Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [35]
The author of this eyewitness description, the Jesuit Paolo Bisciola, describes how huge crowds were exhorted to join in these mass demonstrations of faith. He also notes, without apparent irony, that ‘on these occasions, the plague grew very much.’ Bisciola’s account is also interesting for its visual detail. He says that Borromeo ordered temporary altars, lit with candles, to be set up throughout the streets of the city, ‘so that to walk in the streets was like walking in church’. As autumn advanced, and as the nights drew in, the city seemed ablaze with ‘the lights of piety and religion’. On a multitude of outdoor altars ‘there burned a great quantity of candles and much incense’. Flame and shadow: Milan had become a city of chiaroscuro.
The artist was five when the plague reached its height, and only a year older when it reached into his life and tore his family to pieces. The sequence of events is charted in a series of documents from the archives. On 20 October 1577 the death was recorded, in Caravaggio, of the artist’s father, Fermo Merisi, his paternal grandfather, Bernardino Merisi, and his (unnamed) grandmother. The document states that they died within a day of each other. An earlier document, of 17 August 1577, indicates that Caravaggio’s uncle Pietro had died earlier in the year. The document in question is a claim to Pietro’s estate, which indicates that he died without having made a will, that is, unexpectedly. It also provides the only explicit link to the plague, stating that Pietro lived in Milan but was in Caravaggio because of the epidemic sweeping the city.46
The archive contains no description of the events that took place in the Merisi household in late October 1577. It was not a notary’s job to paint pictures of human suffering. But the art of Caravaggio’s maturity would be saturated in the ineradicable memory of night terrors. It would be an art of paroxysm and abandonment, filled with images of turmoil in dark places. Towards the end of his life, working in Sicily – the place where Milan’s great plague had started – he would paint a huge altarpiece of the The Resurrection of Lazarus. He himself chose the subject of the picture. It would be a meditation on death and salvation – a work that, though shaded by ambiguity, has a miraculous story to tell. But nothing could change the story of Caravaggio’s own early years. No miracle had raised his father, his grandfather, his uncle, from the dead. By the age of six, Caravaggio had lost almost every male member of his family.
THE BAD APPRENTICE
By 18 February 1578 the plague finally abated. A fifth of the population of the diocese of Milan was dead and everyone else was trying to reassemble their lives. On that day Caravaggio’s mother, Lucia, signed a document in which she assumed legal guardianship of all four of her children. It shows that the family was now resident in Caravaggio.
Nearly a year later, on 21 January 1579, another document shows that Fermo Merisi, her late husband, had died intestate. It apportions his estate and parts of his parents’ estate too. They had also died intestate, on the same night as him, creating a tangle of legal complications. There had evidently been some dispute between Lucia and Fermo’s three half-brothers – a quarrel about who was to get what. Arbitration was necessary. The largest property at issue, Bernardino’s house and land in Porta Seriola (together with his business premises), went to the half-brothers. In exchange Lucia and her children were relieved of Fermo’s debts, which amounted