Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [10]
The story is not exactly true but like many stories about Caravaggio it contains elements of the truth. He could never have been employed in tasks such as preparing glue or plaster for his father, because his father died when Caravaggio was only five years old. But the record shows that Fermo Merisi was indeed a mason. This might suggest that the artist’s origins were, as Bellori implies, rooted in the humble world of the artisan. But the sources hint at a more complicated truth. There is room for ambiguity because Fermo Merisi’s job of mason could encompass different ways of working with stone, and possibly even the vocation of architect.
Baglione’s brief account broadly agrees with that of Bellori – he simply says that the artist, ‘born in Caravaggio in Lombardy, was the son of a mason, quite well off’.4 But Mancini makes the artist’s background sound considerably grander. According to him, ‘He was born in Caravaggio of honourable citizens since his father was majordomo and architect to the Marchese di Caravaggio.’5 Mancini may have got the gist of his account from the artist himself, in particular the idea that Caravaggio was of better than merely common birth. A number of incidents in the painter’s later life indicate that he believed that he came from good stock, and deserved respect on account of that. It is important to establish the truth, because Caravaggio’s elevated sense of his own status would lie at the root of many of his future troubles.
Most of the known facts about Caravaggio’s youth were published by the scholar Mina Cinotti in 1983.6 One of the more revealing documents to emerge from her research records the wedding of the artists’ parents. On 14 January 1571 Fermo Merisi married a woman called Lucia Aratori. Fermo was born in about 1540 and was a widower, with a daughter named Margherita by his first marriage. Lucia was some ten years younger than him and had not been married before. Fermo was recorded as resident in Milan, but the marriage took place in the town of Caravaggio, where both his bride and the rest of his family lived. It would have been an unexceptional wedding had it not been for the presence, among the witnesses, of the Marchese Francesco I Sforza di Caravaggio. The marchese was a member of one of the leading noble families of Italy, the Sforza, who were former lords of Milan. His wife, the young Marchesa di Caravaggio, was from the enormously powerful Colonna family. These were the most important people in the neighbourhood.
The presence of nobility at the nuptials of the Merisi family turns out to have had precious little to do with Caravaggio’s father. Fermo Merisi was just an ordinary stonemason, perhaps reasonably well off but with no great social pretensions. He was certainly not an architect. In a number of documents relating to him he is referred to as a mastro, designating him as a qualified artisan with the right to set up his own workshop and hire apprentices. He ran this modest business in Milan. His probate inventory lists ‘some old iron mason’s tools’, but does not include any books or instruments that would indicate a knowledge of the theoretical aspects of architecture. His retention of an independent workshop makes it unlikely that he was in the direct employ of the Marchese di Caravaggio. Caravaggio’s paternal grandfather, Bernardino Merisi, was himself no higher up the social scale. He too had run a small business. He was a wine merchant and vintner based at the family home in Porta Seriola, in the north-east quarter of Caravaggio.