Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [171]
Pasqualone’s exact words in Italian when first describing the girl were ‘una donna chiamata Lena che sta in piedi a Piazza Navona’ – literally, ‘a woman called Lena who stays on her feet in the Piazza Navona’. This way of describing a woman who can always be found standing in a certain place carries an insinuation; the phrase is still current Italian slang for a streetwalker, a whore. There was in fact a known prostitute called Lena Antognetti working in the area at around this time, who was arrested in Piazza Catinara, the present-day Piazza Cairoli, opposite the church of San Carlo ai Catinari, on the night of 1 November 1604.91 She was apparently on her way home but was stopped for being out after curfew.
The young notary’s second remark about Lena is even more intriguing. He baldly says ‘e donna di Michelangelo’, which literally means ‘she is Caravaggio’s woman’, but implies a particular form of possession. Pasqualone pointedly does not describe Lena as ‘la donna di Michelangelo’ but as ‘donna di Michelangelo’: not ‘the woman of Caravaggio’ but simply ‘woman of Caravaggio’, a phrase that objectifies her and carries the suggestion that she is one of several such women. Pasqualone might simply have been saying that Lena was one of several prostitutes frequented by Caravaggio,92 but it is also possible that he meant to imply that she was one of several prostitutes controlled by Caravaggio – and that the painter, therefore, was a part-time pimp.
Pasqualone’s remarks offer an explanation for much of Caravaggio’s seemingly random nocturnal escapades and unpredictable behaviour. His life becomes no less violent, but more logical. Caravaggio certainly used whores as models. He painted Fillide Melandroni and, quite possibly, Fillide’s friend Anna Bianchini. He painted Lena the streetwalker, and according to Giulio Mancini, who knew Caravaggio well, at least one other prostitute modelled for him in Rome. Perhaps he and his friends just happened to know a lot of whores and courtesans – after all, such women tended to move in the same circles and live in the same places as painters, sculptors and architects. But it is conceivable that there was more to it than that. Caravaggio needed women to model for him, so rather than be at the mercy of pimps for a reliable supply of girls, why not secure his own small team of whores? He would get free use of female models, which was by no means otherwise easy to arrange. He would not be beholden to anybody, which always made him uneasy. He would earn a bit of extra money on the side, and there would have been some free sex. For their part, the prostitutes would get their own livelihood, and a formidable protector.
Caravaggio used his contacts in high places to ensure that he could carry a sword and a dagger with impunity wherever he went. If he could not always actually produce a licence, he could usually count on Cardinal del Monte, or his majordomo, to get him out of trouble. Maybe one of the reasons Caravaggio went about armed the whole time was that when he was out on the street, he was also out on duty, looking out for ‘his’ women.
Many of the known incidents involving him lend at least circumstantial support to the hypothesis. What kind of argument over a whore could have led to a sudden, brutal assault of the kind perpetrated by Caravaggio on Pasqualone? The romantic answer is that both men were in love with the girl. But if that were so, a duel would have been the solution. It would have been a matter of honour, whereas Caravaggio treated his victim with a calculated show of contempt.93