Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [102]
Even an act as apparently gratuitous as Longhi’s attack on a maker of meringues had its own significance. It was Longhi’s way of asserting that he was a valent’huomo, a cut above the common herd. Deportment books of the time encouraged gentlemen and aristocrats to cultivate a deliberate air of insolence towards the lower orders. In 1616 Giovanni Bonifacio published a manual on deportment entitled L’arte de’ cenni, in which he argued that gesture and facial expression themselves amounted to a language as complex as that of human speech. Bonifacio devoted fifty-eight sections to the eyes alone, itemizing different types of wink and squint, differentiating between the promise of a raised eyebrow and the threat of a frown. He also went into some detail about the significance of the out-thrust elbow. To walk with arms akimbo gave the impression of strength, he noted, it being the demeanour of someone prepared to thrust through the mass of ordinary people, to ‘push their way through crowds’.68 Anthony Van Dyck captured this modishly insouciant arrogance in his portraits of swaggering English aristocrats at the court of Charles I. Van Dyck’s portraits were painted in London in the 1630s and 1640s, but they evoke an aggressive air of sharp-edged hauteur that had been fashionable among ‘gentlemen’ throughout Europe for decades – the same style of threatening superiority that was being aped by men such as Onorio Longhi, and indeed Caravaggio himself, in Rome at the turn of the seventeenth century. They too were men who walked around with their elbows – and often their swords – out-thrust.
It would however be a mistake to regard Longhi as a simple thug. He was a man of learning, a poet as well as an architect, who used his literary skill to curry favour with the great and the good. When Ferdinando de’ Medici’s first son was born, Onorio marked the occasion with a witty poem full of satirical jibes against the Spanish. He associated with writers and musicians, as well as the likes of Caravaggio. Men working in the liberal professions, who could dream of rising through the social hierarchy, were attracted to the mock-chivalric ethos of his circle. Some of his companions were genuinely high-born, the sons of Rome’s leading families. Others were simply out-of-work soldiers. Most lived around the Campidoglio, between the Piazza dei Sant’Apostoli and the Piazza Montanara.
But Longhi was also undoubtedly dangerous. Perhaps the most telling detail in descriptions of him in the archive is the fact that he often went around the streets of Rome on horseback, as if he were a knight and his servant were his page. Onorio and Caravaggio and those who ran with them – or against them – did not just copy the clothes and the manners of the aristocracy. They behaved like modern, debased versions of the ‘veray parfit gentil knights’ of the old romance tradition. Instead of wandering through the forests of Arthurian legend, doing battle with monsters and saving damsels in distress, they frequented the streets and taverns of Rome, picking fights with pimps and vying for the favours of whores.
This topsy-turvy translation of courtly manners and codes of honour, from high-flown literature to the most ordinary milieux of modern life, was by no means restricted to Italy. It became a leitmotif of seventeenth-century prose, poetry and drama across Europe. The misapplication of chivalric codes of honour to the circumstances of modern life is the great theme – the essential running joke – around which the whole of Cervantes’s picaresque novel Don Quixote revolves. The Don might be aged, Sancho Panza fat and ridiculous, and they might inhabit a gentler and more absurd world than the Rome of Pope Clement VIII; but their escapades are none the less close parodies of the scrapes and adventures in which Caravaggio, Onorio Longhi and their companions were habitually embroiled.