M, p.30
M, page 30
We came here straight away to report him, Salini went on importantly. But first he went back to the church to get names of witnesses, and walked into trouble again.
I found him again in the church … and he came at me again with his sword under his arm and and started saying Come on out, come on out you filthy spy. I told him to mind his own business and that unlike him I had no weapons and Onorio replied
Come out, come on out, you sneaking insulting smart alec spy … so you don’t want to come outside – then I’ll be waiting outside your house for you …
and … Giovanni Baglione and I were going home down the Corso at the intersection of the via della Croce … and … we saw Onorio outside the door of my house and he came straight up to us and said
Right, go and grab your sword – I don’t want to give you any trouble until you’ve got a sword,
but I didn’t trust him and went inside the tailor’s shop by the butcher’s on the via del Corso and mr Giovanni went into the baker’s shop that sells bread and wine and charcoal … he started saying
You filthy prick of a spy, come on out and bring your sword – I’ve got a bone to pick with you, snitch.
While he was speaking there were a lot of people around who saw and heard what was going on – the barber next door to the tailor, the owners of the baker’s shop … Tommaso Della Porta the sculptor and an old man called mr Annibale …
Longhi was arrested that day. Giovanni Baglione made a statement confirming everything and going into some detail about the damage done to his hat by Longhi’s brick, and two days later so did witnesses. Longhi’s fury however had been entirely directed at the sidekick and not at the man who’d brought the criminal charges against him – maybe he’d heard about the snitch’s repeated mentions of M’s and Onorio’s fuck boy. Maybe his wife had heard too. The sculptor Della Porta said he was a friend of both Longhi and Baglione and had led Longhi away because he didn’t want to see them hurt each other. The barber had seen a redbearded man armed with a sword shouting at a painter who’d retreated into the tailor’s shop and another who said he was a painter too hiding in the wine seller’s shop. Another shopkeeper had been disturbed at Sunday lunch, and gone out to see a crowd of people and a man with a sword red in the face threatening two others he didn’t recognize, but since they fled into the tailor’s and the wine seller’s and nothing more seemed to be happening, the shopkeeper returned to his lunch.
There’d been a nasty undertone to the trial – nastier than the ostensible cause – and both sides tried not to acknowledge it directly in their testimony. On the face of it Baglione and his pupil Salini had been grossly slandered out of professional jealousy. But the gross verses were themselves a response to unspecified attacks, as the poem Johnny Prick made clear. This was the one the snitch Salini claimed had been written by Orazio Gentileschi and Ottavio Leoni, and in its angry choked up way it was all about Coglione Baglione’s contemptible attacks on an artist the writer, or writers, greatly admired. There was no reason to disbelieve Salini on who the authors were – Gentileschi’s intense admiration for M came out when he was cross examined. The poem’s very lack of specificity was its point. The attacks on M had been in some way unmentionable – the handwriting was hard enough to decipher let alone interpret – and the mention of washing out my mouth reinforced a sense of the unspeakable. Washing out the mouth was what you did to get rid of something really foul, like lies of a particularly hateful kind, and evoked a different order of language from – say – the contemptuous remarks Zuccari had made about what he claimed was the unoriginality of M’s Matthew called. The obscenity didn’t feel gratuitous. It voiced a moral squalor.
10
ROME 1603
Isaac & Abraham II
THEY NEVER STOPPED attacking M and his style and spread it around that he didn’t know how to come up out of the cellar.
It wasn’t true – not until late in 1603 at any rate – what the resentful old mannerists said about M. The landscape M did now – a background glimpse, but integral to the picture, placing its moment of violence and drama and fear in a deeply reassuring setting of quiet continuity – was the last such glimpse, though, of the outdoor world in M’s work. It did mark a change of tone, a final break with the painted northern world of his first twenty years. After more than a decade in Rome of formation and triumph, a great urgency now came into his work. After this painting, M’s big public commissions and half figure histories would be interspersed with a series of intensely solitary and introspective single figures, brooding in their isolation. The social world of his youth disappeared from his work along with the pagan subjects and the still life. From now on, M’s experience was rendered entirely through his imagining of the figures and images and events of the Christian drama. And the visual correlative was enclosure and isolation in the middle of darkness, out of sight of the larger social world. After this he really was more and more a prisoner in his cellar studio, trapped like his models in the dark air of a closed room.
M started painting Isaac & Abraham in the spring of 1603 – soon after Baglione’s unfortunate Resurrection was unveiled and before the crisis it led to – using the same horizontal three quarter format he’d lately used for the Meal at Emmaus, Doubting Thomas and Christ taken. He had to suspend work on it when Baglione went to the police with the poems and didn’t finish it until he came out of jail in autumn. He wasn’t finally paid off until January 1604. Isaac was a new commission from Maffeo Barberini – a response to what Barberini had seen or heard of M’s reimaginings of biblical events in entirely human terms – and it was close up, urgent, unadorned and intimate. Barberini was evidently still pleased with the dynamic gesturing portrait M had done of him in 1598, and freshly impressed too, if he hadn’t seen the new work himself, by what Del Monte told him when they met in Florence in 1602. He’d done Isaac before – the patriarch Abraham with his knife out and ready to slit his own son’s throat as an offering to the old testament god, the angel interceding at the last moment, the ram making itself available as a substitute sacrifice – and the earlier version had been a much more rigorously controlled study of figures in darkness, a close sculptural group in the glow of a fire and a little heavenly highlighting. It’d been a very gentle study – within the terms of an event set up to diminish merely human love – thoughtful father, weeping son and sweetly reasonable young angel. The new version took the old man last seen looking on in Doubting Thomas and before that as the second Matthew writing with the angel, and before that as Peter, looking less disturbed than his forerunner at the orders he was being asked to carry out, sceptical at the last minute stay of execution. He still had his son under his thumb, which was pressing cruelly into the boy’s cheek as the hand held his neck to the stone. Isaac was Cecco – stripped naked, hands tied out of sight behind his back, face pressed down sideways and bum arching upward in struggle, white and distorted, yelling his head off. It looked like a sexual assault in the grey morning light – peasant violence on a child labourer somewhere on the outskirts of town. The upward jutting knife blade stood for rape and murder. Beside the boy’s writhing and his terrified yell of resistance, both the serenely intervening angel and the ram, looking in sideways from opposite edges of the canvas, were a lot more formulaic than M’s earlier rams and angels. They carried no freight of meaning here. The violence was on its own – so nakedly that M, pressured by circumstances or Barberini or a late loss of nerve of his own after the trial, muted and muffled its force with some last minute changes.
The oddly crude and unconvincing angel was actually a makeover – Cecco was doubling roles. M had painted him as the angel too, and – as infra red reflectography would show – then disguised and idealized him into something Leonardesque. Cecco’s
small chin and delicate lips are evident in the infra red reflectogram inside the blocked in profile. These highly individual features were then masked over by extending the profile outwards to give the figure a suitable idealized countenance
– and above all to make Cecco as angel look different from Cecco as Isaac. It was Isaac who was really the whole centre of interest in M’s second imagining of this history, and in the earlier stages his nude body was much more visible before it was obscured by Abraham. M made a lot of incisions in the priming of this canvas to fix the models’ contours, and
The most fascinating lines occur in the figure of Isaac; the whole of his head as well as the features of his face are indicated. An arc … defines the alignment of the eyes and a little hook gives a preliminary indication for the nose. The open mouth was of crucial importance for the picture’s impact, and M carefully marked the position of the lips with incised lines … two diagonal lines define his right thigh, clearly visible in the reflectogram, while the U shape line must, by extension, record the placement of Isaac’s genitals. So important had the leg seemed to M that he initially blocked in the dark area around it.
The trouble was the boy’s projecting body interfered with the flat serial arrangement of the figures across the canvas – frieze like as in Judith & Holofernes – and his leg ended up concealed behind Abraham’s sleeve, wrist and cloak, his genitals behind the knife handle. So that
the tightly compressed pose of Isaac – his right leg bent back over his left, his right arm tied behind his back – is almost impossible to read without the aid of the information provided by the incisions and infra red reflectography.
This meant that the original violence being done to the boy’s trussed and folded naked body was partly painted over and obscured as the painting was completed. Even as it was, the part of Cecco left in view under the descending knife – his twisted neck, the white deactivated shoulder, his open bawling mouth and the faint curve of his squirming bum – was the picture’s vital centre, drawing the eye irresistibly, leaping out from the deadness of the rest with ugly energy. The Abraham who took up so much of the canvas was a finefeatured face on an inert and bulky bundle of heavy cloth that fell in unconvincing folds – he’d nothing of the tense and edgy way he’d knelt on his stool before, looking over his shoulder in an almost identical pose as Matthew with the angel. The angel here, and the ram, were verging on the perfunctory and looking too much like each other for comfort.
The strongest bit of human figuring here was Isaac, now unrelentingly drained of any attribute of charm or desirability, showing only the physiology of fear and pain. You had the feeling that some real pain was used, maybe in the pressure of that thumb, to achieve the desired effect. Cecco himself had visibly changed in a couple of years from the chubby goldenhaired child angel of the first Saul, through the pubescent tough of Love and the longer limbed adolescent John in the wild to a pasty unsettled teenager with bags under his eyes and clammy hair – a streetwise Roman who knew making a lot of noise was the best defence. Cecco Boneri’s was a much more remarkable metamorphosis than any in the earlier and longer series of Mario Minniti portraits. It had to do not only with Mario’s being older when M first knew him, and already formed, but with M’s being younger then too, adoring in the early pictures and in thrall. He was older now, a lot older than Cecco Boneri, knowing and lustful. Whatever the pictorial mise en scène required, there was never any idealization of Cecco.
Isaac & Abraham was interrupted in the painting. Maffeo Barberini’s account books for 1603 recorded part payments to M of twenty five scudi on May 20, ten scudi on June 6 and fifteen on July 12. In August, when M might’ve been expected to be getting round to completing the painting, the feud with Baglione reached the height of its virulence and on August 28 Baglione went to the police demanding that M and the others be charged. M spent only a couple of weeks in jail, though things had clearly turned out badly when the ambassador Béthune intervened and got him out on September 25. The feud, the trial, imprisonment, uncertainty and its aftermath of unabated anger would’ve reduced his will and energy to paint for some time after that. Then there was the housing question. M’s trial and apparent conviction for obscene libel of an establishment painter made him a very embarrassing member of a cardinal’s household. Whether he was still living in the palace of cardinal Mattei at the start of summer 1603 or whether he’d returned to Del Monte’s – and he’d been picked up in piazza Navona, a few steps from the palazzo Madama – it was clear he couldn’t go back when he came out of jail. Since he remained under house arrest and wasn’t allowed to leave home without written permission – facing the horrible penalty of rowing in the galleys if he did – having his own independent home was quite likely a condition of being allowed house arrest, maybe part of the deal engineered by Béthune and M’s ecclesiastical backers. M contracted with a widow named Prudenzia Bruni to rent a two storey house with attic, cellar and a courtyard garden with a well in the lane of san Biagio in the campo Marzio. He moved there on his formal release from the Tor di Nona prison, and the rental arrangement was evidently part of the deal. The house was near the studio where he’d once drudged for Cesari, and closer still to the Tuscan ambassador’s palace. After years of precarious or subordinate lodgings in other people’s houses and palaces, his house, nothing fancy but big enough, was now M’s first independent home and studio in Rome. It was also, for the time being, his prison. Here he finished off the Isaac for Barberini.
M had placed sexuality and violence at the painting’s centre in the assaulted nude body of Isaac – quite unlike the gentler weepier handling of the boy in the other Isaac several years before. But now M subdued all that blatant pain he’d created. He partly obscured Isaac’s bare body with Abraham’s bulky drapery and filled out the canvas rapidly with the perfunctory angel and ram. The cruelty in the closeness of the knife, humiliation in the pose, brutality in the thumb grinding into his cheek – these were part of the painting’s origin, but after the trial M seemed to lose his nerve and go to some lengths to muffle the violence. He handed the finished painting over to Barberini around the end of the year. The final instalment of fifty scudi was noted in Barberini’s account book on 8 January 1604. It brought M’s total payment to a hundred scudi.
* * *
DID THE JESUITS put Baglione up to his libel suit? Baglione was behaving in the months before the trial like a man who felt he had institutional power behind him. His frontal assault on M as a painter with his own Divine love was a remarkable provocation in itself. He followed it up with a very pointed and poisonous allusion to M the second time round, when he gave the devil a face and made it M’s. The pictorial insinuation wasn’t a light one – could hardly have been a more emphatic nod and wink in the direction of the inquisition. That the naked devil was grovelling with a naked and sprawling adolescent earthly love doubled the dose of allusive poison. Mao Salini’s elaborately casual mention of the fuck boy in his later deposition was dropped on well prepared terrain.
Even if he’d wanted to, there was no way M could respond to this kind of insinuation. His reaction – and his friends’ – was the spluttering angry obscenity of the verses circulated and some loud and savage mockery of Baglione’s dud magnum opus for the Jesuits, whose very public failure must’ve been vastly more satisfying. Baglione’s prompt and confident response in pressing criminal charges – a wholly justified confidence, it turned out – reinforced the sense of a hidden sanction to the whole exercise. The whiff of heresy that clung to Baglione’s image of the devil wasn’t merely wanton. Baglione never could’ve got away with suggesting something that didn’t evoke a suspicion already lurking in ecclesiastical minds. Onorio Longhi’s rage at Salini for being a snitch and a spy also implied that Salini had been tattling behind the scenes about dangerous matters – religious, political or sexual – that never came out in the trial.
Some things were unmentionable in a civil court. There was the vitium nefandum, which was the sin literally not to be mentioned, and there was heresy. They were matters for another court, matters of belief or morality of interest to the inquisition, and you only raised such things if you were going for broke. People burned for such things. The holy office was the controlling institution of the papal dictatorship and if its time of really savage repression was past, the crisis of authority over and public burnings getting rarer, the machinery of repression kept ticking over. The burning of Bruno and the others in the holy year had been the last direct assertion of control – and that’d been more a piece of admonitory theatre than a really necessary act of repression. Crimes of belief in the strictly doctrinal sense were now making way – since the revived inquisition, up and running beautifully in all its complex articulation, still needed human material to work on – for thought crimes of a more nebulous kind, antisocial thinking or behaviour that threatened or questioned the new order of church power.
By now terror reigned supreme. But the terror was courtly, intangible, ceremonious, made up of anonymous denunciations masked with a smile, of betrayals hidden behind scruples of conscience, of a meticulous legality always observed with care. It was the moment of the uncommitted, the mediocre, the legalistic, the churchgoers, the academics and their acolytes …
It was the moment of people like Baglione. Control was still needed, but it was now more subtly exercised through the mechanism of the confessional, the dense network of constant lowlevel monitoring of people’s thoughts and deeds that the Jesuits had perfected, the base structure on which the society of Jesus was erecting the front line educational and ideological defence of catholic orthodoxy. It was inevitable that the confessional, with a little discreet urging from the father confessor, became a vehicle for retailing what other people were up to as well as your own sins.
