Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (20 page)

The ultimate ambition of every artist was the same: namely to work for the cardinals closest to the pope, to secure the most important commissions and win lasting fame – along with the money and security that went with it. The rules of the game were by no means straightforward. Everybody knew of mediocre artists who had been
promoted above their abilities, and of deserving painters who had been
overlooked. In a world where competition and rivalry were intense, resentment flourished easily, so Antinoro’s was a rumour factory as well as an artists’ supply shop. Stories of sabotage abounded – of the scaffolding that collapsed in the night, of the painter whose rival poisoned his colours with acid so that all his blues turned green in a matter of days. Once an artist got a reputation for bad luck or inefficiency, once it got around that he had ‘the evil eye’, his commissions would soon dry up.
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Though they disagree in some details, taken together Caravaggio’s early biographers paint a convincing picture of a young man struggling to find his way in a harsh and unfamiliar world. During these first years in Rome he had contacts to ease his passage into the city: his uncle, Ludovico Merisi, the priest, was living there in 1591–2, Costanza Colonna in late 1592. But he seems to have fended mostly for himself, moving restlessly from one studio to another in search of employment – and quite possibly instruction too.

Baglione reports that ‘in the beginning he settled down with a Sicilian painter who had a shop full of crude works of art.’
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Bellori, in his marginal notes to Baglione’s life, gives the Sicilian painter a name of sorts – Lorenzo Siciliano, whose line of work was painting crude bust-length heads for general sale. According to Bellori, in Lorenzo’s workshop ‘Caravaggio painted heads for a groat apiece and produced three a day.’ The ‘heads’ in question may have been portraits of the famous men of the past, a subject in vogue among collectors of art since the middle years of the fifteenth century. The mercenary soldier and intellectual Federigo da Montefeltro, ruler of Urbino, had turned
his private study into a gallery of such pictures, encompassing figures
as various as Cicero and St Thomas Aquinas. If Caravaggio did paint his own versions of such subjects, none is known.

It was while staying with Lorenzo Siciliano that Caravaggio met an ambitious but unpredictable young Sicilian artist called Mario Minniti. According to the eighteenth-century biographer Francesco Susinno, who had access to sources now lost or destroyed, the young Minniti had been forced to flee Syracuse, via Malta, to get away from unspecified troubles. Arriving in Rome, he lodged with a hack painter from Sicily, in whose studio he befriended Caravaggio. Susinno implies that they were united in their dissatisfaction with the type of work which ‘that coarse artisan’ demanded of them, and dreamed together of rising to greater things. They became close friends, Minniti even posing for the impoverished Caravaggio – who could ill afford a model – on several occasions. His moon-shaped, mumpish face can be recognized in a number of early works. Minniti would also prove to be a useful contact much further along the pitted track of Caravaggio’s life.

According to Mancini, during this period Caravaggio also lodged with a beneficed priest of St Peter’s named Pandolfo Pucci, from the town of Recanati. He may have been introduced through his connections with the Colonna: the priest was household steward to a member of the Peretti family, and the Peretti and the Colonna were close. Mancini says that Pucci gave the artist a room and allowed him to paint there in exchange for domestic chores. The deal was not to the painter’s satisfaction, and not only because he was not the sort of man to take pleasure in doing the housework: ‘Worse, he was given nothing but salad to eat in the evening, which served as appetizer, entrée and dessert – as the corporal says, as accompaniment and toothpick. After a few months he left with little recompense, calling his benefactor and master “Monsignor Salad”.’
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Mancini records that during his time with the parsimonious Pucci, Caravaggio ‘painted some copies of devotional images’, which the priest took home to Recanati with him when he left Rome in 1600. No trace of them has been found. Lost too is ‘a portrait of an innkeeper who had given him lodgings’ as well as another, unnamed portrait mentioned by the biographer. But the young Caravaggio’s painting of a ‘boy who is peeling a pear with a knife’, also mentioned by Mancini, has perhaps survived.

There are at least ten versions of a similar subject, all showing the same rudimentary composition. The painting in the British Royal Collection, which is thought to have been acquired by Charles II, is conceivably the original picture described by Mancini. It was already recorded in the James II inventory of the collection as a work by ‘Michael Angelo’, which indicates that it was regarded as an autograph Caravaggio as early as the seventeenth century. An adolescent boy in a white shirt sits at a table on which various fruits, including cherries, peaches and nectarines, are scattered. The boy’s shirt is spotlessly white, his hands unblemished, details suggesting that he is of noble birth. He peels not a pear but a green Seville or Bergamot orange, a bitter fruit. Perhaps this symbolizes his determination to choose the path of virtue, to avoid the sweeter temptations that life has to offer, or perhaps it is an emblem of the disappointments and difficulties that lie ahead even for a boy like this, blessed by wealth and fortune – a characteristically sour note for Caravaggio to have struck. But the mood of the painting is anything but ominous, so it might be unwise to burden it with too much hidden meaning. If it is indeed an autograph work, this undistinguished genre picture confirms just how little progress Caravaggio had made as a painter by the early 1590s. The handling is crude, the boy’s expression wooden. Only in the extreme contrast of light and shade – the whiteness of the shirt, the depth of the shadows – can some presage of Caravaggio’s later work be discerned.

THE BROTHERS CESARI

For the rest of his early time in Rome, Caravaggio appears to have been very much out on his own. Having left Monsignor Salad to his greens, he probably spent some time in the studio of a Sienese painter called Antiveduto Gramatica.
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Gramatica was an artist of limited gifts about whom little is known save for the fact that his father had a questionable sense of humour. After predicting his son’s premature birth, he registered his prescience by giving him his joke of a name –
antiveduto
, meaning ‘foreseen’.

Caravaggio may have entered his studio in early 1593. In the same year Gramatica became a member of the guild of painters, the Accademia di San Luca. He was prolific, turning out small-scale devotional pictures, portraits and copies of portraits by the score. Particularly popular were his copies of a series of
Famous Men
then at the Villa Medici. Caravaggio, whose work for Lorenzo Siciliano had probably included similar pictures, may have painted his own copies of the Villa Medici ‘heads’ while in Gramatica’s studio. If so, it is possible that he now came to the attention of his future protector, the Medici cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, for the first time.

The next studio in which Caravaggio found work was more exalted. It was that of Giuseppe Cesari, otherwise known as the Cavaliere d’Arpino, one of the most prominent artists in Rome in the 1590s. Giuseppe Cesari was only three years older than Caravaggio but far more successful. He was from a family of artists: his father, Muzio, was a painter. His brother, Bernardino, was his chief assistant and may also have acted as workshop manager. When he was a boy, Giuseppe had shown such precocious gifts as a draughtsman that his mother had taken him to Rome. At the age of just thirteen he had found work as a colour mixer for Niccolò Circignani, who was then directing the decoration of the Vatican Loggie for Pope Gregory XIII. He soon graduated to the painting team and made enough of a name for himself to win several important independent commissions in Rome during the later 1580s. Following the death of his most influential patron, Cardinal Farnese, in 1589, he accepted an invitation to carry out a series of paintings for the Certosa di San Martino in Naples, including a monumental canvas,
The
Crucifixion
. He returned to Rome in 1591 and on Clement VIII’s accession became the pope’s leading painter.

Cesari’s art was a limp but occasionally elegant hybrid of High Renaissance and Mannerist styles. As a painter of religious subjects, he answered the Counter-Reformation call for clarity, grace and decorum. But in his smaller, erotically charged mythological pictures, he experimented with complicated poses and frequently arcane symbolism. He painted the rape of Europa and the judgement of Paris, as well as the naked Diana and her companions surprised by the huntsman Actaeon. A composition of Perseus swooping from the skies to rescue an alluring and unusually languid Andromeda from the clutches of a diminutive lapdog of a dragon proved especially popular; several versions survive.

Caravaggio probably began working for the Cesari brothers in the middle of 1593. It was an eventful time for his new employers. In late 1592 Bernardino Cesari had been sentenced to death for associating with known bandits and had run away to Naples. But by May of the following year he was back in Rome, having secured a papal pardon thanks to the intervention of Cardinal Paolo Emilio Sfondrato, one of several powerful patrons of the Cesari workshop. Giuseppe now needed all the help he could get. The studio was busy: the papal treasurer, Bernardo Olgiati, had commissioned the decoration of an entire chapel in the church of Santa Prassede. Figures of the prophets, sibyls and doctors of the Church were required, as well as a
Resurrection
and a monumental
Ascension
. There was also a commission to decorate the vault of the Contarelli Chapel, in the church of San Luigi dei Francesi, with small scenes set into an intricate stuccowork design. Six years later Caravaggio would win the commission to paint two large canvases for the walls of the very same chapel – works that would instantly establish him as the most original religious artist of his time, and forever overshadow the earlier contributions of the Cesari workshop. But in 1593 he was just another apprentice painter from Lombardy with everything to prove.

The sources say that Caravaggio was employed to paint ‘flowers and fruit’. Artists from northern Italy had recently begun to work in the relatively new field of still life painting. It was a genre of secular art – albeit frequently with undertones of religious meaning – that had its roots in post-Reformation Flanders and Holland. But its popularity had begun to spread southwards across Europe during the late sixteenth century. The Spanish played a part in disseminating this new taste, buying works of art in their northern territories and taking them to the cities that they controlled in Italy. It is likely that Caravaggio had seen Dutch or Flemish still life paintings during his time in Milan, and perhaps that was why Giuseppe Cesari marked him out for the same line of work. It is likely that he would have contributed the decorative festoons of frescoes by the Cesari workshop, as well as painting canvases for direct sale to private clients. Cesari also bought and sold Dutch and Flemish cabinet pictures, which suggests that he was well aware of the new taste among Roman collectors for the novelties of landscape and still life painting. But the supply of such pictures from the north was inevitably limited. Who better than an artist from Lombardy – a man from fertile Caravaggio, surrounded by the orchards that supplied Milan – to create homegrown depictions of flowers, fruit and vegetables?

There may have been an element of condescension about Cesari’s decision to channel Caravaggio’s energies towards still life – a trace of dismissive preconception about painters from the north. It was not unknown for Lombard artists to be caricatured as rustic provincials, country bumpkins of painting, unacquainted with the grand traditions of Renaissance art. Artists were ranked according to a strict hierarchy determined by subject matter. At the top were those who specialized in paintings of the human figure shown in heroic or significant action – paintings from the Bible or mythology. Lower down the scale came portraits, then paintings of animals. Then came another relatively new genre, the landscape, followed last and least by the humble still life. Such distinctions mattered a lot, especially to a man as touchy and as self-conscious about his own status as Caravaggio.

There are strong indications that he resented the lowly nature of the work that he was given to do in the Cesari studio. Bellori suggests that he already had the ambition to work in the higher reaches of art, but had to take whatever employment he was offered simply to survive:

Since models, without which he did not know how to paint, were too expensive, he did not earn enough to pay his expenses. Michele was therefore forced by necessity to work for Cavaliere Giuseppe d’Arpino, who had him paint flowers and fruit, which he imitated so well that from then on they began to attain that greater beauty that we love today. He painted a vase of flowers with the transparencies of the water and glass and the reflections of a window of the room, rendering flowers sprinkled with the freshest dewdrops; and he painted other excellent pictures of similar imitations. But he worked reluctantly at these things and felt deeper regret at not being able to paint figures.
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Shorthand notes in the manuscript of Mancini’s biography yield several tantalizing glimpses of Caravaggio in the Cesari workshop. They are obscure and hard to interpret, but suggest that the painter’s relationship with his employers was fraught. At first they rescue him, but then they let him down or betray him in some unspecified way. There is a reference to Caravaggio in poor and ragged clothing. Then Bernardino Cesari takes him into the ‘Torretta’, which was the name of the building in which the Cesari workshop was housed. He is put up on a straw mattress on a raised platform, presumably some kind of minstrels’ gallery in one of the rooms. He boards there, in all, for eight months. But at a certain point something bad happens, although Mancini’s notes do not say what that something was. Giuseppe Cesari is a witness: ‘Giuseppe sees and is petrified and in order to distract him makes him retreat and flee so he does not appear.’ Following this nameless act and its enigmatic aftermath, the Cesari brothers seem to feel that Caravaggio’s presence in their workshop has to be concealed. Mention is made of ‘C. G.’, short for Giuseppe Cesari, painting a picture of St Joseph on which Caravaggio perhaps collaborates; but wherever this takes place, Cesari is very keen that Caravaggio should not be seen. Then Caravaggio gets kicked by a horse so badly that his leg swells alarmingly, but a surgeon is not called because he still must not be seen by anyone. A Sicilian friend who owns or runs a shop – more likely to be Lorenzo Siciliano than Mario Minniti – takes him to the hospital of the Consolazione. The Cesari brothers never go to visit him and he never goes back to them.
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