Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [168]
Ermete Cavalletti was of course dead by the time Caravaggio finished The Madonna of Loreto. But he would most likely have approved of the painter’s innovations. Ermete’s dedication to the Santissima Trinità dei Pellegrini is proven: as a member of that lay confraternity, he, a rich man, had abased himself in imitation of Christ and washed the feet of poor pilgrims. Caravaggio’s painting no less dramatically asserted the pauperist values of that institution. In fact the painter might be said to have repeated that act of self-abnegation, on Cavalletti’s behalf, by putting poor pilgrims in place of his rich patrons. The replacement may even imply a kind of wishful metamorphosis, with the kneeling pilgrims as metaphorical portraits of Ermete and Orinzia Cavalletti themselves – transformed, through their humility of heart, into honorary members of the blessed poor.
Whether that too was part of Caravaggio’s meaning, there is every indication that the family approved wholeheartedly of his picture. Not only was it accepted without demur and without alterations, but Orinzia Cavalletti arranged for her own burial beneath the floor of the same chapel.
Once again, Caravaggio had painted a monumental altarpiece aimed squarely at the poor and the hungry. The location of the church for which he painted the picture was also part of its message and part of its significance.84 With the completion of The Madonna of Loreto, Caravaggio now had major works on display in two of the most frequently visited churches on the principal pilgrimage axis through northern Rome. Every year wave after wave of pilgrims would enter the city from the north at the Porta del Popolo. Immediately on their left was the church of Santa Maria del Popolo, for which Caravaggio had painted The Conversion of St Paul and The Crucifixion of St Peter. The main pilgrimage route from there towards St Peter’s then led directly along the Via di Ripetta and its continuation, the Via della Scrofa, to the corner of the Via dei Coronari. Turning right on to that street, in the direction of the Tiber and the Ponte Sant’Angelo, the pilgrim would find himself in one of the most congested thoroughfares in all Rome. The church of Sant’Agostino lay at the start of the Via dei Coronari, so named after its multitude of Rosary-makers’ shops, thronged by pious tourists buying Rosaries and other devotional souvenirs of their visit to the Eternal City. Caravaggio knew that he was guaranteed a vast audience of the pious and the humble by virtue of Sant’Agostino’s prominent place on the city’s Christian itinerary. To the pilgrims who entered the church and walked into the Cavalletti Chapel, he offered a perfected mirror image of their own travels, one in which they could see themselves reaching the wished-for end of every pilgrim’s journey.
It was this direct appeal by Caravaggio to the poor, and the central role he gave them in his theatre of Christianity, that most shocked his critics. Writing from the perspective of the later seventeenth century, when the pauperist ideals of the early Counter-Reformation lay in ruins, Bellori cast Caravaggio in the role of a seditious revolutionary. With pictures such as The Madonna of Loreto he had opened a Pandora’s Box of vulgarity: ‘Now began the imitation of common and vulgar things, seeking out filth and deformity, as some popular artists do assiduously … The costumes they paint consist of stockings, breeches, and big caps, and in their figures they pay attention only to wrinkles, defects of the skin and exterior, depicting knotted fingers and limbs disfigured by disease.’85
Bellori’s disgust for Caravaggio’s ‘popular’ art, his lazar-house realism, was echoed by Giovanni Baglione. Unlike Bellori, Baglione was a