Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [21]
The mass of directives issued from the archiepiscopal palace of Milan must have occasionally wearied even the most conscientious of the Milanese clergymen whose task it was to enforce them. Here for example is the archbishop on the intricacies of the holy-water stoup, its placement, its design, its necessary accessories:
[The holy-water stoup] should not be put outside, but rather inside the church, accessible to those who enter and at their right hand, if possible. One font should be placed on the side where men enter and another … where the women enter. These [stoups] should not be near the wall but distant from it in proportion to the space that is there. They should be supported … on a small pillar, or some type of base on which nothing profane appears. There should be a sprinkler on a small metal chain hanging from the rim … it should not terminate with a sponge rather than bristles. It may terminate with a sponge only if it is enclosed in a silver, tin, or brass-perforated knob that has bristles on the outside.20
The bristles about which Borromeo was so particular symbolized the cleansing branches of hyssop that purify the souls of the faithful in the ancient biblical psalm (Psalm 50): ‘Sprinkle me with hyssop and I shall be cleansed; wash me and I shall be made whiter than snow.’
Many years later, near the end of his life, when Caravaggio was a fugitive from justice in the Sicilian town of Messina, he was offered some holy water in a little church. The story is told by Francesco Susinno, a Messinese writer of artists’ lives. It suggests that Caravaggio may still have carried with him some sardonic remembrance of the obsessive concern with the purification of souls that had coloured so much of his childhood and youth in Milan: ‘One day he went into the church of the Madonna of Pilero with certain gentlemen, and the politest of them stepped forward to offer him some holy water. Caravaggio asked him what it was for, and was told ‘to cancel venial sins’. ‘Then it is no use,’ he said. ‘Because mine are all mortal.’ That terse remark captures the darkest of the painter’s moods – the sullen conviction that nothing, certainly no holy water, could ever wash his soul clean or whiten the stain of his sins.
‘EGO TE ABSOLVO’
For Carlo Borromeo, confession was the Church’s greatest weapon in the war on sin and evil. His highest priority was to regularize and control the administering of the sacrament of penance – which he believed could be used not only to mould the individual conscience but to redesign society. In Borromean Milan the hearing of confession was restricted to trained teams of diocesan confessors, who were allowed to operate only under direct licence from the archbishop himself. Each confessor was obliged to attend weekly classes to hone his confessional technique and receive the latest instructions from Borromeo. The archbishop told his confessors that they were even more important than the parish priests when it came to the saving of souls; he told them that they ‘have the souls in their hands’ and ‘speak to Jerusalem’s heart’.21
In 1566 a new Roman Catechism had been composed, under Borromeo’s supervision, in which the sacrament of penance had been described as ‘the fortress of Christian virtue’. It had preserved the Roman Catholic Church from the attacks of the devil and his heretical minions, and it was to be considered responsible for ‘whatever today’s Church has preserved in holiness, piety and religiosity’.22 Borromeo went to great lengths to ensure that ‘the fortress of virtue’ remained pure of carnality or corruption. He popularized a new article of furniture for the administering of the sacrament,