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The traveller Thomas Coryat visited Milan in 1608, by which time Caravaggio was long gone from the city. But the Englishman’s vivid account, published in 1611 under the title Coryat’s Crudities, describes the metropolis much as it had been when Caravaggio was young. Coryat noted Milan’s conspicuous opulence, and the many luxury trades that thrived there: ‘No City of Italy is furnished with more manuary arts than this. Their embroderers are very singular workemen, who worke much in gold and silver. Their cutlers that make hilts are more exquisite in the art than any that I ever saw. Of these two trades there is a great multitude in the city: Also silkemen do abound here, which are esteemed so good that they are not inferiour to any of the Christian world.’12

He grouped the city’s armourers and sword-makers together with its embroiderers and silk-workers, perhaps implying that all were working in different branches of the Milanese fashion industry. The ability to fight was certainly just as important, to a young man out to impress, as the clothes that he wore. Swordsmanship was part of that intangible code of pseudo-chivalric skills and values encompassed by the Italian words virtù and nobilità – although in Caravaggio’s Italy it was never easy to tell whether a young man’s aspirations to virtuous nobility were rooted in fact or fantasy.

Coryat was also struck by the number of churches in Milan and impressed by the city’s close links with some of the most dynamic figures of early Christianity. He visited the church of St Ambrose, where the relics of Ambrose himself, Bishop of Milan in the fourth century, were preserved. He seems not to have visited Santa Maria delle Grazie, the Dominican friary for which Leonardo da Vinci, more than a hundred years before, had painted his famous Last Supper (another English traveller, Fynes Moryson, who visited Milan in 1618, noted that ‘in this Monastery … in the place where the Friers eate, the supper of our lord is painted with wonderfull art’). But Coryat did pay a trip to Milan’s cathedral, ‘an exceeding glorious and beautifull Church, as fair if not fairer then the Cathedrall Church of Amiens’, where he witnessed ‘one of the nayles wherewith Christ was crucified, as they affirme’. He then climbed the cathedral tower to get a view of the whole city and the plains beyond, the little town of Caravaggio somewhere in their midst. As he did so, looking out and beyond the city’s nine great gates, he encompassed the whole world of the artist’s childhood:

There I observed the huge suburbs, which are as bigge as many a faire towne, and compassed about with ditches of water: there also I beheld a great part of Italy, together with the lofty Apennines; and they shewed me which way Rome, Venice, Naples, Florence, Genoa, Ravenna &c. lay. The territory of Lombardy, which I contemplated round about from this tower, was so pleasant an object to mine eyes, being replenished with such unspeakable variety of all things, both for profite and pleasure, that it seemeth to me to be the very Elysian fieldes, so much decantated and celebrated by the verses of Poets, or the Tempe or Paradise of the world. For it is the fairest plaine, extended about two hundred miles in length that ever I saw, or ever shall if I should travell over the whole habitable world: insomuch that I said to my selfe that this country was fitter to be an habitation for the immortall Gods than for mortall men.

Milan was built on a circular plan. At the centre of the circle stood the massive, intimidating Castello Sforzesco. This daunting structure had originally been built as a palace for the mighty Sforza dynasty. It is an epitome of the Renaissance architecture of tyranny, with its dark and towering walls covered with diamond rustication, like the studs on a knuckleduster. When Milan came under Habsburg control in the 1530s, the patronage of the Sforza came to an end. Caravaggio knew the building as the fortress from which the city’s Spanish governors nervously ruled, ever on the