M, p.28
M, page 28
It was a Divine love that he’d done to compete with an Earthly love by M and he’d dedicated it to cardinal Giustiniani.
The cardinal brother, relieved to have an acceptably orthodox counterweight to M’s provocative masterpiece in the collections of palazzo Giustiniani, rewarded Baglione ostentatiously with a gold chain, just as Pietro Aldobrandini had given Annibale Carracci a gold chain worth two hundred scudi in admiration for his Farnese gallery frescos the year before. The display of approval got up M’s nose – an extravagant reward for a painting that was at once cheaply derivative and smugly critical of his own most daring work. By flaunting it in San Giovanni dei Fiorentini as well, opposite Gentileschi’s probably likewise armoured and striding Archangel Michael, Baglione made a second enemy with the same painting. People didn’t like it as much as M’s, Gentileschi said some months later of Baglione’s effort, using carefully neutral tones and pretending not to know too much about the episode, even though it was understood the cardinal gave him a neck chain. Gentileschi clearly didn’t think much of Benedetto Giustiniani as a judge of art. He told Baglione what he thought too, probably in more vivid terms than he later used to recall it.
The painting had a lot of faults and I told him he’d done a grown man and armed when it should’ve been a naked boy and so he did another who was all nude.
But the second painting Baglione did wasn’t quite all nude. It was a replica of the first, only Divine love had shed his armour and donned a hideously fancy and fussy girdle. A brocade skirt was hitched up on the thigh of the cocked leg, now smoothly nude. There was one other small difference in the new version. The dark skinned pointy eared devil, whose face had earlier been turned away in shame, was now looking back in dismay over his shoulder, resting on his hand and staring wide eyed at the viewer – or indeed the painter – showing a light scurf of facial hair and a mouthful of bad teeth. The devil’s grimacing face was unmistakeably M’s. This was wanton provocation. If Baglione thought that Divine love with an exposed thigh would silence all critics and even let him mock, in the hypocritical name of counter reformation moralism, the painter whose art he was trying to hijack – and maybe he really did believe that with his facile brush and winning establishment ways he could make short work of a rebarbative and vulnerable genius like M – he had another think coming. It came pretty soon, though at the time Baglione was gloating pictorially because he thought he had it made. There was more than the gold chain.
* * *
BAGLIONE WON A major commission for the Jesuit church in Rome, from the father general of the society of Jesus himself, Claudio Acquaviva. The commission was to do a huge altarpiece for one of the chapels – an immense Resurrection of Christ, almost eight metres high by four and a half wide, one of the biggest paintings in seventeenth century Rome – and M had wanted that commission very badly for himself. The Jesuits were the counter reformation’s ideologues, and Baglione’s image of Divine love trampling and impaling a naked and defenceless Earthly love promised that the exciting, glamorous and prestigious new chiaroscuro realism could be combined with a tasteful assertion of high catholic values. In Baglione. Baglione was offering ideological reassurance a few months before cardinal Paravicino felt the need to put out his uneasily facetious feeler about M’s religious art. Baglione got the job. He already had sound institutional credentials as a Cesari man, and if Acquaviva and the Jesuits could’ve foreseen M’s radically disturbing handling of the resurrection theme that came a few years later, they’d’ve felt their caution well repaid.
Only it was a dud. Baglione flopped. The big screen spectacle opened on Easter Sunday 1603, but the huge canvas, done with love and care, Baglione insisted defensively decades later, was an evident failure. It was so much a failure that late in the century the Jesuits silently removed it and replaced it with another canvas. And after it was taken down, Baglione’s Resurrection as silently vanished out of art history. Only a small preliminary version afforded a glimmer of what it was – as a matter of art and not just personal resentment – M and his friends now so savagely attacked. Baglione’s great stylistic compromise split the canvas in two. Top and bottom came from opposing poles of Baglione’s eclectic mind. Above, a perfectly conventional late mannerist risen Christ in loincloth adopted a stock pose with banner among a perfectly acceptable heavenly orchestra of swooning angels and cherubs playing their instruments on small clouds. Most of the strongly chiaroscuro bottom half was stolen from M’s Matthew killed – unrelated bodybuilder semi nudes, sleeping soldiery who looked as if they’d wandered in from another scene – as indeed they had. Some looked dead, but a left handed nude on his feet wielding a knife irresistibly recalled Matthew’s assassin, and another sprawled along the bottom foreground was aping in a vacuum the role of the nude at the pool’s edge in M’s painting. There was plenty to feed M’s fury here.
That spring, M and his push – specifically Onorio Longhi and Orazio Gentileschi – moved in for the critical kill. Frequent visits to the church – the Gesù one of the symbolic centres of the counter reformation – and loudly voiced and savage criticism of Baglione’s art inevitably got mixed with merely personal rancour and commercial rivalry – since big commissions were a cutthroat business – and mutated, as the sweltering malarial summer came on in the close little world of the painters’ Rome, into the viciously intimate and physical. There was no way, in any case, to draw a line between art and money in the matter of intellectual property rights. Anger at the theft was mixed with contempt for the uses the stolen goods were put to. None of it was new. M had been reacting violently to imitators ever since the Matthew paintings went on view. In the autumn of 1601, when he’d just finished the Cerasi Saul and Peter paintings, a younger painter had gone to the police accusing M of a nighttime attack in the via della Scrofa.
… the said M came up and hit me from behind with the sword he was carrying and caught me on the arm. As I turned to defend myself the said M inflicted many other blows on me, such that if the neighbours hadn’t heard the noise and come running, I might well have been wounded or even killed by the aforesaid who moreover insulted me and called me a fucking prick and other insulting words.
The complainant, who claimed M was continually committing similar offences and attacking people, was a painter several years younger than M who was eagerly taking up M’s way of doing still life, despite M’s vigorous attempts to discourage him from riding in his slipstream. His name was Tommaso Salini and everyone called him Mao and he was a friend and follower – apparently the one and only friend and follower – of Giovanni Baglione. M sardonically called him Baglione’s guardian angel. Mao was an equivocal hanger on. He’d earlier been in trouble with other fellow painters as a slanderer and thief, and even his mentor and great defender Baglione later remembered him as having an excessively free and mostly biting tongue. Many years later he’d be involved in a bitter public feud with M’s friend – his early employer and later his follower – the painter Antiveduto Gramatica, who loathed him.
In 1603 Mao was sticking with Baglione. Mao was, M said, the only painter who praised Baglione’s disastrous Resurrection when it was unveiled that Easter Sunday. And when the attacks on Baglione and the jokes and insults from M’s friends got vicious that summer, it was Mao who got hold of copies of some of the scurrilous poems about Baglione that were circulating among the painters. In his own account, he went to work on Filippo Trisegni, who was one of the eager young painters burning to work in M’s way, a beginner to whom he’d lent art materials in the past, and a couple of days later Trisegni came up with a poem addressed to Gian Coglione, or Johnny Prick.
Johnny Prick can surely be called
he who goes attacking those
a hundred years his better.
In painting I mean since he wants to call
himself a painter like the man in mind
whose colours he doesn’t deserve to grind.
No painter’s better than he, no matter how
many he shamelessly names
and that proverb’s right too when it says
he’ll curse himself who wants praise.
I’m not in the habit of washing my mouth
or praising someone who doesn’t deserve it
like his idol does for sure.
If I wanted to go on about
the shitty things this guy’s done
a month, two months, wouldn’t be enough.
Come over here a bit, you who want to attack
other people’s paintings when you know
your own are still nailed up at home
because you’re ashamed to show them out of doors.
Actually I feel like giving up
there’s too much stuff here to go on about
especially if I start on the gold chain
he doesn’t deserve around his neck
if I’m not wrong he’d better wear
an iron one around his feet.
Everything he said with feeling
I’m sure it was because he was drunk
as indeed he should’ve been
otherwise he’d’ve been a fucking prick.
Salini claimed Trisegni told him this poem, or pair of sonnets – slightly confused over its pronouns, which mixed up the attacker and his victim, but deeply felt nevertheless, attacking Baglione for attacking M – was the work of Orazio Gentileschi and Ottavio Leoni, the young portrait painter and protégé of Del Monte’s. Trisegni denied saying any such thing. Spurred on by this discovery – Salini said – he invited Trisegni around to his home a few evenings later to look at a picture and Trisegni sat down and copied out from memory a shorter and saltier poem against Baglione – one he’d apparently given Salini earlier and that Salini had lost – that incidentally happened to be even more wickedly obscene about Mao Salini’s own wife. The second poem, which might’ve lost some of its finer effects in the phases of memorizing, recollecting, copying and recopying in the area of piazza Navona and the campo Marzio, apostrophized Baglione as Gioan Bagaglia, or Johnny Baggage. It went
Johnny Baggage you don’t know a fuck
your pictures are picturettes
we’ll see with work like that
you’ll never make a cent
to buy yourself some cloth
to make yourself some little pants
to show the world the part
of you that shits
So take what you’ve done
your drawings and sketches
to Andy the grocer
or wipe your arse with them
or stuff them up Mao’s wife’s cunt
since you’re no longer fucking her with your big donkey’s dick
O painter pardon me if I don’t worship you
but you’re unworthy of the gold chain you wear
and an insult to art.
Johnny Baggage – Salini said Trisegni told him – was the work of M himself and Onorio Longhi. Salini raced back with this to Baglione. Whether or not he’d sought the doggerel out on Baglione’s instructions, Mao Salini now strongly felt it was his duty as a concerned friend to make sure Baglione was fully aware of the obscenities circulating on his account. When he read them, Baglione sued M, and Onorio Longhi, Orazio Gentileschi and Filippo Trisegni for criminal libel.
When Baglione laid his suit before the governor of Rome on August 28, its terms made clear that the issue was professional rivalry over the big commission for the Jesuits. M had wanted the job, Baglione said. Neither M nor any of his friends would ever deny that the Resurrection contract had been the trigger. Impervious to further ridicule, Baglione attached the two handwritten poems to his deposition – whose handwriting it was mattered – identifying them punctiliously as
that which begins Johnny baggage and ends an insult to painting and the other … that begins Johnny prick and ends otherwise he’d’ve been a fucking prick …
You should know that I am a painter by profession and have practised this profession here in Rome for many years and now it happens that I have painted a picture of the resurrection of Our Lord for the father general of the society of Jesus … the said M tendered to do it himself, for which reason the said M out of envy as stated, and the said Onorio Longhi and Orazio his friends and followers have gone around … attacking myself and my works … the above named defendants have always persecuted me, they have emulated and envied me, seeing that my works are more highly rated than theirs …
That same day the court took a deposition from Mao Salini, who was generous with names and innuendo. Salini said he’d had the poems two or three months earlier, so it’d taken Baglione a while to act. He said Trisegni had identified M and Onorio Longhi and Orazio Gentileschi as the main authors, with help from Ottavio Leoni, and insisted that M and Gentileschi had wanted the Jesuit commission themselves, that Longhi had given them a hand as their intimate friend who’d already fought with Baglione in the past. A painter called Lodovico from Brescia had distributed them to various other artists,
in particular to a certain Mario, a painter too, who lives on the Corso.
This was Mario Minniti. He also claimed, one thought leading to another, that Trisegni had got the sonnets
from a fuck boy of M’s and Onorio’s called Giovanni Battista, who lives behind the Banchi.
This carefully nonchalant piece of extra helpfulness would stall when M flatly denied knowing anyone young of that name living in that area. A certain Wildean or Clintonian casuistry in the precision of M’s denial nevertheless left a sense that the fuck boy was real, was maybe even Cecco, whom M had painted as a nude boy John the baptist some months earlier – Salini would hardly have mentioned him if he wasn’t at least plausible, and the name and address indicated that he was even hopeful of dragging him in to testify, like the painter Mario. Too detailed a knowledge of people like that might’ve reflected, of course, on Salini himself. As it was, this added detail suggested too that the imputed past whereabouts of his friend the complainant’s donkey’s dick were weighing on Salini’s mind along with the memory of being beaten up by M.
It took the authorities a couple of weeks to pull in M, Gentileschi and Trisegni. Longhi was out of town and out of reach of the law. On September 11 M was arrested in the piazza Navona. Trisegni was taken at home over lunch. Gentileschi was brought in the day after. When Trisegni was interrogated the next day he cast himself as Mao Salini’s concerned friend. Trisegni had felt his helper ought to see the obscene and defamatory doggerel about him and Baglione that was circulating among the painters. So when he heard someone reciting the verses in question, Trisegni said he
pretended I liked them and asked … for a copy … and when I’d copied them out I went and found the said Tommaso and I said to him that he ought to be aware that while he was going around attacking other people’s paintings people were attacking him too and I told him I wanted to show him something that’d been done against him …
Mao Salini, naturally enough, was greatly stirred up by what Trisegni brought along and eager to know who’d written them. But Trisegni had no desire to be a troublemaker. He did a little more stirring.
[Mao] badly wanted to know who’d given them to me and who’d written them but I never wanted to tell him because I didn’t want to make trouble. Yet he kept on very insistently demanding to know and he named a lot of people, particularly M and the said M’s servant Bartolomeo, and Orazio Gentileschi and [a couple of unidentified others] and asked me if it was any of them. And I said it could be one of these – maybe it is one of these, but I don’t want to tell you his name.
Trisegni had his own agenda here. He wanted to make it in the art world and he knew that Mao Salini like Giovanni Baglione had been at work on M’s techniques for a couple of years already. He now said he’d reveal the names if Salini would show him how to paint a human figure with strong cast shadows in M’s way. Salini was unpersuaded by this offer. He never did teach Trisegni how to paint with shadows and so I never told him. But Salini badly wanted to see any further material about himself that Trisegni might come across, so Trisegni went back to his source and copied out the second poem for Mao in a grocer’s shop. Trisegni made it very clear to the court that he personally knew nothing about poetry and copied it out badly, running on the lines. So who were the authors? Trisegni told the court his source had told him it was
a young guy who was a student of logic – or was it physics? – who was really good, a master of the art and available to write sonnets to order for a woman if I wanted. He told me he was a university graduate and wrote exquisite verse.
A faint air of pisstaking that hung over this part – if not indeed all – of young Trisegni’s evidence was reinforced by his immediately following statement that when he took the poem he’d copied at the grocer’s round to Mao and Mao told him he’d lost the first – the one advising Baglione to stuff his drawings up Mao’s wife’s cunt – Trisegni was able to help out by copying the whole thing straight out again from memory. Trisegni’s volubility might also have been the logorrhoea of a defendant having an acute panic attack. The next day Trisegni and Salini were brought face to face and each accused the other of lying. Trisegni denied he’d
mentioned, told or specified the name of anyone who might have composed or distributed the said sonnets and poems.
Salini insisted he’d been given the names – which he avoided repeating in Trisegni’s presence –
and in particular that he’d got them from someone who lives behind the Banchi whose name he specified to me and also the fact that he was the fuck boy of the persons I specified in my examination …
Meanwhile the police had searched Gentileschi’s and Longhi’s homes and found some unrelated handwritten poems in both. These showed their competence as versifiers, though Gentileschi insisted I know how to write but not too correctly.
It looked bad. Whatever the picky and unforgiving professionals of the Roman art world were saying of his mammoth Resurrection, and however much father Acquaviva might’ve been quietly regretting the installation of this ill conceived giant turkey in the Gesù church, Giovanni Baglione had the seal of approval of the society of Jesus and the Jesuits stuck by their choices. The Jesuits were the one leading order of the counter reformation whose churches never accommodated any painting of M’s – unlike the Oratorians, the Augustinians and the Dominicans – and Acquaviva’s choice of Baglione to do the Resurrection had been – according to Baglione himself in his lawsuit, a rejection of M. Baglione had said
