M, p.37
M, page 37
When the wounded man went to find a doctor, his companion, who was a Vatican scribe, testified that when he’d seen Pasqualone suddenly fall to the ground,
I turned around behind and saw someone with an unsheathed weapon in his hand. It looked to me like a sword or a dagger. He immediately sprang away and turned toward the palace of the very illustrious cardinal Del Monte – I mean up that alleyway. He was wearing a short black cloak off one shoulder …
The wounded lawyer wasn’t a jealous suitor – just an unlucky functionary. He was used to trouble, but this time he’d been the bearer of unwanted communications in a matter that was already complicated, tense and violent. Lena’s common law relationship with Gaspare Albertini wasn’t working out. Motherhood wasn’t her thing and monogamy with a fairly low level professional, for a girl used to hanging out with rich and hedonistic cardinals and other friends, must’ve been drab and quite a letdown. Two weeks after Lena was picked up hurrying home shrouded in a man’s cloak came M’s six am arrest that November for insulting the police. He was stopped not far from Lena’s place. When he was next arrested six months later, it was after five o’clock in the morning and in the via del Corso, opposite the church of Sant’ Ambrosio, where Lena lived.
Someone – his best friend – was telling Gaspare Albertini about Lena’s other life with M and the lawyer had recourse to a little domestic violence. He had troubles of his own, with a new lover called Silvia whose husband was taking matters to court. On June 28 things suddenly got worse and Albertini cut Lena up in the face. She packed up and went back to her old place on the Corso and three weeks after the attack she went to court with a friend and reported her ex de facto’s violence against her. This was on July 19. Moving back to the Corso turned out not to be an ideal solution either. Lena’s place there was above a greengrocer’s shop run by a woman called Laura Della Vecchia and her daughter Isabella, and the day Lena was reporting her old lover, M was in jail at the Tor di Nona for defacing the women’s shop front. The women had been talking about the people upstairs’s behaviour or maybe complaining directly to Lena about the scandal and this had angered M and now mother and daughter were determined to drag him through the courts. They sounded much more like the originals of Passeri’s poor but honest mother and daughter than anyone in Lena’s family, where all the women were on the game. Prospero Orsi and Cherubino Alberti the painters and Ottaviano Gabrielli the bookseller and a tailor called Girolamo Crocicchia went over and paid bail of a hundred scudi to get M out of jail and on forfeit of another hundred scudi they underwrote an apprehended violence order against M – guaranteed he wouldn’t insult or assault the greengrocer women or cause them to be assaulted.
Into this overwrought mess stepped Mariano Pasqualone, who worked in one of the legal offices of the cardinal vicar of Rome. One of Pasqualone’s jobs was delivering court orders prohibiting couples involved in scandalous relationships from seeing each other. Maybe he was told – or had taken it on himself if he were a canting right thinker – to warn people off who were living irregular private lives, since Pasqualone said I haven’t had dealings with anyone except the said M, and that he and I had exchanged words over a woman called Lena. M reacted savagely. After the malignant greengrocer women Pasqualone was a moralist too many. But it was one thing to beat up other painters in the street and another to wound a legal functionary of the ecclesiastical state. M had got it badly wrong this time. He’d attacked a middle level representative of the prevailing order – Pasqualone was the lawyer who’d first questioned Beatrice Cenci about her father’s death seven years earlier. The best thing to do was skip town. Let the dust settle, let Del Monte see what could be worked in the way of damage control.
Which was what M now did.
* * *
CAPTAIN PINO AND his squad of the Capitoline division had arrested M near Lena’s place on the Corso between five and six in the morning on May 28. It was two months before M’s attack on Pasqualone and he was wearing a sword and dagger without a licence. M tried a little bluff when they asked to see his permit. He admitted that
I haven’t got a written licence to carry a sword and dagger. Only the governor of Rome ordered the police chief and his corporals orally to let me be …
This cut no ice and captain Pino pulled him in, but just in case M really did have influential cover, Pino carefully sketched M’s confiscated weapons in the margin of his written report. Just in case his action was ever queried. It shouldn’t’ve been. Sometime in the six months since his last arrest in the early hours of the morning M’s licence to bear arms had been withdrawn. Either someone had it in for him or he was getting a record as a dangerous person. It wasn’t exactly surprizing. His art seemed dangerous to many but it entailed a vulnerable openness on M’s part, an exquisiteness of feeling that’d’ve had some need of social armour for going about the ordinary business of life. On canvas M was showing an ever more intense and nuanced awareness of physical presence, an absorbing empathy with other people’s ways of being in the world. His awareness of others increased its range with almost every new painting. Ten years earlier he’d started – subjectively – with himself, and young boy objects of desire. He’d broadened his range into young, physically interesting, various and vigorous models of both sexes. Now he was more and more often including deeply felt and loving renderings of the old, the work worn, the poor, and a few children and animals springing with life. And on the streets he was widening the range of his enemies.
The street fighting had to be a release from the ever less bearable tensions involved in the painting – the higher pitch of violence coincided roughly with his work’s new depth. His earliest violence had been directed at hostile or opportunistic painters – M’s public behaviour first became a matter of comment when M was doing the Matthew canvases. It was renewed now – in the seemingly random and pointless flareups like the violence in the eating house, the obscene provocations of police – as he toiled with the largest, barest, greatest work, the most tragically reduced and essential canvas he would leave in Rome. Mary dead was strong because M dared to be weak, giving up even the bravura resources of his own painterly powers to show a true thing. Hurled rocks and artichokes, arrests and imprisonment, were the price M paid for doing it. So it looked.
Now there was Lena too. M was most involved in Lena’s life, or so the accumulating fragments of evidence implied, in the summer of 1605. Maybe it’d been going through most of 1604 as well – during the painting of the Pilgrims’ Madonna and Mary dead – flaring up in 1605 when Lena’s own domestic situation got more difficult and more violent. The clamorous notoriety of Lena as the Pilgrims’ Madonna in a local church can’t’ve helped, nor the shock of rejection and removal around the end of the year of Mary dead. And the street life was hardly calm.
The streets of Rome in 1605, during the interregnum after Clement VIII’s death in March, were even more volatile than they’d been in the summer of 1604, and just as polarized between the partisans of France and Spain. When Alessandro de’ Medici was elected pope Leon XI on the first of April it was a French triumph – then he picked up something nasty and twenty seven days later he was dead and things were more tense and unstable still. They were verging on anarchy. A couple of days after the new pope’s death, a wild street fight between the factions in via Condotti with drawn swords left several wounded and maybe some dead. The Roman police chief and his men were taking in some of the arrested when they were confronted by an armed band in campo Marzio, led by three of the Tomassoni brothers, one of them Ranuccio. They made the police hand over the prisoners – otherwise we’ll cut you all to pieces you fucking pricks – and drove the patrol out of the neighbourhood, where Giovan Francesco Tomassoni was district head. In mid May a new conclave elected the proSpanish bureaucrat Camillo Borghese and the day he was crowned pope Paul V was the day M was picked up for carrying unlicensed weapons. The new pope’s first thought was for his family, and two months later he made his sister’s son a cardinal. Scipione Borghese was still in his twenties, five years younger than the painter M in whose work he was about to take the keenest interest. The day after Scipione Borghese became a cardinal, M fled Rome after cutting Pasqualone’s head open.
* * *
IN THE TWO years between the libel trial and his bashing of Pasqualone – when he was arrested and jailed on five separate occasions – along with his two altarpiece paintings with Lena and his two new versions of John in the wild, M did two paintings of Christ humiliated and maltreated by his captors. They were both done for private clients and continued a line of pictorial thinking he’d begun with Christ taken for Mattei just before the trial. For Massimo Massimi he did a vertical painting of a middleaged barechested Christ, seated and stupefied, passive and wooden, being crowned with thorns by three snubnosed, faunlike crophaired soldiers looming over him. One of them gripped Christ at the waist as in a vice, another yanked the cord tight that bound his wrists, the third jerked his head back by the hair, and as Christ looked up in pain and apprehension at the lookalike killers standing over him, his hands convulsed in the spasm of the tightening cord, there was a sense of worse to come. The fear and pain were no more than physical – the painting was a study in human rights abuse, the military’s maltreatment of a frightened civilian caught at the ugly moment when things were turning worse. The sharp pain of the cord on the wrists brought the edge of sudden fear into the eyes, the rush of apprehension of all the worse to come. The powerlessness and humiliation would’ve been less acute if the Christ figure had been meeting the violation with some resource of his own. What made this model so unlike Christ and so much like anyone else was the lack of understanding in the eyes. No larger purpose was working itself out here. The sadism shocked you because this was everyday work. Nothing was put on. The understatement was appalling. Where are you taking me? Into the painting’s darkness was where they were leading the prisoner.
Massimo Massimi loved it and commissioned M to do another just like it. Massimi belonged to another old and powerful Roman family and owned the palazzo Massimi alle Colonne, which was a couple of minutes’ walk from piazza Navona and San Luigi. He was himself a close younger relative of the Giustinianis and the Matteis and had been a district chief for longer than Giovan Francesco Tommasoni. He was also an extremely busy and wealthy young financial entrepreneur of a kind that was only just coming into existence and deeply into collecting art and decorating the family palace as an affirmation of his place in Roman society. A decade or so later the business empire would begin to collapse, and by the middle of the century it had become so complete that Massimo Massimi was forgotten and his art collection sold off and dispersed. In 1605, however, he was rich and getting richer, about M’s age and looking around for art to buy.
On 25 June 1605, a month into the Borghese papacy, four weeks after his last arrest and four weeks before his run from Rome, at the height of his involvement with Lena, M wrote – in a cultivated hand and spelling his family name differently, in the one surviving document in which he wrote it out in full, from the way everyone would write it thereafter – that
Io Michel Ang.lo Marisi da Caravaggio
undertake to paint for the most illustrious Massimo
Massimi, having been paid in advance
a picture of the same size and value
as the one I have already done for him
of ChriXt’s crowning for the
first of August 1605. In faith
I have written and signed in my own hand
this day 25 June 1605
Io Michel Anglo Marisi
He was giving himself five weeks, a short time even for him. Having pocketed the money he was under some pressure to deliver. What M did deliver – and exactly when was never recorded, though it surely wasn’t before he fled Rome after the July 29 attack – wasn’t one of his great paintings. Maybe it was a mistake on Massimo Massimi’s part to pay for art in advance. Maybe it was the distracting conjuncture in M’s private life. It was an Ecce homo – Pilate showing the stripped and beaten Christ to the mob – the next phase of the passion, the next frame in the iconic comic strip after the crowning with thorns and utterly consonant in tone, though the stress was shifted now from private pain to public humiliation. Did M propose the subject or did Massimi? At the very least Massimi must’ve liked the idea of another work that developed the sadomasochistic dynamic of Thorns. Maybe he demanded more of the same.
The painting M now did for him showed a quite different Christ from the blocky, white and frightened middleaged figure Massimi got before. The new Christ was young, slender, smoothskinned, tanned, almost beardless, apart from some downy facial hair. He stood almost frontally to the canvas, naked except for a strip of steambath issue cotton slipping over his hips. His wrists were tied in front of him and the twined thorn branches jammed over his forehead. His face was lowered, largely in shadow, big heavy eyelids covering his eyes, a long overlip above a resolutely closed mouth. It was an expression of great delicacy, hemmed in by shadow. Its strength, though, came from its relation to the two figures on the right. In the foreground was a lean greybearded pointy eared Pilate with a floppy wide black beret like hat pulled rakishly over one eye. His eyebrows were raised in theatrical query, the high forehead a mass of furrowed skin. M’d always had a weakness for the wrinkled brow and here he indulged in folds of turtle neck. Pilate’s face wasn’t unlike Christ’s, a generation on – fine, narrow, long nose, large eyes, high forehead and pointy faunlike ear – but it was done as caricature, in crudely heavy strokes, such that people would be trying ever after to identify the original. Andrea Doria? Surely Galileo Galilei? The painting’s buyer? – but he was too old for Massimo Massimi, though he sure was a hardbitten businessman.
Pilate’s query to the crowd had been whether – exercising his governor’s prerogative of mercy for one man – he should release Christ or the condemned prisoner Barabbas. This merchantlike Pilate might’ve been offering Christ for sale. The demure and girlish nudity on display was powerfully enhanced by the gesture of the tall, slim and swarthy figure standing behind Christ – between Christ and Pilate – in an open necked shirt and a piratical turban or sweatband on his head. He was holding open over the bound and helpless Christ’s shoulders a brown cloak or blanket. He’d just removed it, to reveal the nudity, or was just replacing it, and his framing gesture gave an unequivocally sexual sense to the way the bound body was laid bare. The man’s gaze, while Pilate stared out of the canvas and fixed you in the eye with his question, was fixed on Christ with a delicate and deeply private blend of gentleness, brutality and lust. Shoved to the back, this illdressed and unshaven proletarian loomed over the son of God and the sleek exponent of worldly power. The whole thing looked like a scene at the slave market. Christ was on offer.
The analogy wasn’t a remote one for anyone living in the Mediterranean. The endless war with the Turks had reached a kind of stasis, and after the ruinously expensive failure of Clement VIII’s land campaign in the east, neither the Christian nor the Islamic forces had the means or the will to make a decisive move. Life in the Mediterranean now went on in a permanent state of low key warfare between the power blocs. Its normal form was the piracy or privateering in which both sides combined war and normal business. Mediterranean piracy included a busy slave traffic in the soldiers and sailors taken as prisoners of war and the women and children seized in shore raiding parties and it was practised on both sides. In Algiers at this time there were twenty five thousand Christian slaves. All the big Italian seaport cities – Genoa, Naples, Venice and the others – were implicated in the slave traffic. It was big business.
For over a century, hunting the infidel would remain something between a high risk sport and a normal economic activity for the warlike aristocracies of the western Mediterranean.
The Tuscany of Del Monte’s boss Ferdinando I de’ Medici was a major player in this and Livorno was one of the main Mediterranean cities to run one of the
specialized markets created by privateering … the market in human beings.
The Christian powers were like Islam, and
… they too had their bagnios, their slave markets and their sordid transactions … it was not merely in Algiers that men hunted each other, threw their enemies into prison, sold or tortured them and became familiar with the miseries, horrors and gleams of sainthood of the concentration camp world. It was all over the Mediterranean.
A lot of the privateers and slave dealers on the Islamic side were renegade Christians from Italy, prisoners who’d turned, or people, especially from the south, driven by poverty and the chance of fortune into the flow of Christianity’s silent haemorrhage. In 1605, the year of this painting, a Spaniard who’d spent five years as a prisoner in Algiers at the time of M’s childhood published a memoir in which he remembered of his captor Uchalì that
He’d been born in Calabria, and was a highly moral man who treated his slaves most humanely. There were over three thousand of them, and when he died his will provided that they be divided between the grand Turk – who always shares equally with the deceased man’s children – and the renegades who’d been in Uchalì’s service. I was given to a Venetian renegade who’d been captured as a ship’s cabin boy, and of whom Uchalì was so fond that he became one of the man’s pampered favourites, and indeed turned into one of the cruellest renegades I ever saw …
This was Cervantes remembering as the captive his own five years’ imprisonment in the freshly published first part of Don Quixote. So a slave market scene made a natural modern setting for Christ’s betrayal and killing. The analogy mightn’t’ve appealed much to one of the new breed of wealthy financial entrepreneurs who also had his close ties to the Oratorians and their cult of Christian poverty and simplicity. In any case M’s brutally erotic treatment would’ve disconcerted an owner of the Thorns who – M’s contractual note implied – wanted and expected more of the same. The pain of a cord being pulled savagely tight around wrists was one thing, the violation of the cane sceptre thrust into the helpless tied hands was another. Maybe Massimo Massimi gave the painting to a relative called Innocenzo Massimi who was later a papal nuncio in Madrid and a bishop in Catania, because Bellori claimed the painting was taken to Spain and a copy turned up in Messina.
