Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [257]
And what of those with whom Caravaggio drank and dined, quarrelled and fought? What of those whom he loved and hated? What of the waiter with the cut face, the sharp-eyed barber-surgeon, the disgruntled notary? What of all the pimps and soldiers and the boys and girls who lived by selling their bodies? Some survived in his paintings, whether as villains or martyrs, torturers or apostles. Most disappeared without trace. But one fragment has survived: the last will and testament of Fillide Melandroni.
Fillide had been Caravaggio’s first model. She was the disconcertingly sexy St Catherine, as well as the girl holding the flower up to her breast and gazing out with a smouldering, coquettish stare in the portrait he had painted of her in 1598. She was Fillide the courtesan, who perhaps won the heart and certainly lightened the purse of the Florentine aristocrat Giulio Strozzi.
In the summer of 1618, Fillide was thirty-seven or thirty-eight years old, close to the same age as Caravaggio when he died. She was still living in Rome, but by now she had her own house. She had clearly gone up in the world. But she was mortally ill, perhaps with the same form of venereal disease that had cut short the life of Caravaggio’s friend Onorio Longhi. On 3 July she died.
Soon after, an inventory was made of her now considerable possessions. Her main reception room was decorated with gilded leather panels. At its centre stood a table covered with a Turkish carpet, and around the table there were eight leather-covered chairs. In the bedroom she had a large gilded four-poster bed with a green taffeta canopy and a chest containing some lengths of luxury fabric. She had books, vases, plants, an inkwell of silvered copper, a pearl necklace, twenty gold buttons and two gold pendants with pearls.
On 19 November her estate was settled and division was made of her goods. The will that she had made four years earlier was read out. It seems that she was happy for all her property to be sold and the proceeds parcelled out, in specified fractions, to her chosen legatees. But she wanted one particular object to go to one particular individual: ‘Item: she states and declares that she has in her house a painting or portrait by the hand of Michelangelo da Caravaggio that belongs to Giulio Strozzi. She wishes it to be restored and consigned to Sr Giulio.’
Fillide’s portrait by Caravaggio, the picture that would be consumed four centuries later by the flames of the Second World War, was the most precious thing that she had. She wanted it to go to Strozzi, her protector, who had allowed her to keep it for so long. Perhaps she liked the thought of being with him, in surrogate, after she died. Perhaps she still loved him.
From the inventory of her possessions and the terms of her will we may think that Fillide was not quite the same woman she had been when Caravaggio knew her. Once, she had shamelessly touted for business as a prostitute in the very shadow of the monastery of the Convertites, the religious foundation for the reform of prostitutes, and had assaulted her rival, Prudenza, in her house directly next door to it, screaming as she did so: ‘You dirty whore! I want to cut you! I want to cut you!’ Now, as well as the portrait by Caravaggio, her house contained three small devotional paintings: of the Nativity, of the Virgin Mary and of the Penitent Magdalen, the prostitute who mended her ways. Her will specified that she wanted to be buried in her parish church. At the end, as death approached, she left several legacies to religious institutions dedicated to the Virgin, so that Masses would be said for her soul after she had died, and a fifth of her entire legacy to the Convertites. The bequest was stipulated in the penultimate clause in her will, set down by the notary in black and white.
But who knows what Fillide really felt, or what she really believed. Like the dark-haired painter she had once