Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane Read Online Free PDF

daughter Margherita, Caravag gio’s maternal aunt, was wet-nurse to the Sforza children. She lived in the Colonna household for many years and breastfed Costanza Colonna’s sons, including the future adventurer and sometime mili tant Knight of the Order of St John, Fabrizio Sforza Colonna. In 1584, as a reward for her service, Costanza gave Margherita a small estate in Fara d’Adda, near the town of Caravaggio. As late as 1601 Margherita was still in regular touch with the marchesa, writing letters to her in Rome – at a time when Caravaggio, elsewhere in the city, was receiving some of his most important commissions.
    Costanza Colonna would be called on many times by Caravaggio. Always she would respond. She would be a constant support to him in times of crisis, giving him shelter when he was on the run and shielding him when he was under sentence of death. Yet, unlike any of his other noble allies or protectors, she would never try to acquire a painting by his hand. All the evidence suggests that she genuinely cared for him, perhaps even loved him as a child of her own. Her influence and that of her family, with its tentacular network of feudal and familial alliances, reaching right across the Italian peninsula, can be sensed throughout Caravaggio’s life – but especially during his later and more troubled years.
    Social class, in particular questions of ‘nobility’ and ‘virtue’, would be at issue in many of Caravaggio’s future disputes and quarrels. These were matters of intense debate in medieval and Renaissance Italy. In northern Europe the aristocracy took its own pre-eminence for granted and assumed that nobility was a quality that could only truly inhere in those fortunate enough to be born into the upper, landed classes. There, a nobleman was easily identified: a man of virtue and pure blood, who had the right to bear arms in the service of his monarch, who was a skilled swordsman and horseman and would never dirty his hands with trade. In Italy the situation was more ambiguous, because Italian society was more fluid and its ruling elites more diverse, made up of imperial knights, communal knights, magnates and other types of feudal lord. It was also an increasingly urbanized society, and that too led to the blurring of social distinctions. From the second half of the fourteenth century onwards, urban patriciates sought to tighten their hold on government. The men who made up those bodies, which included merchants, moneylenders, textile manufacturers and other drivers of early capitalism, were themselves intensely class conscious. They founded their own dynasties, staked their own claims to nobilit à – so much so that the very term itself became, in Italy, shifting and unstable. As early as the fourteenth century, writers ranging from the poet Dante to medieval jurists had struggled to define the concept. Legal definitions based purely on titles conferred by the monarchy or the church were countered by those who preferred to regard nobility as a moral quality to which, in theory, almost anyone could aspire. 8
    What position did Caravaggio’s maternal grandfather occupy within this world of subtly shaded social distinctions? Giovan Giacomo Aratori is referred to in the documents of the time as signor , messer or dominus . While his social status was certainly higher than that of anyone on the Merisi side of Caravaggio’s family, neither he nor his descendants possessed any actual titles. He was a member of what might be called the upper, professional bourgeoisie, while the likes of Bernardino and Fermo Merisi belonged to the petty, trade bourgeoisie. Mancini’s statement that Caravaggio was born into a family of ‘very honourable citizens’ – cittadini is the word he uses in Italian – was entirely accurate.
    But in the small world of Caravaggio, where the artist spent much of his youth, his status may to him have seemed grander than that. As we have seen, his maternal grandfather was a