Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [31]
The evidence of his art suggests that Caravaggio was profoundly shaped by the insistent, manic ocularity of Borromean piety. He would surely have been a very different artist had he not been exposed to the very particular nexus of Milanese attitudes that linked seeing with guilt-ridden sensuality on the one hand, and salvation on the other. His pictures certainly speak of an intense sensitivity to every aspect of visual experience. So too do his notorious arguments and quarrels. Nearly all of the disagreements that would mark and mar Caravaggio’s life would turn on a glance taken amiss, a perceived slight or insult implying a potential loss of face. When he looked at people, nothing missed his attention and sometimes his sensitivity may have fooled him into seeing things that really were not there. When people looked back at Caravaggio, they did so at their peril.
PLAGUE
In the summer of 1576, when Caravaggio was almost five years old, the city of Milan was struck by an outbreak of bubonic plague. A census taken at the end of that year in the Milanese parish of Santa Maria della Passerella records the presence there of Fermo Merisi and his wife Lucia. Also listed were Fermo’s daughter by his first marriage, Margherita, as well as Giovan Battista Merisi, Caravaggio’s brother, four years old at the time. Mysteriously, there is no mention of Caravaggio himself, or of his two-year-old sister, Caterina, or of his still younger sibling, Giovan Pietro.36
It is possible that by November or December they had already been evacuated from the city to the relative safety of the countryside, although it is not clear why they alone should have been sent away, leaving the equally vulnerable Giovan Battista at risk. Perhaps the censor missed their presence in the household; perhaps they were not there on the day that he came; perhaps Fermo and Lucia hurriedly managed to conceal at least some of their children when the censor visited, making it easier to evacuate them, unnoticed, at a later date. The movement of people and goods was strictly controlled in time of plague, and almost as soon as the contagion had become apparent, in August, Carlo Borromeo had issued edicts prohibiting anyone from leaving the city. At the end of October, as the disease appeared to abate, this quarantine was briefly lifted – although even then only a select group of wealthier families was allowed to leave. Is it possible that Caravaggio’s parents took advantage of their contacts with the Colonna family to secure safe passage for their children, away from Milan, at that time? All that the historical record shows, for sure, is that the whole family had moved to their home in Caravaggio by the autumn of 1577 at the latest.37 Whatever the subsequent course of events, there is no reason to believe that the artist was not living with his parents in Milan when the outbreak struck in August of 1576. So he is likely to have witnessed much of the horror of the epidemic, especially during its early months, at first hand.
The symptoms of bubonic plague (yersinia pestis) are grim and unmistakable. On infection, plague bacteria swiftly multiply in the sufferer’s lymphatic system, affecting tonsils, adenoids, spleen and thymus. Within a day or two, the victim suffers fevers, chills and headaches. Vomiting and diarrhoea follow. But the most decisive sign of plague, the true mark of death, is the appearance of the so-called ‘buboes’ – swellings caused by internal bleeding that appear in the neck, groin and armpits, at the point of the lymph nodes, oozing both blood and pus. Damage then quickly spreads throughout the victim’s underlying tissue, until the whole body is covered in dark, purplish blotches. The majority of sufferers die within about four days of contracting the disease.
To the young Caravaggio and his contemporaries, the plague was a visitation, a mysterious curse, like a torture from