Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [104]
Fillide was born in Siena, but in early adolescence she was uprooted to Rome. Her father had died when she was still young, so money was scarce. Her aunt Pietra was already waiting on tables in a taverna in the city; perhaps it was she who encouraged the family to move there in search of better prospects. Fillide made the journey with her mother, Cinzia, and her brother, Silvio. They arrived on a rainy day in February 1593, less than a year after the young Caravaggio had first come to the city. They shared their coach with the Bianchini family. Sibilla Bianchini had a son called Matteo and two daughters, Alessandra and Anna. Anna was the same age as Fillide.
The two families lodged together in the same house on Via dell’Armata. Close by was the church of Santa Caterina, patron saint of their home town, Siena. Not long after arriving in Rome, the two mothers, Cinzia and Sibilla, put their daughters to work as prostitutes. In April 1594 the two girls were arrested together for being out after curfew, on suspicion of soliciting. The investigating magistrates called them ‘Donna Anna’ and ‘Donna Fillide’, which made them sound more grown-up than they really were. They were fourteen and thirteen years old, respectively.70
Caravaggio painted his portrait of Fillide around 1598, by which time she was seventeen or eighteen, and when she and Anna Bianchini were still going around together. According to a witness statement made in that same year, Anna was ‘smaller rather than bigger’ and had ‘long red hair’.71 There is an outside possibility that she was the girl who modelled for The Penitent Magdalen and the sleeping Virgin Mary in The Rest on the Flight to Egypt.
Fillide first appears in a devotional painting of about 1598, Martha and Mary Magdalen, now in the collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts. The picture is badly damaged and of questionable quality: the brightly illuminated Magdalen is puffy and distorted and clumsily portrayed, giving her a pop-eyed appearance, but it is certainly by Caravaggio.
The painter shows the moment when the Magdalen, urged on by her sister Martha, forswears her life of harlotry. The shadowy Martha, viewed in half-profile, is another figure who may possibly have been modelled by Fillide’s friend, Anna Bianchini. Like preachers of the time, Martha counts on her fingers the reasons to repent. But her sister has already decided to devote herself to God. Fillide as Mary Magdalen once again holds a flower to the bodice of her scarlet silk dress. This time it is not perfumed jasmine but orange blossom, symbol of purity. A gap-toothed ivory comb and a precariously propped-up convex mirror – probably the same convex mirror in which Caravaggio studied his own distorted features to paint the screaming Medusa – here symbolize worldly vanities renounced. The mirror also evokes the prophecy of St Paul: ‘Now we see through a glass darkly, but then we shall see face to face’ (1 Corinthians 13:12). Her mind has turned away from the things of this world, and towards the next.
The ring on the wedding finger of her left hand symbolizes her decision to embrace chastity and become a bride of Christ. The finger sticks out at an angle, as though dislocated or nerve-damaged. Another figure by Caravaggio for which Fillide modelled, that of the slightly later St Catherine, suffers from the same slight deformity of the same finger: Fillide must have had a damaged hand.
The painter could easily have disguised or corrected the flaw, but he chose to preserve it on both canvases. Why? The most likely explanation is that he intended it as an advertisement of his militant naturalism. To animate the old stories of Christianity, to make them seem as though taking place in the present day, he had developed his own unique method: he would systematically restage the sacred dramas, using real, flesh-and blood people, and paint the