Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [41]
For the next fourteen years Caravaggio would be at the heart of Roman Catholic Christendom, achieving fame and notoriety in equal measure. The most vivid late sixteenth-century account of the city was written by the French essayist and philosopher Michel de Montaigne, who spent several months there in late 1580 and early 1581. That was ten years before Caravaggio’s time. But the city Montaigne described was, by and large, the city that Caravaggio knew.
Montaigne was immediately struck by the ugliness and poverty of the surrounding countryside: ‘The approaches to Rome, almost everywhere, look uncultivated and barren, either for want of soil, or, what I consider more likely, because this city has hardly any labourers and men who live by the work of their hands.’4 The few labourers who were to be encountered in the fields tended to be migrant workers, from the mountains of northern Italy: ‘When I came here I found on the way many groups of villagers who came from the Grisons and Savoy to earn something in the season by labouring in the vineyards and the gardens; and they told me that every year this was their source of income.’5
Rome was a city of migrants. Its shifting population was drawn from every corner of the Christian world – priests seeking preferment, pilgrims seeking salvation, courtesans seeking riches. ‘It is the most universal city in the world,’ proclaimed Montaigne, ‘a place where strangeness and differences of nationality are considered least; for by its nature it is a city pieced together out of foreigners; everyone is as if at home.’6
It was also a suspicious city. On arrival, Montaigne’s baggage was seized. The books in his travelling library were meticulously inspected by Rome’s customs officials. They were looking for forbidden texts, for evidence of heresy, and, although they found little to concern them, Montaigne was struck by the severity of their regulations: ‘the rules were so extraordinary here that the book of hours of Our Lady, because it was of Paris, not of Rome, was suspect to them, and also the books of certain German doctors of theology against the heretics, because in combating them they made mention of their errors.’7 Much to Montaigne’s annoyance, the authorities confiscated a book ‘on the histories of the Swiss, translated into French, solely because the translator – whose name, however, is not given – is a heretic … it is a marvel how well they know the men of our countries.’
More than half a century had passed since the Lutheran troops of Emperor Charles V sacked the city in 1527. But Rome had still not recovered. Thousands had died during the Sack and many others had abandoned their homes. Montaigne was struck by the contrast between the splendour of the papal court – ‘remarkable houses and gardens of the cardinals … palaces divided into numerous apartments, one leading to another’8 – and the squalid, neglected condition of so much of the rest of the city.
Relics and reminders of ancient Rome were everywhere, so that ‘in many places we were walking on the tops of entire houses … in truth, almost everywhere, you walk on the top of old walls which the rain and the coach ruts uncover.’9 But so mangled were the tangible remains of the classical past that Montaigne felt the totality of its destruction more keenly than anything else: ‘those who said that one at least saw the ruins of Rome said too much, for the ruins of so awesome a machine would bring more honour and reverence to its memory: this was nothing but its sepulchre. The world, hostile to its long domination, had first broken and shattered all the parts of this wonderful body; and because, even though