M, p.39
M, page 39
Paul V understood that a bureaucrat pope of undistinguished family had to show straight away that he personally was in control. Paul V began with an exemplary execution. A right thinking domestic servant had drawn the authorities’ attention to an unpublished life of Clement VIII written by her employer. It described the Aldobrandini regime as a tyranny and compared Clement VIII to the emperor Tiberius. Paul V had the author publicly beheaded for lèse-majesté. The Venetian ambassadors reported that the wildly excessive punishment scared all of Rome and that the new pope seemed immensely rigorous, severe and inexorable. Which was just how Paul V wanted to be seen.
Scipione’s task was to establish the Borghese family and elbow aside the Colonnas and the Orsinis and he set about it with a will. Four years into the Borghese papacy Scipione’s annual income was knocking a hundred thousand scudi. Three years later he was pulling in a hundred and fifty thousand and by the end of the papacy fifteen years later nearly two hundred thousand a year. These colossal sums let him buy up whole principalities and feudal states and eighty farming properties around Rome. In the fifteen years of the Borghese papacy the public deficit went from twelve million to eighteen million scudi, and over a million scudi went directly to the pope’s two nephews. Not to mention the privileges that flowed to the papal family through side doors. And Scipione Borghese was, if anything, greedier for art than he was for cash and real estate. He became a great builder, a great decorator, a great collector of antiquities and a lover of modern art. He was eager for the coming thing and the good life, whose final effects were marvellously rendered in marble by Bernini the year before he died thirty years later – the genially glazed little eyes, the lips parted by the weight of the plump cheeks and abundantly flowing jowels, the whole mass of liquefying flesh sliding down beneath the cardinal’s biretta that sat on the back of the head like something out of a party cracker, toward a body held in below by an imperfectly fastened button. But in 1605 Scipione Borghese was still the poor provincial relative whose uncle had just won the papal lottery and he was seizing the day. In Ottavio Leoni’s portrait of that time he had beady, avid eyes, cheeks already filling out and small wet looking lips. He was five years younger than M, poised and ready now for a lifetime of personal gratification on an heroic scale. His quickness of mind and his eye for the main chance and his feel for the up and coming must’ve made M’s present difficulties seem like a gift. No wonder the case was resolved under the new cardinal’s wing.
Maybe it was now that Scipione Borghese commissioned or extorted the painting M did for him of Jerome writing. Maybe it was a little sweetener thrown in by Del Monte when he was setting up the deal, or offered by M himself when the papers were signed. The matter was private enough for no record to be left of exactly when or for whom or for how much M did this painting, but it came out of this time and seemed to belong to Borghese from the start and it wouldn’t be the last sweetener M’d find himself needing to offer Scipione Borghese. Bellori was unequivocal that the painting was done for Borghese.
For the same cardinal he painted saint Jerome absorbed in writing and reaching out his hand with the pen to the inkwell.
Jerome, the elderly hermit translating the Bible from Hebrew to Latin in his cave, surrounded by his skull and his books, was the source of the Vulgate’s authority and the council of Trent had decided the Vulgate was the one legitimate source of knowledge. Jerome was a staple of counter reformation art and one of its dreariest subjects. Dashing off this emergency work, M threw sclerotic scholastic piety out of the window and galvanized the subject in his favourite threequarter horizontal format. Limbs, books’ paper and vellum, drapery, the wooden table itself, skull and pen were combined into an extended and almost abstract still life in tones of brown, white, red, a painting whose slashing bold economy of strokes and rawness of presence would convince some people he’d left it unfinished.
But it was more than a still life – Jerome like the Basket of fruit was charged with a subtle drama. The old man, who had a powerful generic likeness to the old models from Peter killed, Matthew & angel II, Isaac & Abraham, Mary dead, now older and scrawnier, sat wrapped in a cardinal’s mantle that looked like an urgent homage to the newly appointed Scipione, at the far right of the canvas, his own skull gleaming as he bent over his book and reached out distractedly toward the inkwell. The form and movement of the old man’s endless seeming prehensile extension, in all the folds of its loosening skin, the covered ridges of its aging muscles and veins, the creaking articulation of its joints, down to the dirt rimmed thumbnail on his tanned manual worker’s hand and the plucked looking quill the hand was grasping, the uncertainty of the pen tip’s unguided approach to a not quite seen inkwell perched on an uncertain heap of massive old books and a wobbly death’s head, halfway across the canvas from the other skull housing the old brain that’d absently sent it on its mission, filled the painting with tension, uncertainty and – in a way that recalled the tipping stool of that other elderly and distracted recorder of the religion’s most sacred texts, the Matthew who looked so like this Jerome – imminent slapstick. If the Ecce homo had been a merely hurried work, Jerome’s headlong violence of execution was a unifying and electrifying tour de force. Who would have thought the old man had so much blood in him? Scipione Borghese – his later behaviour showed – loved it.
M’d done another painting of Jerome not long before, maybe for Vincenzo Giustiniani or his brother the cardinal. It was another unrecorded work that might’ve been the half figure of Jerome listed in the Giustiniani archive. It was actually a vertical canvas, but it was posed like a half figure that’d been extended above and below, the kind of mistake a distracted inventorist might’ve made. The painting used the same old model and painted him in a pose that eerily reproduced his most recent John, sitting with a bare torso and the red mantle around his knees – it was like the boy imagined sixty years on. It was a quieter preparation for the Borghese version, without the subdued drama of the inkpot and books but a lot of attention to the folds in the skin on the old man’s belly, and on his brow and wrists, smaller versions of the larger folds in his clothes. The leisurely and contemplative work on this figure clearly enabled the whirlwind assurance and economy of the job M rushed for Borghese, which he must’ve done very soon after the first.
The tenderness and amusement that M’s art always showed for old people, the loving unselfconsciousness with which he reproduced the much lived in carapaces of the working old, and the unsentimental distinction – sensuous appeal even – he could find in a bald skull, a wrinkled forehead, a horny foot, uncertain movement and not very clearly seeing eyes – suggested that when he was a child he’d spent a lot of time in the company of old people. Observing them. Maybe he invested his elderly models with memories of the grandfather he lost in the plague when he was hardly six years old. The loving attention was directed at the old of both sexes, and it was the exigencies of history that made him more often paint old men than old women. Every new art defined its newness in part through its choice of material, and although the people who attacked M’s realism were never explicitly ageist, the ugliness and deformity they found unpleasant in his paintings came from the models’ age as much as their poverty. It was quite new for a painter to show as much feeling for the realities of age as for youth and beauty. Even Leonardo had turned age into caricature. M showed a deep feeling for its frailty.
The young maternal woman was just as deeply felt a figure in his art – M more than met the requirements of catholic iconography when it came to doing a mother and child, as he was about to show with Lena again – but there was a curious absence from his work of anyone like a virile father figure. Beyond adolescence, M’s male imagery leapt from unattached bravi, workers and thugs to patriarchal age, skipping man as achiever, nurturer, teacher. In a range of studies from life that took in marvellous small children and animals, the figure of a man you might admire or trust, a sense of male respect, was quite absent. It made you think about M’s early years in Caravaggio and Milan, useless and impertinent thoughts about the father who also died when M was a child of barely six. And about how slim the chances were, in the weird and unreal society of Rome’s theocratic dictatorship, for a man born without privilege, to create some happiness and self respect in his own life. You were reminded again of Montaigne’s impression of the universal idleness in Rome, the envied idleness of the higher clerics and the frightening idleness of the destitute. The idleness of a city almost without trades or professions, in which the churchmen were playboys or bureaucrats, the lay men were condemned to be courtiers, all the pretty girls and boys seemed to be prostitutes and all wealth was inherited old money or extorted new. There’d be a small and remarkable group of exceptions to this rule of absence in M’s work. It’d come almost at the end, and he had to leave Rome and Italy to do them.
M couldn’t afford to get negative now. Things might be looking up. He’d lived in Rome through the entire thirteen years of the Aldobrandini papacy without getting any encouragement or patronage at all from the establishment and with plenty of small signs of suspicion and hostility. He’d been given all his chances by a small circle of enthusiasts, whose network had also brought in his few private commissions in churches. Paul V, as far as art went, seemed to be no improvement on his predecessor – a renewed taste for big public works like Sixtus V’s went with an inertly conventional preference in painting – but when his nephew Scipione hovered into sight over the pickings M must’ve sensed the difference. Pietro Aldobrandini’s main interests had been politics and sex. Scipione Borghese liked art, as well as other consumer goods. He was committed to bringing back the good old days. The renaissance had shut up shop long ago but the poor boy from the provinces was busy reinventing himself as a renaissance prince, like Ronald Reagan playing the cowboy. He had the money to do it. He liked parties. He liked food, and
… some descriptions of his banquets and their menus have survived. The lists of hot and cold courses of meat and fish, fruit and vegetables, pastries and sweets, wines and liqueurs go on forever. It’s unimaginable how a human stomach could take in even a tiny part of all the courses …
Between meals he was clearly interested in M. It wasn’t that he had any particular insight into what M was doing or felt any personal affinity with it. He knew nothing, really, about painting at all. Neither would he learn much. He’d been developing his taste and growing into his role as collector and connoisseur for fifteen years or more when the Venetian ambassador described him as notable for
the mediocrity of his learning and a life devoted largely to cultivating pleasures and pastimes.
Scipione Borghese liked art and for the moment at least he liked all of it. He was setting out on a career of collecting everything and M was as interesting as anyone else in 1605. M was keen to play along. The mirage of official patronage was floating into sight.
The cardinal was pleased with these and other works M did for him, wrote Bellori, including paintings that Scipione Borghese wouldn’t get his hands on until later,
and presented him to pope Paul V, whom he did a portrait of sitting down and was very well paid for it.
It looked like things were starting to pan out, and an invitation to paint the pope was too good to refuse, although portraits were never M’s thing – Mancini would always insist M couldn’t get a good physical likeness, making the point that likeness and art in a portrait weren’t the same thing – and especially not portraits of people like Paul V. Even the young Bernini, later a master of vivid and flattering portrait busts of people in power, was defeated when he did Paul V a dozen years later. He produced a smoothly inert eggshaped marble head with sightless slits for eyes and a stubborn little pursed mouth fringed by an obscenely anal wisp of moustache and beard. He made Paul V look like a central committee member on the dais in Red Square. M did no better now in 1605, though his was surely an excellent likeness, identifiably a younger and hairier and slightly slimmer version of Bernini’s egg. He caught the pope stiffened in a posture of blank hostility and disapproval. The holy father’s stumpy, bulky body was wedged into a high armed throne, narrow eyes staring out suspiciously, lower lip jutting and mouth fixed in a descending curve, fat hands hanging off the arms of his throne with the papal ring well on show and the kissing slipper peeping from his ample skirt. This was no touchy feely pontiff like Clement VIII. No maudlin theatre here. Neither did the new pope show that formidable gravitas that diplomats and court reporters were retailing to the world. This was the image of an insecure bureaucrat, a functionary not yet comfortable with absolute power. M’s hurried handling of the fabrics was very fine. His acute treatment of their wearer was insolently disinterested, almost entymological. His beatitude could’ve been anyone. The pope’s reaction wasn’t recorded. No papal commissions followed.
* * *
CUTTING HIS BEATITUDE down to size on canvas and throwing rocks through his landlady’s window weren’t all M was doing on his return to Rome to show that he was in no way downcast by his enforced flight and the arranged peace. He took up with Lena again. At the end of October he signed a contract for another altarpiece – his first commission for a church since Mary dead had been knocked back. He took the job at a giveaway price that showed the weakness of his current standing. It’d put him back in the public eye, he must’ve thought, and lead to other things – and again it’d show Lena as Mary, the third such altarpiece in a row. He was certainly pushing it. Their relations were already notorious. This was what’d led to the violence against the lawyer Pasqualone. It was why the fruit and veg lady and her daughter, Lena’s neighbours, had got him jailed. The two episodes had likely been linked. If the women reported the scandalous goings on, the court was bound to intervene. M had assaulted Pasqualone a week after his friends had bailed him out of jail, with the promise not to offend the two women.
Pasqualone was settled, but there was a painting that looked like a working out of his feelings on canvas, another work in the satirical, polemical vein that was running through M’s work that summer and autumn – M having the last word to Laura Della Vecchia and her daughter Isabella in a still life of early autumn fruit and veg. On a massive chipped marble slab tabletop, whose corner jutted out at you like the tombstone in the Burial or the Pilgrims’ Madonna doorstep, was a cheap wicker basket of fruit and vine leaves, a heaped replay of the Borromeo Basket of fruit, and of the fruit basket on the table’s edge at the Meal at Emmaus. A strongly defined and almost vertical shaft of light fell on the table from slightly left of centre, as though through a hole in the ceiling. The muted palette recalled the colours of the Pilgrims’ Madonna. Only this time the fruit basket, with its plums, grapes, peaches, a pear and an apple – the apple with the dark scar of a worm’s boring, the peaches, and indeed the apple too, with a more striking than usual resemblance to pale human buttocks – wasn’t in the centre foreground. It was shoved to the left rear, behind a couple of ripe pomegranates, one of the husks slashed open to show the glowing moist red seeds, and on a bed of their own leaves laid down on the slab’s projecting near corner, six or eight very ripe figs, soft skin abraded and one of them too, split open in its ripeness to display its mass of reddish purple flesh and tinier seeds. Even these small and delicate fruit were jostled aside by the rotundities of a mass of big melons, marrows and pumpkins that took up the bulk of the room on the slab. One of the pumpkins at the front was slashed open like the pomegranate to show a crescent shaped gash of its voluptuous moist interior. So was the watermelon, revealing its pink flesh and slippery black seeds. The marrows were long, uncut and remarkable. The subtle and delicate youthful drama that played over M’s only other surviving and identified still life, the early Basket of fruit Borromeo had taken to Milan six years earlier, was supplanted here by tumultuously physical free for all of vegetable love, as one long curved marrow thrust itself diagonally across the slab toward the moist gash of a pumpkin. Behind it, another smoothly elongated marrow was rearing even more suggestively into the viewer’s face, its end caught in a brilliant play of chiaroscuro contrast, looming into the picture in the centre of the falling shaft of light, coming right at you through the fruit as unmistakeably the head of an engorged penis.
Whether M painted this big and wildly erotic fruit and veg for himself – to let off steam – or as a shared joke with a sympathetic client who was in on his personal difficulties, or as a picture he expected to palm off as just another still life on an ingenuous client – but it was far too in your face for even the sourest counter reformation prude to miss its thrust – was unknown. The painting was ignored in all the surviving records until an inventory of cardinal Antonio Barberini’s collection made in 1671 listed
