Caravaggio: A Passionate Life Read Free

abound in rich coaches, and are full of noblesse,” the diarist John Evelyn recorded in 1646. It must have been like this in Caravaggio’s boyhood. Coryate says the suburbs were “as bigge as many a faire towne, and compassed around with ditches of water.” Enclosed by a network of canals, notably the Naviglio, which linked it to Padua, its population of over 100,000 was enormous for the age. There were more than 150 churches, many of them magnificent, and a citadel “of an incomparable strength,” the Castello Sforzesco.
    The duchy of Milan had been ruled by Spain since 1535, through governors who imposed savage taxation. At the same time, a constant flood of gold and silver from Spanish America devalued the currency, so that prices were rising enormously, impoverishing all classes. The regime was deeply unpopular. In April 1572 the governor, Don Luís de Zúñiga y Requeséns, reported to King Philip II at Madrid, “One cannot trust any of the subjects of this state, since many of them are much more sympathetic to France.” He was warning Philip that an uprising against the Spaniards might break out at any moment. Even so, Spain was determined to keep the duchy, the expense of a large garrison and the hostility of the Milanese being small prices to pay for its military and strategic advantages. Occupying Milan not only enabled the Spaniards to control the entire plain of Lombardy but it guarded against any threat of a French invasion of Italy from across the Alps.
    This was the city of Caravaggio’s earliest childhood. When he was five years old, it experienced one of the most terrifying calamities in its entire history.

II
    Carlo Borromeo and the Plague, 1576–1578
    T all, painfully thin, with piercing eyes, Cardinal Borromeo was one of the sights of Milan, celebrating Mass in gorgeous vestments at the Duomo’s high altar, tramping through the meaner streets to visit the sick and the dying. Accessible to all, he was a father to the city’s poor, selling his furniture to feed them, and an uncompromising ascetic who slept on straw and lived on bread and water. His sole luxury was music, in the service of the Church.
    Borromeo embodied the new Catholicism of the Counter-Reformation. He has been called the first modern bishop, because he was the first to found seminaries for training parish priests and because he never left his diocese. Besides re-creating the Milanese clergy, he initiated a massive program of church-building all over Lombardy. As Pope Pius IV’s nephew, he was cardinal secretary during the last session of the Council of Trent, and he was present on 4 December 1563, when the council issued its edict on the visual arts. Caravaggio must have often heard his parents talking about the saint who played such an important part in the lives of their Sforza patrons, and who fascinated everyone in the city.
    As archbishop of Milan, he made many enemies. Alarmed by the extent of his influence, the Spanish governor asked King Philip to remove him as“the most dangerous rebel Your Majesty has ever had,” but Philip wisely refused. Borromeo’s most violent foes were the Humiliati, a degenerate group of Benedictine oblates, or part-time monks, who lived in scandalous luxury on the vast revenues of ninety abbeys. When the archbishop told them to reform, one of the brethren shot him as he knelt at prayer in his chapel, but the bullet merely grazed his spine, and the Pope ordered the immediate dissolution of the Humiliati.
    In August 1576, bubonic plague broke out in Milan, spreading across Lombardy and not coming to an end until 1578. Instead of escaping with the governor and the rich, Borromeo stayed and organized a nursing service and shelters for the sick. He also visited lazar houses, which no one else dared to enter. “He fears nothing,” said a Capuchin who knew him. “It is useless trying to frighten him.” Convinced that the epidemic was a punishment sent by God, he went every day on processions of