Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (15 page)

Such developments marked a great shift in attitudes. During the Renaissance religious artists had come to believe that, within fairly loose constraints of Christian orthodoxy, they were free to interpret and depict the stories of the Bible as they liked. As a result of the Counter-Reformation, the Roman Catholic Church set new and stringent limits on the presumed freedom of artists. The principal aim of this policy was to replace the Renaissance cult of freedom and originality with the ideals of artistic duty and responsibility. The second half of the sixteenth century witnessed a widespread call to order – a movement intended to take religious art back to the values of an earlier and supposedly purer time. Carlo Borromeo was at its forefront. As well as containing recommendations of every kind about church architecture and decoration, his
Instructiones
set out his views on art with typical forthrightness. No animals or other distracting details should be included, unless actually mentioned in the biblical text that the artist had been instructed to illustrate. In the seventeenth chapter of his book, devoted to the correct representation of sacred events, Borromeo determined the appropriate fines and punishments for artists who failed to meet the strictest standards of decorum. In Milan, errant artists as well as heretics were liable to come to the attentions of the archbishop’s
famiglia armata
. No painter could be in any doubt about what was required of him. Images should be clear and direct. It was the job of art simply to educate spectators and move them to penance.

Borromeo’s influence on art in his native Milan is well documented. Simone Peterzano, the feeble late Mannerist painter with whom Caravaggio would sign a contract of apprenticeship, developed a sparer and more austere style in direct response to Borromeo’s pronouncements. The archbishop himself owned a collection of paintings that, to judge by its contents, he is likely to have used in his meditations. According to an inventory of 1618, these included an
Adoration of the Magi
by Titian, an
Agony in the Garden
by Antonio Campi and an
Annunciation to the Shepherds
by Jacopo Bassano (all three paintings can be seen, today, in Milan’s Pinacoteca Ambrosiana). Such works reflect his taste for the art of Venice and the Veneto, and his marked preference for small-scale devotional pictures. But the most intriguing aspect of Borromeo’s taste, for the student of Caravaggio, is his implicit rejection of high art in favour of more traditional, popular visual representations aimed squarely at the promotion of mass piety. Within five years of becoming Archbishop of Milan, he had sold his entire personal collection of art and given the proceeds to charity. This was an act consistent with his personal asceticism, indicating that Borromeo shared the widespread belief – propounded by supporters and opponents of the Reformation alike – that money spent on ‘dead’ images of Christ, i.e. paintings, could be yet better spent on Christ’s ‘living’ images, namely the real flesh-and-blood poor.

THE SACRED MOUNTAIN

Borromeo was not against religious art
per se
, but he had forceful likes and dislikes. There was a powerfully retrospective cast to his thought. He believed that the best solution to the problems of the modern Catholic Church lay in a return to the past. As a corollary to that, he favoured popular spectacle over the intellectual abstractions of supposedly sophisticated ‘High’ Renaissance art. Long after he had sold his own paintings, Borromeo continued to sponsor and support particular forms of popular Christian visual spectacle – events and phenomena that were literally ‘vulgar’, in the sense of being aimed directly at the
vulgus
, the crowd, the general mass of people. Borromeo himself staged numerous theatrical performances of his own extreme ideal of Christian faith. In times of trouble or pestilence for the city, he would march barefoot through the city of Milan with thousands of his supporters, all in sackcloth and ashes. Such processions might themselves be seen as a form of choreographed visual art.

Borromeo’s theatricality was another reflection of his belief in the value of constantly remembering and re-enacting the life of Christ – whether actually or in the mind’s eye. It was deliberately unsophisticated, direct and immediate, and that was part of its point. Borromeo was intentionally attempting to revive the emotive methods of the itinerant medieval friars such as Francis of Asissi and his followers. The teachings of Francis had unleashed a flood of early Renaissance painting on the walls of churches throughout fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy, clear images bringing Christ’s message to the poor. But Francis had also helped to found yet more popular and rabble-rousing forms of artistic expression – not only penitential processions of the kind imitated by Borromeo, the pious medieval equivalent of performance art, but also a very particular type of folkish
mise-en-sc
è
ne
in which painted statues were arranged to conjure up events from the Bible. The first and most widely copied example of this was the crib that Francis created at the monastery of Greccio for the Christmas of 1223: a three-dimensional mock-up of the Nativity, complete with painted carvings of Mary, Joseph and the infant Christ, it was all done, in his words, ‘to bring home to the people of Greccio what the birth of Christ at Bethlehem was like’.

Francis’s innovation of celebrating the Nativity with the creation of a crib proliferated and mutated. Over the following centuries it produced other, far more elaborate traditions of folk art, including the so-called
sacro monte
, or ‘sacred mountain’. It was here that several of the most vital elements of popular piety – including the practice of empathetic visualization of the life of Christ, the ideal of religious meditation and a much enlarged version of the sculptural arrangement devised by St Francis in the crib – all came together in a single carefully orchestrated experience.

The earliest
sacro monte
came into being at the end of the fifteenth century when a Franciscan friar named Bernardino Caimi decided to re-create the sites of Christ’s life and passion – ranging from Bethlehem to Nazareth, from Gethsemane to Mount Sion – in the mountains above the town of Varallo, in what is today the Piedmont region. Caimi received papal permission and support for his plan, which involved the construction of numerous chapels linked by mountain paths. Each chapel was to contain polychrome figures acting out the stories of the Bible. Eventually a total of forty-five such chapels were built, allowing pilgrims who climbed up to them to travel even further in spirit – journeying all the way from Original Sin, where they would encounter Adam and Eve tempted by the serpent, to Golgotha, ‘the place of the skull’, where Christ was crucified. Carlo Borromeo spent the last days of his life on just such a pilgrimage, ascending the mountain at Varallo and praying day and night among its painted figures.

Somewhat decayed, and much restored during the intervening centuries, these sculptures remain
in situ
today. Some of the figures are carved; others are formed from terracotta or stuffed fabric. The effect is inconsistent but full of lively touches of naturalism, somewhere between sculpture and waxwork theatre. The chapel of the Massacre of the Innocents is particularly vivid and gruesome, with its goitred executioner and grieving mothers, its floor strewn with dismembered babies. The
sacro monte
took the kind of interior, spiritual journey advocated for centuries in manuals of prayer and meditation, and turned it into an actual, physical itinerary, with suitably moving or horrifying scenes for the traveller moving up the mountain to witness at each new point of arrival. The sacred mountain gave a palpable form and structure to the instructions contained in devotional handbooks such as the fifteenth-century Venetian text
The Garden of Prayer
– books that, like the Franciscan prayer manuals before them and Ignatius’s
Spiritual Exercises
afterwards, counselled the worshipper to summon up a chain of places and images as vividly as possible within the space of the mind:

The better to impress the story of the Passion on your mind, and to memorize each action of it more easily, it is helpful and necessary to fix the places and people in your mind: a city, for example, which will be the city of Jerusalem – taking for this purpose a city that is well known to you. In this city find the principal places in which all the episodes of the Passion would have taken place – for instance, a palace with the supper-room where Christ had the Last Supper with the Disciples, and the house of Anne, and that of Caiaphas, with the place where Jesus was taken in the night, and the room where he was brought before Caiaphas and mocked and beaten . . . And then too you must shape in your mind some people, people well known to you, to represent for you the people involved in the Passion – the person of Jesus himself, the Virgin, Saint Peter, Saint John the Evangelist, Saint Mary Magdalen, Anne, Caiaphas, Pilate, Judas and the others, every one of which you will fashion in your mind.
32

The sacred mountain was designed to ease the process of devotional visualization. The worshipper must make the physical effort of ascending from one chapel to another, but once inside each space he or she would find that the job of visualization had already been accomplished. The images at Varallo were begun by the artist Gau
denzio Ferrari in the late fifteenth century, but they were ultimately des
tined to be created, re-created and continually restored in a centuries-long collaborative process involving generations of sculp
tors, craftsmen and architects. What those images did was, precisely, to
re-create scenes from the Bible as if enacted by ‘people well known to you’.

The most skilfully carved and painted of the figures have a shocking actuality about them. This is not art that seeks to idealize or generalize life; it is art that aspires to the condition of a simulacrum of life itself. Collectively, the chapels of the
sacro monte
exemplified an ancient, pious fairground form of realism – a type of art that has in general been overlooked or avoided by most art historians precisely because of its naked and self-conscious ‘vulgarity’. Yet the art of the
sacro monte
also had strong roots in traditions of high artistic realism going back to the start of the Renaissance. This was a tradition that had produced the sculpturally immediate, emotionally vivid and highly theatrical fourteenth-century paintings of Giotto – which themselves had strong links with certain forms of sacred drama, miracle plays and the like, promoted by the Franciscans and other orders of mendicant friars; as well as the startlingly lifelike fifteenth-century sculptures of Donatello, creations such as the
Mary Magdalen
or the
Habakkuk
, which struck his contemporaries as so eerily imbued with human presence that he was even suspected of necromancy.

This tradition of the work of art as, essentially, a speaking likeness intended to bring the Bible to life was displaced during the later Renaissance – or, at least, it was so transformed by the values and
imperatives of the High Renaissance, of Michelangelo and Raphael and
the Mannerists who came after them, that its original, uncanny effects were greatly diminished. Yet it continued to thrive away from the perceived centres of art such as Rome or Florence. In Emilia-Romagna and throughout Lombardy, unsettlingly realistic groups of figures were created by a school of sculptors working in the malleable and highly expressive medium of terracotta. Their art is still insufficiently appreciated, but a sculptor such as Guido Mazzoni from Modena, whose breathtakingly emotive works can still be seen in churches across northern Italy – and indeed as far south as Naples – deserves to be ranked alongside any of his better-known contemporaries. The traditions of the highly realized terracotta sculpture, and of the
sacro
monte
, played a crucial role in shaping the imagination of pious Italians
in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Both traditions were also deeply influential on Caravaggio. Caravaggio’s mature paintings, such as
The Crucifixion of St Peter
and
The
Conversion of St Paul
, are blatantly rooted in the traditions of popular pious realism that produced the sculptures of the sacred mountain and the freestanding groups created by Mazzoni and other such masters. So clear and direct is the connection, so manifest the visual resemblance, that it might even be said that his principal strategy as a religious artist was to translate the effects of these two particular branches of theatrical sculpture into the painting of his time. The way in which he paints the wrinkled faces and bodies of his protagonists has its exact parallel in the wizened physiognomies conjured from clay by the masters of terracotta sculpture in Lombardy and Emilia-Romagna – so much so that some of the older faces in his painting might almost have been copied direct from sources in terracotta sculpture.

Caravaggio’s fondness for going into gruesome, visceral detail – his depiction, for example, of the gouts of blood that spurt from the decapitated tyrant’s head in
Judith and Holofernes –
also vividly testifies to the affinity between his art and the rowdy, bloody, popular spectacle of much
sacro monte
imagery. But even more telling is his constant habit of framing and composing scenes as though confined within a single, small, contained, theatrical space. There is very little landscape in Caravaggio, very little feel of the open air. The scenes he depicts are mostly to be imagined taking place indoors. He habitually collapses the immensity of the world to the confines of a room in which he can control the action and rigorously limit the cast of actors – a space analogous to the densely packed, theatrical spaces devised by the creators of the popular, pious, sculptural
mises-en-sc
è
ne
.