Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [72]
The pattern is set by Amayden’s discussion of Ferdinando de’ Medici’s patronage of del Monte. He begins with the phrase ‘It is said’, eternal refrain of the unreliable reporter. In this case, ‘it is said’ that del Monte wormed his way into Ferdinando’s affection by arranging clandestine trysts between the young Medici buck and the wife of another man, ‘the bride of one Cesarino’. The double calumny is followed up instantly by a sly denial of which Shakespeare’s Iago would have been proud: ‘this nevertheless I would not believe, knowing perfect friendship arises out of virtue, not vice.’10
Not only is Amayden’s del Monte an accomplice to adultery. He also turns out, at the end of the biography, to be a closet homosexual with a particular fondness for young men. The author’s explosion of this bombshell inevitably casts something of a shadow over his earlier, flatly dutiful assertion that del Monte was an intellectually enlightened patron of the arts and sciences who ‘was very liberal to painters, chemists and similar’. The scandalized reader is naturally inclined to wonder whether the cardinal might have asked for certain favours, from certain young men, in return for his support. The very last paragraph of Amayden’s life of del Monte addresses the question in the author’s characteristic style and leaves the matter open:
He was of unusual sweetness of behaviour, and loved to be familiar with youths, not, however, for a criminal reason, but from natural sociability. This is presumably connected with the fact that he prudently hid it before Urban was elected. When Urban was made pope he threw off all restrictions; in the longed-for reign he indulged his inclination openly, and, though aged and almost blind, more a trunk than a man and therefore incapable of allure, a young man of short stature got a benefice from him.11
The image of del Monte in old age as an absurd and enfeebled pederast is hardly flattering. It is also, in all probability, a fiction. Amayden spent his life in the service of Spain, promoting the cause of the mighty Habsburgs with unwavering constancy and taking every opportunity to blacken the names of their enemies. The pro-French faction at the papal court was anathema to him and he had a professionally ingrained hatred of the Medici. So this was a man with every motive to slander the memory of del Monte, whose curial vote had always been cast in favour of the Medici and their French allies. Amayden’s story about del Monte belatedly coming out of the closet in 1623, on the accession of Urban VIII, should also be read as a slander aimed at the pope himself. The subtext is that Urban’s reign was so licentious that every sin suddenly dared to show its face. This too fits with the hispanophile Amayden’s anti-French agenda, since Urban VIII had shown great favour to Cardinal Richelieu, Governor of France under Louis XIV.
Despite its implausibility, Amayden’s text has insidiously shaped the legend of Caravaggio. It has fostered a deeply fanciful view of del Monte’s household as a louche pleasure palace, subversively lodged at the heart of Catholic Rome. Through the rooms of this imaginary Palazzo Madama passes a parade of freethinkers and sexual outsiders, mostly exquisite young men. The shadowy figure of del Monte, libertine masquerading in a cardinal’s robes, looks on with a mischievous twinkle in his eye. Viewed through the lens of this seductive fantasy, many of the pictures that Caravaggio painted during his sojourn with del Monte are correspondingly distorted. They become thrillingly decadent