Caravaggio: A Passionate Life Read Online Free PDF Page B

stiletto, properly handled, caused almost no external bleeding, while a tiny folding crossbow, easily concealed beneath a cloak, was virtually noiseless, even at close range. There was also poison, administered by a quick scratch from a “death-ring,” a fruit knife, or a lady’s hat pin.
    Pope Sixtus had succeeded in making murder less fashionable during the years just before Caravaggio’s arrival in Rome, by the most savage measures, but he had died in 1590, and Pope Clement was neither so frightening nor so effective. Gradually, the murder rate rose again. Caravaggio must have seen plenty of heads rotting on the Ponte Sant’ Angelo or over the city gates. No assessment of him should omit this background of constant violence and daily executions.

VII
    The Rulers of Rome, 1592
    E verything in Rome revolved around the pontiff and, after him, the sixty or so resident cardinals. The Papal States were a theocracy governed by priests, and the pope was a temporal prince, an absolute monarch. In 1581 Montaigne saw the then pontiff pass by, wearing a white cassock and a red hat and cape, riding a gray horse decked in red velvet fringed with gold. After him came three cardinals on mules, a hundred mounted men at arms, bareheaded, “each with lance on thigh and in full armor,” and then a hundred monsignori and courtiers, also mounted.
    When Caravaggio arrived in Rome, the Pope was Clement VIII, only recently elected. A giant of a man, fat and white-bearded, who, from a weakness in his tear glands, often wept uncontrollably, he was kindly by nature, although he prided himself on his severity. He was also prone to fits of undignified rage. The last of the austere Counter-Reformation popes, Clement said Mass every day at noon and confessed every evening to his greatest friend, the Oratorian Cardinal Baronius.
    A recent predecessor, the dynamic Sixtus V, had made the papacy stronger than ever. It finally secured undisputed control of central Italy, and Sixtus took advantage of favorable conditions to make Rome very rich. Heamassed millions in gold, by draconian reductions in the cost of the papal court and by heavy new taxes on all agricultural produce. Marshes were drained, roads and bridges repaired, farming and manufacture encouraged, all of which would have been impossible before the Spaniards’ enforced pacification of the Italian peninsula.
    At the same time, the Counter-Reformation was succeeding. The decrees of the Council of Trent were transforming Catholicism, partly because new religious orders were spreading their message, partly because enough Catholics were determined to save their religion from indifference and corruption. Today, it is difficult to appreciate the sheer power of Catholic Christianity in Italy at that period. Only a few rare eccentrics, gathered in swiftly by the Inquisition, ever felt the need or the possibility of doubting the existence of God, even if they criticized the shortcomings of priests or bishops. Science had not yet emerged. There was not even a vocabulary for atheism, while heresy barely existed. Only one or two foreign Protestants were caught from time to time, generally ending at the stake. In any case, it was impossible to be an individual in the modern sense. Well-balanced men and women were convinced that it was neither right nor proper to hold opinions contrary to those of their rulers.
    Clement VIII found himself reigning over a Rome much richer and much less threatened than it had been for centuries, leading a Church in many ways reborn. Neither a very clever nor a very forceful man, surprisingly, he was a most successful pope, and especially effective as a statesman. Not only would he receive Henry IV of France back into the Catholic fold, in the face of fierce opposition from Spain, but he used France as a counterweight against Spanish attempts to control him, and he managed to do so without alienating the Spaniards. If the Romans did not love Pope Clement, they certainly