VI
The Rome that became Caravaggio’s home was a magic place with its churches, monasteries, palaces, and fountains set amid the majestic ruins from classical times. Only the part next to the Tiber was inhabited. More than half of the ancient city had become a wasteland, often thickly wooded, sometimes interrupted by farms or vineyards. As well as isolated chapels and abbeys and the odd villa among beautiful gardens, there were a few hamlets with cornfields in the southern area. But the overwhelming impression was of a haunted wilderness. Cows and goats grazed beside fallen marble columns, while shepherds folded their sheep in what had once been the atria of Roman mansions, and outlaws hid in noble rooms underground. There was a brooding sense of history and legend.
Some visitors found Rome a melancholy spectacle. “What he had seen was nothing but a sepulchre,” the great essayist Montaigne wrote mournfully after his pilgrimage in 1581. But he had to admit that in the grandeur and number of its public squares, the beauty of its streets and palaces, the city was far more imposing than Paris.
The Romans themselves—a mere hundred thousand compared to at least two million in the days of the Caesars—were enormously proud of their past. Antique statuary, constantly unearthed, was purchased eagerly by a host of distinguished collectors, including cardinals, who displayed it in galleries at their palaces and villas. Even humble artisans collected Roman coins. A young tourist from England, Thomas Nashe, grumbled that they “shewed us all the monuments that were to be seene, which are as manye as there have beene Emperours, Consulles, Oratours, Conquerours, famous painters or plaiers in Rome. Tyll this daie not a Romane (if he be a right Romane indeed) will kill a rat, but he will have some registred remebraunce of it.” Nashe adds, “I was at Pontius Pilates house and pist against it.”
However, the vast majority of visitors, especially artists, seem to have been spellbound by the ruins. During the early years of the century, Raphael and his friends had themselves let down by ropes into the banqueting halls and bedchambers of antiquity, which they called grotte (grottoes). By the light of guttering torches they searched for grotteschi, their name for Roman murals, gazing entranced at a flickering, phantom world of gods and goddesses, nymphs and fauns.
When Caravaggio arrived, there were also fine modern buildings. Pope Sixtus V (1585—1590) completed the dome of St. Peter’s in less than two years, totally rebuilt the Lateran Palace and the Vatican Library, enlarged the Quirinal, built the Sistine Chapel at Santa Maria Maggiore and the Loggia Sistina at St. John Lateran and new streets, notably the Via Sistina and the Via delle Quattro Fontane, besides resiting obelisks and statues all over the city. Less admirably, he demolished one or two important classical buildings but failed in his plan to convert the Colosseum into a wool factory. His greatest triumph was to be the first man since Roman times to construct, or at least restore, an aqueduct in Italy, the Acqua Felice.
Despite his gloomy reflection that Rome was a sepulchre, Montaigne admitted that it had more rich men in coaches than any city he had ever seen. Lesser folk, too, could live very pleasantly. Rising early, they did most of their work in the morning, before dining frugally at twelve—an astonishingly late hour by northern standards—after which they rested till six. The evening, interrupted by a light supper at about nine, and much of the night were devoted to amusement, in particular to promenading.
The city was especially cheerful during the Carnival before Lent, with pageants and floats, masks and masquerades, cockfights, jousting matches, and battles with sugared almonds (the original confetti). Races were run along the Corso by donkeys and buffalo, urged on mercilessly with whips and goads. There were also races by wretched old men and by Jews, who, after being stripped naked, were forced to take part and then pelted with rotten eggs, dead cats, and every sort of filth as they ran. The Corso races always culminated in a wild gallop by fifteen superb Arabian horses.
In its own way, Lent was no less colorful. Brethren from a hundred pious confraternities thronged the streets in hooded gowns of white, red, blue, green, or black, with masks that concealed their faces except for the eyes. On the night of Maundy Thursday, Rome looked as if it were on fire when the brethren marched to St. Peter’s in their thousands, each bearing a lighted torch. In their midst were five hundred hooded penitents with naked backs, which they scourged till the blood ran.
On Holy Saturday—Easter Eve—the supposed heads of St. Peter and St. Paul were displayed at the church of St. John Lateran. Given Caravaggio’s future obsession with severed heads, he may well have been among the bemused spectators on at least one Easter Eve.
Throughout the year there were more somber entertainments, the most frequent and most popular being public executions. Parents brought their children to watch them, waiting breathlessly for the condemned to receive the Sacrament at the foot of the scaffold and reassure everyone that they were dying reconciled with God. Occasionally heretics—“soul murderers”—were burned, as were sodomites, although they often escaped by paying an enormous fine.
There was also the casting out of evil spirits. Montaigne came across one quite by chance, in the chapel of a church where he had been hearing Mass. A small crowd watched a priest praying over a lunatic bound with ropes, hitting him, spitting in his face, holding a holy candle upside down to make it burn faster, and shouting threats at the devil inside the man. When he stayed crazy and was led away, the priest told the crowd that it was a particularly nasty demon and could be got rid of only by a great deal more prayer and fasting. He then described a more satisfactory exorcism he had recently conducted, driving a really big devil out of a woman; at the moment it left her body, she had vomited up its nails and claws and a large piece of scaly hide. Her friends complained that she was still “not quite herself,” but he had explained to them that another evil spirit had immediately entered her, although not such a bad one.
However beautiful Rome may have been, there was always the threat of famine, and even without famine, innumerable beggars and abandoned children starved in the streets. In summer the Romans shivered all too frequently with the ague—malaria from the nearby marshes—and venereal diseases were rife, spread by the many prostitutes who served the bachelor officials. It was an extremely dirty place, its streets filled with human excrement. Almost the only scavengers were the pigs, who roamed everywhere. Despite pleasantly warm weather from spring to autumn, bitterly cold winds set in during the late autumn, followed by drenching rain, which fell throughout the winter.
Rome was notoriously dangerous, even by sixteenth-century standards. If Caravaggio became a violent man, the city’s violence and savagery were in some degree responsible. Undoubtedly, there was a peculiarly sinister atmosphere at Rome, and it can have had only a baneful influence on him. Montaigne tells us that it was unsafe to walk through the city’s streets at night, that houses were constantly being broken into. Murder was commonplace. More discreet weapons than swords or guns were available. A thinbladed stiletto, properly handled, caused almost no external bleeding, while a tiny folding crossbow, easily concealed beneath a cloak, was virtually noiseless, even at close range. There was also poison, administered by a quick scratch from a “death-ring,” a fruit knife, or a lady’s hat pin.
Pope Sixtus had succeeded in making murder less fashionable during the years just before Caravaggio’s arrival in Rome, by the most savage measures, but he had died in 1590, and Pope Clement was neither so frightening nor so effective. Gradually, the murder rate rose again. Caravaggio must have seen plenty of heads rotting on the Ponte Sant’ Angelo or over the city gates. No assessment of him should omit this background of constant violence and daily executions.