Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [166]
Deturpatio was a specific legal term that can be translated as ‘house-scorning’.81 It was invariably a response to a perceived slight or injury. House-scorners generally operated in the dead of night, when they were less likely to be disturbed by the police. They often made a lot of noise, shouting insults or singing lewd songs as a prelude to the vengeful assault itself. Then they would throw stones, damaging shutters and blinds. Sometimes they would also hurl animal bladders filled with blood or ink to leave other visible marks of shame. Excrement was often smeared on to doors and door handles. Doodles were drawn, scurrilous graffiti in the shape of erect phalluses or cuckold’s horns.
The charges levelled at Caravaggio by Laura della Vecchia and her daughter do not specify which of these methods the painter had employed. The wording of the complaint against him suggests that the worst damage was done to the door of the house. That may in itself suggest the nature of the painter’s grievance. House-scorning was an almost exclusively male activity, and the most common perpetrators were men whose amorous attentions had been rejected by women. Had Isabella della Vecchia led Caravaggio on in some way, only to change her mind? Had Laura della Vecchia shut the door of her house – and therefore, metaphorically, the door of her daughter’s chastity – against the infuriated painter? Or perhaps Isabella was just one of the many whores with whom the abrasive Caravaggio mingled, and quarrelled. There is reason to believe that sex, in some form, lay at the root of the argument. As the spring turned to summer in the troubled year of 1605, even the painter’s relationships with women were going badly.
A CACKLING OF GEESE
Caravaggio did manage to start work on at least one picture in the heat of the Roman summer of 1605: The Madonna of Loreto, commissioned for the Cavalletti Chapel in the Roman church of Sant’Agostino some eighteen months earlier. Caravaggio’s painting was clearly shaped by his experience of visiting Loreto and its Holy House, which was said to have flown miraculously from Nazareth to Italy in the Middle Ages, eventually touching down in Loreto one night in December 1294. Protestants, predictably, dismissed the cult of Loreto as a sham. Even the credulity of many devout Catholics was strained by a legend according to which the childhood home of Jesus Christ himself had been aerially projected, by the force of miracle, from Nazareth to an obscure wood in the eastern Marches of Italy. The popularity of the shrine was sustained by its dramatic popular appeal, and by the persuasive rhetoric of its promoters. Louis Richeome’s influential tract Le Pelerin de Lorette was originally published in French in 1604, the year before Caravaggio painted his picture. Soon translated into Latin, Italian and a number of European vernacular languages, Richeome’s text was a bestseller that brought thousands more pilgrims to the doors of the Holy House.
Richeome placed great emphasis on the miracle of the Incarnation and eloquently made the case for regarding Loreto as the holiest of all holy shrines. The following passage is taken from The Pilgrime of Loreto, the English translation of his book:
when we shall have reckoned up by name, the most renowned places of all the world, as well out of profane Writers, as out of the sacred Scriptures, the Chamber of Loreto exceedeth them all in this condition, in having been the closet, where the marriage of the Sonne of God with our humane Nature was celebrated in the B. Virgin’s womb, the most high and mysterious worke, that the holy Trinity maker of all things, did ever accomplish; for therein God was made man; the Creator, a creature; the supreme cause, an effect; the Word, flesh; the spirit did take a body; the first is become last, and Alpha, Omega …82
By Caravaggio’s time there were two basic conventions for depicting the shrine of Loreto.