Caravaggio in Rome. His life from real
di // pubblicato il 01 Agosto, 2011
- Translated by Patrizia Cani -
The aura of Bohemian genius that had featured him for more than 400 years, has not helped the implementation of detailed studies on his daily life, on the places that he frequented and on the people who he knew. It’s simply enough, in this respect, to scroll through the biographies that have been dedicated to him, starting from an early one, the one compiled by Giovanni Baglione, which represents him as true neighbourhood bully, dedicated more to brawls than to painting:
"Michelangiolo Amerigi was a proud and satirical man; and at times he used to denigrate all past and present painters, albeit highly distinguished, since he assumed, only with his works, to be ahead of all the others in his profession. On the contrary some of them estimates that he ruined the art of painting […]".
The opinion of Baglione, his contemporary, is no doubt conditioned by a certain degree of rivalry and by a different understanding of art. But who was actually Caravaggio, beyond the stereotypes and the prejudices?
The 60 kilometres of shelved documents into the Rome State Archives are a priceless treasure for anyone wishing to deepen his knowledge on every aspect of the Roman artistic culture. Here, archivists and art historians, engaged in a real treasure hunt, have rediscovered documents that put new light on some aspects so far neglected of the life of Michelangelo Merisi, clarifying the chronology covering the Roman years of the painter and at the same time allowing us to rediscover the Roman society of the end of fourteenth century . They definitely put an end on the debates concerning most of the studies devoted to Caravaggio, based on dates that are now completely incorrect.
First of all we have to rethink to the arrival of Merisi in Rome, until now located in 1593. According to the witness Pietropaolo Pellegrini, apprentice of the barber shop attended by the painter, it is apparent that the two knew each other only from the spring of 1596, a period in which Caravaggio begins to attend the workshop of the Sicilian Lorenzo Carli, located in “Via della Scrofa”.
His words, fruit of a deposition released immediately following his arrest for an aggression and for the theft of a mantle that had involved the same artist, are also valuable since they supply a true portrait of Merisi:
"This painter Michelangelo is aged around 28, proper stature, more sturdy than podgy, not too pale in face and not too dark, has a little beard pretty dark and is dressed in dark[…] not too well in order, at times goes out well in order while at times doesn’t and wears in his head a dark felt hat."
The fact that one of the first texts that testifies the presence of Caravaggio in Rome is a deposition, might seem a bit singular, but it must be considered in the context of the Roman society of the time, in which misery, prostitution, delinquency and violence were literally on the agenda. A city in which it is preferable to walk equipped with weapons, despite the law prohibition:
"Michelangelo use to carry the sword since he’s a servant of “Cardinal del Monte”, and I saw him carrying it several times".
A city, finally, in which justice is exercised in an exemplary way, in order to discourage the repetition of violent episodes.
The Rome in which Caravaggio arrives in 1596 is the Rome of Pope Clement VIII Aldobrandini, an inflexible character that, few years after, almost at the same time, sentenced to death both a young girl and a monk philosopher, accused of being an unrepentant heretic.
The girl is Beatrice Cenci, accused together with her stepmother Lucrezia and with the brothers Giacomo and Bernardo of having killed their father Francesco after having suffered countless harassments.
Emitted in the wake of the process, especially thanks to the confession, made under torture, of the same Beatrice, the death sentence was performed on “Piazza di Ponte Sant’Angelo” the eleventh of September 1599.
According to the legend, Caravaggio was there, witnessing the sad spectacle, minutely described in the register of the Archconfraternity of “San Giovanni Decollato”, which had the task of assisting the condemned in their last moments before death:
"The said Ladies Lucretia and Beatrice were condemned to the prison and conducted in Ponte forward to the carriages, accompanied by all our companions as usual. Arrived in Ponte above the eminent stage, the heads of these two ladies were cut off and Iacomo on the same stage was bumped off and quartered, persevering all to the extreme in good and Christian disposition and Mr Bernardo stood always above the said stage ".
The 17th of February 1600 “Theatre of execution” is instead Campo de’Fiori. Here is prepared the stake intended to Giordano Bruno, Dominican friar who had questioned the Dogma of the Trinity and the theory of divisibility of infinite, for this reasons processed and condemned to death. We could imagine Caravaggio witnessing again, as the square where the stake was posed is not distant from the places the painter usually attended.
The documents contained in the archive which specifically mention the painter from Milan refers almost always to Rione Campo Marzio, area between Via della Scrofa, Piazza Sant’Agostino and San Luigi dei Francesi, the Pantheon and Piazza Navona. In this area are found, as said elsewhere, the house and the workshop of the Sicilian painter Lorenzo Carli, but also Palazzo Madama, the residence of one of the great patrons of Caravaggio, Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, and Palazzo Giustiniani where lives the Marquis Vincenzo, the other major purchaser of the painter.
In Vicolo di San Biagio there was instead (and there is still, in Vicolo del Divino Amore 19) the study in which Caravaggio worked from 1604: the rent agreement, a document searched for years, even forged, is back in the light revealing some precious details, among which the authorisation required by the artist (and granted by Prudenzia Bruni, usufructuary of the apartment) to "uncover half of the room".
This was apparently a fact of little importance, but crucial if a reference is made to the paintings to which Caravaggio was working in those years and in particular to the “Death of the Virgin”, commissioned by Laerte Cherubini for the Church of Santa Maria della Scala which lies in Trastevere neighbourhood. An enormous canvas, for which Merisi needed space, plenty of space, and light, which is provided by the skylight in the mansard, built consequently to the dismantle of the attic planks.
We must finally rely on other documents, once again related to a process, to discover one of the few, perhaps the only, statement on painting made directly by Caravaggio. Anyway we should start from a prior event: the appearance of some offensive poems dedicated to Giovanni Baglione and to one of its works, “Amor sacro e Amor profano”. Baglione has no doubts: Caravaggio is the author of those words, together with his mates Orazio Gentileschi and Onorio Longhi. On the 28th of August 1603 is recorded the lawsuit against them "because the sued above-mentioned have always persecuted me."
Called to testify, Caravaggio expresses an opinion on the artists of his time. Precious words which impress on paper a key feature of his paintings. To him, because we would be unworthy of continue, we let the conclusion of this article:
"If I’ve been told to be a capable man, it is because I knew how to do it properly, so capable that I was able to imitate all the natural things […]
I think I know almost every Roman painter starting from the skilfull Gioseffe, Caraccio, Zucchero, Pomarancio, Gentileschi, Prospero, Giovanni Andrea, Giovanni Baglione, Gismondo and Giorgio Todesco, Tempesta and others […]
Among the ones I mentioned above neither Gioseffe nor Giovanni Baglione, neither Gentileschi nor Giorgio Todesco are my friends, because they don’t talk with me, all the others converse with me […].
Among the painters I already named as good painters are Gioseffe, Zuccaro, Pomarancio and Annibale Carraccio, but I don’t consider the others as skilful men. […]
And I forgot to mention that Antonio Tempesta, he is also a skilful man.”