Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [34]
The man whom Borromeo installed in charge of the lazzaretto was a Franciscan friar named Fra Paolo Bellintano, who later published a detailed account of his methods. Under his stewardship, the lazzaretto became a kind of centralized fortress for the management of plague. He employed a team of sbirri – policemen, or constables, recruited like himself from within the Franciscan order – to maintain discipline within the lazzaretto itself, and enforce their own standards on those working with plague victims in the city at large. The sbirri were, he wrote, an essential part of his tactical plan:
Many needs arose during the day which could not be remedied without these. I dare to say that without them Milan would have become a den of thieves. How would I have been able to hold back so many monatti who cleaned out the houses without fear of justice? Decrees and proclamations could have been made without end, and they would not have feared a thing. But they saw that almost every day I had people whipped, birched, imprisoned, scourged, tied to a column, and that I imposed other punishments besides. And they did not want to become familiar with all this [i.e., suffer the same fate themselves].43
As a result, he noted with tight-lipped satisfaction, the behaviour of the monatti was soon much improved.
Bellintano’s account of the methods applied within the lazzaretto graphically demonstrates how the terrors of the plague were used to scourge the collective Milanese soul. The people were being punished for their attachment to the pleasures of Carnival, yet Bellintano himself takes a positively carnivalesque relish in the ways that he and his sbirri devised to ensure their penitence. He tells the story of how, one night, the inmates put on a secret dance to raise their spirits. One of his fellow Franciscans, Fra Andrea, got wind of the party and determined to puncture the festive mood. He went to the plague pit in the middle of the lazzaretto and retrieved the bloated corpse of an old woman. As he heaved her on to his shoulders, a great belch of air was expelled from her swollen guts. Unperturbed, he told her to keep quiet and get ready for a dance. He went to the room where the inmates were dancing and asked to join their party. When they opened the door, he threw the dead body into their midst, shouting out ‘Let her dance too!’ There then followed a brief sermon, after which, Bellintano drily observes, ‘the dance ended.’44
Public counterparts to such dark, private theatricals were the processions organized by Carlo Borromeo. Believing that the only way to salvation was passionate identification with the suffering body of the Lord, he staged a series of re-enactments of Christ’s journey to Calvary. In October 1576 he announced three days of fasting and ordered that Milan’s most prized relic, a nail said to come from the True Cross on which Christ had been crucified, be taken out of the Cathedral:
His holiness performed the three processions dressed di mestitia, with a large rope around his neck, barefoot and hooded, dragging his clothes on the ground, and with a large Crucifix in his arms. And on the Sabbath he carried the Holy Nail in procession, supplicating God by the merits of His Most Holy Passion to turn away the ire he had conceived against this people, and use them with mercy. He went in the same habit, and manner, as the previous days, but was also accompanied by about a thousand flagellants, who beat themselves continuously, causing great pity in whoever saw them. All the portable relics of the city were also carried in procession that day. But that which most moved the people to tears, penitence and dolour was [the sight of] the illustrious Cardinal in such sad and mournful dress, that great black cross on which he