Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [258]
Notes
PART ONE: MILAN, 1571–92
1. See Helen Langdon (ed.), The Lives of Caravaggio (London, 2005), pp. 89, 81.
2. The very structure of Bellori’s Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors and Architects consigns Caravaggio to darkness. In arranging the engraved portraits that illustrated his book, Bellori made sure that the artists whom he truly valued be given dignifying attributes such as books or paintbrushes to hold. So for example Nicolas Poussin, one of Bellori’s heroes, holds a book fixed with a fine clasp and gazes out with an expression of grave calm on his face. Caravaggio, by contrast, has his hand on the hilt of a sword and glares nervously sideways with the furtive and guilty eyes of a criminal. One of just twelve artists singled out for inclusion, he has been allowed his place at the table of art history. But he sits on the wrong side, a Judas among the true apostles. For an arresting interpretation of some of the fictional elements of the early biographies see ‘Caravaggio’s Deaths’ by Philip Sohm, Art Bulletin, vol. 84, no. 3 (Sept. 2002), p. 452.
3. See Helen Langdon, The Lives of Caravaggio, p. 57.
4. Ibid., p. 41.
5. Ibid., p. 27.
6. See in particular M. Cinotti, Novita sul Caravaggio (Milan, 1983).
7. For the importance of Caravaggio’s maternal relations and their contacts, Giacomo Berra, ‘Il Giovane Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio: la sua famiglia e la scelta dell’ars pingendi’, Paragone, vol. 53 (2002), pp. 40–128, is the invaluable source.
8. See Richard A. Goldthwaite, Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy 1300–1600 (Baltimore, 1993): ‘Generally speaking … the argument got shifted from the nature of nobility to the behaviour of the noble; and along the way, most of the essential elements of the traditional definition – arms, service, virtue, blood, economic activities – were qualified.’ So many different ideas were ‘bandied about the concept’, the writer adds, ‘that one could have it just about any way he wanted it’.
9. See Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided 1490–1700 (London, 2003), pp. 330–32.
10. See C. Hughes (ed.), Shakespeare’s Europe: Unpublished Chapters of Fynes Moryson’s Itinery (New York, 1967), p. 49; see also D. E. Zanetti, ‘The Patriziato of Milan from the Domination of Spain to the Unification of Italy: An Outline of the Social and Demographic History’, Social History, no. 6 (Oct. 1977), pp. 745–60.
11. See D. E. Zanetti, ‘The Patriziato of Milan’, pp. 750–52.
12. See Thomas Coryate, Coryat’s Crudities (London, 1611), p. 102.
13. See ‘Instrucciones de Carlos-Quinto a Don Felipe su hijo’, in C. Weiss (ed.), Papiers d’Etat du Cardinal de Grenvelle, vol. 3 (Paris, 1842), pp. 267–318. My attention was brought to this document by John Hale, who cites it in his The Civilisation of Europe in the Renaissance (London, 1993), pp. 95–6.
14. See Agostino Borromeo, ‘Archbishop Carlo Borromeo and the Ecclesiastical Policy of Philip II in the State of Milan’, in John M. Headley and John B. Tomaro (eds.), San Carlo Borromeo: Catholic Reform and Ecclesiastical Politics in the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century (Washington, London and Toronto, 1988), pp. 85–111.
15. See Ludwig von Pastor, The History of the Popes (London, 1951), vol. 15, p. 108.
16. See Wietse de Boer, The Conquest of the Soul: Confession, Discipline and Public Order in Counter-Reformation Milan (Leiden, Boston and Cologne, 2001), p.73; Paolo Prodi, ‘San Carlo Borromeo e il Cardinale Gabriele Paleotti: due vescovi della Riforma Cattolica’, Critica Storica, 3 (1964), pp. 135–51.
17. See Agostino Borromeo, ‘Archbishop Carlo Borromeo’.
18. See Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided, pp. 411–12.
19. See E. Cecilia Voelker, ‘Borromeo’s Influence on Sacred Art and Architecture’, in John M. Headley and John B. Tomaro (eds.), San Carlo Borromeo, pp. 173–87.
20. Ibid., p. 178.
21. See Wietse de Boer, The Conquest of the Soul, p. 43.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid., p.122.
24. See Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation: