Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [20]
Borromeo saw to it that the Spanish Inquisition, which operated in Spain’s offshore Italian possessions, Sardinia and Sicily, was excluded from Milan. He was able to clip and curtail Spanish power in a number of such ways, largely because he had strong support in Rome. He removed jurisdiction over alleged religious crimes from Milan’s Spanish rulers, insisting that he himself should be the final judge in all such cases. But he also slowly won the grudging respect of the pious Philip II – to whom he explained, in a long and persuasive letter, that his aim was not to usurp Spanish power but to strengthen the Roman Catholic Church.17
For two decades, throughout the formative period of Caravaggio’s life, the archbishop pushed through a multitude of Church reforms intended to control the hearts, souls and minds of the people at large, measures that ranged from the introduction of new confessionals to the segregation of men and women in church. He made no secret of his distaste for self-styled elite clerical associations such as the Theatines or the Barnabites. He actually suppressed one of the orders nominally under his protection, the Humiliati, on the grounds that its membership was restricted to a corrupt, self-serving clique of aristocrats. He was promptly shot in the back at close range by a disgruntled Humiliatus, but survived the attack unharmed – an escape subsequently attributed, by his hagiographers, to divine intervention.
Borromeo was an obsessive regulator and centralizer, and he did his best to turn his clergy into a spiritual equivalent of the famiglia armata – a body of Christian soldiers animated by a single purpose and method. All priests with a pastoral duty were obliged to preach every Sunday and feast day. Reports were gathered from every parish in the diocese and underperforming priests were summoned to the archbishop’s presence to practise their skills in front of him (they also had to leave a written copy of their sermon behind for his perusal). Not least because Milan was on the frontier with partly Protestant Switzerland, Borromeo was determined to turn his diocese into a shining demonstration of revitalized Roman Catholicism – a beacon to those who had erred, the brilliance of which might persuade them to mend their ways. He built new churches by the score and trained up an army of new priests to spread the word of God to their congregations. He founded diocesan seminaries and many schools. By the time of his death some 40,000 children in the diocese of Milan were being educated at any one time, an unprecedentedly high proportion of the juvenile population.18 Caravaggio’s own family would be directly involved in the Borromean spiritual experiment: his only brother became a priest. No one in Milan and its surroundings was left untouched by the archbishop’s plans for spiritual revival.
Borromeo saw sinfulness everywhere and envisaged his priests as an army of spiritual stormtroopers taking the battle to the devil. No detail was too small to escape his eye, especially in the design of churches, which he saw as machines for the purification of an evil world. He wrote entire volumes of instructions about the minutiae of ecclesiastical architecture, the so-called Instructiones, in which he pronounced on matters ranging from the precise amount of space church architects should allow for each member of the congregation (‘one cubit and eight ounces square’ exactly, four square feet in modern terms) to the appropriate scale and decoration of the entrances: ‘the middle doorway must be distinguished by its width and ornamented with sculptures of lions … to represent the Temple of Solomon and the vigilance of bishops.’19 Borromeo was particularly concerned to ensure that men and women be separated from one another in church. He devised movable screens