ONE OF THE PRIVILEGES of living in Rome is the chance to freely admire, just as if they were any other regular church decoration, some of Caravaggio’s greatest masterpieces—all you have to do is walk in and look. Anywhere else in the world, this alone would be enough to make a city famous. In Rome, on the other hand, the six gratis works by Caravaggio (I’m not counting the ones in various museums and galleries) get mixed right in with the rest of the city’s marvels. Our tour of Caravaggio’s work can begin in the Piazza del Popolo. Just inside the eponymous city gate is the church of Santa Maria del Popolo. According to legend, it was founded in 1099 to exorcise the ghost of Nero, which was apparently wandering restlessly near his family tomb. Santa Maria del Popolo houses works by Bramante, Pinturicchio, Raphael, Sebastiano del Piombo, Bernini, and Sansovino, among many others. Today, though, we’ll only have eyes for Caravaggio’s two canvases in the Cerasi Chapel, just to the left of the high altar. They represent The Crucifixion of St. Peter and The Conversion of St. Paul. Look at Saint Peter—he is old, but still vigorous even though he’s had a trying life. Notice his executioners—they work like dogs to hoist the weight of the oppressive wooden cross and its burden. They’re just poor devils with dirty feet who happen to make their living as jailors, and could just as well be construction workers or farmers. The year is 1601; the artist, in his thirties by now, was finally enjoying some success, and this painting was a harbinger of a new style in his work. Look at Saint Paul in the other painting—he lies flat on his back, his arms raised toward the heavens, terrified, and conquered by faith. His horse, one of the most beautiful in the history of painting, towers over him.
For the next stop I suggest we go to the sixteenth-century church of San Luigi dei Francesi. This is yet another church with no shortage of masterpieces (works by Domenichino, Guido Reni, and others), but we’ll go straight to the Contarelli Chapel, which has three Caravaggios—St. Matthew and the Angel, The Calling of St. Matthew, and The Martyrdom of St. Matthew. These images are made powerful by the brutal realism of the martyrdom, the magic of the composition accentuated by a dramatically angled light, and the emotional presence of the figures—starting with Matthew himself, who is shown right at the moment when he abandons his job as tax collector to become a disciple of Christ. Caught at the decisive moment, stupefied, he points to himself with his finger, asking, “Me? You really want me, Lord?”
Our last stop is the church of Sant’Agostino, just a few feet from the Piazza Navona, whose facade is made of travertine blocks lifted from the Coliseum. Here we can admire the Madonna di Loreto (also called Madonna of the Pilgrims) one of the master’s most moving and perplexing works. Even for a layman the extraordinary image of the Virgin, in reality just an ordinary Roman mother with her child in her arms, takes your breath away. She’s a rather common beauty, as was Lena, the model who posed for this picture. The Virgin stands just above the two pilgrims kneeling in front of her; she is a slender figure, perhaps a little out of proportion, and listens intently to the travelers’ prayers, her head inclined toward them. The coarse-looking youth on his knees is seen from behind, his large rear and big, dirty peasant feet facing the viewer. Next to him is a poor, wrinkled old woman, her hair held back in a dirty rag. Not until the nineteenth century would this type of realism, intense to the point of being visionary and yet quite stark, leave its imprint on an entire artistic current.
There could have been a seventh work by this extraordinary artist in yet another church, Santa Maria della Scala in Trastevere. Yet things happened differently, and today this supreme masterpiece is in Paris, at the Louvre.
To explain why Caravaggio painted the way he did, and how he arrived at his style, means exploring one of the most interesting moments in all of art history. The story’s setting is Rome on the cusp between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—a time of disorder, savagery, miracles, and atrocities committed in the name of faith. In short, a city in perpetual turmoil, wracked by a hundred practical and religious problems, and full of risks; the life of Michelangelo Merisi, called Caravaggio, became its mirror. The evidence we have highlights the artist’s intemperance, arrogance, unsteadiness, and sudden outbursts. Might his nasty reputation come from the fragmentary nature of the news available to us, or is it instead shaped by the quality of his painting itself, from the dark depths of its realism? The Catholic Church had been badly shaken by the spread of Protestantism, and in response it tried to impose edifying, idealizing, and strongly ideological principles on art. Caravaggio painted as if the crude truths of life were revealing themselves for the first time—the saints and virgins don’t stare rapturously toward the heavens, are not accompanied by garlands of angels, nor do they clasp their hands together in ecstatic prayer. Whether they reside in glory or are being gruesomely martyred, they remain human beings; their bodies show the signs of exhaustion, old age, illness, misery, and the weight of the flesh. There is torture and death in these pictures; victims fall to the ground in pools of their own blood, and their assassins stand over them, knife in hand, ready to deliver the final blow.
When Caravaggio arrived in Rome, in the autumn of 1592, he was barely twenty years old and totally unknown. A barber named Luca described him as “a large youth of twenty or twenty-five with a sparse black beard, chubby, with dark eyes and long eyelashes. He dresses untidily in black, his black socks are slightly ragged, and he wears his hair long in front.” These words come from a police report, the inevitable result of one of the brawls the young painter was involved in—a hasty scuffle or sudden attack followed by a breathless chase, stifled cries in the Roman night, a yell, dark alleys with crumbling walls marred by trickling liquids of suspicious origin. Caravaggio’s dark complexion has often been remarked on, and some have exaggerated its importance, attributing to his “long lashes and dark eyes” the character of his works. Giovan Pietro Bellori, an intellectual and art connoisseur who lived just after Caravaggio, from 1613 to 1696, wrote in his Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, “Caravaggio’s manner corresponded to the appearance of his face. He had a dark complexion and dark eyes, his eyebrows and hair were black, and that color was reflected in his paintings.”
Michelangelo Merisi was born in 1571, the fateful year in which the navy of the Holy League crushed the myth of Turkish invincibility at Lepanto. He trained in Milan and perhaps visited Venice, but by the time he was little more than twenty years old he was already in Rome, the mecca for every talented artist, just as Paris was at the end of the nineteenth century, and New York at the end of the twentieth century. He began as an apprentice in the shop of Giuseppe Cesari, known as Cavalier d’Arpino, and it’s hard to imagine two more different personalities. The two men were almost the same age—Arpino was only about three years older than Caravaggio. Arpino had had a poor childhood, and was the son of a mediocre ex-voto painter. Because he knew how to find the right favors, including papal favors, he reached quick success. His paintings were elegant, decorative, facile, and therefore much in demand. Success kept him in good health, making him “happy, witty, and free of sentimentality.” He did seem to succumb to melancholy at the end of his long life, which lasted from 1568 to 1640, but such things, among the old, aren’t surprising.
Arpino had a lively workshop in the area around Piazza della Torretta, and many apprentices and young artists from Italy and Northern Europe worked there. Taking his cue from Raphael’s workshop organization, Arpino meted out tasks to his studio assistants—an ornamental frame for one, some less important finishing work for another, a few flowers here, some fruit there. Twenty-year-old Caravaggio was part of this workshop, and was also lodged there, though his accommodations seem to have been scarce—little more than a pallet in a corner. He also painted flowers and fruit; according to Bellori, “he was set to painting flowers and fruits so well rendered that many others came to repeat those same charms that are so popular today.” This lasted for about nine months, until there was an incident or some scuffle that left him with a badly wounded leg. He was sent to recover at the Ospedale della Consolazione, and upon leaving the hospital he wanted nothing more to do with the Cavalier d’Arpino or his shop. Traces of all the fruits and flowers he’d painted for Arpino can be found in his Sick Bacchus and Boy with a Basket of Fruit. The character of these two pieces, however, comes from the figures, and the contours of these two youths contain all of Caravaggio’s later work.
Exactly which Rome did this clever, restless twenty-year-old get to know? The capital of the Catholic Church was, at the end of the sixteenth century, little more than a village crossed by wandering flocks of animals and strewn with majestic ruins. Its princely palaces rose up against an expanse of small houses. Most were only two stories, built of poor materials, and inhabited by even poorer people. The population was just over one hundred thousand, and outside the walls, as well as in parts of the city itself, were vast open areas with dense vegetation interrupted here and there by a buttress or the peak of some ancient ruin. Some Catholics were cheered by this landscape of ruin; the Jesuit Gregory Martin wrote in a letter dated 1581, “Where there was so much beauty on the seven hills, what is there now but desolation and solitude? Not a dwelling, not a house, only here and there good and holy churches of great piety … the kingdom of Christ has overturned the empire of Satan.”
The abundance of holy buildings notwithstanding, Rome was as turbulent and dangerous as it always had been. In the classical period Juvenal had warned in one of his satires, “He who goes out at night goes to his death,” and the poet Belli, in the nineteenth century, used that line as a title for one of his sonnets. In the sixteenth century venturing out into the dark and deserted streets after sunset could become a fatal adventure. Those who could defend themselves went out armed with a sword or a rapier even though they were officially banned. Respectable people, young women, and the elderly avoided going out at all after sunset. But there were, of course, those who did go out looking for adventure, including sexual adventure, in the dark of the night, regardless of the risk. Among them were many artists, including a hoard of foreigner painters attracted to Rome by the transparency of its incomparable light. They gathered in the taverns around the Platea Trinitatis (today the Piazza di Spagna), dominated by the Trinità dei Monti, the church that looked down on the square from the top of a steep, grassy slope. Here they held noisy parties and dinners that went on and on amidst jokes, laughter, vulgarities, and dares, all in an atmosphere of apparent camaraderie that often hid bitter feelings. Competition among artists was fierce, and often caused jealousy, disagreements, cheating, and swift exchange of accusations, including one of the most frequent and slanderous (as well as fraught with possible legal consequences)—sodomy.
Another densely populated area of the city lay on the slopes of the Capitoline Hill, including the Jewish Ghetto, extending to the edges of the Theater of Marcellus. Here you could go to places with names like the Taverna del Moro, del Lupo, dell’Orso, della Torre, or del Turco (Tavern of the Moor, Wolf, Bear, Tower, and Turk, respectively) and drink late into the night. It was also easy to find female companionship here, and women could be seen hurrying their clients along, sometimes toward home, sometimes straight to the nearest secluded corner. Bordellos were also densely packed in the area around the Mausoleum of Augustus.
The overabundance of priests, soldiers, adventurers, and pilgrims—all of them officially celibate or at least deprived of female company—meant that prostitutes flocked to Rome from all over, certain of secure earnings. It has been estimated that there were at least 13,000 prostitutes in Rome at the beginning of the seventeenth century, or eighteen for every hundred female residents of the city, including old women and children. Pope Leo X had turned prostitution into a source of income for the papal treasury, levying a special tax on them to pay for the construction of the Via di Ripetta. Rome is still today one of the few cities in the world where there is a square named after a famous courtesan, dubbed an honest courtesan, or high-class kept woman, as we might call her today. The Piazza Fiammetta, near the Via dei Coronari, gets its name from Fiammetta Michaelis, whose many lovers included Cesare Borgia, the illegitimate son of Pope Alexander VI, better known as Valentino, the nickname Machiavelli gave him. Fiammetta lived at Via Acquasparta 16, just at the corner of the little square that now carries her name. Like most of her colleagues, she went to the nearby church of Sant’Agostino to confess and pray, and also left generous gifts there on behalf of the souls in purgatory. She was buried there, although all traces of her tomb have long since disappeared.
Another salient characteristic of seventeenth-century Rome was the vast quantity of beggars who crowded the city’s every street and intersection. For the most part they were professional mendicants—gypsies who were considered the epitome of poverty, or quintessential cheats, and they were often stereotyped in the collective imagination as shrewd thieves or kidnappers of children—or poor pilgrims looking for a little money so they could go home. According to the chronicler Camillo Fanucci, “in Rome you see nothing but beggars, and so many that it is impossible to walk without being surrounded by them.” Pope Sixtus V branded them with very harsh words, saying that they wandered around like wild animals disturbing the meditations of the faithful with their lamentations. Caravaggio represented mendicants and cheats at work in some of his paintings. In The Fortune Teller a gypsy woman steals from her witless victim while reading his palm, and in The Card Sharps two picturesque swindlers are fleecing an inexperienced young man.
There were also those who treated the poor and marginalized with compassion. These included Saint Philip Neri, one of the most affable figures in Catholic tradition, who the people of Rome called Pippo Buono, or Pippo the Good. Neri spent his time in the poorest neighborhoods, prisons, and hospitals, paying special attention to the ubiquitous abandoned children who were destined for a life of crime or prostitution. With a mix of his native Florentine humor and his acquired Roman common sense, he entertained the children, made them sing, play, and smile, and at the same time tried to teach them something, keep them off the streets, and prevent them from going hungry.
The streets of Rome were a veritable theater, sometimes merry, sometimes sinister, and almost always unpredictable. In considering the spectacles played out there we mustn’t exclude the public executions held in the square at the end of the Ponte Sant’Angelo (a convenient spot since it was close to the Tor di Nona prison), the Piazza del Popolo, and the Campo de’Fiori. In November of 1825, Angelo Targhini and Leonida Montanari were executed in the Piazza del Popolo “by order of the Pope,” as the commemorative plaque records; the two carbonari, or members of a secret revolutionary society, had been convicted of high treason and assault with the intent to injure. The next year saw the last execution carried out there—Giuseppe Farina was bludgeoned to death for having killed a priest who robbed him. Public executions were so frequent that, according to Ferdinand Gregorovius in his monumental History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages, guests at the Locanda del Sole, an inn on the Campo de’Fiori, complained that “they witnessed the spectacle of torture or watched people dangling from the gallows in the area every day.”
But one of the most famous places of execution was the Ponte Sant’Angelo, originally the Pons Aelius, built by Hadrian as the monumental approach to his mausoleum. The bridge continued to be called the Ponte Elio until the seventh century, when Pope Gregory the Great had a vision of an angel sheathing his sword, thus signaling the end of a devastating plague. From then on both the bridge and the castle were renamed Sant’Angelo after the vision of the holy angel. The bridge became very important in 1300, when Boniface VIII declared the first Holy Year. Miniscule shops were built on the bridge; they served a commercial purpose, and also divided the flow of pilgrims into those going to Saint Peter’s and those coming back. In 1488 the bridge became a showcase for the heads of decapitated prisoners and the bodies of those who had been hanged. The ten lovely statues that now decorate it, making it something of a Via Crucis, were based on designs by Bernini and sculpted by his assistants. The master only carved two of them himself—the one holding the crown of thorns and the one with a scroll. After a series of interesting vicissitudes those two ended up where they are now, in the church of Sant’Andrea delle Fratte. Regarding our story, there was one particularly memorable and horrifying execution in the Piazza di Ponte Sant’Angelo that’s worth a little digression here because of its impact on those who witnessed it, including Caravaggio.
On September 11, 1599, a swelteringly hot day, Beatrice Cenci, her stepmother Lucrezia, and her brother Giacomo were all put to death in the Piazza di Ponte Sant’Angelo. This was the final chapter in a criminal case so famous that it took on mythic proportions and inspired artists like Stendhal, Shelley, Dumas, Guido Reni, Delaroche, and Moravia, as well as several film directors. A number of the circumstances of this murky affair caught people’s attention and fired their imaginations, including Beatrice’s tender age (she was barely twenty), the sexual violence she endured, the legal controversies, and remote motives for the crime. Thus Beatrice has understandably become a symbol of youthful rebellion against parental tyranny, of bewitching beauty, of innocence punished, and of an oppressed woman who sought independence at any cost.
Beatrice was the daughter of Francesco Cenci, a depraved and tyrannical man whose economic fortunes were on the decline. Married for the first time at fourteen, Francesco fathered twelve children, seven of whom survived to adulthood. When his first wife, Ersilia Santacroce, died, he married Lucrezia Petroni, a well-to-do widow who bore three of his children. Beatrice grew up in the ancient Palazzo Cenci, which stood in the old ghetto in front of the Isola Tiberina. She grew into a lovely young woman, open-minded and in love with life, perhaps too much so, at least in her father’s eyes. He imprisoned her and Lucrezia in the fortress of Petrella Salto, which stood just outside the confines of the Papal States, toward the Abruzzi, in the Kingdom of Naples. Cenci sent Beatrice away in an attempt to separate his children and thereby stop them from making any joint claim on his almost exhausted resources. “I want you to die out here,” he told Lucrezia as he accompanied her to the desolate fortress in the feudal territory of Marzio Colonna, who’d granted him permission to use the castle.
A pair of servants were assigned to guard the women, including Marzio Floriani, called Il Catalano, who was later identified as one of the men who carried out the crime, and Olimpio Calvetti, Colonna’s faithful castellan and an energetic fifty-year-old who was described as “a large and handsome man.” He also had a heroic past, as he had served with Marcantonio Colonna in the legendary Battle of Lepanto in 1571. A relationship, probably manipulated by Beatrice, developed between the girl and Olimpio, who was married to Plautilla Gasparini. She began to beg Olimpio to help her kill her father, hiring, if possible, one of the many bandits wandering around in that area. In the end the crime was carried out differently, and it was Giacomo who organized delivery of a fatal dose of opium and other soporific drugs to his restless sister.
At dawn on September 9, 1598, Francesco Cenci’s body was found with its head split open in the garden beneath the castle’s balcony. The balcony’s railing was broken and left hanging away from the wall. A hole in the floor made it look like one of the boards had given way when someone walked on it. After a church service Francesco was hurriedly buried along with his troubled past. He had been repeatedly accused of sodomy, a crime that was punished by burning at the stake. Four years earlier, during a trial conducted at Cenci’s expense, a witness testified, “Many times I saw Messer Francesco calling the boys and leading them to the stables while I was still around. And there, in the stall and in my presence, he kissed them and undid their pants and then said to me, ‘Matteo, go away.’ ” He was also accused of sodomy by several female servants, and defended himself not by denying the fact, but by specifying that his relations with them took place “in the ordinary way, as honest men do it, from the front.” This testimony was belied by that of another servant, who gave convincing evidence of the man’s outrageous behavior: “He asked me if I had any sickness, and I said no. He then said again, ‘no, no, I’m afraid that you have some sickness and that I will get it. I don’t want to do it like this. Turn over on your other side.’ Because I didn’t want to turn over, he turned me over by force and leaned me over a chair.” These precedents carried some weight as mitigating factors at Beatrice’s trial, but not enough.
Once buried, Francesco’s case should have been closed, but things went differently. Rumors that the man had been murdered led the authorities to open a per fama investigation, questioning multiple suspects among the public. Once some complicated jurisdictional questions were resolved, the investigation uncovered a number of troubling circumstances. The sheets and mattress from Francesco’s bed were discovered soaked in blood, whereas there was very little blood near the body, a fact that gave rise to the suspicion that he had been killed somewhere else. It was also revealed that the gap in the balcony rail was so narrow that Francesco’s large body could not have fallen through it. “There is no way with a hole of that width that the body of Signor Francesco could or did pass through it. Only with great difficulty could a slender body pass through it, and Signor Francesco was fat.” Even if there had been an accident, the narrow width of the gap would easily have allowed the unfortunate man to cling to the iron railing, which would then have bent toward the wall rather than in the opposite direction.
Il Catalano was arrested, stripped, and taken to the torture chamber where he was subjected to the territio—a technique intended to terrorize the accused just by the threat of torment. Seeing the instruments of torture lying ready was enough to convince him, and he told the whole story in all its details—how the two women lived in unjust confinement, their harsh treatment at the hands of the tyrannical Francesco, and the violence Beatrice suffered, all of which gave the impression that her father had sexually abused her. This inspired the idea of drugging Francesco’s wine and then finishing him off with a club, throwing his body off the balcony to make his death look like an accident. This seed of the perfect crime turned out to be a badly botched mess. Nothing went as planned; there was not enough opium to knock Francesco out, leaving him only a little stunned, and then the murder itself took some time. “I delivered two blows to the said Signor Francesco with the aforementioned club, and thus we killed him. There was a lot of blood; it ruined the bed and soaked into the mattresses and the wool and stained and bloodied the sheets.”
The inquisitors now had a confession, their best proof. The two women and their accomplices were imprisoned at Castel Sant’ Angelo. Beatrice denied any crime, and both she and her brother Giacomo were convinced they would get off. Because they were of noble blood they couldn’t be tortured, and their behavior in front of the judges was a mixture of ingenuousness and arrogance typical of noble defendants.
Il Catalano was tortured with Beatrice present, and that gave the ring of truth to his statements. Shortly afterward the unfortunate fellow died. Beatrice and Lucrezia continued to deny the crime, trusting that someone of importance would come to their aid. They hoped in vain, as almost no one came forward; the only exception was the unwanted help of a cleric friend who had Olimpio Calvetti murdered to avoid another confession. In a sudden and ferocious turn of events, three hired assassins cornered Olimpio in a deserted place and decapitated him. The assassination of one of the accused, who was also a witness, hardened the judges’ attitude. They made the condition of the women’s imprisonment harsher, and, believing that one of Calvetti’s brothers was privy to information, subjected him to prolonged torture. It was Pope Clement VIII himself, however, who sealed the fate of the Cencis. In August 1599, he handed down a motu proprio, a personal decree in which he authorized the court to torture the two Cencis, and at the same time he found them guilty. Giacomo was subjected to the strappado “for the length of an Apostles’ Creed.” He confessed, but assigned all the blame to the dead Olimpio. A few days later Bernardino Cenci, another of Beatrice’s brothers, and a minor, also confessed. Then it was Lucrezia’s turn. As a sign of respect she was tortured without first being stripped or shorn as would normally have been the case. She also confessed, naming Beatrice and her lover Olimpio as masterminds of the crime.
Finally, on August 10, it was Beatrice’s turn. The judge immediately treated her severely, admonishing her not to lie. The young woman continued to deny the accusations against her. The judge tried in his own way to help her, saying he knew about all the violence her father had committed against her. Beatrice still insisted on her version of the story. Giacomo and Bernardino were tortured again, in front of her, to force her to confess, and then she herself was hung (still dressed) from the strappado. At this point she gave in, “Hung in that way, she spoke. ‘Oimé, oimé, o Holiest Mother, help me.’ Then she said, ‘let me down, I want to tell the truth.’ ”
The strappado was an almost intolerable form of torture. It consisted of tying the hands of the accused behind his back, bound with a leather strap at the wrists. A heavy rope was then attached to the strap, and the accused was pulled up and left hanging in the air for an amount of time measured by the lengths of different prayers—from the Gloria to the Apostles’ Creed. It caused atrocious pain and, in the case of a clumsy or sadistic tormentor, permanent dislocations or maiming.
The crux of Beatrice’s capital defense, undertaken by Prospero Farinacci, was the violence and rape her father inflicted upon her, and relied heavily on the evidence of the deceased’s wickedness. Yet there was little to do, and moreover the papal motu proprio had already sealed her sentence—death.
At 9:30 on the morning of September 11, 1599, the brothers of the Confraternity of San Giovanni Decollato accompanied the condemned prisoners to the scaffold singing psalms. Only Bernardino was spared because of his age. He was forced, in chains, to watch the executions and was then sent to the papal galleys. Lucrezia was the first to die; hoisted up in tears, she was decapitated. Beatrice followed immediately. In an involuntary reaction to the violence of the blow, “she kicked up her right leg so hard that she almost knocked her clothes up over her shoulder.” Giacomo’s death was the most gruesome. He was first subjected to torture with red-hot pincers in the wagon that brought him from the prison to the scaffold. When it was his turn to be executed he was first bludgeoned on the head, then drawn and quartered.
At the end of the spectacle the immense crowd slowly dispersed. The throng was so great that, given the extreme heat, it isn’t surprising that several deaths from suffocation and heatstroke were reported. The remains of the condemned were displayed for twenty-four hours, attracting pilgrims and the curious—the two women were laid out on a bier surrounded by torches, and Giacomo’s quartered remains were hung on a rack. The myth around Beatrice began with her horrendous end. Rumors also started to circulate that Clement VIII had sentenced the Cenci family to death in order to confiscate their property; we know for certain that when their belongings were auctioned off a few months later the pope purchased a large part of them for his nephew.
According to some stories the two executioners, Mastro Alessandro Bracca and Mastro Peppe, met tragic ends of their own. The former died thirteen days after the execution, tormented by nightmares and remorse for having inflicted such enormous suffering, and especially for having tortured Giacomo with red-hot pincers. The latter was mortally stabbed at Porta Castello a month after Beatrice’s death.
Caravaggio, accompanied by Orazio Gentileschi and his young daughter Artemisia, was certainly present in the enormous crowd that witnessed the execution of Beatrice and the others. It’s quite likely that he carefully observed the behavior of the condemned, in a sort of obedience to the memory of Leonardo’s advice to painters to study “the eyes of the assassins, the courage of the combatants, the actions of the actors, and the attractions of the courtesans, so as not to miss any detail in which the life in the painting itself consists,” as recorded by Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo in his Trattato dell’arte della pittura. It was certainly no accident that both Caravaggio and Artemisia then painted the story of Judith beheading Holofernes, representing that murder with a blunt directness and seemingly excessive quantities of blood. In addition to love, both human and divine, much of what Caravaggio represented in his paintings was some sort of death or martyrdom—as he grew older, and his pain grew ever greater, these themes appeared more often. The gospels and the stories of saints and martyrs were his primary sources, but the artist also transferred the dark color of his own experience to the canvas—the black of night, the ambushes, the sudden flash of a blade, heads separated from their bodies in the uproar of a crowded piazza. In his images of Lucy, Holofernes, Goliath, and Saint John the Baptist Caravaggio painted what he had seen and experienced, and his pictures reflected all the violence of Rome.
The hidden player behind Beatrice’s trial was Pope Clement VIII, Ippolito Aldobrandini. Physically he was “of average stature, his complexion between rosy and phlegmatic, [had] an appearance that was serious and noble, although he was a little bit overweight.” Cautious and suspicious in temperament, he tended toward diplomacy. At that time the Curia was divided between pro-French and pro-Spanish parties; the pope refused to take a clear position between them, even as he signaled the possibility of receiving ambassadors from King Henry IV of France, formerly the leader of the French Huguenots who, after being excommunicated by Sixtus V, had begun to consider the advantages of returning to the arms of the Catholic Church.
Ippolito was quick to show emotion, relatively devout, and moved by poverty. For the purpose of this story, though, we also know that he was obsessed with sexuality, and wanted to clear the streets of Rome of prostitutes and combat nudity in art. At one point he even arranged to tour churches to assure himself that all licentious or profane images—he judged images of the Magdalene the most disturbing—were removed. When all was said and done, he was the true incarnation of the spirit of the Counter-Reformation, which had required that artistic representations be capable of reinvigorating the faith. The Council of Trent had handed down precise rules for art, requiring that it be decorous, doctrinally correct, and avoid “all that was profane, vulgar or obscene, dishonest or licentious.” As early as 1564 the painter Daniele da Volterra was given the task of covering the “shameful parts” of Michelangelo’s nudes in the Sistine Chapel, a commission which earned him the derisory nickname, Braghettone, after the braghe, or loincloths, he added to the figures. Only in Stalin’s Soviet Union were there equally severe rules for art, resulting in the so-called Social Realism enforced by police, which extended first to people’s consciousness, and then to works of art.
In Counter-Reformation Rome there were punishments and fines for disobedient artists, in addition to the loss of jobs and patronage. Cesare Baronio, a priest who later became cardinal, was one of the greatest advocates of this policy. He was director of the Vatican Library, was fanatically religious, and offered a theoretical basis for the type of picture we now call mediating scenes, usually martyrdoms, that were accessible to everyone through realistic figures, traditional forms, and reassuring messages, as well as faithful to Church doctrine in their content. Amongst the many martyrdoms depicted was a particular interest in early Christian virgins—Cecilia, Prudenziana, Lucy, Felicity, Perpetua, and Priscilla—a gallery of women prepared to renounce their lives but not their chastity, a sexually phobic ideology the church clung to until the twentieth century and the canonization of Maria Goretti, a girl who was murdered when she would not surrender to the demands of a rapist. It was also clear that images were more persuasive than words. Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti wrote about this, proclaiming beneficial the emotions produced by an image which everyone, including the illiterate, could understand: “Devotion grows and grips the gut, such that anyone who doesn’t know devotion must be made of wood or marble.”
To understand such a repressive attitude we must remember that the Church was undergoing a dramatic crisis. Northern Europe was rocked by the Reformation, the Turkish threat soon followed in the southeast corner of the continent, and only a few decades had passed since Rome had been sacked and burned by Imperial troops in 1527. In the city itself there was the constant threat that the two political factions within the Curia, the pro-French and pro-Spanish, would come to blows in the streets, weapons in hand.
In 1595 Caravaggio entered the service of Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, and after having lived for several years in temporary and uncomfortable lodgings, he moved into the Palazzo Madama. A few years later, in 1601, he moved to the Palazzo Mattei, the splendid residence of Cardinal Girolamo Mattei, near the Botteghe Oscure. These lodgings were far more comfortable than anything he’d previously known; the people who visited these houses included the most interesting intellectuals in Rome, especially musicians and writers, and all were ready to show off their exquisite predilections. If paintings in churches had to be orthodox and encourage piety in the faithful, in these patrician homes, whether they belonged to churchmen or laymen, pictures with daring, if not downright lascivious, subjects were freely displayed. These were generally scenes in which female nudity and bodies in close proximity were justified by calling them scenes from ancient history or mythology. This served, though, not to moderate the sensuality, but instead often to reinforce it by making the references allusive. The most licentious paintings, however, were kept in secret rooms, sometimes hidden behind draperies that the master of the house raised like a miniature theater curtain for the enjoyment of his most trusted friends.
The young painter now found himself at the center of Rome’s artistic circles, populated by cardinals who were earthly princes even before they were princes of the Church. Besides Del Monte, they included Ferdinando de’Medici, Pietro Aldobrandini, and Alessandro Montalto; their palaces were the most sumptuous in town, and they had villas on the high ground of the Pincian Hill or outside the city in the Alban Hills, the most pleasant retreats from summer heat.
Caravaggio’s habits didn’t change along with his circumstances. He certainly enjoyed his new company, and through it found commissions as well as inspiration and figures for his paintings, but he didn’t put a stop to his restless nocturnal rounds of the city. While his cardinal was with the pope in Ferrara, for example, celebrating that city’s annexation to the Papal States after the death of Alfonso II d’Este, the painter was once again arrested in Piazza Navona for illegally bearing arms. His temperament didn’t change, and his arrogance and conceitedness grew apace with his fame. He let himself get drawn into street brawls, offending the antagonists, and if they replied by drawing their swords he was ready to fight, or reacted with brazen gestures, like when he threw a plate of artichokes in the face of a poor waiter he had some unknown objection to. His friends, whether painters or not, were swordsmen, skillful gamers, and also quick to draw their knives; they were great companions for drinking and wenching. Caravaggio himself had carnal relations with both men and women. He never entertained a lasting relationship, and if he had some liaison that was less than ephemeral, as he did on two or three occasions, it was invariably with some young man of fine figure and shameless manners.
Despite his noisy companions, the artist’s figure remains cloaked by the shadows of reservation and isolation. Caravaggio was aggressive, ready for adventure and risk, and gladly carried his sword at his side—perhaps it was the same fearful weapon to appear in his Saint Catherine of Alexandria. However, as the Sienese doctor and art connoisseur Giulio Mancini wrote in his Considerazione sulla pittura, “one cannot deny that he was extremely extravagant.” We can easily decipher “extravagant” as fruit of a profound anxiety rooted in some secret inner tension, or perhaps the proud knowledge of being the most gifted of all the artists painting canvases and altarpieces in Rome at the time.
Gifted in what way? In a book like this we can only briefly touch on a topic that has already been treated at length by specialists. Caravaggio brought a realism to religious paintings that upset the canon. Poor people—we would now call them the proletariat—and in some cases even those further down the economic scale, appeared in his paintings, the same ambiguous, working-class youths Pasolini saw and wrote about in the twentieth century. A Roman boy, taken from who knows what back alleyway and involved in who knows what sort of trafficking, posed for Caravaggio’s figure of Saint John the Baptist. There was nothing left of Raphael’s refined beauty or Michelangelo’s excellence in Caravaggio’s works. Saints, soldiers, witnesses, protagonists, and even the dead didn’t hide their ages—their flesh was cracked and wrinkled, bulging veins betrayed those who did heavy labor, their limbs stocky, their large feet almost always dirty, and their garb was the worn-out clothing of the poor. We understand that they are illiterate, because if they hold a book they do so with the annoyance of someone unaccustomed to such an object. The boys, nude or only partially dressed, stare fixedly at the painter (and the viewer) with an impudence never before seen, each of them with an inviting grin, winking. There are also religious pictures, but any traditional heavenly aura has vanished from them; they speak instead of the weight of the earth, the mortality of the flesh, and reek of the bad breath of vice, including those practiced as profession.
According to Helen Langdon, a biographer of the artist, this kind of painting “might be connected to the aggressive tactics of Philip Neri, to his desire to humiliate the refined elite, to push the poor to the front of religion and reassess coarse, vernacular means of expression.” Who knows if this hypothesis is justified. We do know that when he was questioned about his own art in court, Caravaggio gave an almost provocative answer. Good painters, whom he called valentuomini, are those who “know how to do their art well, and to imitate things in nature well.” This was his somewhat reductive idea of realism. Moreover, the technique he used mirrored the idea. He drew the figures directly on the canvas, perhaps with the help of a camera obscura, except when it came to plunging them into the complex play of light that only he was able to command. One landlord denounced him for the damage he caused to the ceiling in one of his rooms; it’s not too difficult to imagine that the painter cut a hole so that the light would fall on his models in exactly the way he wanted. His astonishing inventions brought him fame and success, but they also attracted many critics, and not just those who were envious of him. A few of his adversaries judged him “bereft of invention and drawing, without decorum or artistry, he colored his figures by candlelight, with a plane above, without degrading them.”
Often the revolutionary significance of his work escaped his patrons, as did the feeling of piety it could excite in the most humble, who in his saints and martyrs finally saw themselves. The first version of his Saint Matthew was refused by the priests who commissioned it because “that figure has neither the decorum nor the appearance of a saint.” The painting of the Death of the Virgin, intended by its patrons for the church of Santa Maria della Scala in Trastevere, caused an even greater scandal. The church was connected to a monastery called the Casa Pia, a charitable organization meant to help female victims of violence who were then at risk of becoming prostitutes. The painting has none of the traditional elements associated with sacred representations; Mary is a cadaver, ashen in color, her belly swollen as if she might have drowned in the Tiber, her pose disorderly, and her feet large and bare. Far from appearing to be a Madonna, she’s simply a dead woman. The apostles, bent over her, are poor old men, bald and wrought by a completely human grief. The Carmelite fathers were shocked by the image’s force, and refused to accept it. Judging the composition lascivious, they were suspicious (as they said) that the model who had posed for the picture was some “filthy whore.” This is the missing canvas I mentioned at the beginning of the chapter. Had it not been for those fears we could still enjoy it today in that small church in Trastevere, rather than having to travel to the Louvre, its final home after sundry vicissitudes.
It is said that this poor, dead Madonna is, along with the Madonna di Loreto, one of the most touching religious images created in the seventeenth century. It took the disinterested eye of a layman to truly appreciate the painting. Even if the friars weren’t interested in it, dealers and connoisseurs certainly were. Rubens was called upon to appraise the picture, and brought it to the attention of the Duke of Mantua, who then bought it. He didn’t really care that the artist’s model for the Virgin was “some flithy whore from the Ortacci whom he loved, so scrupulous and free of devotion.”
The woman who posed for the picture was in fact Maddalena Antognetti, called Lena, who had already been the model for the Madonna di Loreto. This is another story worth telling; it seems this girl, lover of priests and cardinals, as well as the more-or-less permanent concubine of Gaspare Albertini, was proposed to by a practicing notary. Her mother refused his proposal, and all this happened at a time when Lena was often at Caravaggio’s house posing. Might there also have been an amorous relationship between the two? This was often said, but no one had any proof. It’s possible—certainly Lena’s comings and goings annoyed the notary, who complained to the girl’s mother. Their conversation degenerated, and ended with the red-hot words of the lovesick youth, “You can have that old maid daughter of yours, who you refused to let me take as a wife and then led her to that evil painter to do as he pleased with her—good riddance.” A few days later Caravaggio, armed with a hatchet, confronted the unfortunate young man in the Piazza Navona and gave him such a blow to the head that he “fell to the ground in a mess, all covered with his own blood.”
A few months after the horrendous death of Beatrice Cenci and her accomplices there was another execution in Rome that was even more ferocious, cruelly motivated, and destined to raise echoes that reverberate even today; the philosopher Giordano Bruno was burned alive in the Campo de’Fiori. This horrible affair began in Venice, where the philosopher from Nola had gone after long peregrinations in London, Paris, Geneva, Frankfurt, Prague, and Zurich. He was a perennial wander, and was never really accepted by Catholics, as he was a dissident and heretical Dominican friar, nor by Calvinists or other reformers. He defined himself in his comedy Il candelaio as an “academic of no academy.” A minor Venetian nobleman, Giovanni Mocenigo, had invited him to come to Venice to give him lessons in mnemonics. The serene city’s reputation as a liberal, independent republic reassured the philosopher, especially because from Rome Pope Gregory XIV seemed to guarantee a certain degree of open-mindedness even for rebels like him. Unfortunately he was mistaken; his relationship with Mocenigo deteriorated, perhaps for trifling reasons. In May of 1592 the Venetian nobleman, defined as delator—informer—in the trial documents, denounced Bruno to the Inquisition. He was arrested on the night of May 24 and imprisoned at San Domenico.
The Holy Office, also known as the tribunal of the Inquisition, was a magistracy concerned with all crimes against the faith. It judged those who voiced opinions different from those of the Church doctrine, but also scientists and philosophers, as their disciplines were linked to the faith. The boundaries between them were ill-defined, as we shall see, which gave the inquisitors broad discretion. At first Bruno wasn’t worried about the accusations, and dismissed them as gossip, since they were merely the dull words of Mocenigo supported by few witnesses and scarce depth. In July, at the end of seven hearings, the philosopher cut it short; he knelt and begged the pardon of the judges, confident that a light sentence would put an end to the affair.
But this wasn’t to be. The Venetian tribunal was just a peripheral organ of the Holy Office, and its acts had to be sent to Rome. The Roman judges read those documents in another spirit, with a purpose that had only in part to do with the accused. Examining the acts, the Inquisition asked that Bruno be transferred to Rome to be tried again. The philosopher arrived at the end of February 1593, and was immediately jailed in the prisons of the Holy Office near Saint Peter’s. He knew that the situation was now more serious, but initially continued not to worry too much, as he was counting on the mysticism of Clement VIII. It was said that the pope was sympathetic to philosophers because of his youthful friendships with Neo-Platonic philosophers in Padua. In reality Ippolito Aldobrandini, once he came to the throne of Saint Peter’s, surrounded himself with advisers and confessors who persisted in repeating to him how dangerous any line of thought other than scholasticism was to the Church.
At first the tribunal seemed in no hurry to finish the inquest. The papal court was divided, Europe was rent by the Reformation, and in his handling of foreign affairs the pope had to work miracles of balance in order to avoid being swept off the stage. New evidence was gathered against Bruno, including the testimony of Fra Celeste, a Capuchin friar, and a layman from Verona named Lattanzio Arrigoni. The latter, who likely had a mental illness, had also been convicted of heresy, and had shared a cell with Bruno in Venice. The monk revealed that the accused formulated heresies in prison, bursting into obscene blasphemies. The deposition of Francesco Graziano was considered especially useful; he was a copyist from Udine who knew Latin and was thus considered an educated person capable of conversing with Bruno in a language unknown to most. According to Graziano, Bruno raised doubts about certain dogmas relevant to Christian doctrine. He added that the philosopher also practiced the occult sciences and exorcisms, denying the value of religious mass.
The months passed and the interrogations carried on—ten, fifteen, eighteen, and finally twenty-two of them—some accompanied by torture. The accused defended himself, answering the accusations: Moses was certainly a magician, but in his magic was a strong cognitive potential which it was wrong to ignore; there is certainly a multiplicity of worlds, but such a hypothesis doesn’t conflict with divine omnipotence, and instead exalted it; the world in its real form was certainly created, but this didn’t preclude that the material it was made from was also, like God, eternal and immutable; and finally, if this was indeed the nature of matter, wouldn’t it mean that other worlds could be inhabited by intelligent creatures similar to humans? Had Adam and Eve not committed the original sin would they not also have been immortal beings?
Bruno’s theory goes beyond the Copernican hypothesis of a stationary sun at the center of the universe. That theory was first formulated in the fourth century BC by Aristarchus of Samos, who was also accused of impiety. Heliocentrism didn’t reappear again until 1543, in Copernicus’s book De revolutionibus orbium caelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres), which marked the beginning of modern astronomy. It was Bruno, however, who brought Copernicus to prominence in his masterpiece of 1584, La cena de le ceneri (The Ash Wednesday Supper), wherein he defended Copernicus and also delineated a new universe, no longer limited to our sun at the center of a system of fixed stars, but one which intuited an infinite space, with infinite worlds evolving for an infinite length of time. In his De l’infinito universo et mondi (On the Infinite Universe and Worlds), he wrote, “There exist innumerable suns and innumerable earths rotate around them.” His theory anticipates by several centuries the discoveries of modern astronomers, and his theories suggested, in essence, that the universe was eternal, that the idea of God as Creator was impossible—if anything, they approached the ideas of Buddhism. Bruno had left the official sphere of Christianity, and he would pay dearly.
A few years after Bruno’s martyrdom, in 1609, Galileo Galilei, an obscure professor of mathematics from Padua, came to hear about a telescope invented in Holland. He built one, pointed it at the sky, and, astonished, made many discoveries: the moon had mountains and valleys, Venus’s phases were similar to the moon’s, Jupiter had four satellites that orbited around it, Saturn had strange anomalies (its famous rings), the sun rotated on its own axis, and the constellations and the Milky Way were made up of an almost infinite number of stars. This news excited people, but also worried the Church. On February 25, 1616, the Inquisition, in order to “prevent disorder and damage,” declared that “the idea that the sun is the immobile center of the world is an absurd proposition, philosophically false, and formally heretical for being expressly counter to Holy Scriptures.” Galileo was imprisoned and tried by the Inquisition, which on June 22, 1633, ordered him, on a vote of seven to three, to abjure. Dressed in the long habit of a penitent, the scientist capitulated, asked for forgiveness on his knees, bartering his honor for his life. He remained under house arrest until his death.
Giordano Bruno, on the other hand, never bent. Months passed, and the inquisitors realized they were spinning their wheels, and the accused wasn’t reacting as they had expected. Isolated before the court of an absolutist regime, Bruno had, in theory, only two ways to save himself: to abjure his ideas or to prove that he had been misunderstood, which was just another way of abjuring while saving face. In reality, he refuted the crudest accusations and defended his philosophy on the others, seeking to demonstrate that the orthodoxy he described was compatible with the official one. He equivocated, dodged, refuted, and sparred with the court, heedless of the fact that his judges had already readied the instrument that would shut him up once and for all.
At the beginning of 1599 Cardinal Roberto Bellarmino (also known as Robert Bellarmine) took decisive control of the trial. He was a Tuscan born in Montepulciano in 1542, and at the age of eighteen entered the Jesuit order, where the sharpness of his intelligence and dialectic subtlety were soon noticed. Bellarmine was more a political thinker than an expert in Holy Scripture, even though only a few months earlier he’d been named a theologian of the Papal Penitentiary and consultant to the Inquisition. His vision of the trial was synthetic and strictly political. Information and slanderous gossip didn’t interest him. He intuited that the accused, with his vision of an “infinite openness and a plurality of worlds,” had initiated a new era in the notion of freedom of thought, and that if he engaged in a debate about the canonical interpretation of Scripture, any number of things might begin to collapse.
The Church of Rome was a fortress under siege. The hammer blows with which another rebellious priest, Martin Luther, nailed his ninety-five theses to the church door in Wittenberg in 1517 still resounded throughout Europe. Rome was losing control of whole regions—the Scandinavian countries, which were latecomers to Catholicism, were also amongst the first to abandon it for Protestantism; England was lost, cut free with a clean blow by Henry VIII; in the German-speaking lands the protests had degenerated into open warfare; Holland and Switzerland nursed heretical sects; and even France and Poland harbored Protestant evangelists. The Counter-Reformation was necessary for the Church to regain some control over its faithful, especially in Italy. Now Bellarmine wanted to put a halt to the heresies, and give the Church back its prestige even in those areas that today would be considered intellectual fields. The chance that Giordano Bruno represented seemed tailor-made to meet these goals.
The first thing the cardinal did was to condense the almost indigestible materials of the trial into eight clear propositions to be presented to the accused. Bruno examined them and signaled that he was prepared to abjure them, but only on condition that his affirmations were defined by the Church as errors only as of that moment, not before. This was just an expedient—he wanted to admit to the court that his interpretations conflicted not with Scripture, but with the dictates of the pope, in other words, with the political necessities of the moment. Bellarmine naturally refused, and the court reaffirmed that the abjuration had to be complete and without time limits. Bruno equivocated; he tried to stay alive without betraying the heart of his beliefs. It is profoundly moving that a man imprisoned for years, without protectors or influential friends, abandoned by everyone, still put up such a resistance, gambling everything on the logical strength of his arguments.
The final session of the trial opened on September 9, 1599, and Clement VIII himself attended. The court wanted to interrogate the accused under torture again, but the pope opposed it. At the end of other controversies, Bellarmine sent the philosopher an ultimatum: either he abjure clearly and without conditions, or he would be sentenced to death. On December 21 the philosopher gave the court his definitive answer, saying that he “could not, nor did he want to, retract, that he had nothing to retract, that he had not the material of retraction, and that he did not understand what thing he needed to retract.” The death sentence was handed down on February 8, 1600, in the apartments of Cardinal Madruzzo and in the presence of the inquisitors, a notary and a few spectators. The document began with these words:
Being that you, Fra Giordano, son of the late Giovanni Bruno of Nola in the Kingdom of Naples, a priest professed in the order of St. Dominic, and being about fifty-two years old, were denounced in the Holy Office of Venice eight years ago …
Bruno listened to this sentence on his knees, without batting an eyelash. He was convicted of doubting the virginity of Mary, of having lived in heretical countries according to heretical customs, of having written against the pope, of sustaining the existence of innumerable worlds and eternities, of affirming the transmigration of souls, of believing magic to be licit, of identifying the Holy Spirit with the soul of the world, of declaring that the Scriptures were nothing but a dream, of believing that even demons could hope for salvation, and so on.
Only when the reading was finished did Bruno utter the tremendous words that have become the motto of every martyr for liberty: “Perhaps you pronounce this sentence against me with more fear than I have in hearing it.” The judges didn’t allow themselves to be moved, nor did they consider that they were writing a shameful page in human history. They were political men concerned with the immediate interests of the Church, and didn’t dare to stray from them. Even Bruno’s books, redundantly pronounced “heretical and erroneous and containing many heresies and errors,” were destined to be “broken and burned” on a second pyre in the courtyard of Saint Peter’s.
At that moment the convicted prisoner was turned over to the secular branch, embodied by Ferdinando Taverna, Governor of Rome. For the week before his execution confessors and comforters alternated visits to his cell. Had he abjured, in the end, he would not have saved his life, but could have had a less atrocious death, as he would’ve been hanged rather than burned alive. Rome was full of pilgrims for the Holy Year that had just begun (at the end of that Jubilee year they had seen over one million visitors), and a public burning had the added value of admonishing those who were returning to countries threatened by the Reformation. Furthermore, Henry IV, King of France and only recently readmitted into the embrace of the Holy Mother Church, had disappointed the pope by allowing Protestants freedom of worship in the Edict of Nantes, issued in 1598. Perhaps this is another reason that Bruno’s execution was set in the Campo de’Fiori, practically in front of the French ambassador’s residence (then in the Palazzo Orsini, at the corner of the Via Giubbonari)—the ambassador had often complained of the horror and the stench of these spectacles.
At dawn on February 17, seven religious men entered Bruno’s cell exhorting him to repent. He refused, and instead continued to sustain his ideas. He was gagged, perhaps because he was cursing his persecutors. It was still dark when the grim procession set off. Bruno was accompanied by the brothers of the Confraternity of San Giovanni Decollato, who wore long hoods to hide their faces, black tunics, and carried torches. They held panels with scenes of martyrdom in front of the condemned man to comfort him. They chanted lugubrious litanies, the crowd looked on silently, and people blessed themselves as the procession passed. From the jail at Tor di Nona the prisoner traveled along the Via dei Banchi and the Via del Pellegrino before arriving at the place of his execution. There he was stripped and tied to a pole that rose out of a pile of well-dried wood. The fire quickly grew to a roaring blaze. Because of the gag the victim’s agonizing screams were transformed into strange howls that were quickly suffocated by the smoke and overwhelmed by the crackling of the fire.
The burning of 1600 signaled the height of the Catholic Church’s efforts to exorcise nascent modern thought. That attempt continued, albeit in slightly less cruel ways, until Pope Pius IX published his Syllabus of 1864, in which he refuted “modern civilization” and defined “freedom of worship and thought” as an error. When the monument to Giordano Bruno was ceremoniously set in the Campo de’Fiori in 1889, Pope Leo XIII addressed a letter of admonishment to the faithful in which the philosopher was once again defamed. The Vatican continued afterward to press for the demolition of the monument. It is to Benito Mussolini’s credit that as head of government he resisted those attempts. Pius XI reacted by first having Bellarmine, the Grand Inquisitor, proclaimed a saint in 1930 and then a doctor of the Universal Church in 1931. He was to be venerated as the patron saint of catechists, and his epitaph read, “My sword has subdued arrogant spirits.”
Two days after the execution this report appeared in the Avviso di Roma, a news bulletin:
Thursday morning in Campo di Fiore the wicked Dominican friar from Nola was burned alive … an obstinate heretic, and having of his capriciousness formed various dogmas against our faith, and in particular against the Holy Virgin and the Saints, he wanted stubbornly to die … and they say that he died a martyr and willingly, and that his soul would ascend into paradise with that smoke. But now he will see if he spoke the truth.
More recently Pope John Paul II sent his Secretary of State, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, with a message to the conference held in Naples on the four-hundredth anniversary of Giordano Bruno’s martyrdom. He affirmed that this “sad episode in the history of modern Christianity invites us to reread even this event in a spirit open to the full truth of history.” The cardinal noted that the philosopher’s views had matured in the sixteenth century, when Christianity was divided because Luther, Calvin, and Henry VIII had taken whole nations away from Rome. He added that Bruno’s “intellectual choices” remained “incompatible with Christian doctrine.” There is no doubt, he concluded, that some aspects of the procedures used in Venice and Rome to judge the friar accused of heresy and “their violent outcome at the hands of the civic authorities could not today but constitute a reason for regret for the Church.” Finally a little regret, at least.
It’s against this backdrop of continual violence that we need to imagine Caravaggio’s life. Clement VIII died in 1605, and was succeeded by Leo XI. As happened in the twentieth century with Pope John Paul I, Leo lasted on the papal throne for only a few weeks. Two vacancies at the Vatican in such rapid succession rekindled the political factions in Rome, the pro-French and pro-Spanish parties now confronted each other openly, and the city was unsettled by riots. There was a risk of schism in the conclave of 1605, until a neutral political solution succeeded in settling the dispute and Camillo Borghese became Pope Paul V. One of his first acts was to make his nephew, the twenty-seven-year-old Scipione Borghese, a cardinal. Scipione had only a mediocre education, but he was a passionate art collector. This was good for Caravaggio, as Scipione introduced him to the pope hoping that his uncle would commission a portrait from him.
We know that at the time Caravaggio was living in a house on the Vicolo dei Santi Cecilia e Biagio (today the Vicolo del Divino Amore), not far from the Palazzo Borghese. He lived alone, with a servant named Francesco who was also registered in that parish. His house was wretched and poorly furnished with only a few belongings. The artist lived a bachelor’s life, worked in solitude, and when he ate he often used the back of a canvas as a table. When he wasn’t working, he went wandering around Rome “with his companions, almost all brazen people, swordsmen, and painters.” Not all artists, of course, spent their evenings looking for trouble. Guido Reni, the Cavalier d’Arpino, and Annibale Carracci, for example, behaved in a wholly different manner; they knew everyone, and profitably obeyed the rules. Caravaggio, on the other hand, seemed to be incapable of behaving otherwise; he painted, went out, was involved in altercations, and fought. One day, at the end of May of 1606, he encountered a certain Ranuccio Tomassoni, an arrogant fellow who fancied himself a boss in the neighborhood. There was already bad blood between the two of them, perhaps rooted, at least in part, in politics. Caravaggio belonged to the pro-French party, and Tomassoni to a family of violent gang bosses of pro-Spanish leanings. Blades flashed, and the painter had the upper hand; perhaps he meant only to wound Tomassoni, but impulse overwhelmed him, and he killed his rival.
He was forced to flee, and with this murder on his record he began a period of exile that would last four years, first in the Castelli Romani, the hills just south of the city where he was protected by the Colonna family, then in Naples, Sicily, and Malta. He continued to paint, but his life was now unhappy indeed. All traces of eroticism vanished from his work, and instead the blackness of his own distress prevailed. In Malta he managed to join the Order of the Knights, but even this didn’t soothe him, and instead he once again became involved, as he had been in Naples, in a serious incident. We know the details of this episode thanks to the work of Keith Sciberras, a Maltese scholar who traced all the records of the event in the island’s state archives. Caravaggio was again involved in a scuffle, broke down the door of a house, and burst in. He was imprisoned and put in solitary confinement but managed a daring escape. An already serious matter became much more serious, given his recent nomination as a Knight of Malta. He fled the island and took refuge in Sicily, leaving behind a trail of intense ill will. What was the motive for such rancorous feelings? It’s been suggested that Caravaggio had an intimate relationship with the page of an aristocratic family, committing an offence that in Malta was punishable by death.
Meanwhile, in Rome, where Tomassoni’s murder had gained some notoriety, Caravaggio was condemned in absentia to a harsh punishment, perhaps even death. It took almost four years for the affair to die down, thanks in part to the efforts of Scipione Borghese. It wasn’t until 1610 that Caravaggio began to put any hope in the possibility of return, and requested papal pardon. In July he boarded a felucca in Naples, carrying paintings for Cardinal Borghese on board with him. The little craft set sail, from that moment on everything becomes a veritable puzzle, and (at the risk of using a hackneyed phrase) his last days and death remain a mystery. What little we know comes from unreliable biographies. According to Giulio Mancini, “Leaving with the renewal of hope, he came to Porto Ercole where he caught a nasty fever, at the height of his glory, and somewhere between the ages of thirty-five and forty he died in poverty, without any care, and was buried in a place near there.”
The painter Giovanni Baglione, who hated Caravaggio, wrote, “He set off in a felucca with only a few things to come to Rome, returning on the word of Cardinal Gonzaga that he would take up his case with Pope Paul V. When he arrived on the beach he was arrested, put in prison, and held for two days before he was released.” Why was he imprisoned? Was it the result of the murder committed years before in Rome, or due instead to Maltese authorities who had followed him with an order for his arrest? Baglione mentioned only a beach—it could not be Porto Ercole, but was perhaps Palo, a small cove with a garrison just South of Civitavecchia. We learn that there was yet another version of this peculiar affair when Baglione writes that the artist, upon leaving the prison, discovered to his dismay that the felucca with all his things, including the paintings, was gone. “The felucca was no longer there and, all in a fury, like a desperate man roamed the beach under the fierce sun to see if he could spot the boat that had taken all his things out to sea.”
The art connoisseur Giovan Pietro Bellori also reports, without much clarification, the crazed behavior of a man who, in the intense heat of July, in the malaria-infested Maremma, set out on foot in search of a small boat in the direction of Porto Ercole several dozen kilometers away. Every bit of this last episode in Caravaggio’s history is incoherent, perhaps because of the confusion of the actual events, the fragmentary nature of the evidence that survives, or because of the strength of the legend that has developed around him, which will never fade. We don’t even know if he really died from fever or rather suffered a violent death, just as his life had been violent. One of his biographers, Peter Robb, has suggested that he was murdered—killed by someone seeking revenge for the outrages committed in Malta. The only thing we know for sure is that his story will continue to be told in many different versions by any- and everyone who has sufficient ingenuity to present, while rearranging things to suit his own thesis, the few contradictory elements of the artist’s life.
Of the many things said about Caravaggio, the outrageous and bitter words with which Baglione concluded his chronicle remain strong; having left prison, Caravaggio fell ill “with a nasty fever and, without any human help, a few days later died badly, just as he had lived.”