XVIII

“Wonderful Things at Rome,” 1603

When Carel van Mander wrote of Caravaggio’s disreputable private life, he added that he was “doing wonderful things at Rome.” “He will not make a single brush stroke without a close study from life, which he copies and paints.” Undoubtedly, Caravaggio produced some of his finest work during this later Roman period. In January 1604, he went to Tolentino, not far from the Adriatic coast, where he had been invited to paint an altarpiece for the Capuchin church of the Crocefisso. No trace of such a picture survives. But having made the long journey from Rome to Tolentino it seems unlikely that he would have omitted to make a pilgrimage to Loreto, the Counter-Reformation Lourdes, which was only a few miles away.

According to a widely believed tradition, during the thirteenth century, the house in Nazareth where the Blessed Virgin was born, and where Jesus spent his childhood, was carried away by angels through the sky, first to Dalmatia and then to Loreto. It was a tiny brick building, twenty-eight feet by twelve, and thirteen feet high. Countless pilgrims flocked to it in the hope of finding miraculous cures, or to pray for divine intervention. It was a place of last resort, when everything else had failed. It was also a place where sinners were sent by their confessors, to atone for their misdeeds.

Quivering with horror at the “shamefull opinions of the Papists” and their “idolatry,” the daring Scots tourist William Lithgow came here in 1609, only six years after Caravaggio. As a Calvinist, he observed scornfully that when any of his Catholic companions approached the town gate, they pulled off their shoes and stockings, walking barefoot to the shrine, “many hundreds of bare-footed, blinded bodies, creeping on their hands and knees.” He also learned that every year these pilgrims offered “many rich gifts, amounting to an unspeakable value, as Chaines, & Rings of Gold and Silver, Rubies, Diamonds, Silken Tapestries, Goblets, imbrouderies, and such like.”

In Loreto’s narrow streets Caravaggio saw the crippled and the palsied, the blind and the deaf, the fevered and the crazed. Courtiers came because the shrine had the power to render poison harmless; military men because it could deflect bullets or sword cuts; barren women because it could overcome infertility. Rich and poor, they prayed before the Holy House, which stood inside a church with a dome by Sangallo and side chapels by Bramante.

The shrine had already cast its spell over another painter, Lorenzo Lotto, who had died there as a lay brother in 1557, and who may have influenced Caravaggio. There are paintings by him in the Apostolic Palace that must have been in the church in 1603. If Caravaggio came to Loreto on a pilgrimage, perhaps as a penitent, he is likely to have done so on the feast of the Nativity in September, or of the Translation (removal) of the Holy House in December. Apparently the simplest, humblest pilgrims made the most impression on him.

Entering the church through bronze doors, Caravaggio found its walls covered by frescoes and paintings that told the story of Loreto. Seven massive silver lamps burned before the Santa Casa. Inside, there was an ancient, wonder-working Madonna and Child, carved from wood and black with age, dressed in silks and velvets, ablaze with jewels. Sometimes the statue seemed to come alive, electrifying the pilgrims.

When Caravaggio returned to Rome, he was able to pay special tribute to the Santa Casa. A certain Ermete Cavalleti had bequeathed five hundred scudi to adorn a chapel with a picture of the Virgin of Loreto, and for this purpose his heirs had purchased the first side chapel on the left in the church of Sant’ Agostino. Probably during the latter half of 1603 they commissioned Caravaggio to paint a Madonna di Loreto. The altarpiece that resulted could have been painted only by someone who had felt the full impact of the Holy House, and who understood what it meant to the pilgrims.

In this extremely moving picture, sometimes called the Madonna dei Pellegrini, Caravaggio shows the “standing Madonna holding the child in her arms in the act of blessing; kneeling in front are two pilgrims with hands folded in prayer, a poor man with bare feet and legs, with a leather cap and a staff resting on his shoulder, who is accompanied by an old woman with a cap on her head,” Bellori writes. Few modern observers appreciate that the couple’s feet are bare out of piety, not from poverty. A strikingly beautiful model with a very strong face posed for the Virgin. She was almost certainly Lena.

Baglione sneers that one of the pilgrims has muddy feet, while the other wears a dirty, torn cap. But in trying to belittle the painting, he testifies to its popularity, reporting disdainfully how “the common people [popolani] made a great fuss [estremo schiamazzo] about it.” The picture was every simple pilgrim’s idea of Loreto, of the Virgin appearing miraculously with the child Jesus at the door of the Santa Casa, welcoming those who came in humble simplicity. This was the art envisaged by the Council of Trent.

In fairness to Baglione, many educated people must have agreed with him. Nowadays, it is difficult for us to grasp just how much Caravaggio’s preference for ugly, shabby, lower-class humanity as models shocked contemporaries. Until Victorian times, artists generally depicted men and women as handsome, well groomed, and upper-class when painting scenes from Scripture or history. An Oratorian might have approved, but not many others, apart from common, illiterate folk.

In 1605 Cesare d’Este, duke of Modena, commissioned a Madonna from Caravaggio as an altarpiece for a church at his capital. For once, the artist was late in finishing, or at least in delivering it. Cesare wrote to Cardinal del Monte, asking him to help. Del Monte warned the duke not to be too hopeful, adding that Caravaggio had recently declined six thousand scudi from Prince Doria to paint a fresco. Some years later, Caravaggio sold a Madonna of the Rosary, which may have begun as the picture ordered by the duke of Modena.

Another altarpiece from about this time was the Madonna dei Palafrenieri, the Virgin and Child with a stern St. Anne (the Virgin’s mother). He used the same model for the Virgin as in the Madonna di Loreto. The figures are stamping on the head of a hissing serpent, which may be intended as an emblem of Protestantism. Ordered for the chapel of the Papal Grooms (Palafrenieri) at St. Peter’s, it was just the sort of commission Caravaggio had been seeking. But although he was paid the stipulated price of seventy-five scudi, much less than his normal fee, in Baglione’s smug words “it was removed by command of the Lords Cardinal of the Fabbrica [di San Pietro].” The rejection must have made Caravaggio more bitter than ever and perhaps accounts for some of his violent misbehavior.

He painted a St. John the Baptist for the Genoese banker Ottavio Costa, who gave a copy as an altarpiece for the church of a Ligurian village where he was feudal lord. It may have been painted during the artist’s very brief exile at Genoa in 1605, when he fled there after attacking the notary Pasqualone. If his mind was troubled, he worked with greater speed than ever. A banker in Rome, Costa, one of his warmest admirers, came from the gentry of the town of Albenga in Liguria. He was the first owner of Judith and Holofernes, eventually possessing five Caravaggios and leaving a clause in his will that his heirs were to sell none of them.

Caravaggio continued to paint other pictures besides altarpieces, but these, too, were invariably religious. In a Crowning with Thorns, commissioned by Vincenzo Giustiniani, a pair of sadistic executioners are forcing thorns into Christ’s head, his blood pouring down, while an armored centurion looks on with perverted pleasure. An Ecce Homo, Christ presented to the Jews by Pilate, was painted in response to a request from a Monsignor Massimi. The patient Christ is almost excessively gentle and resigned. In contrast, Pontius Pilate is much more interesting. Ludicrously respectable and fussily bad-tempered, he could easily have been modeled on one of the detested police magistrates with whom Caravaggio had so often come in contact so unpleasantly. What he had not been told was that Monsignor Massimi had slyly commissioned several versions of the subject in a concealed competition between three artists, without telling any of them that they were competing. The version by Il Cigolo pleased the Monsignor best. It was another unfair and humiliating rejection.

There is unmistakable pain on the faces in many of the paintings from Caravaggio’s later years in Rome. Costa’s St. John the Baptist wears a sulky, even lowering look. Disturbance is still more apparent in two somber studies of Francis of Assisi that date from this time. They show not the slightest suggestion of ecstasy. But, although they are not self-portraits, both portray someone of the same physical type as Caravaggio—small, black-bearded, unkempt. There could be no more eloquent expression of Caravaggio’s very personal and strange blend of the most sincere spirituality with the most profound unhappiness than these two paintings of St. Francis.

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