Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [70]
Del Monte was forever buying and selling works of art, antiquities, precious stones, sculptures and curiosities. He kept a sharp lookout for anything that might interest his Medici patrons. In 1607 he excitedly reported his acquisition of some fragments of clothing, discovered on the Appian Way, that had once belonged to a Roman consul alive at the time of First Punic War. He was sending them to the grand duke as a gift, he wrote, so that he could study ‘the weaving of those times’ (as ruler of Florence, a city at the centre of the Italian textile trade, Ferdinando could reasonably be assumed to take an interest in such a find).
The cardinal was an insatiable accumulator of all kinds of things, but above all he accumulated paintings. His collection included allegories and narrative pictures as well as a number of still lives – and, of course, Caravaggio’s Cardsharps and Gypsy Fortune-Teller, those pioneering experiments in the painting of contemporary rogues and tricksters. Inventories show that at his death del Monte owned around 600 paintings, enough to furnish an entire museum. He possessed copies of celebrated pictures by masters of central Italian painting such as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael. But he was also drawn to the very different traditions of Venetian painting, owning no fewer than five pictures attributed – possibly with more optimism than accuracy – to Titian. The names of Palma Vecchio and Jacopo Bassano also figure in the lists, alongside that of Giorgione, an artist to whom Caravaggio was often compared in his youth.
The Venetian tradition valued colore above disegno, emphasizing the primacy of colour rather than design – whereas for the great painters of central Italy, the Tuscan–Roman axis of art for which Giorgio Vasari was such a vocal and persuasive spokesman, drawing was the foundation stone of all excellence. Caravaggio seems to have had almost no interest at all in theories of art. But he shared the Venetian preference for working on canvas, rather than in the medium of fresco. In the ages-old debate about the relative merits of disegno and colore he might have sided with the Venetians.6 Not a single independent drawing survives by Caravaggio’s hand. Even X-rays of his finished work have failed to yield anything resembling a conventional underdrawing.
The nature of the collections in the Palazzo Madama may have reflected the cardinal’s roots in Urbino. Like Federigo da Montefeltro, whose studiolo was lined with portraits of famous men, del Monte made a point of collecting images of those whom he admired. By far the greatest part of his collection was made up of portraits, a pantheon of intellectual and spiritual heroes. A late inventory refers to ‘277 pictures without frames … of various popes, emperors, cardinals and dukes and other illustrious men and some women’.7 In addition, the collection contained 67 paintings of saints. These too were portraits of a kind – images of those individuals from sacred history whom the cardinal especially venerated.
The breadth of del Monte’s interests was reflected not only in the various rooms of his palace, which contained a well-stocked library and an extensive collection of scientific instruments, but also in the wide circle of his acquaintances. Del Monte collected remarkable men in real life as well as in art. He knew writers, bibliophiles and collectors of rare manuscripts. He knew musicians and composers. He knew alchemists, astronomers and others working on the ill-defined border between medieval belief and modern enquiry.
Inspired by the researches of his own brother, Guidobaldo, del Monte took a lively interest in scientific discovery. He was an early and enthusiastic supporter of Galileo, and played a crucial role in the astronomer’s career by helping him to secure the patronage of the Medici. Without the powerful support and protection of Florence’s ruling dynasty, some