Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (49 page)

An inventory of Caravaggio’s household contents was drawn up when his tenancy ended abruptly in August 1605, an event that will be described below. The inventorist noted the objects in the order in which he encountered them, so the list of things also describes a sequence of rooms. Like many of the documents concerning Caravaggio, the inventory is fascinating but tantalizing. Reading it is like leafing through a dossier of arbitrarily cropped and framed snapshots of the things a man once owned – the furniture he sat on, the weapons with which he fought, the books he read, the tools he used. But all the photographs are just a little out of focus. Crucial details are missing and there is no one to fill in the gaps:

This is the inventory of all the personal property of the painter Michelangelo from Caravaggio . . . First, a kitchen-dresser made of white poplar-wood, with three compartments and an alder frame, containing eleven pieces of glassware, namely glasses, carafes and flasks covered in straw, a plate, two salt-cellars, three spoons, a carving board and a bowl, and on the above-mentioned dresser two brass candlesticks, another plate, two small knives and three terracotta vases.
Item
a water jug. Two stools.
Item
a red table with two drawers.
Item
a couple of bedside tables. A picture.
Item
a small chest covered with black leather, containing a pair of ragged breeches and a jacket. A guitar, a violin. A dagger, a pair of earrings, a worn-out belt and a door-leaf.
Item
a rather big table.
Item
two old chairs and a small broom.
Item
two swords, and two hand daggers.
Item
a pair of green breeches.
Item
a mattress.
Item
a shield.
Item
a blanket.
Item
a foldaway bed for servants.
Item
a bed with two posts.
Item
a chamber-pot.
Item
a stool.
Item
an old chest.
Item
a majolica basin.
Item
another chest containing twelve books.
Item
two large pictures to paint.
Item
a chest containing certain rags.
Item
three stools.
Item
a large mirror.
Item
a convex mirror.
Item
three smaller pictures.
Item
a small three-legged table.
Item
three large stretchers.
Item
a large picture on wood.
Item
an ebony chest containing a knife.
Item
two bedside tables.
Item
a tall wooden tripod.
Item
a small cart with some papers with colours.
Item
a halberd.
Item
two more stretchers.
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‘Once he put on a suit of clothes he changed only when it had fallen to rags.’ Bellori’s remark, repeated in one or two other early sources, finds confirmation in the ragged breeches and jacket and the worn-out belt. There is little in the way of cooking equipment, which suggests that neither the painter nor his apprentice spent a great deal of time in the kitchen. It is not surprising to learn that Caravaggio kept books, and a pity that the notary did not list their titles (though if they
had
been identified, a multitude of over-ingenious iconographic hypotheses would have been unleashed on the painter’s work). At any rate, their presence gives the lie to the old academic caricature of Caravaggio as an unlettered copyist of appearances.
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But we cannot tell anything conclusive from what is here about his relationship with his servant: all the references to beds and bedding occur in one place, so it can be inferred that the two men either shared sleeping quarters, or slept in adjoining rooms. But Cecco certainly had his own separate bed, or mattress.

The convex mirror is likely to be the one in which Caravaggio had studied his own, distorted self-portrait while painting the
Medusa
. It is probably the same object that can still be seen, propped up on the table, in the
Martha and Mary
Magdalen
in Detroit. The mention of a
‘large mirror’ is more mysterious: mirrors were extremely expensive in the early seventeenth century, and, given Caravaggio’s often-remarked disregard for his own appearance, it is unlikely he would
have owned one for reasons of vanity. It was most likely another tool of his studio, which he used to bounce or reflect light, much like a modern cinematographer. The ‘large painting on wood’ could have been one of the two botched first attempts at the Cerasi Chapel commission.

One thing is clear from the inventory: Caravaggio was living modestly. For all Baglione’s allegations of ‘the many hundreds of scudi’ that he had ‘pocketed’ from Ciriaco Mattei, there was not much sign of suddenly acquired wealth in the meagre possessions assembled in the little house on the Vicolo dei Santa Cecilia e Biagio. Caravaggio was a very well known painter by early 1604, but his future was by no means assured. When Clement VIII commissioned a series of altarpieces for St Peter’s in these, the last years of his pontificate, Caravaggio was not among the artists approached.

Part of the problem was almost certainly his personality. By now he would have been notorious as a proud and difficult man. Baglione and his clique would have been only too happy to reinforce that impression. But there were other, more powerful forces working against Caravaggio. The Catholic Church was moving decisively away from the severe Counter-Reformation piety embodied so powerfully by his work. The religious attitudes that he had grown up with in Milan were falling increasingly out of favour among those in positions of power. Carlo Borromeo’s belief that the princes of the Church should clothe themselves in humility and model their lives on those of Christ’s own poor disciples was falling terminally out of fashion. Poverty and the poor were there to be controlled, regulated, put in their place. In parallel, the idea that Christian art should exalt poverty was regarded as increasingly eccentric and distasteful by senior churchmen, from the pope downwards. It was the function of art to hymn the majesty of God in his heaven – and therefore to bathe the papal court and the upper hierarchies of the Church in the reflected glory of that higher, celestial court. Like the art of Caravaggio, the art favoured by a newly triumphalist Church was aimed at the poor as well as the rich. But its approach was very different. It did not welcome the poor and the meek or make them feel that they, ultimately, were the inheritors of the earth. It was there to awe, daunt and stupefy them, to impress them with visions of a force so powerful it could not be resisted – and must, therefore, be obeyed.

For all his sensitivity and genius, there could ultimately be no place in this new Baroque sensibility for an artist such as Caravaggio. If anything, his art was becoming even more pared down, more severe, with the passage of time. This pattern of development, begun with the Cerasi Chapel paintings, had continued throughout 1603. In his evidence given at the libel trial, Orazio Gentileschi had remembered Caravaggio returning ‘a Capuchin’s robe and a pair of wings’. Cecco had worn the wings when he sat for
Omnia vincit amor
. The Capuchin robe, sacred uniform of the Franciscan order, had been worn by the rather older model whom Caravaggio cast in another picture of the same period,
St Francis in Meditation
, now in the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, Palazzo Barberini, Rome. Nothing is known about why, or for whom, this ascetically morbid picture was painted. The saint kneels alone in darkness beside the simple wooden crucifix that assists his meditations. His torn, patched cloak is the symbol of his piety and of his utter disdain for the things of this world. He holds a skull in his hands, staring deep into the sockets where eyes once were. He is shown lost in contemplation of his own mortality, and of the eternal life that awaits him thanks to Christ’s crucifixion at Golgotha, ‘the place of the skull’. But the idea of the picture is stronger than its execution. The folds of the drapery have been cursorily painted and the penitential pose seems artificial. Caravaggio had always composed with a strong sense of theatre, but here his work tips over into theatricality.

According to Gentileschi, Caravaggio had returned the borrowed habit at around the beginning of September 1603, so probably the
St Francis
was completed shortly before then.
The Sacrifice of Isaac
is another picture from this time. Less penitentially gloomy, it clothes an Old Testament legend in the same robes of holy poverty. The lined and bald Abraham is cousin to Caravaggio’s earlier pauper saints and strongly resembles the uppermost disciple in his
Doubting Thomas
. A simple man of simple faith, he steels himself to do God’s bidding, holding his screaming son down as if the boy – modelled by Cecco in yet another guise – were just one more lamb brought to slaughter.

The Sacrifice of Isaac
had been the subject of a famous competition in fifteenth-century Florence between Lorenzo Ghiberti and Filippo Brunelleschi, for the commission of a cast-bronze pair of doors for the city Baptistry. Each artist had produced a single bas-relief in bronze, which between them became the two most famous Renaissance treatments of the subject. The eventual winner, Ghiberti, had devised a composition of great elegance and delicacy, setting the scene in a gracefully abbreviated landscape and lending a balletic quality even to the murderous gesture of the Old Testament prophet. Brunelleschi
had produced a much brusquer and more violent interpretation of the story, focusing on the action itself, where Abraham plunges the dagger dramatically towards his son even as the angel stays his hand. Brunelleschi lost the competition, but unsurprisingly it was with his vivid, violent, essentially late medieval view of the story that Caravaggio
identified. Caravaggio’s greatest Dutch admirer, Rembrandt, would give a yet more brutal emphasis to the drama, by showing Abraham’s smothering hand clamped over the face of his helpless son.

The Sacrifice of Isaac
is also notable for Caravaggio’s very last view of landscape: an idyllic glimpse of the Roman
campagna
complete with winding path, avenue of cypresses, a country villa and a distant monastery silhouetted against a fragment of summer sky. From 1604 onwards, his painted world shrinks in on itself, and even events set outside look as though they are taking place in a darkened theatre. Middle tones almost disappear. Increasingly, there is only darkness and light.

A PLATE OF ARTICHOKES
AND OTHER STORIES

Caravaggio would receive just three commissions for large-scale public religious paintings between 1603 and 1606. As the spareness and solemnity of his work became increasingly out of step with the times, he was forced to watch from the sidelines as lesser painters overtook him in the unstable hierarchy of Roman patronage. In reaction, he became ever more aggressive. An eighteenth-century writer of artists’ lives, Filippo Baldinucci, recounts the story of Caravaggio’s jealous attack on a Florentine painter called Domenico Passignano. Passignano’s sin had been to secure the coveted commission to paint an altarpiece for St Peter’s. One day his assistant was alone with the unfinished picture, which was still curtained off from public scrutiny, when Caravaggio went to take a look. Showing ‘no respect for place or person’, he drew his sword, cut a slit in the fabric and poked his head through the hole. His assessment of the work in progress was predictably caustic: ‘As bad as I thought, from a painter like him’.
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The message was presumably passed on to Passignano by his startled apprentice. The legend was soon absorbed into the collective memory of the Italian artist.

Caravaggio was picking fights with other people too. On 24 April 1604 he got into an argument with a waiter at one of his local restaurants, the Osteria del Moro, or ‘Tavern of the Blackamoor’. In the course of an altercation concerning artichokes, he smashed a plate against the man’s face. Stopping only to have his wound dressed at the barber-surgeon’s, the waiter took his grievance straight to court. He gave his name as Pietro de Fossaccia and declared that he was originally from Lago Maggiore. This is his testimony against Caravaggio:

At about seventeen hours [half past twelve] the above-named defendant with two other men was eating in the Tavern of the Blackamoor, near the Church of the Magdalen, where I am employed as a waiter. I had brought him eight cooked artichokes, to wit, four cooked in butter and four in oil, and the said defendant asked me which were done in butter and which in oil. I replied: ‘Smell them, and you will easily know which are cooked in butter and which in oil.’ Thereupon, he flew into a rage and without further words seized an earthen plate and flung it in my face. It hit me here in the left cheek, wounding me slightly. Then he got up and snatched the sword of one of his companions, which was lying on the table, perhaps with intent to strike me. But I got away from him, and came here to the office to file a complaint.

A copyist called Pietro Antonio de Madii, from Piacenza, had also eaten at the Tavern of the Blackamoor that lunchtime. He was called as an eyewitness. He partially corroborated the waiter’s story. But, in recalling the exact words that had been exchanged, he shed new light on the incident. The verbal precision of his evidence may have reflected the habits of his work, as a transcriber of others’ words:

I was dining at the Tavern of the Blackamoor. On the other side of the room there was Michelangelo da Caravaggio, the painter. I heard him ask whether the artichokes were done in oil or butter, they being all in one plate. The waiter said: ‘I don’t know’, and picked one up and and put it to his nose. Michelangelo took it badly and sprang to his feet in a rage, saying: ‘It seems to me, you fucked-over cuckold, that you think you’re speaking to some kind of vulgar provincial [
barone
].’ And he seized the plate and threw it at the waiter’s face. I did not see Michelangelo grasp the sword to threaten the waiter.
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