Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [42]
Like any other migrant worker from the north, Caravaggio would have entered the city through the Porta del Popolo, into the Piazza del Popolo. In those days the great square was flanked on its northern side by the church and monastery of Santa Maria del Popolo, and on the south by a line of ordinary houses. Attempts had recently been made to aggrandize this main avenue of entry to the city. In 1587 an obelisk had been erected in the middle of the square. A marble fountain had been added too, but still the piazza was anything but grand. A traveller just arrived might get something to eat from one of the fritter vendors at the foot of the obelisk. He might sit with his back to the stump of a classical column – there were several protruding from the ground, like broken teeth – to munch his snack. There was a drinking trough nearby, used by farmers bringing pigs and goats to market, and a watering place where women did their laundry in the open air.
Much of Rome was still down at heel, as it had been when Montaigne visited. But by the time of Caravaggio’s arrival the city was in the throes of a great transformation. In the spring of 1585 a devout Franciscan, Felice Peretti, Cardinal of Montalto, had been elected Pope Sixtus V. Energized by the same sense of mission as the formidable Carlo Borromeo – with whom he collaborated on an edition of the writings of St Ambrose – he set out to rebuild Rome both spiritually and physically. The edicts of the Counter-Reformation, handed down at the Council of Trent, were to be scrupulously observed. The fabric of the city itself had to be transformed into the visible symbol of a triumphantly reaffirmed Catholicism.
Under Sixtus V and his immediate successors, the appearance of Rome was dramatically altered. Seven grand new radial avenues were created to link the seven principal Christian basilicas and to ease the passage of pilgrims through the city. Many of the ancient Christian sites of Rome – including the catacombs, the tombs of the early martyrs – were excavated and restored. The dome of St Peter’s, begun by Bramante nearly a century earlier, continued by Antonio da Sangallo and finally redesigned by ‘the divine’ Michelangelo, had at last been completed. Within a year of Caravaggio’s arrival a gleaming ball topped by a golden cross had been mounted above its lantern.
As if to justify Montaigne’s assertion that ancient Rome still ‘terrified the world’, its vestiges were yet more thoroughly subjected to Christian zeal. Prominent remains of antiquity were appropriated – moved, transformed, sometimes defaced and demolished – to demonstrate the eternal triumph of a resurgent Catholic Church over paganism and heresy alike. Sixtus V’s principal architect, Domenico Fontana, transported a vast obelisk from the Circus of Nero to the square of St Peter’s. Inscriptions were added to its base, declaring that a monument erected to the impious cults of the ancient gods had been brought to ‘the threshold of the apostles’ and consecrated to ‘the undefeated cross’.11 The old Renaissance spirit of admiration for the art and literature of the classical past began to be regarded with a distrust that bordered on outright hostility.
The same, severe repudiation of pagan antiquity had been expressed by one of the most prominent commissions of Sixtus’s predecessor, Gregory XIII: Tommaso Laureti’s painting The Triumph of Christianity – a fresco decoration for the Sala di Costantino in the Vatican Palace, completed in the mid 1580s. In a chilly atrium, a statue of Mercury lies shattered at the foot of an image of Christ on the Cross. The fragments of stone that symbolize the destruction of the ancient gods – hand, torso, decapitated head – have been placed in the foreground, at the start of a brutally insistent single-point perspective scheme. The vanishing point of the picture is like a black hole, where all energy converges. The painter rushes the eye from pagan idol to redeeming Christ and beyond