Caravaggio (13 page)

Some of this may partly explain the fervor with which Guido Reni was welcomed as the new darling of the Roman art scene. Fastidious, well-mannered, presentable, a pious and sensitive soul whose only vice was gambling and who was so devoted to the Virgin that he himself was rumored to practice a celibacy that aspired to her spotless purity, Reni was Caravaggio's opposite, and the differences in their natures were reflected in their compositions. The chasm between them remained wide even when Reni painted by the light of Caravaggio's theories—a notion that Caravaggio found infuriating. For little is more demoralizing or conducive to self-doubt than the way in which a poor imitation can point up the flaws and banalities of the original, and confirm even the most confident artist's own worst fears about his work. Like their creator, Reni's paintings are stylish, sweet, sentimental, easy on the eye. Even in his Caravaggesque phase, his imagery suggests Caravaggio's less than that of the French romantic painters like Adolphe Bouguereau who, centuries later, would recast Guido Reni's angels and pentitent Magdalenes as the nymphs and bathing beauties whose heavily idealized, perfectly pulchritudinous, and oddly sexless femininity ensured them an elevated place in the pantheon of artists most admired and approved by the Nazi leaders.

Like Baglione, Reni was recognized by his contemporaries, including Caravaggio himself, as a competitor and a threat. Malvasia, an early biographer of Reni's, writes that Caravaggio asked why, if Reni was so great, he was always trying to see and to buy Caravaggio's paintings. Why, Caravaggio demanded to know, had Reni copied his technique when Reni painted
The Crucifixion of Saint Peter
for the Church of the Tre Fontane—a commission that would have gone to Caravaggio if d'Arpino had not unfairly interceded to help Reni get the assignment?

Caravaggio was receiving fewer and fewer commissions, while Reni's stock was rapidly rising. And when Pope Clement VIII died in the winter of
1605
, his successor, Paul V, promptly reverted to a more traditional taste for the sort of heroic, exalted art that, he felt, would reflect the importance and the ideals of his papacy. Once more the Cavaliere d'Arpino—Guido Reni's champion—resumed his former position as a papal favorite.

It's easy to imagine how it must have galled Caravaggio to see his inferiors lionized and praised and to observe the ebbing enthusiasm for his own work and ideas. Marked, as we have seen, by increasingly frequent legal troubles, brushes with the police, and outbursts of temper and volatility,
1605
was a particularly unfortunate year for the painter.

That summer, he returned from Genoa to find that he had been evicted and was essentially homeless—a peculiar situation for a painter who remained, despite his recent setbacks, among the most celebrated in Rome. The inventory drawn up by the landlady, who repossessed his belongings for nonpayment of rent, is not merely modest but grim: He owned two beds, a few simple pieces of furniture, some kitchen items, ragged clothes, studio props, weapons, a guitar, twelve books, and some art supplies. Bellori tells us that Caravaggio liked expensive clothing but that once he put on an outfit, he wore it until it was in tatters. He paid only minimal attention to personal cleanliness, and for many years he used the canvass on which he'd painted a portrait as a tablecloth and ate off it, day and night.

Far more worrisome was the fact that Caravaggio seemed to be having trouble completing his commissions on time, or at all. He had contracted to do some paintings for the duke of Modena, but a series of letters from Fabio Masetti, the duke's agent in Rome, describe Masetti's futile attempts to extract the promised work. First he reports, somewhat balefully, that he is unable to obtain the pictures since Caravaggio, as a consequence of his assault on the notary, is currently in Genoa, a fugitive from justice.

Masetti appealed to Del Monte for help, and, in a famous letter, Masetti repeats Del Monte's description of the painter as having an extreme and erratic personality—literally
un cervello stravagantissimo
(a most extravagant and unruly head). To prove his point, Del Monte described how Caravaggio had refused an offer of
6
,
000
scudi
to paint a loggia for the Principe Doria. This decision must have seemed even more puzzling to Masetti when, twice during the next few months, Caravaggio turned up at his door to beg for an advance—first of
12
scudi
, then of
20
more—against the
50
or
60
scudi
that he had agreed to charge the duke of Modena for his work.

Much later, after Caravaggio fled Rome, Masetti continued to write a long series of heartfelt and almost comical letters in which he assured his employer that, even though the painter has committed a murder and left the city, the agent had not slackened in his efforts to obtain the promised paintings, or at least to recover their
32
-
scudi
advance.

Throughout that difficult year of
1605
, the downturn in Caravaggio's fortunes seems to have increased his determination not only to stick to his principles but to see how far he could take them, how hard and how recklessly he could push against the increasingly straight and narrow confines of orthodoxy. His work became even more provocative and outrageous, almost as if he were testing the limits and the patience of the patrons who had engaged his services.

And so, in the late autumn, after years of wishing to be included among the artists hired to work on Saint Peter's, after years of resenting those—among them, Il Pomarancio, Domenico Passignano and Lodovico Cigoli—who were employed in the ongoing redecoration of the basilica, Caravaggio was commissioned by the Archconfraternity of the Palafrenieri (the papal grooms and horse guards) to paint an altarpiece for their chapel in Saint Peter's. The painting was supposed to depict the Virgin, the Christ Child, and Saint Anne, the patron saint of the Palafrenieri. Furthermore, the image was meant to illustrate the doctrine, formally established by Pope Pius V in
1569
, that Christ and Mary were equally responsible for the eradication of original sin. This ruling was intended to address and combat heresies such as that of the Protestants, who believed that the credit for man's liberation from the consequences of Adam and Eve's fall was due solely to Christ, and not to his mother.

In the painting, the Virgin, dressed in a red, low-cut gown rucked up to reveal a dark skirt, bends over to support her young son. Christ is a fair-haired, unusually tall, naked boy of two or three. He is old enough and so naturalistically rendered that his nakedness seems startling, sexual, denuded of the innocence we are used to associating with the holy infant. Indeed, there is nothing beside the dramatic situation of the painting to distinguish him from any other little boy or to identify him as Our Lord and Savior.

Mary's hands tenderly cup the sides of Jesus's chest, just beneath his armpits, steadying and bracing his tense, energized, and slightly off-balance little body. Besides them stands Saint Anne, an old woman in a coarse gown, whose gaze helps direct our own to the bottom of the painting, where the baby's bare foot rests on his mother's bare foot as, together, they apply their weight and force to the presumably critical spot directly behind the head of a serpent that twists, coiling up off the ground. All three figures are looking at the snake, and we need their direction, because, without (and even with) their help, our attention tracks first to the Virgin's radiant face, then to the bright flash of white paint on the body of the snake, and finally—or perhaps it is what we have noticed first and have required a moment to process—to the little boy's penis, very much at the center of the trio of figures, and again so realistically depicted that it casts its shadow on the boy's thigh.

Even today, regardless of how sophisticated and knowing we imagine ourselves to be, the painting still has the power to make us look and then look again to see if we are really seeing what we think we are seeing. How did Caravaggio expect the Vatican grooms to react? What precisely did he think they would do when he delivered the painting in the early months of
1606
and collected his modest fee of
75
scudi
?

Once more, Caravaggio's painting was rejected—owing, says Bellori, to the vile portrayal of Virgin and the naked Christ Child. Baglione adds that the cardinals in charge of Saint Peter's ordered it removed from the church. In addition, it was decided that the grooms would not be given their own altar in the main portion of the church, and they were later assigned a chapel in a less central part of the basilica.

 

On the night of Sunday, May
28
,
1606
, two men—both soldiers, both Bolognese, both armed and up to no good—loitered in the Via della Scrofa near the tennis courts. They were waiting for something to happen, a fight about which they'd been warned. At least one of the men had agreed or been hired, as he said,
to perform a service.

Late May can be very hot in Rome. It had already proved to be an unusually troubled and restless night. A celebration with fireworks and parades to mark the anniversary of the pope's coronation had degenerated into chaos and violence. A man had been murdered in a fight along the banks of the Tiber, not far from the spot where the pair of thugs—a guard at the papal prison and his one-eyed companion—anticipated the moment when rival gangs would meet, and Caravaggio's crew would battle Ranuccio Tomassoni's.

The Tomassoni were a family of street fighters and neighborhood bosses, the
caporione
of the Campo Marzio, Caravaggio's neighborhood. Their forebears had a military history illustrious enough to justify the clan's distinguished social status, which involved a mix of outright criminality and political clout. They functioned as guards, as private armies, and as the strong right arm for such influential families as the Aldobrandini, the Farnese, and the Crescenzi. Ranuccio Tomassoni had been the lover of Fillide Melandroni, the courtesan who had modeled for Caravaggio, and who had attacked another woman she believed had stolen Tomassoni's affections. It was said that the ill will between Caravaggio and Tomassoni had something to do with Fillide. Depending on who was testifying in a series of criminal actions, Onorio Longhi had been a friend or an enemy of Ranuccio Tomassoni's, and over the years the two men had a number of hostile and violent confrontations.

So, too, with Caravaggio, the line between friend and enemy could shift suddenly and without warning. Not long before the night of the twenty-eighth, a feud had erupted between Caravaggio and Tomassoni, a dispute that had some connection to a game of tennis.

The detail of the tennis game clings persistently to the event. But like so much of what has come down to us about the life of Caravaggio, the story of the tennis match has survived in a number of variant forms. Everyone (not just the early biographers, but also the professional clerks who wrote the first
avvisi
, or official notices) seems to have heard or imagined something slightly different, or to have concocted his own version of the crime according to a personal recipe of hearsay, fantasy, and truth.

In a letter from one of the duke of Modena's representatives in Rome, the fight is described as having broken out over a disagreement about a tennis game that Caravaggio and Tomassoni were actually playing together. Something akin to that idea must have influenced Bellori's contention that part of the struggle involved the two men beating each other with tennis rackets. According to the best known
avviso
, written three days after the fight, the cause of the disagreement was a bet on a tennis game, a wager in which Tomassoni had won ten
scudi
from Caravaggio. Another
avviso
confirms the story about the bet, and goes on to say that Caravaggio indignantly refused to pay the ten
scudi
.

It was not a light or casual wager, especially when we consider how Caravaggio's fees had decreased. He had received a mere
75
scudi
from the Palafrenieri and was planning to charge the duke of Modena
50
or
60
scudi
for the work he would never deliver. Meanwhile, as we have seen, he had come to beg the duke's agent for two advances—the first of which was for only
12
scudi
. And all this was around the time that he had been evicted, and was homeless, and had had his belongings repossessed.

Consequently, the initial conflict and the fight that evolved were about more than honor, temper, and indignation. Ten
scudi
, the amount of the bet, must have seemed a considerable sum to a man struggling for his economic survival. And it provided an excellent excuse for a fight to a man who seems never to have required much of a reason for violence.

The tension had led to conflict a few days before the twenty-eighth, the night on which, as everyone involved seemed to know, the dispute would be settled. Each side would consist of at least four men, though one
avviso
claims that twelve were involved. And the two Bolognese had been conscripted to round out the numbers for the painter and Onorio Longhi, Caravaggio's friend and longtime partner in crime.

None of this was spontaneous. It was not the result of a quick, hot response, a lightning flash of temper. It was almost balletic, so carefully choreographed and staged that, like so much of Caravaggio's life, it evokes Shakespearean drama.

On the night of May
28
, Caravaggio and his little band swaggered past the house of Ranuccio Tomassoni, in the Piazza di San Lorenzo in Lucina. And Ranuccio's gang, which included his brother Giovan Francesco and two other family members, rose eagerly to the challenge.