Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [103]
Tommaso Garzoni’s Piazza universale of 1585 includes a vivid characterization of Rome’s ragged army of self-appointed knights errant, marauding through the city:
Every day, every hour, every moment, they talk of nothing but killing, cutting off legs, breaking arms, smashing somebody’s spine … For study, they have nothing other than the thought of killing this or that person; for purpose, nothing more than to avenge the wrongs that they have taken to heart; for favour, nothing more than serving their friends by butchering enemies …69
The author goes on to describe a day in the lives of such ‘dregs-of-knaves … scum-of-scoundrels’. Armed with an improbably extensive arsenal of weaponry, they sally forth into the city to do their worst. Despite, perhaps, some element of caricature, Garzoni paints a convincing picture of Caravaggio’s life, as it must have been, during his Carnival months, when he would ‘swagger about … with his sword at his side … ever ready to engage in a fight or argument’.
The day begins in the piazza and ends, more often than not, in the whorehouse:
In the morning they get out of bed and straightaway pull on their hose, put jacket and breastplate on their back, hats on their heads, gauntlets or hunting gloves on their hands, sword and dagger at their side, arquebus in a bag and its iron balls in their breeches. And thus, armed like St George, they swagger out of the house, make a circuit of the piazza and, with four companions, make themselves master of the field …
Then they go in a group to walk about the district, bullying everyone they meet, demanding the right of way, and with their plumes, whether black or white, they flutter fearlessly about, so that they will be taken for the boldest swordsmen on earth. Then they stop on a street corner and here, drawn up in a circle, they make fun of whoever passes, and mockingly salute whomever they like with their hats, deride the farmers, poke fun at the masters, and stop their servants by force … They also make it their custom to go out in the piazza and, as ruffians, stop to look at the peasant-girls and the countrywomen, whom they harass … Then they go to where the whores and procuresses are found: there they play a bit with Laura, strut about with Betta, and mess around with Rosa. With Cieca they have an argument, pinching a pair of clogs and taking away her shoes, or giving her some slaps on the head, pinching her buttocks, biting her breasts, and making her howl like a wretched bitch. On the way home they meet some other bravi, by whom they are punished as they deserve …
There is no written evidence to place Caravaggio in the company of any particular Laura or Betta, any Rosa or Cieca, but he was certainly friendly with a number of prostitutes, some of whom modelled for him. His favourite was a dark-eyed girl destined to become one of Rome’s most famous courtesans. Caravaggio painted her portrait, perhaps in exchange for favours received, which she would bequeath to her richest lover and patron, a Florentine nobleman named Giulio Strozzi. It later passed into the collection of Cardinal del Monte’s friend Vincenzo Giustiniani, in whose collection it was catalogued as ‘a courtesan called Fillide’, and eventually the work entered the collections of the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum in Berlin. It was destroyed during the Second World War, but black-and-white photographs survive. They show a smouldering beauty, in understated finery, with a look of wary self-possession about her. She could be a sister to Edouard Manet’s hard-faced nineteenth-century whore Olympia. She clutches a posy of jasmine blossoms, symbol of erotic love, to her breast.
‘Fillide’ was Fillide Melandroni. The literary land of Arcadia was peopled with pure and innocent shepherdesses named Fillide (or Phyllida, as the name is often anglicized),