VII
Everything in Rome revolved around the pontiff and, after him, the sixty or so resident cardinals. The Papal States were a theocracy governed by priests, and the pope was a temporal prince, an absolute monarch. In 1581 Montaigne saw the then pontiff pass by, wearing a white cassock and a red hat and cape, riding a gray horse decked in red velvet fringed with gold. After him came three cardinals on mules, a hundred mounted men at arms, bareheaded, “each with lance on thigh and in full armor,” and then a hundred monsignori and courtiers, also mounted.
When Caravaggio arrived in Rome, the Pope was Clement VIII, only recently elected. A giant of a man, fat and white-bearded, who, from a weakness in his tear glands, often wept uncontrollably, he was kindly by nature, although he prided himself on his severity. He was also prone to fits of undignified rage. The last of the austere Counter-Reformation popes, Clement said Mass every day at noon and confessed every evening to his greatest friend, the Oratorian Cardinal Baronius.
A recent predecessor, the dynamic Sixtus V, had made the papacy stronger than ever. It finally secured undisputed control of central Italy, and Sixtus took advantage of favorable conditions to make Rome very rich. He amassed millions in gold, by draconian reductions in the cost of the papal court and by heavy new taxes on all agricultural produce. Marshes were drained, roads and bridges repaired, farming and manufacture encouraged, all of which would have been impossible before the Spaniards’ enforced pacification of the Italian peninsula.
At the same time, the Counter-Reformation was succeeding. The decrees of the Council of Trent were transforming Catholicism, partly because new religious orders were spreading their message, partly because enough Catholics were determined to save their religion from indifference and corruption. Today, it is difficult to appreciate the sheer power of Catholic Christianity in Italy at that period. Only a few rare eccentrics, gathered in swiftly by the Inquisition, ever felt the need or the possibility of doubting the existence of God, even if they criticized the shortcomings of priests or bishops. Science had not yet emerged. There was not even a vocabulary for atheism, while heresy barely existed. Only one or two foreign Protestants were caught from time to time, generally ending at the stake. In any case, it was impossible to be an individual in the modern sense. Well-balanced men and women were convinced that it was neither right nor proper to hold opinions contrary to those of their rulers.
Clement VIII found himself reigning over a Rome much richer and much less threatened than it had been for centuries, leading a Church in many ways reborn. Neither a very clever nor a very forceful man, surprisingly, he was a most successful pope, and especially effective as a statesman. Not only would he receive Henry IV of France back into the Catholic fold, in the face of fierce opposition from Spain, but he used France as a counterweight against Spanish attempts to control him, and he managed to do so without alienating the Spaniards. If the Romans did not love Pope Clement, they certainly respected him.
Next among the rulers of Rome came the Princes of the Church, the cardinals who elected the pontiff and who held all the important offices. Caravaggio must have caught glimpses of them in their magnificent palaces, open to the public; or in their black carriages drawn by black horses; or riding sidesaddle on their mules with the skirts of their long scarlet trains pinned to their bridles. Invariably they were escorted by retinues of violet-clad monsignori and gentlemen in black.
There were also the great lay princes of Rome. Although neither so powerful nor so wealthy as in the past, they were still enormously rich, with splendid palaces at Rome and immense estates in the Campagna. While they usually held some hereditary ceremonial office at the papal court, they were seldom in the city, preferring to stay at one or another of their many castles. Like the cardinals, the princes were surrounded by officials, servants, and hangers-on, so that it would need luck bordering on the miraculous for any of them to take notice of a ragged young painter in search of a patron.
There was a whole host of other clergy at Rome, ranging from bishops to parish priests and seminarians, from abbots to monks and friars. The members of the new religious orders were especially influential. Those who stood out were the Theatines, Oratorians, and Jesuits. There is no record of Caravaggio being in contact with the Theatines, but he saw a good deal of the Oratorians and the Jesuits.
The Oratorians, groups of priests and laymen, preached a cheerful, warmhearted religion, with emotional sermons on the need for simplicity and the value of inner voices. Marching through the streets to prayer meetings in the Catacombs or at some venerated shrine, they sang oratorios, antiphons set to music by composers such as Palestrina or Vittoria. Caravaggio may have come across the Filippini as a boy in Milan, where Borromeo gave them an enthusiastic welcome, helping them establish a Milanese Oratory. He may even have seen their founder, Filippo Neri, still alive when he came to Rome, at their church of Santa Maria in Vallicella.
The Jesuit church, the magnificent Gesù, was still being built all through his stay in Rome. With his temperament, he must have been alarmed by the Jesuits’ uncompromising discipline but, like everyone else, could not have helped admiring their heroism. They trained their men to welcome death, encouraging them to become martyrs, which was why they commissioned scenes of martyrdom for their churches. The Spiritual Exercises, the Jesuit training manual, declared that “no wild animal on the face of the earth can be more ferocious than the enemy in our human nature.” It stressed the inevitability of death and brevity of human life. Dying was not to be dreaded but welcomed as the gate of Heaven.
Although Caravaggio received important commissions from the Oratorians and only just failed to secure one from the Jesuits, there is no evidence that he ever belonged to a circle dominated by either order. Even so, he must have heard countless sermons by them; in Counter-Reformation Rome it was impossible to remain unaware of Oratorian and Jesuit ideals. The mature Caravaggio’s extraordinarily direct approach when painting, his uncompromising realism, probably owes much more than we realize to the Oratorians.
Both orders were building churches. They required pictures urgently, to proclaim their message. Unfortunately for the young Caravaggio, so far they only wanted frescoes, and he did not know how to paint them.