Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [47]
The ultimate ambition of every artist was the same: namely to work for the cardinals closest to the pope, to secure the most important commissions and win lasting fame – along with the money and security that went with it. The rules of the game were by no means straightforward. Everybody knew of mediocre artists who had been promoted above their abilities, and of deserving painters who had been overlooked. In a world where competition and rivalry were intense, resentment flourished easily, so Antinoro’s was a rumour factory as well as an artists’ supply shop. Stories of sabotage abounded – of the scaffolding that collapsed in the night, of the painter whose rival poisoned his colours with acid so that all his blues turned green in a matter of days. Once an artist got a reputation for bad luck or inefficiency, once it got around that he had ‘the evil eye’, his commissions would soon dry up.18
Though they disagree in some details, taken together Caravaggio’s early biographers paint a convincing picture of a young man struggling to find his way in a harsh and unfamiliar world. During these first years in Rome he had contacts to ease his passage into the city: his uncle, Ludovico Merisi, the priest, was living there in 1591–2, Costanza Colonna in late 1592. But he seems to have fended mostly for himself, moving restlessly from one studio to another in search of employment – and quite possibly instruction too.
Baglione reports that ‘in the beginning he settled down with a Sicilian painter who had a shop full of crude works of art.’19 Bellori, in his marginal notes to Baglione’s life, gives the Sicilian painter a name of sorts – Lorenzo Siciliano, whose line of work was painting crude bust-length heads for general sale. According to Bellori, in Lorenzo’s workshop ‘Caravaggio painted heads for a groat apiece and produced three a day.’ The ‘heads’ in question may have been portraits of the famous men of the past, a subject in vogue among collectors of art since the middle years of the fifteenth century. The mercenary soldier and intellectual Federigo da Montefeltro, ruler of Urbino, had turned his private study into a gallery of such pictures, encompassing figures as various as Cicero and St Thomas Aquinas. If Caravaggio did paint his own versions of such subjects, none is known.
It was while staying with Lorenzo Siciliano that Caravaggio met an ambitious but unpredictable young Sicilian artist called Mario Minniti. According to the eighteenth-century biographer Francesco Susinno, who had access to sources now lost or destroyed, the young Minniti had been forced to flee Syracuse, via Malta, to get away from unspecified troubles. Arriving in Rome, he lodged with a hack painter from Sicily, in whose studio he befriended Caravaggio. Susinno implies that they were united in their dissatisfaction with the type of work which ‘that coarse artisan’ demanded of them, and dreamed together of rising to greater things. They became close friends, Minniti even posing for the impoverished Caravaggio – who could ill afford a model – on several occasions. His moon-shaped, mumpish face can be recognized in a number of early works. Minniti would also prove to be a useful contact much further along the pitted track of Caravaggio’s life.
According to Mancini, during this period Caravaggio also lodged with a beneficed priest of St Peter’s named Pandolfo Pucci, from the town of Recanati. He may have been introduced through his connections with the Colonna: the priest was household steward to a member of the Peretti family, and the Peretti and the Colonna were close. Mancini says that Pucci gave the artist a room and allowed him to paint there in exchange for domestic chores. The deal was not to the painter’s satisfaction, and not only because he was not the sort of man to take pleasure in doing