M, p.45
M, page 45
Naples was excessive in every respect … an overpopulated and disquieting city … order could never be maintained, and at night the only law was that of the strong and cunning … it was the most astonishing, most fantastically picaresque city in the world … a more hard working city than its very bad reputation gives it credit for, but that reputation was not undeserved …
Beside all this the caput mundi M had lately fled was in many ways a poor and rather demure thing. Rome was an elegant but unproductive show city. Naples had all the attributes of manifold economic life, production and consumption from hardscrabble desperation to unparalleled idle opulence. And it had the appurtenances of real power. Militarily, for instance. Naples garrisoned the massive forces that maintained Spanish power in the central Mediterranean, a riotous and parasitic soldiery that lived promiscuously off the Neapolitan populace. The city sustained as well the courtiers of the local nobility, the retinues of the Spanish rulers and the imperial bureaucracy of the occupying power.
Which was what Spain was, in Naples, and the people hated it and never forgot it. In 1510 and 1547 armed revolt by the people had forced the Spanish to abandon their plans to introduce the Spanish inquisition in Naples, and these were only two of the periodic uprisings of Neapolitans against Spain that would continue through the next century. One of the reasons for Neapolitan poverty, amid all its natural and geographical resources, was the rapacity of viceroy after viceroy. These were aristocrats from the court of Madrid given monarchical powers and liberty to profit from their appointments in whatever way they could, while the city ran up huge deficits. The poor were hurt most by the viceroys’ profiteering, but from time to time they found allies against Spain in Neapolitans further up the social scale. In 1585 the Spanish viceroy provoked a massive armed revolt by increasing the price of bread in Naples while exporting local grain to Spain. The uprising was, in the end, savagely repressed, but it marked the beginning of organized opposition to Spanish rule in Naples, and was the forerunner of the great revolt of sixty years later.
The seaport was the busiest in Italy and the city around it contained a busy community of foreign merchants and financiers. The endless influx of new people from the surrounding country, the closeness to the sea’s international traffic and the local fishing fleets made Neapolitan society more heterogeneous and less isolated from the daily realities of life than Rome’s febrile society of priests and prostitutes, and even more cosmopolitan. And the physical promiscuity in which everyone lived meant that while life in Naples was no less hierarchical than elsewhere, there was more contact among the different classes – they were living on top of each other. The stories and songs and theatre of popular life fed directly into the high culture – in the stories, for instance of M’s contemporary Giambattista Basile or the demotic vigour of Bruno’s dialogues.
Naples was also a centre of the counter reformation and no less priest ridden than Rome.
Even considering Rome’s dogmatic and normative rule, Munich’s bigotry and missionary fervour, Spain’s mystical and repressive impulses, Paris’s great population and culture, Naples was the real capital of the counter reformation, and reflected its successes, its ambiguities and its failures.
But it was also a city that kept asserting its religious and intellectual autonomy against Rome’s dictates, as Sixtus V found in 1586 and Clement VIII discovered in 1594, when they tried to replace by force the friars of two Neapolitan convents with more acceptable adherents of the counter reformation and were driven back by armed popular resistance on both occasions. One of these was the convent of San Domenico Maggiore, where Giordano Bruno had begun his career and where Tommaso Campanella had studied. They and their acquaintance the Neapolitan scientist and playwright Giambattista Della Porta, inventor of M’s camera obscura and the telescope, and like the others tried by the inquisition, were, with Galileo Galilei, the most original thinkers in Italy at that time. It may or may not have been coincidental that M was about to undertake two commissions for the church of San Domenico Maggiore in his very first months in Naples.
When M arrived in the autumn of 1606, the viceroy of Naples was don Juan Alfonso Pimentel de Herrera, known for short as the conde de Benavente, one of the grossest, most incompetent and arrogant rulers the city had known, and the city was in the middle of a particularly serious food shortage that’d been approaching crisis for the previous couple of years. The viceroy was taking advantage of the famine to do a little profiteering for himself and his business partner, and eliminating the functionaries who’d become embarrassing witnesses of his activities by having them publicly executed for real or invented irregularities. The previous year he’d slapped a big new tax on fruit, in case people looked for alternatives to bread and pasta. Salt was already seen to. In January of 1607 the inspector general sent out by Madrid to investigate Benavente’s administration put a lot of the viceroy’s associates on trial, including several of Marzio Colonna’s colleagues on the collateral commission, but Benavente sailed on undisturbed. By the following spring, the Naples correspondent of Ferdinando I de’ Medici was writing to the grand duke in Florence, in April 1607, that
the famine is so great throughout the kingdom that whole communities come to Naples and go around the city crying bread, bread, and so many poor people have fallen that I pray to God the plague doesn’t take hold of this city, because people are dying in the streets and nobody’s doing anything about it.
So M found the world’s richest and most vicious city in a state of crisis, or most of its population. Beyond a few contracts and receipts for work he did in the city, no record of any kind would survive of the time M spent in Naples – where he stayed, who he knew, how he spent his non painting time. It was likely that he behaved for a while with more circumspection than usual. Apart from the Colonnas and their circle, which included the Spanish ruling group – and he’d hardly be mingling freely in their social life – M was on his own in the crowded, difficult and disquieting city. It wasn’t the moment to be acting up. He was also very busy with commissions. Through Colonna connexions or because his fame had preceded him, M had all the work he could handle in Naples over the winter of late 1606 and early 1607.
He immediately found work because his style and his name were already well known there,
wrote Bellori. No wonder his social life was low key, in the middle of famine. At least he seemed to have Cecco for company. By the time summer came he was off again, though not for long.
On October 6, within days if not hours of M’s arriving, a Naples bank issued a payment order for two hundred ducats in the name of Niccolò Radolovich. It was for an altarpiece showing the
Madonna and child surrounded by choirs of angels, plus saint Dominic and saint Francis embracing below, with saint Nicholas on the right and saint Vitus on the left.
Radolovich was a very prominent local businessman – a shipowner and trader of Croatian origin, related through his mother to the recent pope Gregory XIII – and it sounded like he had appallingly conventional taste. M had never done choirs of angels in his life. He refused to do them, and that’d been the whole trouble over his masterpiece Mary dead. And there were four saints to galvanize into life below. There was no record of M’s thoughts as he banked the money the same day, or when he withdrew most of it three weeks later. But the promised painting was never traced or convincingly identified, although there were reasons – a later painting in Naples that seemed to be derived from it – for thinking it might’ve been done. The money was good and he needed it and he could hardly afford to mess around with his first client in Naples the way he had the duke of Modena and the relentless ambassador, when his life was falling to pieces in Rome. It still didn’t sound like M, somehow. He’d undertaken to deliver it by December.
Though – beyond the few contractual fragments – there was no documentary record of M’s life in Naples or the impact Naples had on him, there was the evidence of his work. That was unequivocal.
Political paralysis, poverty, famine, epidemics, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, Saracen raids, banditry, organized crime, bureaucratic corruption, crippling taxation, the arrogance of their Spanish rulers and the exploitation of the local barons – none of it got the better of the people.
The same went for M. His life and career were shattered, he was separated from the people and place he loved, he had to live under the hideous threat of a price on his head, he had the inner knowledge of himself as a killer, he’d lately hit the depth of isolation and loss – and now he rebounded with dazzling energy. Naples brought M back to life, and he showed it in painting one of his very greatest works.
* * *
M WAS MISSED in Rome. People were quietly working to gather evidence in his favour, although the chances of a pardon were slim. Ranuccio Tomassoni’s wasn’t a death that could be treated lightly, given his family’s standing, and the Tomassoni family clearly blamed M alone for the death. Paul V was making a point of establishing a reputation as iron willed and inflexible in matters of law.
A document later turned up in the archives in which a surgeon testified on July 24 that he’d lately been treating a mattress maker’s son called Francesco, who was now fully recovered from a head wound inflicted on him – and a note somebody else had added on the back of the page indicated that this certified recovery counted in favour of M. The two months elapsed between the date of the certified recovery and the fatal brawl made it look as though Francesco might’ve been a peripheral victim that day in campo Marzio. He was evidently in the Tomassoni camp, maybe a local youth enlisted by Giovan Francesco, and evidence of his recovery would count to minimize the case against M. Someone was clearly hunting for testimony useful to M. The document was dated, by a slip of the surgeon’s pen or the scribe’s, 1616 instead of 1606. For his friends and protectors, M’s hash was far from settled. His shocking flight from Rome convulsed the art world. A rather surprizing consequence of this was the reappearance of the egregious Giovanni Baglione on centre stage. Most surprizingly of all, he was taking M to court again. In absentia. This time Baglione’s accusation against M was rather more serious than it’d been three years earlier. This time Baglione was accusing M of premeditating a murder. He wasn’t referring to the death of Ranuccio Tomassoni, although he clearly felt that recent event would make his own case more plausible. Baglione was now accusing M of trying to engineer his own murder.
In late October, two or three weeks after M had surfaced in Naples, Giovanni Baglione was on his way alone from an autumn Sunday afternoon mass at his local church of Trinità dei Monti – so he claimed to the police in the deposition he made from home some days later – when he was the victim of an assault. He’d been coming down the steps when his assailant, who’d been
hiding behind a pillar, attacked me with an unsheathed sword and landed me a blow on the back that cut through my cloak and jacket as you can see … and then aimed an overarm blow at my head, which landed flat on my left arm … I drew my own sword and in so doing wounded a finger on my right hand [here the court recorder duly noted in Latin the presence of a small scar on Baglione’s right index finger] and then we exchanged several blows until my sword broke, because I believe he was wearing armour on his chest … and the people arrived and separated us.
Another painter testified that he’d seen the hooded assailant lying in wait on the steps for Baglione with his sword drawn, and identified him, as Baglione had, as a beardless youth named Carlo Bodello, whom the witness knew by sight. At the time Baglione, who got himself identified as knight on the court transcript, although Paul V wouldn’t get around to making him a knight of Christ until the following year, was nearing the zenith of his prestige and was president of the painters’ accademia di San Luca. The outgoing president – the election of the painters’ new president three weeks earlier was in fact what Baglione wanted to tell the court about, even before he got to the assault. The attack, he said, had everything to do with it. Baglione identified the beardless youth who’d attacked him as an aspiring painter, a hatter’s son who’d turned up at the academy three weeks earlier for the election of the new president. Baglione had tried to have him thrown out as a minor and not a member of the academy. Young Bodello had stood his ground,
and he told me he was a painter like the others and wanted to stay … but I made sure he didn’t vote.
Baglione said young Bodello had been set up and incited to attack him. Behind Bodello, he claimed, were Carlo Saraceni and Orazio Borgianni. Saraceni and Borgianni were two of M’s earliest and most passionate followers among the young painters of Rome. Saraceni was the one who’d got a black poodle of his own to be like M. They’d been planning, Baglione claimed, to stack the meeting three weeks previously with supporters like the beardless hopeful Bodello, to swing the election of a chief of their own kind to the presidency. When they failed, they’d put the youngster up to this revenge attack. And if Saraceni and Borgianni were behind Bodello’s attempt on his life, Baglione added, behind them stood M himself.
… they did this because they were and are hostile to me and followers of M, who is my enemy – in fact I understand various people have given [Bodello] things and told him to murder me and take the news to M, who’d pay him well for it …
Baglione’s servant testified that he’d been holding his master’s horse outside during the election meeting when Bodello had come out at the end with Borgianni and Saraceni and another, and that he’d overheard Borgianni say to Bodello
You didn’t do what I wanted. That fucking prick was there …
without knowing who the fucking prick might’ve been. The painters then went off together and he couldn’t hear the rest of what they said because I stayed there holding my boss’s horse. What followed Baglione’s accusations, and how they weighed on M’s standing with the pope – who was the only person now who could decide his fate – was lost in the archives. No records of further proceedings would be found. It was hard not to relate what was going on here in the election jockeying to a recent dispensation of the newly elected Paul V. The previous year the pope had granted the accademia di San Luca the annual right – on saint Luke’s day – to free a condemned man. This gracious nod in the direction of the academy’s seriousness and the stresses of the artistic temperament was suddenly a concession of some moment. It might’ve been designed with M in mind. His beatitude must’ve been kicking himself. Its usefulness, though, would depend on having the right man at the head of the organisation – a man who’d put in the right request. Not Giovanni Baglione or any such successor as Baglione might want to hand pick. In late 1606 the right man wasn’t in place. The attempt to put him there clearly failed, but it did show that M now had a committed minority following within the official artists’ body – which seemed to be riven by murderous internal tension – and that his followers were ready to do almost anything to get him back to Rome. It was that year that even M’s old friend Prospero Orsi, who like M himself in his earlier years had never bothered with the academy before, took the trouble to get himself nominated. Anything to make up the numbers.
* * *
A HOUNDED MAN, M came to Naples, and Naples took him in.
I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.
Kindness to strangers was a duty of Christian charity and it’d lately taken on a peculiar weight. The counter reformation held out the hope that you might be saved in the next life through your good works in this. Carefully dosed social assistance was also a way of keeping a lid on social unrest among the scary new masses of urban poor, and nowhere were the poor more numerous or more assertive than in Naples. In Naples the words from Matthew’s gospel had been the founding text for seven young aristocrats, younger sons of some of the city’s better families, still in their twenties, when in 1601 they’d set up an organisation to give comfort to the poor, the sick, the dying, the imprisoned. The growing mass of destitute in Naples afforded plenty of scope for social work. The young men’s original intent had been to undergo a little personal mortification by dirtying their own hands every Friday in the most desperate corners of the city, like the hospital for the incurables. Five years on their original intention, probably to their relief, had been overtaken by the very success of their initiative. They’d attracted a lot of followers and a lot of money. The project became institutionalized as a charity fund the year after they started and gathered the approval of Felipe III and pope Paul V. A large amount of money was at first mostly put into a hospital for the destitute and then into assisting prisoners, rescuing slaves and other such work. By 1606 they’d built their own church, and they held their first meeting in September there, a few weeks before M arrived in the city.
Some time in October or November of 1606, the young gentlemen commissioned M to do a painting for their main altar. The fee was four hundred ducats, double what he’d got from Radolovich. The nobles wanted a major statement from a major painter. The pio monte della misericordia was a cutting edge institution of social assistance and it had to show. The theme was the Seven works of mercy – the six named by Christ in Matthew’s gospel, plus burial of the dead, which was a real hygiene issue in Naples. Dogs were chewing the corpses of prisoners dumped outside the city jail, and that wasn’t the worst of it. And since Neapolitans and the people of the south were greatly exposed to Islamic raids on the coast – Capri had been torched by a Turkish landing party – an eighth item was added to the programme of good works, the ransoming of Christian slaves from the infidel. The ten thousand foreign slaves in Naples weren’t a concern, and in any case slaves weren’t, it seemed, part of M’s brief. He did, though, have to show all seven other activities in the space of a single canvas. It was an unprecedented demand in Italian art, and sounded like an iconographic nightmare.
