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By Root 1461 0

is little in the way of cooking equipment, which suggests that neither the painter nor his apprentice spent a great deal of time in the kitchen. It is not surprising to learn that Caravaggio kept books, and a pity that the notary did not list their titles (though if they had been identified, a multitude of over-ingenious iconographic hypotheses would have been unleashed on the painter’s work). At any rate, their presence gives the lie to the old academic caricature of Caravaggio as an unlettered copyist of appearances.69 But we cannot tell anything conclusive from what is here about his relationship with his servant: all the references to beds and bedding occur in one place, so it can be inferred that the two men either shared sleeping quarters, or slept in adjoining rooms. But Cecco certainly had his own separate bed, or mattress.

The convex mirror is likely to be the one in which Caravaggio had studied his own, distorted self-portrait while painting the Medusa. It is probably the same object that can still be seen, propped up on the table, in the Martha and Mary Magdalen in Detroit. The mention of a ‘large mirror’ is more mysterious: mirrors were extremely expensive in the early seventeenth century, and, given Caravaggio’s often-remarked disregard for his own appearance, it is unlikely he would have owned one for reasons of vanity. It was most likely another tool of his studio, which he used to bounce or reflect light, much like a modern cinematographer. The ‘large painting on wood’ could have been one of the two botched first attempts at the Cerasi Chapel commission.

One thing is clear from the inventory: Caravaggio was living modestly. For all Baglione’s allegations of ‘the many hundreds of scudi’ that he had ‘pocketed’ from Ciriaco Mattei, there was not much sign of suddenly acquired wealth in the meagre possessions assembled in the little house on the Vicolo dei Santa Cecilia e Biagio. Caravaggio was a very well known painter by early 1604, but his future was by no means assured. When Clement VIII commissioned a series of altarpieces for St Peter’s in these, the last years of his pontificate, Caravaggio was not among the artists approached.

Part of the problem was almost certainly his personality. By now he would have been notorious as a proud and difficult man. Baglione and his clique would have been only too happy to reinforce that impression. But there were other, more powerful forces working against Caravaggio. The Catholic Church was moving decisively away from the severe Counter-Reformation piety embodied so powerfully by his work. The religious attitudes that he had grown up with in Milan were falling increasingly out of favour among those in positions of power. Carlo Borromeo’s belief that the princes of the Church should clothe themselves in humility and model their lives on those of Christ’s own poor disciples was falling terminally out of fashion. Poverty and the poor were there to be controlled, regulated, put in their place. In parallel, the idea that Christian art should exalt poverty was regarded as increasingly eccentric and distasteful by senior churchmen, from the pope downwards. It was the function of art to hymn the majesty of God in his heaven – and therefore to bathe the papal court and the upper hierarchies of the Church in the reflected glory of that higher, celestial court. Like the art of Caravaggio, the art favoured by a newly triumphalist Church was aimed at the poor as well as the rich. But its approach was very different. It did not welcome the poor and the meek or make them feel that they, ultimately, were the inheritors of the earth. It was there to awe, daunt and stupefy them, to impress them with visions of a force so powerful it could not be resisted – and must, therefore, be obeyed.

For all his sensitivity and genius, there could ultimately be no place in this new Baroque sensibility for an artist such as Caravaggio. If anything, his art was becoming even more pared down, more severe, with the passage of time. This pattern of development, begun with the Cerasi Chapel paintings,