Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [73]
The best corrective to Amayden’s sweet-tongued libel is an eyewitness description of Cardinal del Monte’s household as it actually was in the 1590s, published for the first time in 1991. The recipient of the description was Grand Duke Ferdinando de’ Medici. Its author was a musician and gentleman called Emilio de’ Cavalieri.12 It presents a thoroughly believable, down-to-earth picture of the milieu in which Caravaggio, in his mid twenties, found himself:
Del Monte amazes me in regard to spending that he can live on what he has and do it so honourably. It is true that for his clothing he doesn’t spend a giulio; he has had only one livery made; his coach is also the first he has had; he makes the best of what he has; he has bought himself a carriage and with this he keeps himself; the mouths he feeds in all don’t amount to fifty; he doesn’t keep horses or gentlemen but his servants are treated well and given good meals – all that is seen through your highness’s favour of a beautiful home, [the fitting out and decoration of] which is now finished; as a cardinal of Rome, he formally receives at table in the morning with his silverware; and he is courted by more Romans than cardinals for his great trafficking, which is all honest, with his metalworkers; and his antechamber is always filled with people; there are no high-ranking clergy. The reason for this is that he is not involved in important transactions and those that come do so only to visit … I have made this speech so that you will know the truth …13
This account is just as partisan in its way as that of Amayden (Cavalieri was a close friend of the cardinal and would later name him as one of his executors), but it has the disorderly ring of truth about it. Del Monte was anything but well off by the standards of most Roman cardinals. His residences were Medici property, not his own. His recorded income was approximately 12,000 ducats a year, by no means a great deal of money for a man in his position, so Cavalieri’s sympathetic description of the household’s thrifty but somewhat threadbare imitation of late Renaissance courtly pomp tallies well with the known facts. The reference to del Monte’s ‘trafficking … with all his metalworkers’ suggests necessary financial dealings conducted on the side. The insistence that ‘he is not involved in important transactions’ with the pope or his fellow grand clerics may have been meant to reassure the grand duke that del Monte was sticking purely to Medici-approved business.
Cavalieri was from an old Roman family associated both with the arts and with artists. The legendary Michelangelo had been close to his father, Tommaso de’ Cavalieri, and had given him a highly finished presentation drawing – possibly The Rape of Ganymede of 1532, now in the Royal Collection at Windsor – as a token of his affections. Emilio himself was a composer and impresario, principally employed at the Medici court from the late 1580s as master of ceremonies for the elaborate entertainments known as intermedii, dramatizations of myth and legend, set to music.
Del Monte and Emilio de’ Cavalieri probably met when the latter was orchestrating the unusually lavish spectacles that marked Grand Duke Ferdinando’s marriage to Christine of Lorraine in 1589. By the early 1590s they had become firm friends. Del Monte was in Florence in 1595 to see a production of Cavalieri’s Gioco della Cieca, an early experiment in musical drama inspired by antiquity.14 Over the next ten years the composer often visited the cardinal in Rome. Cavalieri’s letters back to Florence are a valuable source of information about del Monte’s deep immersion in the musical culture of his time, illuminating his tastes and responses to the music that moved him. They also shed some oblique shafts of light on the very first picture that Caravaggio painted for his new benefactor: a compellingly ambiguous depiction of a group of musical performers, about