Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (17 page)

In truth, the Spanish government
was
partly to blame, although not in the way so luridly imagined. The plague had actually been brought from Sicily to Milan by the entourage of Don Juan of Austria, illegitimate brother of Philip II of Spain and hero of Lepanto: the group had arrived in the city in August 1576, with several of its members already close to death. The inner circle of the Milanese Senate knew this, and so did members of the city’s Health Tribunal. The plethora of alternative official explanations was a smokescreen created partly to protect the reputation of the Spanish royal family and preserve the
status quo
.
41
The dirty laundry, the flea-infested bedding, really
was
theirs; but this had to kept from the people at large or riots might ensue.

Any risk of the truth coming out was dispelled when Carlo Borromeo involved himself in the situation. From his perspective, the plague was a God-given opportunity to force home his severe spiritual message; and, as far as he was concerned, there was absolutely no ambiguity about its source. It had nothing to do with bedlinen or shirts or phantom
untori
going around wiping poison on gateposts. It certainly had nothing to do with the Spanish or the visit of Don Juan. Its source was human sin. The Milanese had neglected their souls, had confessed too infrequently, had debauched themselves at Carnival and had indulged in luxuries. The plague was being visited upon them by a vengeful God, and even if it seemed terrible it was truly a blessing in disguise – a call to universal repentance that could not be ignored.

Borromeo was so prominent a figure in the events of the plague of
1576–8 that it would eventually be nicknamed after him – remembered
forever as
la peste di San Carlo
. It brought out, in equal measure, his extreme piety and his fondness for the exercise of bureaucratic control. In the first two months of the epidemic, when as many as 10,000 people are thought to have died, the city almost fell into a state of anarchy. There was inadequate provision for the disposal of so many corpses and during ‘the terrible September’ of 1576 – the month of Caravaggio’s fifth birthday – carts heaped high with bodies rolled along the cobbled streets of the town at all hours of the day and night. Piles of half-naked cadavers were left in open view. The much feared
monatti
, or ‘gravediggers’, public health officials whose responsibility it was to collect the dead and purge houses of disease, were said to be running amok. Dark tales abounded of the
monatti
pillaging the houses they were supposed to make safe, and raping the few female survivors they found there.

Faced with a city descending into nightmare, Borromeo requested and duly received a brief from Pope Gregory XIII giving him full authority to redirect all the energies of his clergy to the alleviation of the plague. He mobilized his private army and summoned all the priests and monks of his diocese to a vast congregation. To each was assigned a different task. No more corpses were to be left outside. Every victim was to be given a proper burial, ‘with crosses and lights’.
42
Borromeo also organized partial quarantines, especially for women, whom he regarded not only as more likely to occasion sin but as the primary carriers of plague (because, he said, they talked so much and constantly visited each other’s houses). On his orders, many of the women of the city were confined within their homes for long periods of time or held in purpose-built isolation cabins. Such measures were not always entirely effective: because women continued to live in terror of the
monatti
, they often failed to disclose the presence of plague or the existence of the dead, with the result that the disease continued to spread, albeit behind closed doors.

Borromeo’s most successful strategy against the disease was the reopening of Milan’s
lazzaretto
, one of the first great penitentiaries for the plague built in Italy. This was a vast moated structure that had originally been constructed during the late fifteenth century on the orders of Francesco Sforza, following an outbreak of plague in 1483–5. The
lazzaretto
– so named after Lazarus, who had been raised from the dead by Jesus and who was often portrayed in art as a plague victim, spotted with buboes – had been left empty for more than fifty years. But it served Borromeo’s purposes well. Into its compound of 288 rooms were squeezed nearly all of Milan’s homeless and destitute (a nearby monastery was also conscripted to accommodate any overspill, confining the spread of the disease to great effect). In its regimented spaces, those who remained healthy could be segregated from those who fell ill. The bodies of the deceased were kept in plague pits at the centre of the compound, to be taken away at regular intervals for mass burial. Death was being bureaucratically managed, to Borromeo’s satisfaction. Most important of all, the whole itinerant population of the Milanese diocese was now being held in one place.

The man whom Borromeo installed in charge of the
lazzaretto
was a Franciscan friar named Fra Paolo Bellintano, who later published a detailed account of his methods. Under his stewardship, the
lazzaretto
became a kind of centralized fortress for the management of plague. He employed a team of
sbirri
– policemen, or constables, recruited like himself from within the Franciscan order – to maintain discipline within the
lazzaretto
itself, and enforce their own standards on those working with plague victims in the city at large. The
sbirri
were, he wrote, an essential part of his tactical plan:

Many needs arose during the day which could not be remedied without these. I dare to say that without them Milan would have become a den of thieves. How would I have been able to hold back so many
monatti
who cleaned out the houses without fear of justice? Decrees and proclamations could have been made without end, and they would not have feared a thing. But they saw that almost every day I had people whipped, birched, imprisoned, scourged, tied to a column, and that I imposed other punishments besides. And they did not want to become familiar with all this [i.e., suffer the same fate themselves].
43

As a result, he noted with tight-lipped satisfaction, the behaviour of the
monatti
was soon much improved.

Bellintano’s account of the methods applied within the
lazzaretto
graphically demonstrates how the terrors of the plague were used to scourge the collective Milanese soul. The people were being punished for their attachment to the pleasures of Carnival, yet Bellintano himself takes a positively carnivalesque relish in the ways that he and his
sbirri
devised to ensure their penitence. He tells the story of how, one night, the inmates put on a secret dance to raise their spirits. One of his fellow Franciscans, Fra Andrea, got wind of the party and determined to puncture the festive mood. He went to the plague pit in the middle of the
lazzaretto
and retrieved the bloated corpse of an old woman. As he heaved her on to his shoulders, a great belch of air was expelled from her swollen guts. Unperturbed, he told her to keep quiet and get ready for a dance. He went to the room where the inmates were dancing and asked to join their party. When they opened the door, he threw the dead body into their midst, shouting out ‘Let her dance too!’ There then followed a brief sermon, after which, Bellintano drily observes, ‘the dance ended.’
44

Public counterparts to such dark, private theatricals were the processions organized by Carlo Borromeo. Believing that the only way to salvation was passionate identification with the suffering body of the Lord, he staged a series of re-enactments of Christ’s journey to Calvary. In October 1576 he announced three days of fasting and ordered that Milan’s most prized relic, a nail said to come from the True Cross on which Christ had been crucified, be taken out of the Cathedral:

His holiness performed the three processions dressed
di mestitia
, with a large rope around his neck, barefoot and hooded, dragging his clothes on the ground, and with a large Crucifix in his arms. And on the Sabbath he carried the Holy Nail in procession, supplicating God by the merits of His Most Holy Passion to turn away the ire he had conceived against this people, and use them with mercy. He went in the same habit, and manner, as the previous days, but was also accompanied by about a thousand flagellants, who beat themselves continuously, causing great pity in whoever saw them. All the portable relics of the city were also carried in procession that day. But that which most moved the people to tears, penitence and dolour was [the sight of] the illustrious Cardinal in such sad and mournful dress, that great black cross on which he carried the Holy Nail, the blood that was seen to issue from his feet. When the procession was finished he preached a public sermon almost three hours long, with such spirit and fervour that he was like another St Paul. I believe there were few who did not weep. When the days of prayer were over he carried it all through the city once more, especially in those places where the disease was worst. On this journey he spilt much blood from his feet, and was accompanied by barefoot priests and monks, with ropes around their necks.
45

The author of this eyewitness description, the Jesuit Paolo Bisciola, describes how huge crowds were exhorted to join in these mass demonstrations of faith. He also notes, without apparent irony, that ‘on these occasions, the plague grew very much.’ Bisciola’s account is also interesting for its visual detail. He says that Borromeo ordered temporary altars, lit with candles, to be set up throughout the streets of the city, ‘so that to walk in the streets was like walking in church’. As autumn advanced, and as the nights drew in, the city seemed ablaze with ‘the lights of piety and religion’. On a multitude of outdoor altars ‘there burned a great quantity of candles and much incense’. Flame and shadow: Milan had become a city of chiaroscuro.

The artist was five when the plague reached its height, and only a year older when it reached into his life and tore his family to pieces. The sequence of events is charted in a series of documents from the archives. On 20 October 1577 the death was recorded, in Caravaggio, of the artist’s father, Fermo Merisi, his paternal grandfather, Bernardino Merisi, and his (unnamed) grandmother. The document states that they died within a day of each other. An earlier document, of 17 August 1577, indicates that Caravaggio’s uncle Pietro had died earlier in the year. The document in question is a claim to Pietro’s estate, which indicates that he died without having made a will, that is, unexpectedly. It also provides the only explicit link to the plague, stating that Pietro lived in Milan but was in Caravaggio because of the epidemic sweeping the city.
46

The archive contains no description of the events that took place in the Merisi household in late October 1577. It was not a notary’s job to paint pictures of human suffering. But the art of Caravaggio’s maturity would be saturated in the ineradicable memory of night terrors. It would be an art of paroxysm and abandonment, filled with images of turmoil in dark places. Towards the end of his life, working in Sicily – the place where Milan’s great plague had started – he would paint a huge altarpiece of the
The Resurrection of Lazarus
. He himself chose the subject of the picture. It would be a meditation on death
and salvation – a work that, though shaded by ambiguity, has a miracu
lous story to tell. But nothing could change the story of Caravaggio’s own early years. No miracle had raised his father, his grandfather, his uncle, from the dead. By the age of six, Caravaggio had lost almost every male member of his family.

THE BAD APPRENTICE

By 18 February 1578 the plague finally abated. A fifth of the population of the diocese of Milan was dead and everyone else was trying to reassemble their lives. On that day Caravaggio’s mother, Lucia, signed a document in which she assumed legal guardianship of all four of her children. It shows that the family was now resident in Caravaggio.

Nearly a year later, on 21 January 1579, another document shows that Fermo Merisi, her late husband, had died intestate. It apportions his estate and parts of his parents’ estate too. They had also died intestate, on the same night as him, creating a tangle of legal complications. There had evidently been some dispute between Lucia and Fermo’s three half-brothers – a quarrel about who was to get what. Arbitration was necessary. The largest property at issue, Bernardino’s house and land in Porta Seriola (together with his business premises), went to the half-brothers. In exchange Lucia and her children were relieved of Fermo’s debts, which amounted to 1,737 lire.
47
They were also granted four modest landholdings, which the document goes on to list:

1. 7
   pertiche
   of land in Canigio Nuovo (which is divided, with three quarters going to Fermo’s brothers, the rest to Lucia’s children);
   
2. land and a vineyard in Rovere, 8
   pertiche
   ;
   
3. 2½
   pertiche
   of land on the road to Calenzano;
   
4. an orchard outside Porta Prato, 1
   pertica
   .
   

One
pertica
, in Lombardy at that time, was the equivalent of approximately 6,500 square feet. So altogether the Merisi family, Fermo’s wife and her four children ended up with roughly 18.5
pertiche
. That is 120,250 square feet, just under three acres. The land’s value amounted to about 3,000 imperial lire, or 500 gold scudi: not a lot of money.

Nothing is known about Caravaggio’s early education but he certainly received one. An inventory of his possessions made several years afterwards, when he was a fully fledged painter working in Rome, reveals that he owned several books. The pictures that he would paint, later in life, are without doubt the works of a questing, curious and liter
ate mind. His brother Giovan Battista, who was destined for the Church,
would later study at the Jesuit Collegio Romano in Rome. The Jesuits were among the most intellectually demanding of the religious orders, so Caravaggio’s brother must have been given at least the rudiments of an education in classical and Italian literature. Numerous grammar schools had been set up across the diocese of Milan at the instigation of Carlo Borromeo, who believed that educated souls were less likely to stray into temptation. Caravaggio’s brother probably attended one such school, which makes it more likely that Caravaggio did too.