M, p.21
M, page 21
It was very indecorous.
The rear parts of horses and other animals are never seen frontally but placed behind, as a part unworthy to be seen.
Saul’s blind eyes made his cropped head look even more military, like a Roman bust, as he looked up sightlessly into an undifferentiated forest of bare legs, the barefoot groom’s with their ropey veins and horny toenails and the horse’s. How he’d got down there wasn’t clear – it looked like an accident in the stables. The weary beast standing over Paul had thrown nobody. Paul’s red cloak, plumed helmet and the absurd ribboned skirt were props recycled from the first version, but now the brilliant red had faded to dun, the leather ribbons were less noticeable than the horse’s dangling reins, and the helmet almost lost in the darkest bottom corner. Paul might’ve been opening his arms to Jesus or groping for a helping hand up, from the intent and placid groom, who hadn’t even noticed him lying there flat on his back. You saw it all at a raked angle as you looked at Annibale Carracci’s Virgin in the narrow chapel. Paul’s prostrate body was directly aligned with your own line of sight, and the suffering carthorse sideways on. In the play of light and darkness, Paul, horse and picture plane made a three dimensional vision swung out forty five degrees toward you. This wasn’t the kind of setup the theoreticians of perspective had foreseen. It sucked your eyes away from the tasteful Carracci altarpiece into an hallucinatory mise en scène that had the pony’s bony workaday rump projecting massively and indecorously toward Annibale’s glossy, demure and untouchable heaven heading virgin. From the altar what you mostly saw was horse’s arse. The history is quite without action was all Bellori was able to say about it – he had no words for this life size view of a tired carthorse’s hind quarters. Bellori wasn’t the only one to have a problem with the immortal skewbald. Neither did Mancini or Baglione mention it. Almost nobody bothered to copy it. Annibale Carracci was probably the only person in Rome with an eye to see what M had done to him.
In Peter opposite, M worked around the same life changing insight. He painted stillness, not action. He saw art lay not in the history you told but in the human truth you showed. It was the artist’s old truth, a lesson that had to be relearnt for every time and every art. In Peter M dramatized a reality that matched the business of horse care, which was the sheer hard labour of torture and execution. Peter was worked out as intimately as Saul – no transcendental presence, no onlooker, no witness to the killing of the old man beyond yourself, and you were taken in as close as anyone could get. It was another strictly private event. The executioners weren’t grimacing nude thugs like Matthew’s assassins. The three faceless labourers hoisting Peter upside down on the cross he was already nailed to – two faces turned down and away, one caught in deep shadow – were concentrating on the job in hand, absorbed in the effort of getting him in place to die. The immobility in this painting wasn’t the stillness in Saul but the momentary stasis of mechanics – Peter’s weight on the massive cross meeting the muscular effort being made to raise him. Peter himself was a well known painter’s model from the via Margutta nearby instantly recognizable to the first people who saw the painting in Santa Maria del Popolo. The others were likely neighbours too.
Darkness was closing in here, nothing visible beyond the four figures, the cross, the rope, the shovel, an abandoned greenish cloak and a small boulder like a loaf of bread that might’ve been the same one seen in Saul. The figures themselves, compact, busy, practised and impersonal as nurses, worked in brisk physical intimacy with the old man they were putting to death. One wrapped his arms around Peter’s legs to steady the cross, the other pulling on the rope was using his own thigh to steady the victim, the face of the kneeling shoveller with his shirt rucked up under the cross was inches from Peter’s. The image of this effort was skewed obliquely and as daringly as Saul’s, bringing the cross’s upright nearly into line with a viewer’s sight, so that Peter was seen feet first and the figures emerged from the darkness with a rounded solidity. No part of which was more rounded or more solid than the kneeling labourer’s arse projecting hugely into the viewer’s face, just above – in the near bottom corner at eye level – the filthiest sole of a bare foot M ever painted. The still point around which the visible effort pivoted was Peter’s face – M’s first rendering of a really old man, the beginning of a long imagining of age. Peter’s fading eye brought back to sharpness for a moment, not by pain or fear but by the sudden bodily disorientation, was something of the order of Pray you, undo this button. Like Lear’s this was a modern death – unmediated, unadorned, unexplained, a death without promise of transcendence, without vindication, death as nothing other than itself. It was another amazing discontinuity. Years seemed to have passed between the first Saul and the second, done weeks apart. Now Peter looked like nothing so much as M’s paintings of age and death that were years away – it was a look into the future of M’s art.
In June while he was starting the second versions on canvas of the Cerasi Peter and Saul paintings, M signed a contract for a new work and it referred to him as resident in the palace of … cardinal Mattei – where the new contract was signed. It wasn’t clear whether the move was definitive – in October he had another brush with the law for carrying an unlicensed weapon at night, and told the police he was on cardinal Del Monte’s payroll. The arresting officer wasn’t convinced and jailed him anyway. It did look as though M left the palazzo Madama in the first part of 1601 and that he spent the next couple of years with the Mattei brothers. No contrary evidence emerged, and he did a lot of work for Ciriaco Mattei in this time. Mario had lately left to marry so he could live more quietly – it looked the moment for a change of life and a flexing of his suddenly won independence of Del Monte. Other things were changing too. On the personal front M’s immediate future was being signalled, just as he signed the new contract at the Matteis’, by the puffy faced angel with reddish brown hair and a broad nose in the first Saul. He came floating into the painting’s top right hand corner and stopped the fatal nosedive of the dark and shaggy plummeting Christ. It might’ve been an image of the boy’s role in the life of dark and shaggy plummeting M. The tawny haired angel’s name was Francesco Boneri, Cecco for short, and he was about twelve when he entered M’s life the year Mario got married. Whether Cecco also moved into the cardinal’s household with M wasn’t recorded. If he wasn’t living there on a permanent basis, Cecco certainly spent a fair amount of time in M’s studio there over the next year, because he spent a lot of time being painted nude by M. The Matteis soon got to know him pretty well in any case, since M’s second full frontal nude of the boy went straight into Ciriaco’s collection. Cecco’s arrival was about to tie M’s art and his life into an inextricable knot.
7
ROME 1601–1602
Maffeo Barberini
Matthew & angel I
Matthew & angel II
SUMMER TIME WAS fun time and nobody was more aware of this than the younger members of the college of cardinals. The wealthier and social minded set. In 1601 M was being found more and more often in their retinues – street fighting at night wasn’t the only relief from the mental drama of the Cerasi canvases. The social set included young Odoardo Farnese, whose gallery in the finest palace in Rome Annibale Carracci had just covered with a riot of neopagan nudes. He was three years younger than Alessandro Peretti da Montalto, whose great uncle pope Sixtus V Peretti had made him cardinal when he was fifteen years old and who was now fabulously rich. One of Montalto’s young courtiers had described him in spring as
a soft youth, and so given over to pleasures that he neglects almost everything else
and in summer he was more so. Odoardo was two years younger than Pietro Aldobrandini, who’d been made a cardinal by his uncle the present pope and was rapidly becoming fabulously rich and whose niece had just married Odoardo’s brother and who was nearing thirty like the painter M. The eldest of these friends was cardinal Alessandro d’ Este who was thirty two. No more than five years separated the eldest from the youngest of these pleasure lovers.
Francesco Maria Bourbon Del Monte was a good deal older and nothing like as rich as the younger ones, but great company and he liked the younger cardinals and he was very well connected. They were a close little group and enjoyed sharing the good times with each other. On the first Sunday of July that summer, Odoardo Farnese had had them all to lunch in his garden, where an avviso reported that they ate splendidly. The next day, the avviso went on, they all did the same at signor Marzio Colonna’s palace at Santi Apostoli. The next Sunday they were all at a big wrestling tournament put on in the evening by the Colonnas outside their palace. One of Odoardo Farnese’s grooms was the winner, but the cardinal himself had left for Parma the day before and missed the triumph. He was still away on August 9 when cardinal Montalto’s brother the marchese Peretti invited them all to another garden banquet, for which the host
had ordered in at great expense from many places many different kinds of really excellent fish.
Not everyone was a cardinal at the seafood barbecue but nobody brought his wife. Nobody ever did. These were male occasions and the only women ever present were honest courtesans, who were strictly professional girls, ones who had enough class and cultivation to grace high society as well as satisfy the guests. One of the most sought after girls in the Rome of 1601 was at the lunch that day. Her name turned up in the police report of an incident that took place when some of the guests decided later that afternoon to go for a jaunt outside the city. The officer in command of the checkpoint at the porta Pinciana reported that three coaches and some men on horseback were approaching toward evening opposite the gateway to cardinal Del Monte’s vineyard when the first coach galloped through the road block as its passengers screamed to the driver to stop. As the officer’s men overtook it, three girls jumped from the thundering coach – shrieking with laughter presumably – and were apprehended. One of them, who was very flirtatious and insolent to the commander – if you want to beat me up, go ahead officer – was Domenica Calvi, known as Menica from Siena, even more familiarly Menicuccia, around sixteen years of age, nearly two of these spent on the game in Rome. The other two were her sister and another colleague.
When I saw you outside I was screaming to the coachman to stop but he didn’t want to because he was scared of the cops.
She’d provoked the whole incident to impress the cops, whom she knew, with her influential connexions. Now she was mocking them. The commanding officer’s report doggedly reported her words.
Lieutenant I kept telling the coachman to stop but he refused to listen to me.
And when [he] told her You’ve got to go to jail she said I want to go by coach and not on foot. A lot of gentlemen had reached us by now from the two coaches she’d left behind and they lent her a coach and so she was driven to jail … when she got inside the said Menica told one of the gentlemen
Oh, Sir, I left my silver cup with the prawns in the coach, see that it doesn’t get lost.
When Menica was interrogated by the magistrate the next day, she naturally kept her mouth shut about the cardinals she and her sisters in arms had been in the coach with, and apart from remembering a signor Ottavio Doni she kept her mouth shut too about most of the gentlemen who’d made up their escort. Whether M ever entered into Del Monte’s social milieu as part of his retinue on jaunts like this – not particularly likely in the light of his own known social habits – he did at some point get to know Menica Calvi, as he already knew Anna and Fillide, because three years later, under interrogation about his role in a street fight, he insisted to the police that while the rocks were being hurled in the street he’d been chatting with Menicuccia, who lives in that street, he added helpfully. Where they’d been heading this summer day was Del Monte’s country lodge, the one whose laboratory ceiling M had painted with Jove, Neptune, Pluto. It was one of Del Monte’s favourite retreats, a very lovely and delightful place where he used to invite friends for musical entertainments. It was so delightful that Pietro Aldobrandini four years earlier had decided he wanted it and Del Monte, because his friend was the pope’s nephew, had to give it up. Pietro Aldobrandini was like that. Everything he liked he wanted. Everything he wanted he expected to get. It was the whole point of being the cardinal nephew. Del Monte had told Ferdinando I at that time that Aldobrandini had looked out at the villa Medici estate from the verandah of Del Monte’s lodge and said loudly That’s the pope’s vineyard over there and then turning toward Frascati had added And that’s the Capranica vineyard and that’s the one I want. A couple of years later in 1599 he’d got another country house and graciously given Del Monte back his own. It was good to have Del Monte on side.
Menica Calvi went on to have a long and brilliant career in Rome, at least as brilliant as the other Siena girl Fillide’s, and a lot more soundly managed. And this from starting seven years behind. Menica’s adolescent high spirits never frightened off the cardinals or seriously alienated the police. On her way down from Siena in 1599, when she was around fourteen – she was coy about her exact age and always managed to keep it out of the court records – she’d stopped off in Orvieto where a girlfriend from Siena helped her get started professionally. Menica was a fast learner. She knew the value of a good address and when she arrived in Rome in early 1600 she set up in a smart central neighbourhood, in the via del Babuino, renting a big house of several floors with parking for a coach and stables for the horses. She had silver cutlery and crystal wineglasses for her visitors, and she received them in a big fourposter bed topped by a
domed canopy in turquoise damask silk from Bologna with matching bedcover and surrounds,
with expensive gilt embossed leather on the bedroom walls. Barely a month after Menica’s arrival in Rome cardinal d’ Este was so struck by her that he sent two of his men around one evening to bring her back to his palace. This was good news and bad news. Menica had only been a year with the cardinal before an avviso reported he’d had to return to Modena, to recuperate from the heavy expenses sustained at court. Meanwhile Menica was taking the airs dressed in cloth of silver with gold roses. She was also taken sick at this time, in the spring of 1601, and frightened enough to make her will, but bounced back quickly enough to be surprized a couple of weeks later by the police in the company of two of her regulars, barons who moved in the young cardinals’ set. She took up music lessons that spring. I can’t play, only strum, she explained to a magistrate who wanted to know about the sounds of music coming from her house. Around this time Montalto took up with her as well.
Menica Calvi sustained her brilliant career over many years. She understood about investing her earnings and she died at fifty a very wealthy woman. Over the five years that followed their summer jaunt in 1601 she and M would both come into glancing contact with third parties that implied a common milieu, but the summer outing to Del Monte’s place in the country would be the only documented link ever made between them. M had painted Menica’s colleague Fillide several times, and another of her neighbours and coworkers would shortly become M’s most seen female model. Fillide was identified as Judith, Catherine and Mary Magdalen through the named portrait he also did of her that Vincenzo Giustiniani owned, the one destroyed in Berlin. Nobody ever identified Menica as a model in M’s work, though he knew her and she impressed people no less than Fillide did with her looks and intelligence. Maybe he did paint her. In the same big room of Vincenzo Giustiniani’s gallery, where he hung all his paintings by M, the inventory made when he died listed next to a portrait of a Courtesan called Fillide … by the hand of M another
half figure portrait of a famous courtesan on canvas still unfinished … by the hand of M.
This time the girl was unnamed and the painting then lost, but she might’ve been Menica Calvi and why her portrait should’ve been the only picture M ever left unfinished was a total mystery. He might’ve been working on it at a time he suddenly had to leave town.
* * *
IN AUTUMN 1600 a poet arrived in Rome – on the run from Naples – who quickly turned his attention to the art sensation of the moment. Giambattista Marino was two years older than M and in the same urgent need of patrons and protectors M had known earlier. Marino’s bright career in Naples had run into trouble when he got a wealthy businessman’s daughter with child and was jailed in 1598 after her death in a botched abortion. Marino was now under death sentence for falsifying papers to help a friend facing execution – connexions let him escape to Rome. He was a far more accomplished operator than M and soon found a place in the household of monsignor Melchiorre Crescenzi, and M painted portraits of both Marino and Crescenzi before Marino’s next career move to the household of Pietro Aldobrandini in 1602. Nearly all M’s portraits were later lost, as these two were, and he did quite a few of his friends around this time, as well as the commissioned ones of patrons like Benedetto Giustiniani. He painted Bernardino Cesari, the cavalier d’Arpino’s rougher younger brother, Onorio Longhi and his wife Caterina Campani, the courtesan Fillide Melandroni and the other famous courtesan who might’ve been Menica Calvi, maybe his friend the miniaturist Sigismondo Lair.
