Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane Read Online Free PDF Page B

highly respected man, but other factors may have conspired to make him feel that both he and his family were blessed by aristocratic favour. Maybe Costanza Colonna showed particular favours or kindnesses to Caravaggio’s mother, Lucia, sister to her own children’s wet-nurse. Lucia’s early years of motherhood were hard indeed, marked by bereavement and loss. Costanza Colonna too had suffered a difficult time during the early years of her marriage to Francesco I Sforza. She had been married off, as the custom then was among the nobility, at the age of thirteen. The duties of a wife had at first been abhorrent to her, so much so that she had at one point threatened suicide. Did Costanza Colonna feel a particular sympathy for Lucia and her young children during the harsh years of their early upbringing? It is impossible to know for sure, but she certainly took a particular interest in Caravaggio’s wellbeing later in his life. Perhaps the date of his birth had something to do with it too, because as far as anyone in Christendom was concerned – but especially a Colonna – he was born at an auspicious time.
    THE ANGEL WITH SWORD AND SHIELD
    Caravaggio grew up as Michelangelo Merisi. It was an evocative name for a future artist – the same Christian name as that of the most famous Italian sculptor and painter of all, Michelangelo Buonarrotti, who had died just seven years earlier. But Caravaggio’s parents did not have that in mind when they named their son. They called him Michelangelo for reasons of faith and superstition. He came into the world on 29 September 1571. His parents named him after the Archangel Michael, whose feast day it was.
    This was a charged and momentous time in the history of Christendom. Throughout the 1550s and 1560s the Christian powers of the western Mediterranean were threatened by the forces of Islam – led first by the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman ‘The Magnificent’, and then by his successor, Selim II. The bitter and bloody conflict between Muslim and Christian reached a climax at exactly the moment of Caravaggio’s birth. In 1570–71 Christian Cyprus, a strategically vital island fortress long controlled by the Venetians, fell into Ottoman hands. The garrison stationed at Famagusta, the last Christian stronghold in Cyprus, fought bravely before being forced to surrender. The survivors of the siege were cruelly massacred. Churches and cathedrals were converted into mosques, their stained glass smashed, their paintings and sculptures destroyed, their belltowers turned into minarets. Pope Pius V was appalled not only by the atrocity and its immediate consequences, but also by the possibility that the Ottomans might gain control over the principal trade routes of the Mediterranean. He joined forces with the Venetians, and together the allies sought additional support wherever they could find it. Missions were sent to Spain, to Portugal and to all the independent states of Italy. The princely families of southern Europe rallied together and thousands of soldiers were pressed into service. The result was no mere political alliance, but a self-styled Holy League for the defence of Christendom against the infidel.
    Under the command of Don Juan of Austria, illegitimate brother of Philip II of Spain, a vast fleet of galleys – most of them constructed, in record time, within the great dockyard-cum-factory production-line that was Venice’s Arsenale – set out to humble the Turkish navy. Eight days after Caravaggio’s birth, on 7 October 1571, the two sides met in the Greek Gulf of Corinth, then known in the west as the Gulf of Lepanto. The result was the last great sea battle fought between galley- rowed ships. Both sides suffered heavy casualties. Eight thousand Christians died, and many more Turks. But, while the fleet of the Holy League survived the battle all but intact, the Ottoman fleet was destroyed and its commander-in-chief killed. One of the heroes of the battle was the commander of