Caravaggio: A Passionate Life Read Online Free PDF

the night were devoted to amusement, in particular to promenading.
    The city was especially cheerful during the Carnival before Lent, with pageants and floats, masks and masquerades, cockfights, jousting matches, and battles with sugared almonds (the original
confetti)
. Races were run along the Corso by donkeys and buffalo, urged on mercilessly with whips and goads. There were also races by wretched old men and by Jews, who, after being stripped naked, were forced to take part and then pelted with rotten eggs, dead cats, and every sort of filth as they ran. The Corso races always culminated in a wild gallop by fifteen superb Arabian horses.
    In its own way, Lent was no less colorful. Brethren from a hundred pious confraternities thronged the streets in hooded gowns of white, red, blue, green, or black, with masks that concealed their faces except for the eyes. On the night of Maundy Thursday, Rome looked as if it were on fire when the brethren marched to St. Peter’s in their thousands, each bearing a lighted torch. In their midst were five hundred hooded penitents with naked backs, which they scourged till the blood ran.
    On Holy Saturday—Easter Eve—the supposed heads of St. Peter and St. Paul were displayed at the church of St. John Lateran. Given Caravaggio’s future obsession with severed heads, he may well have been among the bemused spectators on at least one Easter Eve.
    Throughout the year there were more somber entertainments, the most frequent and most popular being public executions. Parents brought their children to watch them, waiting breathlessly for the condemned to receive the Sacrament at the foot of the scaffold and reassure everyone that they were dying reconciled with God. Occasionally heretics—“soul murderers”—were burned, as were sodomites, although they often escaped by paying an enormous fine.
    There was also the casting out of evil spirits. Montaigne came across one quite by chance, in the chapel of a church where he had been hearing Mass. A small crowd watched a priest praying over a lunatic bound with ropes,hitting him, spitting in his face, holding a holy candle upside down to make it burn faster, and shouting threats at the devil inside the man. When he stayed crazy and was led away, the priest told the crowd that it was a particularly nasty demon and could be got rid of only by a great deal more prayer and fasting. He then described a more satisfactory exorcism he had recently conducted, driving a really big devil out of a woman; at the moment it left her body, she had vomited up its nails and claws and a large piece of scaly hide. Her friends complained that she was still “not quite herself,” but he had explained to them that another evil spirit had immediately entered her, although not such a bad one.
    However beautiful Rome may have been, there was always the threat of famine, and even without famine, innumerable beggars and abandoned children starved in the streets. In summer the Romans shivered all too frequently with the ague—malaria from the nearby marshes—and venereal diseases were rife, spread by the many prostitutes who served the bachelor officials. It was an extremely dirty place, its streets filled with human excrement. Almost the only scavengers were the pigs, who roamed everywhere. Despite pleasantly warm weather from spring to autumn, bitterly cold winds set in during the late autumn, followed by drenching rain, which fell throughout the winter.
    Rome was notoriously dangerous, even by sixteenth-century standards. If Caravaggio became a violent man, the city’s violence and savagery were in some degree responsible. Undoubtedly, there was a peculiarly sinister atmosphere at Rome, and it can have had only a baneful influence on him. Montaigne tells us that it was unsafe to walk through the city’s streets at night, that houses were constantly being broken into. Murder was commonplace. More discreet weapons than swords or guns were available. A thinbladed