovan Giacomo Aratori, was an agrimensor, or ‘surveyor’, whose job it was to help resolve disputes over land ownership. He was also involved in buying and selling land. His work brought him directly into contact with the Colonna, who owned much property in the region. Whereas Caravaggio’s father and paternal grandfather worked with their hands, Giovan Giacomo was a professional rather than an artisan. His work required more literacy than that of a mason, as well as a knowledge of geometry and arithmetic. In 1570, a year before the birth of his grandson, the future painter, he was made a member of the college of land surveyors of the Duchy of Milan.
Giovan Giacomo Aratori also played his part in the religious life of Caravaggio. The most celebrated event in the history of this sleepy little agricultural town had occurred in 1432, when a peasant girl working in the fields was reputed to have had a vision of the Virgin Mary. According to legend a freshwater spring had miraculously gushed from the spot where she experienced her vision, and a shrine had been subsequently erected to the honour of the wonder-working ‘Madonna della Fontana’. By the second half of the sixteenth century, the shrine of Santa Maria della Fontana had become the most significant religious institution in Caravaggio. It was administered by a body of scolari, to which Giovan Giacomo was elected at various times from the mid 1560s onwards.
In addition, he held important positions in the local comune, as councillor, treasurer and emissary to the Spanish authorities (the Duchy of Milan, including the town of Caravaggio, was at that time part of the vast Habsburg empire, controlled by Philip II of Spain from the Escorial, his palace and monastery outside Madrid). Giovan Giacomo’s many responsibilities meant that he was a familiar figure among the local nobility. He acted directly as an agent for the Marchese Francesco Sforza I di Caravaggio, served as a legal witness for the Sforza family and collected rents on their behalf. Some documents connect him directly to the marchese, others to the marchese’s wife, Costanza Colonna.
There were yet more intimate links between the Colonna family and the Aratori clan. Giovan Giacomo’s daughter Margherita, Caravaggio’s maternal aunt, was wet-nurse to the Sforza children. She lived in the Colonna household for many years and breastfed Costanza Colonna’s sons, including the future adventurer and sometime militant Knight of the Order of St John, Fabrizio Sforza Colonna. In 1584, as a reward for her service, Costanza gave Margherita a small estate in Fara d’Adda, near the town of Caravaggio. As late as 1601 Margherita was still in regular touch with the marchesa, writing letters to her in Rome – at a time when Caravaggio, elsewhere in the city, was receiving some of his most important commissions.
Costanza Colonna would be called on many times by Caravaggio. Always she would respond. She would be a constant support to him in times of crisis, giving him shelter when he was on the run and shielding him when he was under sentence of death. Yet, unlike any of his other noble allies or protectors, she would never try to acquire a painting by his hand. All the evidence suggests that she genuinely cared for him, perhaps even loved him as a child of her own. Her influence and that of her family, with its tentacular network of feudal and familial alliances, reaching right across the Italian peninsula, can be sensed throughout Caravaggio’s life – but especially during his later and more troubled years.
Social class, in particular questions of ‘nobility’ and ‘virtue’, would be at issue in many of Caravaggio’s future disputes and quarrels. These were matters of intense debate in medieval and Renaissance Italy. In northern Europe the aristocracy took its own pre-eminence for granted and assumed that nobility was a quality that could only truly inhere in those fortunate enough to be born into the upper, landed classes. There, a nobleman was easily identified: a man of virtue and pure blood, who had the right to bear arms in the service of his monarch, who was a skilled swordsman and horseman and would never dirty his hands with trade. In Italy the situation was more ambiguous, because Italian society was more fluid and its ruling elites more diverse, made up of imperial knights, communal knights, magnates and other types of feudal lord. It was also an increasingly urbanized society, and that too led to the blurring of social distinctions. From the second half of the fourteenth century onwards, urban patriciates sought to tighten their hold on government. The men who made up those bodies, which included merchants, moneylenders, textile manufacturers and other drivers of early capitalism, were themselves intensely class conscious. They founded their own dynasties, staked their own claims to nobilità – so much so that the very term itself became, in Italy, shifting and unstable. As early as the fourteenth century, writers ranging from the poet Dante to medieval jurists had struggled to define the concept. Legal definitions based purely on titles conferred by the monarchy or the church were countered by those who preferred to regard nobility as a moral quality to which, in theory, almost anyone could aspire.8
What position did Caravaggio’s maternal grandfather occupy within this world of subtly shaded social distinctions? Giovan Giacomo Aratori is referred to in the documents of the time as signor, messer or dominus. While his social status was certainly higher than that of anyone on the Merisi side of Caravaggio’s family, neither he nor his descendants possessed any actual titles. He was a member of what might be called the upper, professional bourgeoisie, while the likes of Bernardino and Fermo Merisi belonged to the petty, trade bourgeoisie. Mancini’s statement that Caravaggio was born into a family of ‘very honourable citizens’ – cittadini is the word he uses in Italian – was entirely accurate.
But in the small world of Caravaggio, where the artist spent much of his youth, his status may to him have seemed grander than that. As we have seen, his maternal grandfather was a highly respected man, but other factors may have conspired to make him feel that both he and his family were blessed by aristocratic favour. Maybe Costanza Colonna showed particular favours or kindnesses to Caravaggio’s mother, Lucia, sister to her own children’s wet-nurse. Lucia’s early years of motherhood were hard indeed, marked by bereavement and loss. Costanza Colonna too had suffered a difficult time during the early years of her marriage to Francesco I Sforza. She had been married off, as the custom then was among the nobility, at the age of thirteen. The duties of a wife had at first been abhorrent to her, so much so that she had at one point threatened suicide. Did Costanza Colonna feel a particular sympathy for Lucia and her young children during the harsh years of their early upbringing? It is impossible to know for sure, but she certainly took a particular interest in Caravaggio’s wellbeing later in his life. Perhaps the date of his birth had something to do with it too, because as far as anyone in Christendom was concerned – but especially a Colonna – he was born at an auspicious time.
Caravaggio grew up as Michelangelo Merisi. It was an evocative name for a future artist – the same Christian name as that of the most famous Italian sculptor and painter of all, Michelangelo Buonarrotti, who had died just seven years earlier. But Caravaggio’s parents did not have that in mind when they named their son. They called him Michelangelo for reasons of faith and superstition. He came into the world on 29 September 1571. His parents named him after the Archangel Michael, whose feast day it was.
This was a charged and momentous time in the history of Christendom. Throughout the 1550s and 1560s the Christian powers of the western Mediterranean were threatened by the forces of Islam – led first by the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman ‘The Magnificent’, and then by his successor, Selim II. The bitter and bloody conflict between Muslim and Christian reached a climax at exactly the moment of Caravaggio’s birth. In 1570–71 Christian Cyprus, a strategically vital island fortress long controlled by the Venetians, fell into Ottoman hands. The garrison stationed at Famagusta, the last Christian stronghold in Cyprus, fought bravely before being forced to surrender. The survivors of the siege were cruelly massacred. Churches and cathedrals were converted into mosques, their stained glass smashed, their paintings and sculptures destroyed, their belltowers turned into minarets. Pope Pius V was appalled not only by the atrocity and its immediate consequences, but also by the possibility that the Ottomans might gain control over the principal trade routes of the Mediterranean. He joined forces with the Venetians, and together the allies sought additional support wherever they could find it. Missions were sent to Spain, to Portugal and to all the independent states of Italy. The princely families of southern Europe rallied together and thousands of soldiers were pressed into service. The result was no mere political alliance, but a self-styled Holy League for the defence of Christendom against the infidel.
Under the command of Don Juan of Austria, illegitimate brother of Philip II of Spain, a vast fleet of galleys – most of them constructed, in record time, within the great dockyard-cum-factory production-line that was Venice’s Arsenale – set out to humble the Turkish navy. Eight days after Caravaggio’s birth, on 7 October 1571, the two sides met in the Greek Gulf of Corinth, then known in the west as the Gulf of Lepanto. The result was the last great sea battle fought between galley-rowed ships. Both sides suffered heavy casualties. Eight thousand Christians died, and many more Turks. But, while the fleet of the Holy League survived the battle all but intact, the Ottoman fleet was destroyed and its commander-in-chief killed. One of the heroes of the battle was the commander of the papal forces, Marcantonio Colonna, father to Costanza Colonna, father-in-law to Francesco I Sforza, who had been witness at the wedding of Fermo Merisi and Lucia Aratori. After the victory, the pope declared that the Virgin Mary herself had interceded with God on behalf of the Holy League. Henceforward, the day of the victory was to be remembered as the Feast of Our Lady of Victory. Marian cults across Catholic Europe received a huge boost to their popularity. In Venice the day was declared a permanent festum solemnis, to be marked every year by a procession led by the doge, and by celebratory masses. All across Italy, churches were built in honour of Santa Maria della Vittoria. Devotion to the Rosary reached a new pitch of intensity.
The Battle of Lepanto was a triumph to salve the wounds of a Christian world that had been sundered by the Reformation some half a century before. The Protestant king of faraway Scotland, James VI, was so carried away by the news that he wrote an epic poem to celebrate the great Catholic victory (though he felt compelled to add a prefatory disclaimer that Don Juan of Austria, hero of his verses, should still be regarded as ‘a foreign papist bastard’). Meanwhile, Costanza Colonna’s father, Marcantonio, made his triumphal entry into Rome. He rode into the city on a white horse, a modern-day Mark Antony stealing the glory of the caesars of old. But he also had the decorum to temper that show of pride with a spectacular display of humility. Having processed in triumph, he exchanged the armour of victory for rags and set forth on a pilgrimage to give thanks to Our Lady of Loreto.9
Michelangelo Merisi had been born on a day full of promise for zealous Christians, whose world was under threat. Archangel Michael had been the guardian angel of the Hebrew nation, and was associated with the protection of the faithful from harm. He had also been adopted, in Christian times, as the principal saint of the Church Militant. In depictions of the Last Judgement, he weighs the souls of the blessed and the damned, separating good from evil. In such paintings he is commonly shown wearing chain-mail and armed with a sword and shield, symbols of the archangel’s ancient association with knights and crusades, and holy wars against the infidel.
Michelangelo was a fitting Christian name for any child within the sphere of the Colonna family, defenders of the faith and warriors against heresy – but all the more so in the case of a child born not just on the saint’s name day, but on the eve of a great battle between Christian and Muslim in which the head of the Colonna family himself would take a leading role. When victory at the Battle of Lepanto followed within just over a week of his birth, the hopes and prayers attendant on his baptism were answered. Perhaps he was thought of as a child who had brought good luck. Perhaps that was another reason why, despite his difficult personality and frequent lapses into criminal behaviour, Costanza Colonna would always stand by him.
The artist’s early life was divided between the town of Caravaggio and the city of Milan. The contrast between the two could hardly have been greater. Set in the fertile plains of Lombardy, Caravaggio was a quiet place, architecturally undistinguished, which had once been a Roman outpost. The activities of the town revolved around agriculture, which was vital to the booming prosperity of the region. Since the later Middle Ages the entire area had been intensively developed. Irrigation channels, networks of stream and canal that still criss-cross the fields today, had been systematically introduced. Better understanding of crop rotation had transformed the area into a prime producer of cereals. Large plantations of mulberry trees were grown as feed for silkworms, silk being the essential raw material for Milan’s booming textile industry. The people of Caravaggio lived and worked by the rhythms of nature. They were known for their phlegmatic character, their solid business sense and their piety, the symbol of which was, from the 1580s onwards, the construction of the great shrine dedicated to Santa Maria della Fontana. Caravaggio was tranquil bordering on dull, a place where it felt as though nothing much had happened for a hundred years and more.
Milan, the great city, two hours’ ride away, had a population of 100,000, much the same as that of London or Paris at the time. Milan was noise and bustle, trade and industry, a populous and prosperous city – the place where Fermo Merisi, Caravaggio’s father, went to work each day with his mason’s tools of iron. It was a city known for the skill of its stone-workers and the ingenuity of its sword-makers. Milanese armour, Milanese swords and Milanese daggers were renowned as the finest in Italy. The men of the city were famous for their swordsmanship, a skill at which Caravaggio would come to excel.
The men of Milan were also known for their singular reluctance to marry. ‘In Italy marryage is indeede a yoke, and that not easy, but so grevious, as brethren no where better agreeing, yet contend among themselves to be free from marryage.’10 Distrust of matrimony was common enough in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy, especially among the upper classes, to have provoked many such comments from visitors. Italian humanists, including Petrarch and Leonbattista Alberti, had railed against marriage as a distraction to the intellect and a potential cause of economic ruin. Nowhere was the misogynistic cult of celibacy stronger than in Lombardy. It did not necessarily entail sexual abstinence, merely a refusal to be yoked to any single woman. The rate of celibacy among the Milanese aristocracy reached unprecedentedly high levels in the second half of the seventeenth century, so much so that it has been calculated that more than fifty per cent of all high-born males in the city never married at all.11 Caravaggio would never marry either, although it is impossible to establish whether this was another example of the painter imitating aristocratic mores, or simply the result of his restless temperament.
The traveller Thomas Coryat visited Milan in 1608, by which time Caravaggio was long gone from the city. But the Englishman’s vivid account, published in 1611 under the title Coryat’s Crudities, describes the metropolis much as it had been when Caravaggio was young. Coryat noted Milan’s conspicuous opulence, and the many luxury trades that thrived there: ‘No City of Italy is furnished with more manuary arts than this. Their embroderers are very singular workemen, who worke much in gold and silver. Their cutlers that make hilts are more exquisite in the art than any that I ever saw. Of these two trades there is a great multitude in the city: Also silkemen do abound here, which are esteemed so good that they are not inferiour to any of the Christian world.’12
He grouped the city’s armourers and sword-makers together with its embroiderers and silk-workers, perhaps implying that all were working in different branches of the Milanese fashion industry. The ability to fight was certainly just as important, to a young man out to impress, as the clothes that he wore. Swordsmanship was part of that intangible code of pseudo-chivalric skills and values encompassed by the Italian words virtù and nobilità – although in Caravaggio’s Italy it was never easy to tell whether a young man’s aspirations to virtuous nobility were rooted in fact or fantasy.