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By Root 1366 0

Caravaggio’s youth was not a Spaniard but an Italian. Carlo Borromeo was a dour and deeply pious man with a fierce sense of mission. He became Archbishop of Milan in 1565. He saw the city as the world itself in microcosm, a place teetering on the brink of damnation, teeming with sinners to be converted and souls to be saved. Like the ascetic Dominican friar Savonarola, who had preached in Florence almost a hundred years before, Borromeo galvanized the Milan of Caravaggio’s childhood into regular paroxysms of mass repentance. His appearance, gaunt, hollow-cheeked, charismatically severe, was itself symbolic: a visible sign, like the rags adopted four centuries earlier by St Francis of Assisi, that Borromeo had renounced wealth and privilege to follow directly in the footsteps of Christ and his apostles.

Although he would become one of the most radical reformers of the Catholic faith and way of life, he had first been pressed into the service of the Church by the forces of old-fashioned nepotism. His uncle, Pope Pius IV, appointed him to the position of his own private secretary and elevated him to the rank of cardinal when Borromeo was still barely in his twenties (and despite the fact that he had received no theological training). Yet he soon justified that favouritism. A skilled negotiator, he played a vital part at the end of the Council of Trent. This was the hugely significant nineteenth Ecumenical Council of the Roman Catholic Church – and was, in essence, the Catholic Church’s concerted response to the multiple challenges to its authority posed by the Protestant Reformation.

It was at the Council of Trent that the Catholic Church reaffirmed the importance of the sacraments and the role of the priesthood; that it insisted on the importance of good works as well as of faith, in contradiction of Martin Luther’s belief in ‘justification by faith alone’; that it pronounced its own interpretation of the Bible final, branding any Christian with the temerity to substitute his or her own interpretations a heretic; and that it reaffirmed a multitude of Catholic practices that had been criticized by reformers in the north, such as pilgrimage and the veneration of saints and their relics. These were the basic principles that would underpin the Counter-Reformation, as it became known, the Catholic riposte to Protestant reformers. Yet such was the mood of contention surrounding the questions under debate, in which nothing less than the future of the Catholic Church was at stake, that there were many times when it seemed as though agreement might never be reached. First summoned in 1537, the council was concluded only in 1562–3. Carlo Borromeo was one of the men who saved it, at the last, from breaking down altogether.

He was a hard worker, who rarely slept for more than five hours and often went without food due to the permanent backlog of papal business requiring his attention. But to those who did not know about his punishing regime he may well have seemed like just another corrupt cardinal-nephew, the latest in a long line of such self-serving placemen. The pope appointed him to a dazzling array of positions, including the Protector of Portugal, of Lower Germany and of the seven Catholic cantons of Switzerland; as well as Protector of the Carmelites, Franciscans, Humiliati, Canons Regular of the Holy Cross at Coimbra and of the orders of St John and Christ in Portugal.15 He was also the absentee abbot of a number of monastic foundations. From these sources and his family estates he derived an annual income of around 50,000 scudi, a princely sum in mid sixteenth-century Italy. He was a keen and energetic huntsman who spent lavishly on his horses and hounds, and equally lavishly on his household, which he turned into a magnificent manifestation of his innate asceticism and sobriety: he kept one hundred and fifty servants and retainers, all dressed from head to toe in a uniform of funereal black velvet.

Borromeo in his youth was a volatile combination of pride and piety, but it would take a personal tragedy to transform him