Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [45]
IN THE ARTISTS’ QUARTER
Like his immediate predecessors, the new pope was determined both to stabilize the foundations of the Catholic Church and to reassert the Eternal City as the radiant centre of Christendom. The beauty of Rome’s churches must compel faith and crush heresy. That is why the city was filled with artists. Painters, sculptors and architects throughout Italy, and further afield, knew that there was more than enough work to go round in Rome. As Florence had been during the fifteenth century, and as Paris would be at the peak of Louis XIV’s power, Rome under Clement VIII was the artistic capital of Europe. The artists of the city were so numerous – at a rough estimate, there were 2,000 of them, out of Rome’s total population of around 100,00014 – that they had their own quarter.
This was an area of a little more than two square miles situated, roughly, between the Piazza del Popolo and the Piazza di Spagna. Artists tended to arrive in groups – whether from Naples or Bologna, Lombardy or Emilia-Romagna, Flanders or France – and to board together to save money; it was not unusual for two or three to share a room, using the space both as bedroom and workshop. Rome could be stiflingly hot, which placed a premium on the lower, cooler floors of rental accommodation. But that suited the traditionally hard-up community of painters, who preferred the less expensive upper floors anyway, because there was more light there to paint by. They particularly favoured houses backing on to the Pincio, the hill perched above the Piazza del Popolo.
Different national groups of artists ran in gangs and swapped racial insults with their rivals. There were stereotypes to fit all. Germans were crude, the Flemish were drunks, and the French were violent thugs hiding behind a veneer of fake refinement. The Italians themselves, according to the exiled English earl encountered in Rome by the hero of Thomas Nashe’s novel of 1594, The Unfortunate Traveller, were addicted to ‘the art of epicurising, the art of whoring, the art of poysoning, the art of sodomitry’.15
An Englishman like Nashe grouped all Italians together, but for them the matter of national belonging was less clear cut. Italians had some sense of communal identity but an even sharper feeling for the distinctions that set them apart from one another. The Bolognese were known to hate the Tuscans, while most Romans treated Sicilians as if they were little better than peasants. Neapolitans were said to be obsessive about horsemanship. The Milanese, as we have seen, were famously keen swordsmen, and naturally unruly – although ‘Lombards’ as a group were often stereotyped as sluggish provincials, heavy of mind and body thanks to their rustic diet.
In 1589 the writer Giovanni Botero went so far as to propose a north–south fissure in the Italian temperament: ‘Those who live in northern countries but not in the extreme north, are bold but lack cunning; southerners on the other hand are cunning but not bold … They are as the lion and the fox; whereas the northerner is slow and consistent in his actions, cheerful and subject to Bacchus, the southerner is impetuous and volatile, melancholy and subject to Venus …’16 The personality of Caravaggio would be hard to locate on this particular map. He does not fit either profile, and in fact he would make his sense of his own singularity the subject of one of his earliest paintings – a self-portrait as Bacchus, but a Bacchus who is suffering and full of melancholy.
CITY OF MEN, CITY OF WHORES
The chronology of Caravaggio’s early years is impossible to establish with precision, although we can work out that he changed his address frequently – ten times or so between 1592 and 1595. The houses changed but the milieu was always the same: the dark network of alleyways clustered around the Piazza del Popolo; the narrow streets bordering the