Caravaggio: A Passionate Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

Ostia had once been the harbor of ancient Rome, it had silted up, so that the town had become a small, miserable village in the middle of a malarial, reed-fringed lagoon. After going ashore, Caravaggio had to travel another fifteen miles over land. At last, he came to the Eternal City and entered through the crumbling gate that, long before, had been the Porta Ostienses but was now the Porta San Paolo.

VI
    Rome, 1592
    T he Rome that became Caravaggio’s home was a magic place with its churches, monasteries, palaces, and fountains set amid the majestic ruins from classical times. Only the part next to the Tiber was inhabited. More than half of the ancient city had become a wasteland, often thickly wooded, sometimes interrupted by farms or vineyards. As well as isolated chapels and abbeys and the odd villa among beautiful gardens, there were a few hamlets with cornfields in the southern area. But the overwhelming impression was of a haunted wilderness. Cows and goats grazed beside fallen marble columns, while shepherds folded their sheep in what had once been the atria of Roman mansions, and outlaws hid in noble rooms underground. There was a brooding sense of history and legend.
    Some visitors found Rome a melancholy spectacle. “What he had seen was nothing but a sepulchre,” the great essayist Montaigne wrote mournfully after his pilgrimage in 1581. But he had to admit that in the grandeur and number of its public squares, the beauty of its streets and palaces, the city was far more imposing than Paris.
    The Romans themselves—a mere hundred thousand compared to at least two million in the days of the Caesars—were enormously proud oftheir past. Antique statuary, constantly unearthed, was purchased eagerly by a host of distinguished collectors, including cardinals, who displayed it in galleries at their palaces and villas. Even humble artisans collected Roman coins. A young tourist from England, Thomas Nashe, grumbled that they “shewed us all the monuments that were to be seene, which are as manye as there have beene Emperours, Consulles, Oratours, Conquerours, famous painters or plaiers in Rome. Tyll this daie not a Romane (if he be a right Romane indeed) will kill a rat, but he will have some registred remebraunce of it.” Nashe adds, “I was at Pontius Pilates house and pist against it.”
    However, the vast majority of visitors, especially artists, seem to have been spellbound by the ruins. During the early years of the century, Raphael and his friends had themselves let down by ropes into the banqueting halls and bedchambers of antiquity, which they called
grotte
(grottoes). By the light of guttering torches they searched for
grotteschi
, their name for Roman murals, gazing entranced at a flickering, phantom world of gods and goddesses, nymphs and fauns.
    When Caravaggio arrived, there were also fine modern buildings. Pope Sixtus V (1585—1590) completed the dome of St. Peter’s in less than two years, totally rebuilt the Lateran Palace and the Vatican Library, enlarged the Quirinal, built the Sistine Chapel at Santa Maria Maggiore and the Loggia Sistina at St. John Lateran and new streets, notably the Via Sistina and the Via delle Quattro Fontane, besides resiting obelisks and statues all over the city. Less admirably, he demolished one or two important classical buildings but failed in his plan to convert the Colosseum into a wool factory. His greatest triumph was to be the first man since Roman times to construct, or at least restore, an aqueduct in Italy, the Acqua Felice.
    Despite his gloomy reflection that Rome was a sepulchre, Montaigne admitted that it had more rich men in coaches than any city he had ever seen. Lesser folk, too, could live very pleasantly. Rising early, they did most of their work in the morning, before dining frugally at twelve—an astonishingly late hour by northern standards—after which they rested till six.The evening, interrupted by a light supper at about nine, and much of