Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [261]
35. All quotations from Sandrart taken from the translation given in Walter Friedlaender, Caravaggio Studies, pp. 263–6.
36. See Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, Gaston du C. de Vere (trs.), David Ekserdjian (ed.), vol. 1 (London, 1996), p. 860.
37. Cited in Peter Burke, The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy (Cambridge, 1987), p. 98.
38. See Helen Langdon, The Lives of Caravaggio, p. 42.
39. See Helen Langdon, Caravaggio: A Life, p. 78. Langdon writes (and lectures) particularly well about Caravaggio’s pictures of rogues. The idea that the cardsharps are rather like wasps in human clothing – see below – I owe to her.
40. See Helen Langdon, The Lives of Caravaggio, p. 42.
41. Mancini, cited in Howard Hibbard, Caravaggio (London, 1983), p. 350 (he was writing about the later version, a picture that he particularly loved, but his remarks are equally applicable to the painting owned by del Monte).
42. Cited in Todd P. Olson, ‘The Street has Its Masters: Caravaggio and the Socially Marginal’, in Caravaggio: Realism, Rebellion, Deception, Genevieve Warwick (ed.) (Delaware, 2006), p. 76.
43. The quotations reprinted here have been extracted from the essay ‘Perceiving a Counter-Culture’, in Peter Burke, The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy, pp. 63–75. My summary of the different types of beggar is an abridged version of Burke’s.
44. Ibid., pp. 65–71. My discussion of poverty, religion and politics throughout this section of the book owes a great deal to Burke’s lucid analysis.
45. See Antonio Maria Cospi, Il giudice criminalista, pp. 374–7.
46. Ibid.
47. Cited in John F. Moffitt, ‘Caravaggio and the Gypsies’, Paragone, vol. 53 (2002), p. 141.
48. Cited in D. J. Gordon, ‘Gypsies as Emblems of Comedy and Poverty’, Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, vol. 23 (1944), pp. 39–42.
49. Ibid.
50. See John F. Moffitt, ‘Caravaggio and the Gypsies’, p. 134.
51. Giuseppe Pavoni, Diário, 1589, pp. 29–30, cited in Kenneth Richards and Laura Richards, The Commedia dell’Arte: A Documentary History (Oxford, 1990), p. 74.
52. Ibid., p. 60.
53. Tommaso Garzoni, quoted in ibid., pp. 221–2.
PART THREE: ROME, 1595–9
1. See Helen Langdon, The Lives of Caravaggio, p. 42.
2. See Creighton Gilbert, Caravaggio and His Two Cardinals (Pennsylvania, 1995), p. 116.
3. See Helen Langdon, Caravaggio: A Life, p. 79.
4. See Zbgniew Wazbinski, Il Cardinale Francesco Maria del Monte 1549–1626 (Florence, 1994), p. 77, cited in Helen Langdon, Caravaggio: A Life, p. 81.
5. Decorated with languorous, graceful figures and a flying putto, it is now one of the treasures of the British Museum.
6. He might have appreciated the French Romantic painter Delacroix’s slashing cut through that particular Gordian knot: the observation that a painter’s every brushstroke necessarily incorporated the act of drawing.
7. See Helen Langdon, Caravaggio: A Life, p. 96.
8. For del Monte, Mancini, health care and alchemy, see Silvia De Renzi, ‘ “A Fountain for the Thirsty” and a Bank for the Pope: Charity, Conflicts and Medical Careers at the Hospital of Santo Spirito in Seventeenth-Century Rome’, in Health Care and Poor Relief in Counter-Reformation Europe, Ole Peter Grell, Andrew Cunningham and Jon Arrizabalaga (eds.) (London, 1999), pp. 102–31.
9. De Renzi’s scholarly study of the hospital (see above) concludes, ambiguously, that ‘Reasons to apply for a job at the Santo Spirito could be various: a somewhat difficult-to-detect religious and moral commitment, and the more evident search for a prestigious position, were interwoven.’
10. See Creighton Gilbert, Caravaggio and His Two Cardinals, p. 205.
11. Ibid. Gilbert has done all scholars of Caravaggio and del Monte a service by so thoroughly exposing Amayden’s untrustworthiness as a biographer.
12. The letter in question was discovered in the Florentine State Archives by the scholar Franca Trinchieri Camiz, who published it for the first time in 1991. See Franca Trinchieri Camiz, ‘Music and Painting