Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [144]
Cupido di Caravaggio / Card di Savoya profe. / 2 milia duboli p[er] / il Cupido di Caravaggio / Costo 3 cento scudi. / Checco del Caravaggio tis / calld among the painters / twas his boy – / haire darke, 2 wings / raie, compasses lute / violin & armes & laurel / Monsr Crechy vuolle dare / 2 milia dubole / Twas the body & face / of his owne boy or servant / that laid with him.54
From the readiness with which the story was believed and then accepted into local legend, it seems that nobody had been particularly surprised to hear about Caravaggio’s alleged homosexual proclivities. He was known to be an impetuous man who followed his passions. He kept company with whores and courtesans, such as Fillide Melandroni, and on the evidence of his paintings he was equally alive to the physical charms of men. Caravaggio and Francesco Boneri, alias Cecco, were close: Cecco stayed with him even after he was obliged to leave Rome in 1606. There is a good chance that the rumours were true and that Caravaggio did indeed have a sexual as well as a working relationship with ‘his owne boy or servant’.
Whatever the reality, Baglione’s accusations were damaging and dangerous. Sodomy was a capital crime in Clement VIII’s Rome, and though the authorities were unlikely to investigate the well-connected Caravaggio’s sexual behaviour, as long as he was reasonably discreet, the potential harm to his name and prospects was immense. Once an artist had been smeared as a pederast, his work was smeared too. People were liable to stop taking it seriously, seeing it only through the lens of its creator’s presumed sexual aberration. This had happened half a century before, notoriously, to an artist named Giovanni Antonio Bazzi. Bazzi had offended the famous chronicler of artists’ lives, Giorgio Vasari, who had taken his revenge in print: ‘since he always had about him boys and beardless youths, whom he loved more than was decent, he acquired the by-name of Sodoma.’55 This was all a pure fabrication on Vasari’s part, first started perhaps by Bazzi’s rival, the Sienese painter Domenico Beccafumi. But the mud stuck, and to this day the artist is known as Il Sodoma, ‘the Sodomite’.
Caravaggio was deeply sensitive about his reputation. He never knowingly allowed the least slight to go unpunished. His nocturnal assault on Girolamo Spampa, the art student from Montepulciano, was proof of that. Spampa had probably been recycling Federico Zuccaro’s criticisms of Caravaggio’s Contarelli Chapel paintings, which he had most likely heard from Baglione in the first place. Either way, Baglione must have been aware of the beating that Caravaggio had given Spampa, which had taken place just eighteen months before. He knew that his satires and smears would not be forgotten. Sooner or later, Caravaggio would retaliate.
The autumn and winter of 1602 passed without incident, as Caravaggio bided his time. Only in spring of the following year did he give vent to his simmering anger. He was stung into retaliation by the unveiling of Baglione’s largest work yet, The Resurrection, an altarpiece for the principal Jesuit church in Rome, the Gesù. That work is now lost, but, to judge by Baglione’s preparatory study in the Louvre, it was a clumsy and grandiose essay in the same proto-Baroque idiom as Carracci’s Assumption of the Virgin. In the sketch Christ stands heavily on a stage-flat cloud as angelic choirs hymn his heavenward ascent. Below on earth, one of the soldiers guarding the tomb gets drowsily to his feet, while others snooze or look on in laboured poses of amazement.
Baglione could carry off the mock sublimity of a parody like the Divine Love. But when he strove for effects of awe-inspiring transcendence, he was undone both by his lack of skill and by the essentially prosaic nature of his imagination. His