IV
The most important event in Milan while Caravaggio was an apprentice was the death of its archbishop, Carlo Borromeo, in November 1584. The entire population of the city gathered outside the Archbishop’s Palace opposite the Duomo, carrying lighted candles and singing litanies. When his passing was announced, such dreadful howls arose from the crowd that observers compared them to the roars of stricken wild beasts. For days afterward, long lines of mourners filed past his bier, thrusting rosaries and crucifixes through the choir railings to touch his feet. Even before the Church canonized him in 1610, Milan kept the anniversary with the solemnities for a saint. He was embalmed and enshrined in crystal in a crypt chapel at the Duomo, which Henry James saw in 1872: “The black mummified corpse of the saint is stretched out in a glass coffin, clad in his mouldering canonicals, mitred, croziered and gloved, glittering with votive jewels. It is an extraordinary mixture of life and death: the dessicated clay, the ashen rags, the hideous little black mask and skull, and the living, glowing splendour of diamonds, emeralds and sapphires.”
Carlo Borromeo influenced Caravaggio’s art profoundly, although it is most unlikely that Caravaggio ever realized it. At the Council of Trent, the archbishop had been one of the leaders who reshaped Catholicism and harnessed the arts in the service of the Counter-Reformation. He had defined Caravaggio’s choice of subjects before he was born, by stressing those that were suitable for a Catholic artist.
The Counter-Reformation was far more than a crusade to save the Church of Rome from Protestantism. It was a revolution within the Church for the renewal of Catholic Christianity. The Council of Trent, which sat between 1545 and 1563, produced a series of extraordinarily influential decrees, dealing with every aspect of life affected by religion. The Counter-Reformation’s success in southern Europe, and in much of northern, was assured by the support of the Hapsburgs, the Bourbons, and the Polish kings, who all identified themselves with it.
There is a tradition that the council considered removing all forms of music except Gregorian chant from church services, until the composer Giovanni Palestrina supplied what was wanted. His Masses and anthems were performed constantly at Milan’s churches during Caravaggio’s childhood and apprenticeship, and at Rome when he was working there. Trent was determined to banish “everything ‘lascivious’ or impure” from religious art.
Long before the council, during the 1520s, Pope Adrian VI had planned to redecorate the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel because its naked figures scandalized him. Mercifully, he was prevented by his premature death. In 1549 Cirillo Franco complained in a letter to a friend of “that posturing of limbs and all those nudes” in Michelangelo’s art. Andrea Gilio’s 1564 Dialogo against errors in painting attacked contemporary artists for their obsession with the naked body, and criticized them for distorting it in the cause of elegance. He harked back to the time before Michelangelo, urging a combination of the latest technique with true religion, which would produce a purified sacred art. Bishop Franco and Gilio agreed that, as the former put it, “all art in the service of worship should be functional.” In the bishop’s words, “Everything must be appropriate to its subject.”
The fathers of the council trenchantly expressed their decrees. They insisted that it was the duty of all painters to proclaim and explain the truths of the Catholic religion, and, by inference, concentrate on doctrines attacked by the Protestant reformers. In the future, all religious painting and sculpture must stop cultivating art at the expense of devotion. The decrees amounted to a manifesto against Mannerism, rejecting “superfluous elegance,” excessive displays of nudity, and paganism.
What gave the council’s decrees such force, and ensured that they would have an enormous impact on artists, was the Counter-Reformation’s success in bringing about a deep and sustained religious revival. Caravaggio grew to manhood in an age of renewed faith in which, for most people, the redeemed world was more real than the natural. As a result, throughout Catholic civilization, especially in Italy, the decrees were taken very seriously by artists and art lovers. Eventually they would start a cultural as well as a spiritual revolution, with a new art that would one day become known as the Baroque.
An alternative program for painters and sculptors was contained in the preaching of Carlo Borromeo, who emphasized the two Catholic dogmas to which Protestantism was most hostile: good works and transubstantiation, the belief that the bread and wine changed into Christ’s body and blood during the Mass. He was equally determined to defend other doctrines rejected by Protestants and stressed the importance of the cults of the Virgin Mary and the saints and of prayers for the dead. Acts of charity and mercy, the Last Supper, the Madonna, and martyrdoms became the proper subjects for painters.
At the same time, the archbishop was eager to see as much beauty as possible in the basilicas of his diocese, which he often rebuilt completely to make them more splendid and impressive. He advocated the most sumptuous pomp for the ceremonies of the Church, and he wanted to adorn his basilicas with noble paintings. No paintings could have been more in accord with the council’s decrees than Caravaggio’s during his maturity. Despite their occasional brutality, his naturalism and total lack of affectation or of elegance for its own sake were the looked-for response to the decrees’ demand for functional art. He seldom used pagan imagery. He seems to have had little interest in the art of classical antiquity. In his later years, his painting was wholly religious. The Counter-Reformation had created a climate to which Caravaggio responded absolutely as an artist.