Caravaggio Read Online Free PDF Page A

lopped-off heads arranged on the bridge across the Tiber near the prison in the Castel Sant’Angelo. Public executions provided a popular form of free mass entertainment.
    Gangs of toughs—the bravi —roamed the neighborhoods, looking for trouble, dueling (a practice that had been outlawed by papal decree), battling over obscure points of personal honor, frequenting brothels, and vying for the affection of the most desirable prostitute of the moment. The Italians’ reputation for violence and banditry spread beyond their own cities and dangerous country roads. Just as Anglophones today can’t seem to get enough of the misbehavior of the Corleone and Soprano Mafia families, British playwrights of sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—Caravaggio’s contemporaries and near-contemporaries—mined Italian street life and exaggerated the sad histories of Italy’s spectacularly dysfunctional and incestuous noble families for the plots of their gory dramas. Many of the revenge tragedies written by Tourneur, Webster, and Ford—plays that ended with the stage littered with corpses, the victims of poisonings, stabbings, swordfights, and garrotings—were set in Italy or on occasion in Spain, anyplace where a tempestuous Southern temperament and a Latin lack of impulse control could be guaranteed to satisfy the audience’s taste for dashing swordplay and for ingeniously plotted (poison might be concealed in the pages of a Bible or in a bouquet of flowers) and cold-blooded murder. Indeed, the violent incident that initiates the dramatic action in Romeo and Juliet —the eruption of a street fight that ends in the death of Juliet’s cousin and Romeo’s banishment from Verona—was very much like the lethal brawl that forced Caravaggio to leave Rome.
    Belligerent, contemptuous, competitive, Michelangelo Merisi would soon be drawn into the whirlwind of insults, attacks, retaliations, and vendettas that passed for nightlife in the Campo Marzio, the raffish neighborhood in which many artists, including Caravaggio, lived. And yet he somehow managed to stay out of trouble with the law until close to the end of the century. In the meantime, he had a career to begin and attend to. For one of the most remarkable things about Caravaggio was that, even when his private life was at its most chaotic and disordered, nothing (or almost nothing) prevented him from painting. While a number of his colleagues were famous for the extent to which they delayed and procrastinated, carousing in the taverns when their commissions were months overdue, Caravaggio generally succeeded in finishing his assignments on time.
    New in Rome, living “without lodgings and without provisions,” he resisted the siren song of the sword and the street. He did what his contract with Simone Peterzano had promised he would be qualified for: He found work as a painter.
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    Despite the poverty, disease, and crime that were the daily lot of so many Roman citizens, it was not an inauspicious moment for an ambitious and gifted young artist seeking to make his mark in the capital. From a purely economic standpoint, the scores of new palaces and churches under construction meant that someone would have to be hired to paint and decorate them. Moreover, it was widely agreed—though of course not by the established painters—that art had grown tired, that the static formality and the conventions of high mannerism could use some revitalizing infusion of originality and passion. Important collectors complained publicly about the paucity of genuine talent.
    Pope Clement VIII’s ascension brought some measure of stability to the city. Previously the brief reigns of three short-lived popes had done little to control the sudden resurgence of banditry and crime. Flanked by his two nephews, Pietro and Cinzio Aldobrandini, who would become his closest advisers, Clement VIII—known for his asceticism and for the