Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [43]
CLEMENT VIII
Caravaggio arrived in Rome some seven or eight months after the election of a new pope. Clement VIII was determined to carry on the work begun by his predecessors, albeit in a somewhat less militant style. He was a shrewd, cautious and deeply pious man, whose pontificate was marked by a relaxation of hostility towards the culture and mythology of antiquity. In the private sphere, at least, it became permissible to commission paintings on profane subjects from the artists of the city. So it was that during the 1590s the Bolognese painter Annibale Carracci covered the ceiling of the Palazzo Farnese – the palace of Cardinal Odoardo Farnese, one of the richest men in all Italy – with a dizzying cornucopia of nudes re-enacting the loves of the gods on earth, in the air and in the water. There had been nothing like this joyful celebration of Eros in Rome since the Renaissance.
Clement VIII had been elected, on 30 January 1592, on the strength of his supposed moderation. In practice, he would tread a fine line between political pragmatism and Counter-Reformation zeal. He could be ruthless in the suppression of heresy and dissent, so the Rome that Caravaggio knew could hardly be described as a haven of creative and intellectual freedom. It was under Clement’s pontificate that the speculative mystic Giordano Bruno – who believed in a thousand different worlds spinning through space, but denied the existence of God – was burned at the stake in 1600. Clement was not actively hostile to Philip II of Spain, but he set out to emancipate the papacy from what he perceived as undue Spanish influence. Rival French and Spanish factions lobbied tirelessly for influence in Rome, and at times their disagreements spilled over into street fights and public brawls. Clement steered a skilful middle course. He cultivated closer relations with France, acknowledging the legitimacy of Henri IV’s claims to the throne and thus paving the way for the French king to renounce Protestantism and return to the Catholic fold. He then brokered the peace of Vervins of 1598, which effected a rapprochement between Henri IV and Philip II.
The French king’s conversion was a tremendous coup for the Catholic Church and would come to be considered the greatest triumph of Clement’s reign. (The pope also courted James I of England, whose queen, Anne of Denmark, was already a convert to Catholicism, but to no avail.) At home he did his utmost to restrict the powers of the aristocracy, reining in the feudal barons of the Papal States at every opportunity. In 1597, when the venerable Este dynasty failed due to the lack of a male heir, he promptly claimed title to the family’s fiefdom of Ferrara and incorporated it into the papal states. Clement revised the Vulgate, promulgated a new edition of the Index librorum prohibitorum and took his duties as Bishop of Rome no less seriously than his role as supreme pontiff. He curbed prostitution, introduced a general ban on the carrying of weapons in public, outlawed duelling, made libel a capital offence and sought to enforce the strict celibacy of his clergy. The papal sbirri, the constabulary, were a vital tool in his control of the city. They were the equivalent of the Bishop of Milan’s famiglia armata, but even more numerous. They were given wide-ranging powers, including the power to stop and search anyone suspected of heresy, of bearing arms or of being out after curfew without good cause. They did much of their work at night and were known for the dark cloaks that they wore to conceal themselves as they tailed their suspects, or paid unannounced visits to the houses of witnesses and potential informers.
Punishment, by contrast, took place in broad daylight. Death by execution was a grim public spectacle, a theatre of retribution designed to instil fear and the spirit of penitence into all who witnessed it. In 1581 Montaigne had observed the last moments of ‘a famous robber and bandit