M, p.13
M, page 13
To which Prudenza had replied coolly
That’s all I can expect from someone like you and if I’d known what you were like before I’d never have gone with you.
At which, in this account, she’d excused herself and gone upstairs, only to be loudly insulted from the street and further accused, in the supporting statement of another of those present, of transmitting the French disease and warts. Look at the fine fruits I’ve borne from you! So Prudenza had momentarily opened the upper window and in Ranuccio Tomassoni’s account
thrown a small piece of tile at him which didn’t hit him and was only small anyway.
Ranuccio Tomassoni, in the earlier case, was clearly in damage control mode. He would’ve wanted to cover for the girl whose bed he was found sharing two weeks later and keep the cops away from the house where she and her sister received their clients. Cops were bad for business, and so was loud talk of sexually transmitted diseases. So why did Prudenza then move on to the offensive against Fillide and Tella Brunori? In both cases the women’s resort to violence seemed to express weakness, if not desperation, and the appeal to the police a confidence of victory through law.
In that sense Prudenza’s position improved sharply between mid November and early December, while Fillide and Tella Brunori went from being rivals enjoying the benefits of redirected business to angry aggressors. Prudenza in her own complaint was notably reticent about why the others might have attacked her. The only clue was her incidentally mentioned presence in Ranuccio Tomassoni’s bed, like the incidentally mentioned presence of Ranuccio Tomassoni as a casual bystander and witness in the earlier incident – the police were treating charge and countercharge as a single matter – the same Ranuccio Tomassoni who’d been arrested with Fillide in her house the year before and who seemed to have a working relationship of one kind or another with several of the busiest courtesans in Rome around this time. He appeared in the reports to be well known to both police and other witnesses and to be treated by all with a certain deference. He appeared as a local power in the brothel district, remarkable in one who only turned twenty late in the year of these charges. He was only a year older than Fillide, who in 1600 was nineteen.
Another incidental sign that Ranuccio Tomassoni enjoyed a certain local notoriety came from a report the police made on a quite different matter. This other mention concerned another locally notorious figure and was recorded only three days before the writing up of the charge that Prudenza had thrown half a brick at a former client. M’s friend Onorio Longhi the architect was answering charges of trying to force his way at night into a house. The case had dragged on for a couple of years, and on November 14 Longhi was challenging a witness who’d said he’d recognized Longhi’s voice in the darkened alley. If you only know me by sight, how can you recognize me by my voice at night? Longhi had demanded.
I recognized your voice because I’ve heard you speaking with signor Ranuccio at the Rotonda and seen you playing ball there in the Pantani alley,
the witness had replied. Nobody asked him to say who the signor Ranuccio was. Called a liar by Longhi, he insisted I’ve heard you speak a thousand times. What Longhi had been heard saying to Ranuccio Tomassoni at the ball game in November 1600 was never specified. Onorio Longhi was going through a particularly turbulent phase at that moment and was in conflict on several fronts. Three days later a sculptor friend stood security for him to the court and also guaranteed what amounted to an apprehended violence order against Longhi in respect of six separate individuals. Two of them were his opponents in the forced entry matter, one was a sergeant at arms named Flavio Canonico, two were an otherwise unidentified father and son from Bergamo and the sixth was Longhi’s ball game acquaintance Ranuccio Tomassoni from Terni.
The sporting interests and the local street presence of both Onorio Longhi and Ranuccio Tomassoni were amply recorded from now on. Onorio Longhi was already over thirty in 1600 and a familiar presence in the alleys and taverns and brothels over most of the last decade, when he wasn’t away at the wars. Ranuccio Tomassoni was just twenty and too young to have fought like his brothers, yet locally on the rise and already a figure of some clout. His name too would appear with suggestive frequency in the Roman police records over the next five years or so. So would M’s.
* * *
GIULIO MANCINI was a clever arriviste who’d cut a few corners in his time. Nevertheless he was deeply shocked by one early episode in M’s life as a painter in Rome. As Mancini told it, M
had a single brother, a priest, a cultivated and respectable man who when he heard about his brother’s fame was taken by a desire to see him. Stirred by brotherly love he came to Rome, and knowing that M was living in the house of the very distinguished cardinal Del Monte, and knowing his brother’s strange ways, thought it would be advisable to have a word beforehand with the very distinguished cardinal and explain everything to him. He did this and the cardinal very kindly told him to come back in three days. Meanwhile the cardinal called M and asked him if he had any relatives, and M said he didn’t. Unable to believe the priest had lied in a matter that could be checked and was of no use to him, the cardinal sent out to inquire among the people from M’s home town whether M had any brothers and who they might be. He found it was M who’d told the beastly lie. Three days later the priest came back, and the cardinal kept him there while he had M called. Shown his brother, M denied knowing him or that the man was his brother. At which the poor priest was overcome with tenderness and said in the cardinal’s presence,
Brother I’ve come such a long way just to see you, and now that I’ve seen you I’ve had what I wanted. By God’s grace, as you know, I’m in a condition whereby I’ve no need of you either for myself or my children. Rather it might have been for yours, if God had granted me the favour of marrying you and seeing issue. May God grant that you do well, as I’ll pray to his divine majesty in my services, and I know your sister will do the same in her modest and virginal prayers.
M was unmoved by these words of hot and dazzling love, and the good priest left without even being wished Godspeed by his brother. After this it can’t be denied that he was a very wild and strange person …
Giovan Battista had come to Rome around the same time as his painter brother in 1592. He was still in Rome in April 1599 but went back north later in the year – he was ordained by the bishop of Bergamo near Caravaggio that December. Caterina married in 1594 and had her first child the next year, so 1594 was the terminus ante quem for her modest and virginal prayers. M was fast making a name among collectors but his real fame arrived when he left Del Monte’s household, and by then Giovan Battista was gone. The brothers met in Rome before M was really famous, soon after he was taken up by Del Monte. Mancini seemed not to know M’s brother was already in Rome and not yet ordained, a seminarian mightily surprized and impressed when he heard that a powerful cardinal had given his wild and strange brother an honoured place among his gentlemen. After the obscure trouble in Milan, maybe a killing and time in jail, and the seemingly wasted years and wasted money, the early failures in Rome, the poverty and sickness – maybe he thought his brother had changed. It was a time and place where anyone’s new success, from the pope’s down, would be expected to flow on straight away to the whole family, but M’s repudiation wasn’t about money. M’s savage kicking away of the family props, his refusal to even acknowledge Giovan Battista’s existence, however absurd such a denial seemed to his patron watching the encounter, was absolute and final. He’d severed the links. In that moment of angry denial, Giovan Battista’s unfortunate reference to M’s failure to marry and carry on the family line sounded like a parting jab in family code, a hint at the extreme unlikeliness of M’s ever raising a family. Giovan Battista was a student of the Jesuits.
In a life of radical breaks and sudden unexplained departures, it was the only record of M’s willing the break with the past – a reminder that behind force of circumstance in M’s life lay the will of a man who largely created those circumstances. The train of successes, contingencies and disasters, the powerful friendships and poisonous enmities would all be precipitated by M’s powerful sense of self, his steely will to be his own man, create his own life and project his own vision of the world. Mancini, who thought our age owes a lot to M, was too conventional and too opportunistic a man to see that the glory he applauded and the wildness he deplored necessarily went together.
* * *
THE GIUSTINIANIS HAD a house guest during 1599 – Federico Borromeo, the late Carlo’s younger cousin and very much his creation. When Federico was fourteen his iron cousin Carlo had sent the tender, impressionable and good natured young boy to study in Bologna under cardinal Paleotti, who was then gestating his interminable work On sacred and profane images. Borromeo was a cardinal in Rome at twenty three in 1587 and sent home in 1595 as archbishop of Milan, where he was trying to follow his cousin’s example. So far it was a disaster. Federico liked Rome and art and he’d been forced to take the job. Trouble with the Spanish began in a fight over the seating arrangements for the Spanish governor in the cathedral and soon deteriorated into armed clashes. Del Monte sympathized by mail from Rome – people here understand the endless battles you’re involved in – and looked after his commissions to clockmakers and painters. Borromeo sent presents of fine crystal in return. A year among his flock and in April 1597 he was back in Rome. Clement VIII was intensely displeased to see him but Borromeo hung on in Rome for five years. In Milan someone leaked a complaining letter he’d sent to Madrid, describing Milan in the darkest hues of corruption and vice.
Borromeo was terribly interested in art. He collected paintings. He’d write a book, much later, On sacred art. In 1602 he ordered a cycle of fortyodd large paintings featuring the life and miracles of his uncle Carlo for Milan cathedral – most of his commissions promoted the image of the Borromeo dynasty. More privately, Federico liked the novelties of northern European painters. He especially liked the way they did landscapes and flowers in paintings on their own, a minor area of the avant garde that Flemish painters were introducing to Rome. His favourites were the landscapes of Paul Brill and Jan Brueghel’s bunches of lusciously decorative flowers in expensive vases. He always visited Brill’s studio when in Rome and took Brueghel into his own household for a couple of years. When Brueghel returned home Borromeo wrote him a reference that praised the purity of his spirit and morals as highly as his art. Del Monte liked Brueghel’s work too, and had eleven paintings by him. Amid the anxieties of ideological correctness, it was easier to unwind in private with flowers and landscapes. Even cardinal Paleotti thought plants and landscapes were acceptable as long as they were done with proper decorum, and Borromeo himself later wrote that instead of putting nature into religious painting, where it might get in the way, it was better to show that variety of scenes in another picture. As his Flemish favourites did.
Borromeo’s five years in Rome were the five years of M’s emergence as a great painter – it happened under Borromeo’s nose. Dutiful Federico Borromeo wouldn’t’ve responded to the sensuality, the violence or the technical daring emerging in M’s art. The exquisite precision and economy of the painter’s touch clearly did please him. Borromeo would’ve loved M’s fruit and flowers when he saw them in supporting roles in Giustiniani’s Lute player, or in Del Monte’s Bacchus or his Boy bitten. He would’ve wanted them for his own collection – minus the staring boys. And at some time during his years in Rome Borromeo found and bought or was given the painting by M of a Basket of fruit which was one of the first real still lifes in Italian art.
M painted over a canvas that’d already been used to sketch a frieze of grotesques like his friend Prospero Orsi’s. He painted a small basket of everyday fruit that was so dazzlingly beautiful as a whole and so subtly rendered in colour and texture that you overlooked at first that the pear was past its prime, the apple had a worm hole, some of the grapes were shrivelled, the purple figs were splitting out of their skin, the perfect peach’s leaves were eaten by insects, and indeed that all of the various beautiful leaves framing the fruit were in some degree spotted, discoloured, shrivelled. M’s still life was anything but still. The cheap basket’s leaves were wilting at its outer limits even as the perfectly intact green figs, the peach and the quince and the black grapes with their heavy bloom bulged out of it. Your ranging eye moved in time, covered the haphazard and asymmetrical drama of ripeness. The tiniest marks on the skin seemed to darken under the gaze, as they would’ve under M’s as he worked, and the leaves dried and curled. M enhanced the beauty of the real by showing its life in time – his painterly form and attention revealed the austere splendour of the ordinary, the drama quivering in seeming stasis. His fruit said a lot about M’s coming human drama. Looking at the overlooked, the Basket of fruit was a manifesto.
In case any viewer still imagined that this fruit in this basket – it might’ve been banged on the table after a tavern meal with Onorio Longhi or Prospero Orsi – belonged to a lesser order of life and a merely decorative order of art, M obliterated any other element around the basket and leaves. He painted behind and around them a heavy flat pale goldish backing that looked like a wall behind the basket, so that the only other thing seen in the picture was the base band frontally representing the shelf the basket rested on – and from which it projected out of the picture plane into the viewer’s face. There was nothing in the picture to distract from the basket of fruit itself, nothing to qualify or explain its in your face presence. What you saw was what you got.
Bellori traced the rise of still life in Italy to M’s early work. Other still life painters followed Jan Brueghel’s model and aimed for a touch of class in their work by featuring fine crystal and exquisite foods and making their fruits huge and absurdly faultless. And none of these tried anything as optically unorthodox as M’s fruit. Vincenzo Giustiniani listed twelve degrees of skill in painting, and put knowing how to paint flowers and other tiny things only at the fifth level, though he put M’s work at the top. The disparity made him recall something M’d said to him long ago –
M said once that it used to take as much workmanship for him to do a good picture of flowers as it did to do one of human figures.
The remark was more radical than it seemed, and this was why Giustiniani remembered it – the usual values in art put the human figure above inferior nature and human figures in history painting at the top. It matched something one of Galileo’s pupils reported much later about Galileo’s own early observations of nature in the fifteen eighties. Galileo said
… the effects of nature, however minimal and hard to observe, should never be looked down on by scientists, but all given equal importance … nature did a lot with very little, and everything she did was equally marvellous.
Galileo so liked art and drawing in his youth that later he
used to tell his friends that if he’d been able to choose his own profession at that age he would absolutely have chosen painting.
Galileo never lost his interest in art. Like Borromeo he was in and out of the palazzo Madama all through the years M lived there. In his interested and practical way, he likely looked in on M at work in his studio. If he talked about Guidubaldo’s almost finished work on perspective and his own physicist’s views on optics he mightn’t have got the response he expected from M. Galileo was a scientist and his ideas on art were conventional. The Basket of fruit showed that M saw quite differently from those non artists around the palazzo who were articulating mathematical rules for the use of painters. It wasn’t only the art lavished on low material that made the Basket a manifesto. M’s painting over and flattening out of everything behind his fruit made the picture wall behind the fruit continuous with the real wall the painting was hanging on – or tacked to, without a frame, as it once was in the studio. The fruit on its ledge seemed to stick out of the wall and intrude into your own real space. This reversed your usual experience of looking at a canvas – that sense of looking through the picture plane as you looked through a window on to a scene of life that receded away from you. Guidubaldo and Galileo were codifying the renaissance sense of pictorial space while M’s painting was leaping toward Cézanne. M’s harmless everyday fruit wasn’t dynamic in its ripening and dying alone – it was threatening to tip off its ledge and fall on you. Borromeo, however entranced he might’ve been by the illusion, naturally wanted a conventional frame, which lessened the shock – but holes running along the edges of the painting under the frame remained as hidden traces of the unframed canvas illusion nailed directly to the studio wall that first startled M’s visitors.
The Basket reworked the illusion M had tried on the Medusa shield, and like the Medusa it used visual shock to laugh at the rule makers. Their rules of receding perspective were meaningless for an illusory image that had no depth and existed in your visual space and not its own. M was working out very different ways of representing vision in paint – ways that were truer to sense perceptions than reason and logic. The patina of time later coated M’s spotty fruit in its cheaply woven tavern basket with an odd beauty that masked its original raw provocation, and the Basket of fruit ended up in the limp young hands of the sadly conventional Federico Borromeo, with his timid taste for the gracefully unthreatening new flower paintings. He took the painting back to Milan with him when he returned to face the Spanish governor. He praised it highly in a perfunctory way when he wrote a descriptive catalogue of his collection twenty-odd years later. He evidently hadn’t looked at it closely for a while, or maybe ever, because what he wrote was glorious is the basket … of vibrant flowers, done by M who became famous in Rome …
* * *
PAINTING FILLIDE STIRRED M’s sense of drama to a new pitch and she painted him into a crisis. Fillide coincided with a new buyer – Ottavio Costa, another banker from Genoa who financed the Vatican and did business with Vincenzo Giustiniani. Costa bought both M’s half length action paintings of Fillide – Judith & Holofernes and Martha & Mary and he later bought three or four other paintings by M. Like Del Monte and Giustiniani, Costa left few traces of his link with M, yet he later played a part in getting M out of his worst crisis. He was the third of that triad of M’s early and interventionist patrons who seemed to care for him as much as they did for his paintings. Costa was ten years older than Giustiniani and knew what he liked in M’s work – and by commissioning Judith & Holofernes, he set M on the way to his great work. After that there was no turning back.
