IX
No one could have played a more benevolent role in Caravaggio’s life, or one of more vital importance to his development as an artist, than Cardinal del Monte. Seemingly without hesitation, he took the shabby, tricky-tempered young man out of the gutter into his household, where he gave himparte e provisione, a room, clothes, and an allowance of food and wine. Del Monte’s object was to enable Caravaggio to paint in peace and security. He protected and encouraged him for over four years, even taking in his no less ragged friend Mario Minniti, presumably at Caravaggio’s request.
Del Monte is something of an enigma. The official account of his distinguished, if not very eventful, career is in Chacon’s massive history of the popes and cardinals, which was published in Rome in 1677. From the comparatively small space devoted to him, we learn that he came from a noble family in Umbria; that he was born in Venice in 1549; and that, as a boy, he had been a brilliant student of classical learning and the law. He had then gone to Rome, entering the famiglia of his cousin, Cardinal Alessandro Sforza, and becoming his right-hand man. After Sforza’s death in 1581, del Monte entered the service of Cardinal Ferdinando de’ Medici, with whom he established a lifelong friendship. When Ferdinando “resigned the Purple” in 1588 on inheriting the grand duchy of Tuscany, he petitioned Pope Sixtus to let del Monte succeed him as cardinal deacon of Santa Maria in Dominica. Consecrated Bishop of Palestrina, and then Ostia, he was dean of the College of Cardinals by the time he died in 1627.
Among his duties was the rebuilding of St. Peter’s. He also rebuilt the ruined monastery of Sant’ Urbino for a community of Capuchin friars. He was generous to sculptors, painters, and alchemists. “On Sundays, in honor of the Blessed Virgin, he fasted on bread and water, giving alms to the poor,” writes Chacon’s continuator, and he lived with the utmost frugality, always wearing shabby clothes.
His godfathers had been Titian, the architect Sansovino, and the satirist Aretino, friends of his father, who was a soldier in the duke of Urbino’s service. Because of his friendship with Grand Duke Ferdinando, he occupied a Medici palace, representing Tuscan interests at Rome. Essentially a bureaucrat, he was among the poorer cardinals, with an income of twelve thousand scudi but no private fortune. Although as a young man he had flirted with girls and played the guitar, in the puritanical climate of the Counter-Reformation he could scarcely help being austere. Still, his interests were never exclusively clerical. When Federigo Borromeo left Rome, his place as cardinal protector of the Accademia di San Luca was filled jointly by del Monte and Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti, author of a treatise on what sacred art should be in the light of the Council of Trent. His brother, Marchese Guidobaldi del Monte, was a famous mathematician, who had taught Galileo and introduced him to the Medici.
He was also a keen student of alchemy, which was much more than a mere precursor of chemistry. Believing the “divine science” had little to do with magic or making gold, he thought its purpose was to “extract the quintessence of things” and prepare healing elixirs, even if a patient died after taking one. Like Paracelsus, anticipating modern psychologists, he was convinced that a dynamic spirit was at work beneath human nature. Caravaggio, who decorated del Monte’s laboratory, may have used alchemical symbolism in some of his paintings. He certainly acquired a smattering of the divine science from his patron, giving his dog the alchemical name of “Raven,” a symbol of melancholy—“the bird of Hermes that never rests.”
Like all members of the Accademia degli Insensati, Cardinal del Monte was fascinated by Neoplatonism, a philosophy based on the belief that things are more than they seem, and that each possesses an inner reality of its own. It was reflected in the period’s taste for emblems, which were intended to alert beholders to hidden meanings within a work of art.
Studies of Caravaggio often credit his complex, subtle patron with homosexual tastes, but their evidence is highly dubious. It consists of no more than a misreading of a report in an avviso of 1624 and a single innuendo in the Relatione della citta di Roma by Dirck Ameyden, a collection of hisavvisi that was published in 1642. Handwritten news sheets, the avvisi are no more reliable than modern tabloids as historical documents. Pope Clement grumbled that they “spread lies and calumnies.”
The report in the avviso of 1624 merely says that a cardinal had given a banquet at Palazzo della Cancellari for three other cardinals, including Cardinal del Monte, and for various gentlemen “in the usual fashion.” It relates how “for recreation there was dancing after dinner in which the best dancing-masters took part. And because there were no ladies, many youths dressed as women participated, providing no little entertainment.” This tells us nothing about del Monte’s sexuality.
Dirck Ameyden came from the Spanish Netherlands but was brought up in Rome, where he spent the rest of his life. He claims that del Monte “loved the company of young men, not I think from evil urges, but out of natural friendship.” However, Ameyden insinuates rather more by adding that the cardinal hid feelings of this sort until the election of Urban VIII in 1623, when he “indulged openly in his tendencies.”
Examination of Ameyden’s avvisi shows him to have been both untruthful and malicious. The near-contemporary continuators of Chacon’s history complained that Ameyden “spoke ill of almost all the cardinals and very unjustly.” As a Spanish agent, he was eager to discredit the pro-French Pope Urban and pro-French cardinals like del Monte. His sly reference to del Monte’s private life is contradicted by a Venetian ambassador’s description of the already aged cardinal in 1617, “a living corpse … wholly given up to spiritual exercises, perhaps to atone for the licence of his younger days.” Moreover, del Monte himself revealed a taste for girls in a letter written to a friend in 1608, which wistfully recalled their youth together and “all the honeyed moments with the Artemisias and Cleopatras.”
There is no whisper of scandal about the cardinal in any other avviso, which is significant, since they were notorious for spiteful fantasy. It was a standing joke in Rome that del Monte’s friend Cardinal Alessandro Farnese had created the three most beautiful things in the city—the church of the Gesù, the Palazzo Farnese, and “La Bella Clelia,” his natural daughter, Clelia Facia Farnese, begotten in the unregenerate days before the Counter-Reformation.
Gossip surpassed itself when del Monte’s closest friend, the former cardinal Ferdinando de’ Medici, inherited the grand duchy of Tuscany. He was popularly rumored to have poisoned his brother, Grand Duke Francesco, and his sister-in-law, Grand Duchess Bianca. According to one story, Bianca offered a poisoned tart to Ferdinando at a banquet and, after he insisted on his brother tasting it first, she had swallowed a piece in despair. In reality, both Francesco and Bianca died of malaria.
What is beyond question is that Francesco Maria Bourbon del Monte was one of the great patrons of early Baroque Rome. Genuinely benevolent, besides being a lover of the arts, he was a good friend to more than a few struggling artists. Everyone is in his debt for discovering Caravaggio and making possible his career.