Caravaggio: A Passionate Life Read Free Page B

relieved to have Michelangelo taken off her hands and apprenticed to a respectable Milanese painter in April 1584, when he was about twelve and a half. He indentured himself to serve his master for four years, in both his house and his workshop at Milan, paying twenty-four gold scudi. In return, he was to be fed, clothed, and taught the painter’s craft.
    His master, Simone Peterzano, may have been respectable, but by no stretch of the imagination could he be described as a great artist. Once a pupil of Titian, he ever afterward signed himself “Titiani Discipulus.” He had become what art historians call a “late Mannerist.” Several churches at Milan still contain his stiff and dreary works with only a faint dash of Titian’s color.
    Surprisingly, Peterzano’s friends included extremely interesting painters. He obtained at least one commission by securing the approval of a genuinely distinguished Mannerist, Pellegrino Tibaldi. Architect as well as painter, Tibaldi had impressed Cardinal Borromeo, who employed him as his favorite church-builder. Among Tibaldi’s paintings was a fine
Beheading of St. John the Baptist
, a theme that would one day inspire one of Caravaggio’s greatest pictures. Tibaldi may have chosen it because of the cardinal’s close links with the Knights of Malta, whose patron saint was the Baptist.
    Peterzano was also a friend of the blind Milanese writer and former painter Giovan Paolo Lomazzo, who, in the year Caravaggio was apprenticed, published a book in Milan explaining precisely what Lombard Mannerists hoped to achieve in their painting. Another friend was Antonio Campi, who painted in the “black” manner, emphasizing light and shadow and anticipating Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro. The boy could easily have seen Campi’s own
Beheading of St. John
at the church of San Paolo in Milan.
    One guesses there was a good deal of friction between master and pupil.Caravaggio had a violent temper. Peterzano came from Bergamo, in Venetian territory, and the Bergamaschi looked down on the Milanese. On the other hand, the inhabitants of the
Contado
, which at Milan meant Bergamo and the Bergamo Alps, were something of a joke among the Milanese. Many came from the mountains to work in the city, or in the plain of Lombardy, and a substantial number had taken over farms abandoned during the French wars. The sophisticated citizens of Milan laughed at them as clodhoppers and bumpkins.
    Presumably Peterzano taught Caravaggio to stretch canvases, grind pigments, mix paints, and use beeswax for softening colors. But he never taught him to paint frescoes, which meant painting on a wall with watercolors on wet plaster. Since most of Peterzano’s commissions were for frescoes, he must have found his apprentice idle and unprofitable. Later, when frescoes were very much in fashion, Caravaggio nearly starved because his lack of proficiency in this field made him almost unemployable.
    Mancini tells us that Caravaggio studied with diligence, if occasionally he did something odd from hot blood and high spirits. Mancini’s word
stravaganza
is associated with Caravaggio throughout his career. Bellori, too, believed that when Caravaggio was an apprentice at Milan he worked hard enough, but only at “painting portraits.” He seems to have visited picture galleries regularly in an eager quest for ideas. Historians can only speculate on where he went, but it looks as if he traveled as far as Brescia, Cremona, Lodi, and Bergamo.
    Bellori was convinced that, as a very young man, Caravaggio had been to Venice, “where he was delighted by the colors of Giorgione, which he copied.” He also believed that Caravaggio derived his naturalism from Giorgione, who, in Bellori’s opinion, was, of all Venetian artists, “the purest and simplest in rendering the forms of nature with only a few colors.” But the accepted view among modern historians is that Bellori’s judgment was faulty, because of insufficient knowledge of