Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [67]
Non so qual si piu maga,
O la donna, che fingi,
O tu che la dipingi
I don’t know who is the greater magician,
The woman, who deceives,
Or you, who paint her
The poet rhymes fingi with dipingi, cheating and painting. So Caravaggio is not merely the painter of rogues, crooks and the enchantresses of the street. He is the painter as vagabond. And suddenly all of his subtle counterfeiting has paid off. His illusions have worked their magic, his paintings have been sold – and he has been invited to live in the house of a cardinal. It is the autumn of 1595 and he is twenty-four years old.
PART THREE
Rome, 1595–9
FRANCESCO MARIA BOURBON DEL MONTE
Caravaggio’s patron looks out at posterity from a vivid drawing by the printmaker, painter and master-draughtsman Ottavio Leoni. He has kind but piercing eyes and a fully receded hairline. His thin lips and slightly weak mouth are disguised, not altogether successfully, by a wispy salt-and-pepper beard. Cardinal Francesco Maria Bourbon del Monte was approaching seventy when he sat for the likeness; twenty years had passed since he had taken Caravaggio into his home. But he was still the same inquisitive, thoughtful man whom the painter had known. His epitaph would stress above all that he had always done his best to support ‘the good arts’.
Ars longa, vita brevis. The picture was done, in a single sitting of perhaps half an hour, in black chalk with white highlights on fine-grained paper the colour of a hazy blue sky. The cardinal seems to endure the ordeal of keeping still with patience and forbearance: unlike many powerful men, he does not frown and fidget his way through a sitting. There is a mixture of worldliness, compassion and curiosity in his gaze. The finishing touch is a tricorn hat, rendered in dense cross-hatching, perched on the smooth dome of his forehead. It makes him look a little bit like a chess piece come to life.
Francesco Maria del Monte may have been the first father-figure in Caravaggio’s life. Giovanni Baglione, terse as ever, described the artist’s time with del Monte as a rare idyll in his otherwise troubled existence. ‘In these quarters Michelangelo was given room and board, and soon he felt stimulated and confident.’1 Stimulated and confident: such adjectives were not often applied to Caravaggio by people who actually knew him. This is the only passage in Baglione’s biography of Caravaggio where he appears as anything other than mad, bad and dangerous to know. We can sense the painter’s genuine relief at having found, at last, a refuge from the storms of his early life.
When Caravaggio met him, del Monte was in his late forties, one of the younger and more energetic cardinals. But, unlike most of those elected to the curia, he was neither particularly rich nor especially aristocratic. He owed his position to a combination of solid family connections, considerable charm and – so jealous contemporaries muttered – outrageous good fortune. Del Monte had been born in Venice, on the Fondaco dei Turchi, in 1549. It is a measure of his family’s importance to the city that the great Venetian painter Titian attended his baptism. So too did the notorious poet, pamphleteer and pornographer Pietro Aretino, a man who might be said to have embodied the deepest contradictions of his age. On the one hand, he encouraged Pope Paul IV to fig-leaf the genitalia in Michelangelo’s frescoes for the Sistine Chapel; on the other, he wrote such works as Tales of Nuns, Wives and Courtesans, the opening scene of which involves numerous nuns, their lubricious mother superior and a copious supply of glass dildos. Also present at the ceremony was the less colourful but widely celebrated architect Jacopo Sansovino.
Despite the pomp that attended his baptism, del Monte would not actually be brought up in Venice. Del Monte’s father,