II
Tall, painfully thin, with piercing eyes, Cardinal Borromeo was one of the sights of Milan, celebrating Mass in gorgeous vestments at the Duomo’s high altar, tramping through the meaner streets to visit the sick and the dying. Accessible to all, he was a father to the city’s poor, selling his furniture to feed them, and an uncompromising ascetic who slept on straw and lived on bread and water. His sole luxury was music, in the service of the Church.
Borromeo embodied the new Catholicism of the Counter-Reformation. He has been called the first modern bishop, because he was the first to found seminaries for training parish priests and because he never left his diocese. Besides re-creating the Milanese clergy, he initiated a massive program of church-building all over Lombardy. As Pope Pius IV’s nephew, he was cardinal secretary during the last session of the Council of Trent, and he was present on 4 December 1563, when the council issued its edict on the visual arts. Caravaggio must have often heard his parents talking about the saint who played such an important part in the lives of their Sforza patrons, and who fascinated everyone in the city.
As archbishop of Milan, he made many enemies. Alarmed by the extent of his influence, the Spanish governor asked King Philip to remove him as “the most dangerous rebel Your Majesty has ever had,” but Philip wisely refused. Borromeo’s most violent foes were the Humiliati, a degenerate group of Benedictine oblates, or part-time monks, who lived in scandalous luxury on the vast revenues of ninety abbeys. When the archbishop told them to reform, one of the brethren shot him as he knelt at prayer in his chapel, but the bullet merely grazed his spine, and the Pope ordered the immediate dissolution of the Humiliati.
In August 1576, bubonic plague broke out in Milan, spreading across Lombardy and not coming to an end until 1578. Instead of escaping with the governor and the rich, Borromeo stayed and organized a nursing service and shelters for the sick. He also visited lazar houses, which no one else dared to enter. “He fears nothing,” said a Capuchin who knew him. “It is useless trying to frighten him.” Convinced that the epidemic was a punishment sent by God, he went every day on processions of atonement, through streets littered with putrid corpses and dying men and women, barefoot, with a rope around his neck and carrying a life-sized crucifix.
Throughout his life, Caravaggio can have known nothing more ghastly than the “Plague of San Carlo,” whose symptoms were shivering, shortness of breath, and a sense of unease, followed by a burning fever, purple tumors, and finally delirium. Fermo’s family lived in daily fear of being dragged off to a lazar house and ending in a plague pit. There were officials, robed in dingy scarlet, whose job it was to remove the sick and the dead, their carts heaped high with naked bodies and preceded by men who rang bells to warn of their approach. Throughout the stricken city, greasy smoke rose from the bonfires of infected clothes, dirty bedding, and discarded bandages. Houses were nailed up and marked with crosses to show that there were corpses inside. Everywhere was the all-pervading stench of putrefaction.
It was later believed that seventeen thousand died at Milan, and at least another seven thousand in the surrounding countryside. Agriculture and commerce collapsed. No one dared to work in the fields or the shops for fear of meeting the infected. A severe famine broke out. The archbishop sold what was left of his gold and silver plate to buy food for the starving, ordering his servants to make clothes for the naked out of his tapestries.
Many of Fermo’s friends and neighbors must have been among the dead. During the summer of 1577 Fermo and his family finally managed to escape to their house at the Porta Folceria in Caravaggio, but the plague followed them. Presumably most of the town’s inhabitants ran away to live in the open country, but unfortunately the Merisi were not among them. Fermo died of the pestilence on 20 October 1577, without even time to make a will. Besides his father, Caravaggio lost his grandfather and his uncle, struck down on the same day as Fermo.
Caravaggio was six. All the men in his family had died, suddenly and horribly, after fourteen months of terror. The child can never have forgotten the doleful warning rung by the bellmen, or the sound made by the wheels of the dead cart as it trundled past his parents’ house in Milan, or when it came to take away his father’s corpse. Death appeared very early in Caravaggio’s life. He was shaped by the plague.