M, p.35
M, page 35
There was plenty of empty space in the rented house – an empty room, more or less, both upstairs and downstairs – for arranging his models the way he needed them. M painted his histories in parts – into the studio at vico San Biagio he brought the local people as models, wearing their ordinary clothes, and set them up with cheap everyday objects like the ones found in his house. The whole thing existed only in the unifying imagination – real components assembled into an oniric whole. The hyperrealistic detail that he painted with the living model before him became part of something that couldn’t be found in the workaday world, but it was the everyday reality of the details that made the dream seem real. The missing leg of the money counters’ table, Mary’s body levitating in its red dress, the uncast shadow on the table of the meal at Emmaus, Saul’s disappearing leg – none of them made sense, but you saw and believed. M’s paintings had always turned faults into new strengths. The boy musicians jammed into their unreal space were a young painter’s awkwardness – the hallucinatory space of Matthew’s killing was a dreamlike and fluid and haunting theatre of the mind.
A friendly darkness now bound and united the things the mind bodied forth. Darkness was the dream medium in which the images swam. Darkness smoothed and obscured the illogic that linked things in the mind. The conniving gloom of a Roman chapel suggested and enhanced the darkness of the mind and the darkness of the world. Only the mind could relate the world’s shreds of life into a whole. M’s darkness wasn’t a black emptiness – it was full of hidden life and movement, like the night. Things people never saw he worked as fully and lovingly as he did the brilliant highlights. M was making his art harder, asking more and more of you, forcing you to peer into the gathering darkness to make out the objects of your visual pleasure. More and more, you were having to create those objects for yourself.
* * *
ADOLESCENT JOHN WAS the ascetic and solitary precursor of Christ. He was the boy who spoke with the voice of one crying in the wilderness. The figure of John as a lonely brooding boy caught M’s imagination early and held it to the end of his life. He painted more versions of John in the wild than of any other figure – at least eight. The series was like an intimate running commentary on his life. M’s first John was one of the very last of his early idyllic paintings of boys. Around 1598, when he did his first version of Isaac & Abraham, he painted the same boy as a young John. It was also the time of the Basket of fruit, and this first John was surrounded by foliage, sunlight falling on different angled leaves and playing over their dimples, their veins, their ragged edges – John was awkwardly holding up his cane cross, and the sheep sitting at his feet had the pompous and hieratic look of an animal conscious of posing as a religious icon. The boy himself though, nearly nude – and here and as Isaac he was M’s first full length boy nude – was rendered in a complex and subtle play of intense light and deepening shadow that was already mapping out the contours of bodies to come. The boy’s downward looking face was in shadow, as in Isaac, and his intense, moody, lowered eyes and inwardly directed gaze caught, like the shifting intensities of light on his soft body, the changeability and uncertainty of adolescence. Fragile, withdrawn, vulnerable, he wasn’t much of an image of Christianity’s militant and uncompromising forerunner for a newly militant church.
Then again, neither was Cecco, laid back, grinning and totally nude. It was Cecco’s cheerful grin that gave that painting its peculiarly disconcerting look of a holiday snapshot. M gave his own intensely lighthearted sexual intimacy to the way he painted Cecco as John, but he certainly wasn’t the first painter to do John as an appealing boy more or less stripped of any ideological dress. Leonardo and Raphael had both done it before him. Though only M’s Cecco John frankly displayed his genitals, the most radical thing about this John was the way the painting registered its subject’s own amusement, the delightful charge of pleasure M set up for you to share.
By the middle of 1604 a lot had changed in M’s life. The nude Cecco had last been painted at the start of the year, twisted and yelling with a knife at his throat. M now went back to the figure of John, but using other models – the sexual electricity of the Cecco paintings was out of the series. It was in the two intensely inward paintings of John he did now in a time of trouble that M made this figure peculiarly his own. As the difficult year of 1604 went on, after he’d done Lena as the Madonna, maybe around the time of the April artichoke violence at Moro’s, M went back in mind to his fairly untroubled first assay at John with the green leaves and sunlit wall – and took it up again in a painting he did for Ottavio Costa. He reworked it with another model seen in a similar way in a similar pose, or a mirror image of it. The new boy was older, more deeply frowning, the foliage was now dead and brown, the background dark, the sheep was gone. The delicacy of the first painting, where the red cloak spread around him enhanced the warm tan of the boy’s skin, was screwed up in the new version into a harsh light that broke up the image of the boy’s body into areas of livid white skin and irregular patches of deep shadow. The cloak was so vast and heavy it seemed to be swallowing the boy’s body, and its red now showed up his pallor. Under his tousled hair, the deep shadows of his eye sockets, and the shadow under his cheekbones, nose and mouth, all turned the boy’s sensitive white face into something like a death’s head. The younger and earlier model’s softly slumped body and almost childish splayed legs were now tensed and hollowed, bent with an early adult exhaustion, a thin shoulder, a forearm, a knee catching the full intensity of light, ribs and joints delineated and the rest of the body eaten up by darkness. Age seemed determinant in M’s treatment of his John models – he moved from the tender handling of the first and youngest through frankly expressed desire of Cecco’s active body to a kind of identification now with the more nearly adult figure of his deeply introspective third. The complicated breaking up of the body’s image into extremes of light and shadow implied a fragmented, disturbed, unrested mind, and it was a disturbing and disorienting figure to look at. The raking light from overhead was no longer shaping the figure out of darkness. It was blasting the body to brilliant pieces.
M did another and more sanguine John not long after this lunar hallucinated boy. There was even less here to identify the model with its ostensible subject. The new version was in the horizontal format M liked and the tougher looking model was painted in a similar stance but seated much lower, the image cut off at the knees, and he might’ve been sitting naked on the edge of a bed – the wilderness setting was almost totally obscured and the red cloak looked like a bed cover. The lower centre of gravity had something to do with a regained sense of stability – the previous John looked as though he were slipping off a high stool. The brilliant coldness of the earlier light on flesh was gone now, and so was the sense of fragility – the new model had a labourer’s robustness, and his suntanned face and neck, and his tanned forearms identified him as an outdoor boy. The big work roughened hands – Roman police were just then telling legit labourers in the city from illegal beggars by checking their hands – the food bowl, the everyday white undergarment instead of the animal skin, had come with him from the real workaday world. The densely textured creaminess in the simplified painting of the torso, the economically splendid folds of the dark red drape and the barely suggested background marked a new, confident urgency in M’s art. The warmly rendered body and John’s lowered gaze – eyes unseen and features almost hidden by darkness and the mop of hair, except for the very carnal mouth – gave some sense now of anonymous sex rewarded, release from anxiety, the comfort of strangers, carnal peace. Darkness and light were less ferociously opposed. By the time M did this John it might’ve been 1605.
* * *
THE HAIRTRIGGER TOUCHINESS M’d shown over the artichokes at lunch in spring found nothing in the street life or the political climate of Rome that summer to calm it down. A new ambassador had arrived from Madrid at the end of 1603 whose crass arrogance rapidly alienated the Aldobrandinis – the pope appointed in June 1604 an overwhelmingly proFrench set of new cardinals that swung power away from Spain for the first time. The French ambassador Béthune was delighted to see the Spanish shooting themselves in the foot but it stirred the animosity of the old money old power proSpanish Farnese, and a small incident in the August dog days flamed into a military standoff between the Aldobrandinis and Odoardo Farnese that brought Italy close to civil war. So much for the Roman third force. When Odoardo Farnese was barricaded with an army in his great palazzo, it was inevitable that two of the Tomassoni brothers were on hand – the Tomassonis had been military servants of the Farnese for generations.
Young Ranuccio missed the chance to take up arms with his brothers because he was in jail at the time. Two days earlier he’d been playing the lute at the window of my house, which was only a few metres from M’s, when a neighbour’s daughter called for help during a scuffle with police trying to collect an unpaid debt – so I put down the lute and grabbed my sword. Ranuccio had blocked the police with his sword on the stairs. What insolence is this? he’d said to the cops. Get back. Don’t you know who I am? In fact he was only a young wannabe, and being arrested meant that once again young Ranuccio missed out on the action and the chance to establish a presence among the people with clout. By the time he was out it was all over – Odoardo Farnese had humiliated the pope. Life on the streets was more polarized than ever between the French and Spanish parties.
And M was in fresh trouble. On October 17, a month after Odoardo’s standoff with the pope was settled, M was arrested and jailed again. It happened on a Sunday evening. He’d eaten at the osteria della Torretta – steering clear of Moro’s after the artichoke incident six months earlier – halfway between his rented place and Ranuccio Tomassoni’s. He’d eaten in the company of Ottaviano Gabrielli and Pietro Paolo Martinelli. Gabrielli was a bookseller in piazza Navona and ran a significant business – he’d bought up an aristocrat’s entire library four years earlier for a thousand scudi, and a good part of another just the year before. Two years earlier he too had been tried and jailed for libel, in an unconvincing case that really seemed to be about the sale of prohibited literature. He admitted this and minimized it when he was interrogated now. Gabrielli wasn’t much intimidated by his run in with the law – he went on selling the works of Giordano Bruno after they’d been put on the new Index in 1603. M was quite likely a customer of Gabrielli’s. He had a case of books in his house around the corner – twelve books, likely to have been essential ones, much read and referred to in the rudimentary and utilitarian household or campsite M was running in vico San Biagio. Nobody bothered to list their titles when M’s landlady brought in the lawyers and noted among his things
Item another case with twelve books inside.
Martinelli was a courier. It was a very Roman profession. News was a vital item of consumption, and the information business was another of the city’s essential service industries, like sex, food, tailoring and art. Rome couldn’t work without political, financial and military information, speedily transmitted. The Rome Madrid linkup was the first regular postal service anywhere and by now Rome was connected directly to all the main European cities. Spain, France, Genoa and Venice had services in and out of Rome despite the pope’s determination to get a monopoly on communications – ambassadors, bankers and the pope all ran their own couriers, and a good man could halve the normal four days that separate Rome from Milan or Venice, and get to Florence or Naples in a single day instead of the usual two. Martinelli was evidently a good man, one of the pope’s own couriers. That he also worked for Pietro Aldobrandini made him seem more than a routine messenger, evidently a trusted man. The others didn’t refer to him as Martinelli. They called him Fright. A perfumier was arrested with them later, an anxious little man who denied any connexion with the others and whose name nobody else could remember.
Each of the three gave a quite different stonewalling account of what happened after dinner at the Torretta. Only Martinelli actually mentioned the dinner at all, and he said that after eating they’d set off on foot toward piazza del Popolo. They were about halfway there when they were arrested for throwing stones. Everyone denied doing anything, and everyone was too far away from everyone else to see anything anyone else might’ve been doing. Martinelli said he’d gone on a long way ahead, talking with another friend. Gabrielli told his interrogators he’d had dinner in a different eating house with a youth called messer Aurelio and that they were on their way to visit a girlfriend of Aurelio’s called Giovanna when he got involved in M’s arrest.
Was Aurelio Prospero Orsi’s brother, the poet Aurelio? Gabrielli had lagged a long way behind, talking with his friend, had been aware of no stones thrown and would’ve turned back if I had. M didn’t mention dinner, and said he’d been with Martinelli and Onorio Longhi in the street and had met up with Gabrielli and friend just before his arrest. He claimed he’d been chatting with Menicuccia who lives in that street when he heard stones flying – thrown, he thought, at his friends. Menicuccia was Menica Calvi, the famously beautiful and clever courtesan who’d been on the summer outing to cardinal Del Monte’s country place three years earlier, when she was arrested for insolence to the authorities. Insolence was complicating M’s own arrest now – he was accused of using offensive language to the arresting officer. M said the corporal in question provoked him with his insolence every time they met, but made a point of denying explicitly that he’d ever said the corporal sucked cocks or anything at all.
There was a sense in all this testimony that a lot of shadowy unnamed figures were moving around in the dark of the episode – one or two getting mentioned in passing by mistake – as the various accused responded in the best southern Italian manner by saying nothing of substance and throwing in a few irrelevant details as a smokescreen. It sounded as though the police had interrupted a fairly large scale rock throwing street fight in the dark, one that’d pitched M, an Aldobrandini courier, a fairly radical bookseller and Onorio Longhi and maybe others as well against a bunch of unknowns. M now asked Gabrielli to run to Del Monte’s palace with a message to the cardinal of M’s arrest, which the bookseller did. M also asked Gabrielli to go and speak to a gentleman in the household of Olimpia Aldobrandini. Olimpia Aldobrandini was Pietro Aldobrandini’s sister and niece of the pope. This was the first trace of a continuing Del Monte connexion – there’d been no other recorded link between M and Del Monte since M had moved out nearly four years earlier. It meant M still felt Del Monte would cover for him when there was trouble with the law – and that the cardinal had likely had a hand in cancelling M’s earlier criminal sentences. But if now M simply needed help in another brush with the police, why did he send a message to Olimpia Aldobrandini’s as well? M’s show of arrogant assurance – when the cops were blocking M in the street the scared perfumier heard him say In any case I’ll be out tomorrow – implied a quid pro quo. As if, in the street fight a few minutes earlier, he’d been taking the Aldobrandinis’ side. Which was unequivocally the French side.
Was M being picked on by the police? Or was he trying to provoke them? Was it just a tense and turbulent time on the streets – merely personal or a matter of perceived allegiances? That there was a real and persistent hostility between M and the police by now – that the arrest and insults of October 17 weren’t a momentary thing – seemed confirmed when a month later M, alone this time, was stopped again at one in the morning of November 18 and asked whether he had a proper licence to carry his sword and dagger. M did, and when, having checked it, the officers in question handed it back and – in their leader’s own account – wished M a courteous Good night, M replied with an obscene insult. The patrol officer sent my men back after him. M was arrested and tied up, repeated his insult more extensively and was put in the Tor di Nona jail.
A couple of months later a kind of reconciliation was engineered between Odoardo Farnese and Pietro Aldobrandini, who’d gone on being furiously hostile ever since the summer faceoff. It was too late for Clement VIII, who’d been missing a few beats under the stress and had a massive stroke at the beginning of February. When he died a month later, everyone agreed it was the Farnese uprising that had finished him off.
12
ROME 1605
Mary dead
Crown of thorns I
Ecce homo
THE GIRL MIGHT or might not’ve been Lena. She looked like Lena. Lena in a completely plain red dress with long sleeves and a full skirt that came down to her ankles. Lena lying on her back with her right hand resting on her stomach and her left arm straight out sideways. Her bare feet straight out in front of her, the bare toes of each foot tipping out slightly. Lena with her head tipped back, lolling over toward you, the muscles of her face and mouth relaxed and her eyes closed as if she were asleep.
