Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [71]
Del Monte’s interest in science extended to experiment as well as study. He dabbled in alchemy and had a fully equipped laboratory in the Palazzo Madama. Within a year of Caravaggio’s arrival in his household, the cardinal acquired a third residence, a country retreat at Porta Pinciana, up in the hills above the western edge of the city, not far from the Villa Borghese. Here del Monte established a pharmaceutical distillery. The distillation of drugs, whether from plants, metals or other substances, was something of a fad in the elite circles of Roman society at the time. In his Epistolae medicinales, the Sicilian physician Pietro Castelli (1590–1661) noted that the apothecaries of the day worked not only in their own shops but also in the private households of virtuosi.8 The efficacy of the resulting cures could be questionable. The German taxonomist and doctor Johannes Faber publicly boasted that the celebrated ‘Cardinal Dal [sic] Monte’ had given him the recipe for a highly effective drug made from the meat of a poisonous snake. But he did not specify whether he had actually put the medicine to the test. Another of del Monte’s supposed remedies was rumoured to have killed a man.
Faber’s story suggests that the cardinal took an interest in the activities of the Hospital of Santo Spirito, one of Rome’s largest and most important institutions for the care of the poor and the sick. Faber was himself a physician of the hospital, which, in his estimate, provided more than 12,000 people with food, shelter and medical care every year. Del Monte was friendly with another doctor working at the Santo Spirito, Giulio Mancini, Caravaggio’s future biographer. Mancini, born of humble Sienese parents, had trained in medicine in the city of Padua. He got his job at the hospital in 1595 and probably met the painter in del Monte’s house in that same year. That would explain why Mancini knew so much more than the other early biographers about Caravaggio’s dark deeds in Milan and his very first years in Rome.
The Hospital of Santo Spirito was closely connected to the papal court. A post there was often the prelude to a successful career in medicine at the highest level, and so it proved in the case of Mancini, who eventually rose to become physician by appointment to the pope.9 But Mancini’s commitment to the relief of the poor seems to have been genuine, rather than just place seeking. When he died he left his considerable fortune to be distributed among the impoverished students of his native Siena. He was known for his unconventional behaviour and beliefs: a French obituarist wrote that Mancini was an amateur astrologer and un Grand Athé, ‘a great atheist’. Del Monte probably befriended him because of his reputation as an experimental chemist and connoisseur of art. The two men seem to have shared an essentially philanthropic approach to life.
Del Monte was a philanthropist but he was certainly no firebrand of Counter-Reformation piety. In one of his letters he describes an evening spent gambling at the game of hazard at the Farnese Palace, in the company of the cardinal-nephew Pietro Aldobrandini. Having lost heavily – ‘I more than he’, del Monte noted ruefully – both men finished the evening in the company of a pair of courtesans, listening to music. Overall, the pattern of del Monte’s friendships and alliances suggests that he was a worldly, benevolent, diplomatic, curious, open-minded and socially adept man, with a rare sensitivity to genius in other people and a strong sense of Christian charity.
But a considerably more negative picture of him was painted by his contemporary