Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (13 page)

CARLO BORROMEO

The dominant figure in Milan during Caravaggio’s youth was not a Spaniard but an Italian. Carlo Borromeo was a dour and deeply pious man with a fierce sense of mission. He became Archbishop of Milan in 1565. He saw the city as the world itself in microcosm, a place teetering on the brink of damnation, teeming with sinners to be converted and souls to be saved. Like the ascetic Dominican friar Savonarola, who had preached in Florence almost a hundred years before, Borromeo galvanized the Milan of Caravaggio’s childhood into regular paroxysms of mass repentance. His appearance, gaunt, hollow-cheeked, charismatically severe, was itself symbolic: a visible sign, like the rags adopted four centuries earlier by St Francis of Assisi, that Borromeo had renounced wealth and privilege to follow directly in the footsteps of Christ and his apostles.

Although he would become one of the most radical reformers of the Catholic faith and way of life, he had first been pressed into the service of the Church by the forces of old-fashioned nepotism. His uncle, Pope Pius IV, appointed him to the position of his own private secretary and elevated him to the rank of cardinal when Borromeo was still barely in his twenties (and despite the fact that he had received no theological training). Yet he soon justified that favouritism. A skilled negotiator, he played a vital part at the end of the Council of Trent. This was the hugely significant nineteenth Ecumenical Council of the Roman Catholic Church – and was, in essence, the Catholic Church’s concerted response to the multiple challenges to its authority posed by the Protestant Reformation.

It was at the Council of Trent that the Catholic Church reaffirmed the importance of the sacraments and the role of the priesthood; that
it insisted on the importance of good works as well as of faith, in con
tradiction of Martin Luther’s belief in ‘justification by faith alone’; that
it pronounced its own interpretation of the Bible final, branding any
Christian with the temerity to substitute his or her own interpretations
a heretic; and that it reaffirmed a multitude of Catholic practices that had been criticized by reformers in the north, such as pilgrimage and the veneration of saints and their relics. These were the basic principles that would underpin the Counter-Reformation, as it became known, the Catholic riposte to Protestant reformers. Yet such was the mood of contention surrounding the questions under debate, in which nothing less than the future of the Catholic Church was at stake, that there were many times when it seemed as though agreement might never be reached. First summoned in 1537, the council was concluded only in 1562–3. Carlo Borromeo was one of the men who saved it, at the last, from breaking down altogether.

He was a hard worker, who rarely slept for more than five hours and often went without food due to the permanent backlog of papal business requiring his attention. But to those who did not know about his punishing regime he may well have seemed like just another corrupt cardinal-nephew, the latest in a long line of such self-serving placemen. The pope appointed him to a dazzling array of positions, including the Protector of Portugal, of Lower Germany and of the seven Catholic cantons of Switzerland; as well as Protector of the Carmelites, Franciscans, Humiliati, Canons Regular of the Holy Cross at Coimbra and of the orders of St John and Christ in Portugal.
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He was also the absentee abbot of a number of monastic foundations. From these sources and his family estates he derived an annual income of around 50,000 scudi, a princely sum in mid sixteenth-century Italy. He was a keen and energetic huntsman who spent lavishly on his horses and hounds, and equally lavishly on his household, which he turned into a magnificent manifestation of his innate asceticism and sobriety: he kept one hundred and fifty servants and retainers, all dressed from head to toe in a uniform of funereal black velvet.

Borromeo in his youth was a volatile combination of pride and piety, but it would take a personal tragedy to transform him into one of the most fervent and inventively radical priests of the Counter-Reformation. His elder brother, Federico Borromeo, died suddenly in 1562. Carlo, who was administrator of the pope’s native diocese, the Archbishopric of Milan, was widely expected to give up his career in the Church, renounce his vows of piety and continue the family line by marrying in order to father a son and heir. Instead, he concluded that all man’s earthly hopes and aspirations amounted to no more than a handful of dust. He gave up the trappings of wealth, sacked the majority of his household staff and forbade those remaining in his service to wear garments of silk or to indulge in any other luxuries. He took holy orders and briefly considered retreating from the world altogether, to a monastery. Eventually he decided that it was his role
in the divine plan to revive and reform the Roman Catholic Church –
and he set about the task with the evangelical zeal of a man convinced that he had God on his side.

It was only after the death of his brother that Carlo Borromeo’s influence would really be felt in Milan. In 1565 he was consecrated Archbishop of Milan. He signalled his intentions by making his triumphal entry into the city wearing archbishop’s robes, rather than dressed as a cardinal. It was his way of indicating that he came with his own sense of duty and purpose, not as the mere servant of papal Rome. He was determined to make the city and its provinces into the crucible for an extraordinary socio-religious experiment. Under his steely control and watchful gaze, the 900,000 souls of the Duchy of Milan were to be systematically indoctrinated in the ways of his own, deeply ascetic brand of piety. What he attempted was nothing less than a form of forced mass conversion to what he saw as the real and true tenets of Christian faith.

The archbishop had a darkly pessimistic view of human nature. He passionately opposed the doctrine of free will favoured by so many Protestants, and by some within his own church. To him, the idea that man had a God-given ability to choose between good and evil was a pernicious lie. He had a revealing disagreement with another prominent figure in the Counter-Reformation Catholic Church, the Bolognese theologian Gabriele Paleotti. Paleotti argued that ‘Since God created human volition free and its own arbiter, it can be forced by no chains, but only sparked with the help of God’s grace.’ In Borromeo’s bleaker view, human nature is ‘already tainted by sin’ – the Original Sin of Adam and Eve – and ‘is by itself so inclined to evil that we easily neglect and forget to do good’. Borromeo’s stern conclusion was that ‘we need help and stimulants to live well, and always someone to remind us of it.’
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What that sentence portended, for the people of Milan, was a systematic attempt to change their way of life and transform their habits of thought. Borromeo saw himself as a spiritual successor to St Ambrose. Just as Ambrose had defied the Roman emperor, so Borromeo challenged the Spanish governors of Milan with the aim of asserting his own authority as the city’s spiritual leader.

One of his first acts was to reassert the ancient right of the Archbishop of Milan to maintain a private army. Borromeo’s so-called
famiglia armata
, or ‘armed family’, which was a corps of armed men drawn from his own household, became a key weapon in his fight to reform what he regarded as the rotten state of the city. The archbishop claimed wide-ranging powers, so that those suspected of any offence that he judged to touch on public morality – such as heresy, blasphemy or sodomy – were liable to receive the not so tender attentions of his ‘family’. He revived the defunct civil and criminal tribunals of the archiepiscopal curia, and reopened ancient prisons for the confinement of those found guilty in Milan’s ecclesiastical courts. Borromeo’s insistence on the unrestricted use of his
famiglia armata,
and his extension of ecclesiastical authority into areas of life long regulated by the secular courts and justice system, led to numerous clashes with the city’s Spanish rulers. At the climax of one particularly acrimonious row over jurisdiction, Borromeo went so far as to excommunicate the Spanish governor, the Marqués de Requesens. When Requesens retaliated, Borromeo himself was nearly exiled from the city.

Borromeo saw to it that the Spanish Inquisition, which operated in Spain’s offshore Italian possessions, Sardinia and Sicily, was excluded from Milan. He was able to clip and curtail Spanish power in a number of such ways, largely because he had strong support in Rome. He removed jurisdiction over alleged religious crimes from Milan’s Spanish rulers, insisting that he himself should be the final judge in all such cases. But he also slowly won the grudging respect of the pious Philip II – to whom he explained, in a long and persuasive letter, that his aim was not to usurp Spanish power but to strengthen the Roman Catholic Church.
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For two decades, throughout the formative period of Caravaggio’s life, the archbishop pushed through a multitude of Church reforms intended to control the hearts, souls and minds of the people at large, measures that ranged from the introduction of new confessionals to the segregation of men and women in church. He made no secret of his distaste for self-styled elite clerical associations such as the Theatines or the Barnabites. He actually suppressed one of the orders nominally under his protection, the Humiliati, on the grounds that its membership was restricted to a corrupt, self-serving clique of aristocrats. He was promptly shot in the back at close range by a disgruntled Humiliatus, but survived the attack unharmed – an escape subsequently attributed, by his hagiographers, to divine intervention.

Borromeo was an obsessive regulator and centralizer, and he did his best to turn his clergy into a spiritual equivalent of the
famiglia armata
– a body of Christian soldiers animated by a single purpose and method. All priests with a pastoral duty were obliged to preach every Sunday and feast day. Reports were gathered from every parish in the diocese and underperforming priests were summoned to the archbishop’s presence to practise their skills in front of him (they also had to leave a written copy of their sermon behind for his perusal). Not least because Milan was on the frontier with partly Protestant Switzerland, Borromeo was determined to turn his diocese into a shining demonstration of revitalized Roman Catholicism – a beacon to those who had erred, the brilliance of which might persuade them to mend their ways. He built new churches by the score and trained up an army of new priests to spread the word of God to their congregations. He founded diocesan seminaries and many schools. By the time of his death some 40,000 children in the diocese of Milan were being educated at any one time, an unprecedentedly high proportion of the juvenile population.
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Caravaggio’s own family would be directly involved in the Borromean spiritual experiment: his only brother became a priest. No one in Milan and its surroundings was left untouched by the archbishop’s plans for spiritual revival.

Borromeo saw sinfulness everywhere and envisaged his priests as an army of spiritual stormtroopers taking the battle to the devil. No detail was too small to escape his eye, especially in the design of churches, which he saw as machines for the purification of an evil world. He wrote entire volumes of instructions about the minutiae of ecclesiastical architecture, the so-called
Instructiones
, in which he pronounced on matters ranging from the precise amount of space church architects should allow for each member of the congregation
(‘one cubit and eight ounces square’ exactly, four square feet in
modern
terms) to the appropriate scale and decoration of the entrances:
‘the middle doorway must be distinguished by its width and ornamented with sculptures of lions . . . to represent the Temple of Solo
mon and the vigilance of bishops.’
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Borromeo was particularly con
cerned to ensure that men and women be separated from one another in church. He devised movable screens to be erected between groups of male and female worshippers, to prevent them exchanging glances with one another – often, in Borromeo’s view, the first occasion for sin. He also sought to set strict controls on the clothes worn by worshippers, especially female worshippers, whom he berated for coming to church dressed for seduction, as if they were going to Carnival rather than participating in a holy ritual.

The mass of directives issued from the archiepiscopal palace of Milan must have occasionally wearied even the most conscientious of the Milanese clergymen whose task it was to enforce them. Here for example is the archbishop on the intricacies of the holy-water stoup, its placement, its design, its necessary accessories:

[The holy-water stoup] should not be put outside, but rather inside the
church, accessible to those who enter and at their right hand, if possible.
One font should be placed on the side where men enter and another . . . where the women enter. These [stoups] should not be near the wall but distant from it in proportion to the space that is there. They should be supported . . . on a small pillar, or some type of base on which nothing profane appears. There should be a sprinkler on a small metal chain hanging from the rim . . . it should not terminate with a sponge rather than bristles. It may terminate with a sponge only if it is enclosed in a silver, tin, or brass-perforated knob that has bristles on the outside.
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The bristles about which Borromeo was so particular symbolized the cleansing branches of hyssop that purify the souls of the faithful in the ancient biblical psalm (Psalm 50): ‘Sprinkle me with hyssop and I shall be cleansed; wash me and I shall be made whiter than snow.’

Many years later, near the end of his life, when Caravaggio was a fugitive from justice in the Sicilian town of Messina, he was offered some holy water in a little church. The story is told by Francesco Susinno, a Messinese writer of artists’ lives. It suggests that Caravaggio may still have carried with him some sardonic remembrance of the obsessive concern with the purification of souls that had coloured so much of his childhood and youth in Milan: ‘One day he went into the church of the Madonna of Pilero with certain gentlemen, and the politest of them stepped forward to offer him some holy water. Caravaggio asked him what it was for, and was told ‘to cancel venial sins’. ‘Then it is no use,’ he said. ‘Because mine are all mortal.’ That terse remark captures the darkest of the painter’s moods – the sullen conviction that nothing, certainly no holy water, could ever wash
his
soul clean or whiten the stain of
his
sins.