Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [46]
This artists’ quarter was a dangerous area of the city. Fights were common and fists were not the only weapons used. In an attempt to deter armed violence, the papal police made a public example of anyone caught wielding a pugnello, the short-handled dagger that was so often Exhibit A in the cases brought before Rome’s criminal tribunals. At the corner of Via del Corso and Via dei Greci, in full shaming view of the city whose laws he had violated, the arrested suspect would be subjected to the strappado, an excruciating form of rope torture. The victim’s hands were tied behind his back, with another loop of rope passed beneath his joined arms. He was then hauled into the air and left dangling for half an hour, the full weight of his body gradually pulling his arms further and further back and behind him. The inevitable result was dislocation of both shoulders. Victims eventually recovered but they did not forget the pain in a hurry. A painter subjected to the strappado could not work for weeks.
At night Caravaggio, his friends and his enemies shared the streets with the city’s prostitutes. Rome’s whores and courtesans had long been one of the sights of the city. In the early 1580s Montaigne had noted a craze for open-topped carriages especially adapted for the purpose of erotic ogling: ‘One preacher’s joke was that we turned our coaches into astrolabes … To tell the truth, the greatest profit that is derived from this is to see the ladies at the windows, and notably the courtesans, who show themselves at their Venetian blinds with such treacherous artfulness that I have often marvelled how they tantalise our eyes as they do; and often, having … obtained admission, I wondered at how much more beautiful they appeared to be than they really were …’17
By Caravaggio’s time the prostitutes were so numerous that they had been coralled by papal edict into their own enclosure by the Tiber, the Ortaccio di Ripetta – a name which joked that the place was a kind of reverse Eden, since the literal meaning of ortaccio was ‘evil garden’. But they would escape after dark to ply their trade in the ill-lit streets around the Piazza del Popolo. They were an embarrassment to the authorities because their very presence in such great numbers represented a blatant betrayal of Christian ethics at the very heart of the Catholic world.
Rome was not just an overwhelmingly male city; it was a city full of young and unattached men competing desperately with one another for favours. The city’s whores were a much needed outlet for the accumulated sexual energy of this male-dominated, testosterone-fuelled society. But they were also, often, an occasion for violence in themselves. Some girls offered certain services for free to clients whom they liked, which could easily breed resentment. For an artist, the service might be posing naked for a picture (painting the nude model was officially illegal and this was one way of getting around the rules). But if the girls’ pimps discovered such an arrangement, there was generally trouble.
The young artists who came to Rome to make a name for themselves lived on top of each other, competed for the same work, drank in the same taverns, frequented the same restaurants and bought their materials – paints, canvases, stretchers – from the same artists’ supplier. His name was Antinoro Bertucci and he had a street stall on the Corso. Painters and sculptors of all nationalities would meet there, to buy what they needed for the next day’s work and to discuss the latest gossip and news – to find out about workshop vacancies, to learn who was in and who was out with this or that influential prelate or cardinal. A visit to Antinoro’s in the evening was also a good way to dodge the curfew regulations, because the paint-seller kept a fire burning at all hours. Going out for heat and light was a legitimate excuse