Caravaggio Read Free Page B

ambivalent coda: “If [he] hadn’t died so soon he would have made a great contribution to art because of the skill with which he painted things from nature, even though he showed poor judgment about representing the good and omitting the bad. Even so, he became well known, and was paid more for painting a head than other painters received for whole bodies, which proves that reputation has more to do with what people hear about an artist than with what they see. His portrait is in the Academy.”
    All we know, or think we know, about Caravaggio has been subject to revision and reinterpretation. Informed guesses made by early biographers harden into facts in the work of later writers, while events recorded by those same biographers and long accepted as truth are later—after years of research have failed to substantiate them—dismissed as anecdotes with little basis in reality. There are protacted, undocumented periods in his short life, and considerable uncertainty about such seemingly straightforward matters as his place and date of birth.
    He was not, as was once believed, poor and uneducated, a self-taught brute who came out of nowhere to overthrow and revolutionize the well-mannered, conventional, moribund art of his day. In fact his family was relatively prosperous. They owned land near Milan, in the village of Caravaggio, where they belonged to the new middle class.
    His father, Fermo Merisi, worked principally in Milan as a chief mason, builder, architect, and majordomo for Francesco Sforza, the Marchese di Caravaggio, whose wife, Costanza, was a member of the illustrious Colonna family. In January 1571 , Fermo married his second wife, Lucia Aratori, who was also from the town of Caravaggio. Francesco Sforza attended the wedding, which suggests that Fermo Merisi was a respected member of the marchese ’s household. That autumn, Fermo and Lucia’s son Michelangelo was born, most probably in Milan.
    His birth occurred at an extraordinary moment in the history of our culture. Shakespeare’s life span, from 1564 to 1616 , was remarkably close to Caravaggio’s. And indeed an intensely Shakespearean spirit—theatrical, compassionate, alternately and simultaneously comic and tragic—suffuses Caravaggio’s art, though it must be noted that Shakespeare possessed a considerably more panoramic and forgiving view of human nature. In the year of Caravaggio’s birth, Galileo was a boy of seven, in Pisa; Claudio Monteverdi was a child of four, in Cremona. Rubens would be born six years later, in Westphalia.
    It was also a period during which whole generations of artists were periodically wiped out by the virulent plagues that were notably indifferent to status, talent, and reputation. Titian was killed by the pestilence that swept through northern Italy in 1576 . During that same epidemic, Carlo Borromeo, the bishop of Milan, was beloved for the courage he showed in remaining in his city to help the suffering victims, even as other church and civic officials fled to the countryside. A seventeenth-century painting shows Saint Carlo Borromeo ministering to the ill, possibly in the Lazaretto di San Gregorio, the plague hospital that, by the early 1800 s, could accommodate 16 , 000 victims.
    Throughout Europe, Italy had long been known for its efficient and relatively—that is, by the abysmal standards of the day—effective methods of plague control, a system that imposed draconian measures on both the sick and the healthy. The dead were buried in mass graves, their clothing and possessions burned. The families of victims were walled up in their houses, and the legal penalties for defying quarantine laws often involved torture and death.
    Understandably, Fermo Merisi decided to move his family from Milan to the comparative and, as it would turn out, deceptive safety of his hometown. As so frequently happened, the disease proved hard to outrun, especially when it was being imported