Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [40]
There are many such tales in the annals of the lives of the artists who thrived, floundered or failed in Counter-Reformation Rome. Here is another example.
An artist catches his mistress in the company of his own younger brother, an assistant in his workshop. He pursues his brother to St Peter’s, where they are busy on a commission, and breaks two of his ribs with a crowbar. He then tries to kill him with his sword, but the brother escapes and seeks sanctuary in a church. Meanwhile, the artist sends his servant to the house of his offending mistress, with instructions to give her a sfregio. He finds her in bed and slashes her face with a razor.2
Neither of these stories directly concerns Caravaggio. The first is about a now forgotten painter whose misdemeanours took place at the start of the seventeenth century. The second involves the flamboyant sculptor Gianlorenzo Bernini, who caught his brother in flagrante with his mistress in 1638. More than thirty years and a gulf of talent separated the two artists but they behaved in an identically hot-headed way. Both men acted in the heat of the moment, spurred on by a slight to their honour – a loss of face punished, with terrible literalness, by cuts and slashes to the actual faces of their victims.
During his own fourteen years in Rome, Caravaggio would become embroiled in more than his fair share of assaults, disputes and bloody vendettas. He was a violent man, but it is important to remember that he lived in a violent world. Throughout seventeenth-century Italy – throughout seventeenth-century Europe – an inflammatory code of honour prevailed. The fama of an individual, by which was meant not only his fame or reputation but also his good name, was paramount. Any insult to it had to be paid for, and the price was often blood. Caravaggio went to greater extremes than his contemporaries, in life as in art. He was no angel, even if he had been named after one. He had a hot temper and was forever spoiling for a fight. But he was not the freak or absolute exception that he has often been painted to be – both by his enemies and by those who have claimed to idolize him.
IN ROME
Having cut all ties with his family, the artist travelled to Rome in the autumn of 1592. Bellori says that Caravaggio went there via Venice, ‘where he came to enjoy the colours of Giorgione, which he then imitated’.3 A brush with Venetian art at this formative moment in his life seems likely, although Bellori overplays Caravaggio’s indebtedness to Giorgione. Giorgione’s work had inspired Titian, the most celebrated painter of Renaissance Venice. But that axis of Venetian painting – rich, brightly coloured, with a strong sense of paint as eloquent, material stuff, to be pushed about with the fingers as well as manipulated by the brush – did not hold the young Caravaggio’s attention. Aside from his innate sense of pictorial drama, he would have little in common with either of those great masters. Only in the paintings of his very last years would he move towards the impressionistic manner of Titian’s later work.
If any Venetian painter touched him to the core it was Jacopo Tintoretto. Tintoretto’s brooding, monumental religious canvases, full of dramatic contrasts of light and dark – lightning strikes of supernatural illumination that shiver like spiritual electricity – are the only late sixteenth-century Italian paintings to prophesy elements of Caravaggio’s own mature style. Simone Peterzano, who liked to think of himself as a painter in the Venetian mould, may well have inspired his unruly apprentice to visit the city. If so, he contributed to the final eclipse of whatever dim influence his own art might have had on Caravaggio’s imagination.
The trip to Venice remains hypothetical, but highly plausible. According to such a version of events, the young Caravaggio arrives in Rome with