Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [33]
Any risk of the truth coming out was dispelled when Carlo Borromeo involved himself in the situation. From his perspective, the plague was a God-given opportunity to force home his severe spiritual message; and, as far as he was concerned, there was absolutely no ambiguity about its source. It had nothing to do with bedlinen or shirts or phantom untori going around wiping poison on gateposts. It certainly had nothing to do with the Spanish or the visit of Don Juan. Its source was human sin. The Milanese had neglected their souls, had confessed too infrequently, had debauched themselves at Carnival and had indulged in luxuries. The plague was being visited upon them by a vengeful God, and even if it seemed terrible it was truly a blessing in disguise – a call to universal repentance that could not be ignored.
Borromeo was so prominent a figure in the events of the plague of 1576–8 that it would eventually be nicknamed after him – remembered forever as la peste di San Carlo. It brought out, in equal measure, his extreme piety and his fondness for the exercise of bureaucratic control. In the first two months of the epidemic, when as many as 10,000 people are thought to have died, the city almost fell into a state of anarchy. There was inadequate provision for the disposal of so many corpses and during ‘the terrible September’ of 1576 – the month of Caravaggio’s fifth birthday – carts heaped high with bodies rolled along the cobbled streets of the town at all hours of the day and night. Piles of half-naked cadavers were left in open view. The much feared monatti, or ‘gravediggers’, public health officials whose responsibility it was to collect the dead and purge houses of disease, were said to be running amok. Dark tales abounded of the monatti pillaging the houses they were supposed to make safe, and raping the few female survivors they found there.
Faced with a city descending into nightmare, Borromeo requested and duly received a brief from Pope Gregory XIII giving him full authority to redirect all the energies of his clergy to the alleviation of the plague. He mobilized his private army and summoned all the priests and monks of his diocese to a vast congregation. To each was assigned a different task. No more corpses were to be left outside. Every victim was to be given a proper burial, ‘with crosses and lights’.42 Borromeo also organized partial quarantines, especially for women, whom he regarded not only as more likely to occasion sin but as the primary carriers of plague (because, he said, they talked so much and constantly visited each other’s houses). On his orders, many of the women of the city were confined within their homes for long periods of time or held in purpose-built isolation cabins. Such measures were not always entirely effective: because women continued to live in terror of the monatti, they often failed to disclose the presence of plague or the existence of the dead, with the result that the disease continued to spread, albeit behind closed doors.
Borromeo’s most successful strategy against the disease was the reopening of Milan’s lazzaretto, one of the first great penitentiaries for the plague built in Italy. This was a vast moated structure that had originally been constructed during the late fifteenth century on the orders of Francesco Sforza, following an outbreak of plague in 1483–5. The lazzaretto – so named after Lazarus, who had been raised from the dead by Jesus and who was often portrayed in art as a plague victim, spotted with buboes – had been left empty for more than fifty years. But it served Borromeo’s purposes well. Into its compound of 288 rooms were squeezed nearly all of Milan’s homeless and destitute (a nearby monastery was also conscripted to accommodate any overspill, confining the spread of the disease to great effect). In its regimented spaces, those who remained healthy could be segregated from those who fell ill. The bodies of