Caravaggio: A Passionate Life Read Free Page A

atonement, through streets littered with putrid corpses and dying men and women, barefoot, with a rope around his neck and carrying a life-sized crucifix.
    Throughout his life, Caravaggio can have known nothing more ghastly than the “Plague of San Carlo,” whose symptoms were shivering, shortness of breath, and a sense of unease, followed by a burning fever, purple tumors, and finally delirium. Fermo’s family lived in daily fear of being dragged off to a lazar house and ending in a plague pit. There were officials, robed in dingy scarlet, whose job it was to remove the sick and the dead, their carts heaped high with naked bodies and preceded by men who rang bells to warn of their approach. Throughout the stricken city, greasy smoke rose from the bonfires of infected clothes, dirty bedding, and discarded bandages. Houses were nailed up and marked with crosses to show that there were corpses inside. Everywhere was the all-pervading stench of putrefaction.
    It was later believed that seventeen thousand died at Milan, and at least another seven thousand in the surrounding countryside. Agriculture and commerce collapsed. No one dared to work in the fields or the shops for fear of meeting the infected. A severe famine broke out. The archbishopsold what was left of his gold and silver plate to buy food for the starving, ordering his servants to make clothes for the naked out of his tapestries.
    Many of Fermo’s friends and neighbors must have been among the dead. During the summer of 1577 Fermo and his family finally managed to escape to their house at the Porta Folceria in Caravaggio, but the plague followed them. Presumably most of the town’s inhabitants ran away to live in the open country, but unfortunately the Merisi were not among them. Fermo died of the pestilence on 20 October 1577, without even time to make a will. Besides his father, Caravaggio lost his grandfather and his uncle, struck down on the same day as Fermo.
    Caravaggio was six. All the men in his family had died, suddenly and horribly, after fourteen months of terror. The child can never have forgotten the doleful warning rung by the bellmen, or the sound made by the wheels of the dead cart as it trundled past his parents’ house in Milan, or when it came to take away his father’s corpse. Death appeared very early in Caravaggio’s life. He was shaped by the plague.

III
    Apprenticeship, 1584–1588
    B ellori is generally regarded as a key source for Caravaggio’s life. He is not always accurate, but he preserves vital information found nowhere else. Born in Rome around 1615, he studied to become a painter, and, when still quite young, joined the Accademia di San Luca, which enjoyed considerable prestige. Instead of pictures, he began to write about artists. In 1671 he became the Accademia’s secretary, and when his
Lives of Modern Painters, Sculptors and Architects
was published the following year, it was greeted with applause.
    Although he was unquestionably a dedicated scholar, he must be read with caution. “When Michele [Caravaggio] was employed at Milan with his father, who was a mason, while making glue for some painters working on a fresco, he was suddenly seized with a wish to become a painter himself and went off with them, devoting all his energy to painting,” Bellori informs us most inaccurately. Caravaggio’s father, Fermo, was not a mason, and Caravaggio is known to have at least begun a formal apprenticeship.
    When Fermo Caravaggio died, his widow lost her social position and most of the presumably substantial income and perquisites from her husband’s post with the marchese. Unable to return to the Maestro di Casa’s apartment in the Sforza Palace at Milan, she had to stay at Caravaggio,living on whatever came in from Fermo’s small estate. By no means reduced to poverty, she nevertheless found it hard to manage, falling into debt within a few years.
    It is reasonable to suppose that, in her straitened circumstances, she was