M, p.4
M, page 4
The year before, Carlo Borromeo had published a magnum opus of Instructions on the building and decoration of churches. In Chapter seventeen of Borromeo’s obsessively detailed second part on decoration, the chapter prescribing how sacred events were to be represented, he set out punishments for painters who failed to maintain decorum. This was the counter reformation in art. Any painter who wanted church commissions – any painter who wanted to work for the richest and most powerful patron of all – had to bear these instructions in mind from now on. Four years after Peterzano signed this contract, Borromeo’s friend Paleotti produced his own even more massively and obsessively prescriptive work On sacred and profane images. It spelt out the rules of painting, not only in churches but, as his title continued, in houses and every place. As mediators of the counter reformation to the unlettered public, painters had a particular responsibility. Tomaso Garzoni put painters between spice merchants and servants and slaves in his vast and amazing compendium The universal market-place of all the professions in the world, which came out in 1585 and was reprinted twenty five times over the next century. Like all bestsellers, Garzoni’s book displayed a finely honed sense of what was acceptable and what would sell. Painters were admirable people, he wrote,
except when they paint things that are merely lascivious and improper, as when they sometimes do fauns humping nymphs or satyrs copulating with goddesses, or paint vain foliage and grotesqueries in pious places or depict the deity with unseemly images or represent the male and female saints too lasciviously, or form fanciful figures and utterly indecorous caricatures …
Like all the best moralists, Garzoni had a sharp and loving eye for the things he denounced. There’d be little scope in the coming decades for painting the kind of unseemly sensuality he deplored in art – except in a few very privileged and unexpected corners of counter reformation Rome itself.
* * *
M WAS BORN into a peculiarly unstable and violent society, a time of prolonged crisis that
… twisted and transformed the societies of the Mediterranean between 1550 and 1600 … modified the entire social landscape … into, on the one hand, a rich and vigorous nobility reconstituted into powerful dynasties owning vast properties and, on the other, the great and growing mass of the poor and disinherited, caterpillars and grubs, human insects … a deep fissure split open traditional society, opening up gulfs which nothing would ever bridge … the rich stooped to debauchery, mingling with the crowd they despised … society stood on two banks facing each other: on the one side the houses of the nobles, overpopulated with servants; on the other picardía, the world of the black market, theft, debauchery, adventure, but above all poverty, just as the purest, the most exalted religious passion coexisted with the most incredible baseness and brutality … at the heart of that society lay bitter despair.
M was about to live intensely all the violent contradictions of this age and Milan a good place to learn about violence. A proclamation by the governor in 1583 blamed Milan’s intolerable misery on the presence in the city of louts and vagabonds
whether locals or foreigners, without any trade or employment … without possessions or means of support, not salaried or servants and not known as nobles, however poor … [people who] attach themselves to some knight or gentleman, official or merchant merely in order to keep their company, under pretext of real or feigned friendship, and guard or help them or … in order to entrap others or carry out some vendetta of their own in the other’s shadow, or who converse dishonestly mainly in the houses of prostitutes and in taverns or in games and gambling sessions or stand around like idle vagabonds in the piazzas and the streets, or gather in public thoroughfares or near the very churches to rob or comment on whoever passes, disturbing pious prayers and causing public scandal, or people who being without fixed abode live in rooms, boarding houses or taverns or come and go from the city and even hide in the monasteries during the day in order to kill, wound, rob and do other evil acts by night.
Any such found in the state of Milan after six days, the governor announced, would be sentenced to five years’ forced rowing in the galleys. Rewards were offered later that year for anyone who killed or apprehended a bandit or killer, since
a great many robberies, acts of violence, assassinations, homicides and other serious crimes are still being committed in the city
and the authorities went on issuing similar threats and promises against criminal violence in Milan throughout the years of M’s apprenticeship, and long after. The particularly murderous wheel arquebus was eventually outlawed, and personal weaponry allowed in the street restricted to the relatively inoffensive one handed sword and standard dagger, but by then M was gone. The Spanish garrison was often reinforced to deal with crises of violence, and undesirables rounded up and expelled en masse from the city. The dangerous street life of Milan in the fifteen eighties didn’t belong simply to a subculture, or neighbourhoods to avoid. What seemed to be the peculiarly Milanese phenomenon of the bravi, the louts described in such anxious detail in the governor’s proclamation, the ones who attached themselves as enforcers to members of the nobility and gentry showed how socially promiscuous the violence was. The proclamations themselves were always, apparently, ignored.
With their gauntlets or arm protectors in their hand and their sword and dagger at their side, arquebus in its bag and its iron balls in their trouser pockets … they make themselves bosses of the piazza. They smack their sword against their leg and keep their hand on its hilt, and thrusting and slashing in front of the whole gang in the piazza …
In a livelier variation on the words of the Milanese authorities, Garzoni described how Italy’s street gangs moved through the cities, pushing others aside, demanding respect, mocking women, blocking the path of servants
… they enjoy being called sgherri or names like neckbreakers … insulting and stealing from the peasant women with produce, pinching them to make them yell, or blush at the indecent things they say and do, then hanging out with the whores and procuresses, joking … boasting … fooling around … stealing their slippers, ruffling their hair, pinching their bums, biting their tits and making them howl like maddened bitches.
The irrepressible turbulence of life in the city and the spirited resistance the Milanese kept putting up to the grimly penitential edicts of Carlo Borromeo in the eighties showed Milan was not much changed since the painter Giovan Battista Armenini arrived in the city from Rome thirty years earlier. Armenini, who wrote a lively account of the greatness of earlier sixteenth century painting in a book that appeared in 1586 – a book written out of an acute sense of loss and decline in contemporary art – remembered when he arrived in Milan as a young painter around 1556. He’d stayed some months in the city and wanting to work as a painter,
I set myself to work with some of those young Milanese, but I found they were much more given to ornamenting themselves with various outfits and fine gleaming weapons than to wielding pens or brushes in any form of study.
Armenini anticipated the M who had money, fame and notoriety in the streets of Rome. Bellori wrote that M in his glory days fifteen years later
appeared around town with his sword at his side like a professional fighter and making a show of having anything but painting on his mind.
Armenini’s image was a reminder that if M learnt to paint in Milan, he learnt to use his sword there too. The shadow of personal violence passed over his life before he was out of his teens. Giulio Mancini wrote that M
studied with diligence for four to six years in Milan, despite the odd wild act he committed from time to time, caused by his heat and great spirit.
Fifty years later Bellori parlayed that great spirit into murky and combative behaviour, and said M had to leave Milan at one stage after trouble. Privately, he believed M was already a killer. In a handwritten marginal note in his own copy of Baglione’s life of M, Bellori wrote that
he ground colours in Milan and learnt to paint and after killing a companion he fled the town …
Bellori’s word alone wasn’t enough to make M a teenage killer. But Mancini had earlier added an almost illegible marginal scribble to one of the copies of his own life of M – it was concrete, detailed and barely intelligible. He wrote, or seemed to write, of a whore disfigured and a gentleman wounded and police killed and M imprisoned for a year. The scribble could also be read to make M not a killer but a witness to a police killing, imprisoned for not informing. Something happened in Milan. On either reading, the usually accurate and reliable Mancini had M involved in a killing, and he would’ve got the story from M himself in Rome. Bellori seemed to get the story of M’s crime from a different source. Neither said quite when the killing happened, though both indicated it was shortly before he left for Rome. The Milan police records later turned to dust in the places that mattered – where the criminals’ names were written across the top of the page.
* * *
M’S TIME WITH Peterzano ended in 1588, and the next year M was back in Caravaggio. On 25 September 1589, stating that he was already eighteen years old, he sold – with his mother’s consent – half of one of the pieces of land he now shared with his brother Giovan Battista. The money from the sale, three hundred and fifty imperial pounds, was enough to live on for two years, but nine months later M and his brother together sold the other half to a family solicitor for another five hundred and fifty pounds, using part of the money to buy back the first half, while M took the remaining cash. They did it to pay their and their mother Lucia’s debts. The adult countersigning the sale by minors was their priest uncle Ludovico, who was now a chaplain in Milan. Maybe Lucia Aratori was hopeless with money. M’d been selling off family land for three years, and taking all the cash. Maybe she was sick. Three months later, sound of mind and body, Lucia made her will, leaving everything equally to her children, and a month later, at the end of November 1590, she was dead at forty. Then the selling really started. Four months later, the small orchard went for a hundred and nine imperial pounds and ten days later the recovered half of the earlier, bigger property went for five hundred and ninety six imperial pounds. M again took all the cash and in return Giovan Battista got sole rights to another small vineyard. The deals were overseen again by their uncle Ludovico, now installed in the archbishopric at Milan.
A year later, on 11 May 1592, came the final divvying up. On the Merisi side only the little vineyard was left, and that was already Giovan Battista’s. The Aratoris had the big house where the family lived and another little tract of cultivated land. Giovan Battista got the family house as well as the vineyard, their sister Caterina got half of the tract and the promise of a dowry of two hundred imperial pounds at the time of her marriage. Profligate M had already gone through most of his share of the family property, and had to make do with a small bit of the tract and getting out of contributing to Caterina’s dowry. It was the end of family life in Caravaggio, the end of these Merisis. The records of the final division of the family inheritance in May 1592 were the last evidence of M’s presence in Caravaggio. The others went on to live their quiet lives and disappear forever into the vast humus of the unremembered European dead. Even the memory of M, after a few wild years of fame, then faded for centuries, and he was known only for a few notorious stories and some darkening canvases.
Giovan Battista, who’d done well out of the estate in the end, went to Rome to study with the Jesuits. Caterina married the next year and eventually had six children. Her fourth child was a boy born on 15 July 1610. Somebody in the district was very up to date on M’s career. In a Description of the town of Caravaggio written in Latin in 1608, there was a mention of the town’s famous M, his new style and divine ability, and even a mention of M’s being made a knight of Malta, which happened that very year. The family itself can’t’ve heard about their brother. Caterina surely thought M dead, because in 1610 she gave her fourth child the combined names of M and their younger brother who’d died as a boy. The child’s name was registered as Michel Angelo Gio. Fermo. Three days later, in a strangeness of timing quite unknown to Caterina, M really was dead.
M left this world in 1592 and never went back. He headed south to Rome. In the four years since the end of his apprenticeship, he’d done nothing recorded or remembered, apart from boosting his cash supply by the piecemeal sale of family property in Caravaggio. Bellori said he spent this time painting portraits, but no trace remained. One thing wasn’t recorded in documents but impressed in the visual memory and later bodied forth in M’s art. He travelled around Lombardy and took a serious look at whatever he hadn’t already seen of the kind of painting he’d grown up among – the modest and unflashy Lombard art of Milan, Bergamo, Brescia, Cremona and all the other places in striking distance of home. It was an art – Moretto’s, Savoldo’s, Lotto’s – closely attentive to the natural world and the realities of daily life. It interpreted the miraculous events of the Christian story in images of that life. It was down to earth and unrhetorical painting and it showed how close Lombardy was to Germany and the northern world beyond the Alps. It was a mental universe away from the formality and grandeur of the Roman style that M had yet to meet. Even the greatest and grandest art M knew as a boy, Leonardo’s fresco of the Last supper in Milan, was still utterly true to the reality principle. Unshowy though they were, these paintings afforded M images he never forgot. He never returned in person to the world of his childhood and youth but its art stayed with him forever. Again and again in the coming years it’d be a precise memory from this early time that took him forward. Though he seemed now to break forever with his Lombard past, in reality it never left him. In Rome they’d have no idea where M was coming from. Rome was so self absorbed and so unaware of what went on outside that it had no handle on what M did. M was a revolutionary painter, but like everyone else he too came from somewhere. He came from Lombardy and a large part of his radicalism was simply a stubborn visual loyalty to his childhood world, his refusal to be impressed by Roman artifice, his refusal to do what all the others were aiming for.
And M went to Venice some time before he left for Rome. Quite likely he went there more than once. Bellori thought Venice was where M fled after the killing in Milan. It wasn’t far. Caravaggio was on the frontier of Venetian territory, and there were more reasons for going to Venice than eluding the Spanish police. Venetian painting was a thing apart – still quite unknown down in Rome – and M had likely been hearing from his master Peterzano about Titian and the Venice style. Peterzano’s master Titian was ten years or so dead, and his great master, when Titian was a teenager, had been a painter who lived briefly exactly a century before M and who now seemed to strike the young M deeply. Giorgione
loved nature so much that he didn’t want to take on anything that he didn’t paint from life.
His work was famous for its marvellously real rendering of flesh, and the subtle sense of relief that came from strong shading and contrast – something Giorgione had learnt from his older contemporary Leonardo and made better. But the most remarkable thing about Giorgione was that he had no use for drawing in the process of painting. To Vasari, drilled in Florentine draughtsmanship, this was sheer ignorance – Giorgione was sublime in colour but he never went to Rome, never saw what the very greatest painting was, didn’t understand that drawing was intrinsic to real art. Giorgione, said Vasari,
… used to set himself before living and natural objects and imitate them as well as he could in paint … without doing any drawing, and he was sure that painting with colours alone, without making drawings on paper was the true and best way of working.
For M, Giorgione – not just the way he worked – might’ve been a talisman. The enigmatic poetry of The tempest and the Three philosophers was utterly foreign to M’s painting, but there were other things that lodged in M’s imagination. There were powerfully beautiful portraits of boys, and some decapitations in which the artist’s own portrait figured. The memory of Giorgione and Venetian art was something else M took with him to Rome, another thing he never let go of. He knew what he wanted to do and he was a very conservative revolutionary. In the summer of 1592 there was a new pope in Rome and M was nearly twenty one and he had nearly four hundred imperial pounds in cash.
* * *
THEY ALL CAME to Rome. If you were an artist – a painter, sculptor, architect, stonemason – and you wanted to make the big time there wasn’t, really, anywhere else to work. The more ambitious you were, as the wracked sixteenth century went into its final decade, the more important it was to work in Rome. Painters from all over Italy, and all over Europe – especially the north – were gathering there among the city’s busy huddles of immigrant artisans. Like all migrants they got their first work from the ones who’d arrived before from their shared place of origin. Rome was full of hopeful artists. None of the currently famous names had any real distinction. None would be long remembered. A few celebrity painters were immensely fashionable. They got the big papal commissions and they had more work and more money than they knew what to do with. Art was elusive. Success was flaunted. Lower down the pyramid people were scrabbling for a job, because there were even more hungry artisans than work in that sudden boom time. Nearly all of them were late arrivals from somewhere else. In Rome the building and decorating trades were on a roll.
It was amazing. None of it was happening twenty years before. And half a century earlier Rome’s very survival as a significant centre was in doubt. Caput mundi, forget it. Rome had been looted and mostly destroyed in 1527 by the mutinous imperial mercenaries of Charles V They imprisoned the pope, raped the women, killed tens of thousands and stabled their horses in the Sistine chapel. After the invaders finally abandoned the capital, Rome was nearly finished off by an epidemic of plague. The Tiber broke its banks and flooded the city. The crops failed and brought death by famine. A third or more of the city’s population was gone and the ones who stayed among the wreckage were stunned, demoralized and desperately poor. At mid century, decades after being sacked, Rome was still a small and wretched slum surrounded by abandoned ruins.
