M, p.1
M, page 1
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CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT NOTICE
EPIGRAPHS
A NOTE TO READERS
M
CHAPTER 1: MILAN & CARAVAGGIO 1571–1592, ROME 1592–1593
CHAPTER 2: ROME 1593–1597
CHAPTER 3: ROME 1597–1599
CHAPTER 4: ROME 1598–1600
CHAPTER 5: ROME 1600
CHAPTER 6: ROME 1600–1601
CHAPTER 7: ROME 1601–1602
CHAPTER 8: ROME 1601–1603
CHAPTER 9: ROME 1603
CHAPTER 10: ROME 1603
CHAPTER 11: ROME 1604
CHAPTER 12: ROME 1605
CHAPTER 13: ROME 1605–1606
CHAPTER 14: ROME & PALIANO 1606
CHAPTER 15: NAPLES 1606–1607
CHAPTER 16: NAPLES & MALTA 1607
CHAPTER 17: MALTA & NAPLES 1607–1608
CHAPTER 18: MALTA, SYRACUSE & MESSINA 1608–1609
CHAPTER 19: PALERMO & NAPLES 1609–1610
CHAPTER 20: ROME POST MORTEM
M’S PAINTINGS
NOTES
SOURCES
PEOPLE
ALSO BY PETER ROBB
COPYRIGHT
I.M.
Murray Grönwall
… marquera chaque soirée de son art personnel, piquant
et concis, un peu acide, excentrique, frôlant légèrement le
clownesque et un charme pittoresque un peu à la Daumier,
comme une poésie exotique de mime et de mezzo, mais
toujours l’interpretation du rôle était rigoureuse …
acteur d’un art si riche et si présent, si habité …
Michel Cournot
Le Monde
Young boys take no care, and never
finish off their things with shadows.
Leonardo
We can only describe and say,
human life is like that.
Wittgenstein
Crime was my oyster.
Weegee
A NOTE TO READERS
THE FRAGMENTS that tell us what we know about the life and death of the painter I call M float on the surface of a treacherous reality – they’re lies to the police, reticence in court, extorted confessions, forced denunciations, revengeful memoirs, self-justifying hindsight, unquestioned hearsay, diplomatic urbanities, theocratic diktat, reported gossip, threat and propaganda, angry outbursts – hardly a word untainted by fear, ignorance, malice or self interest. You have to apply a forensic and skeptical mind to the enigmas of M’s life and death. You have to know how to read the evidence. You have to know the evidence is there – you need a feel for the unsaid, for the missing file, the cancelled entry, the tacit conclusion, the gap, the silence, the business done with a nod and a wink. The missing data in M’s life and death make up a narrative of their own, running invisible but present through the known facts.
M’s career was marked out by crimes. Convention has it they were his. I read the record differently and see him largely as the victim of powerful interests he’d offended. I see his death as murder. I turned from the records of a recent Italian past and found M living in a remote but strange world of parallel powers and crimes of state. I don’t pretend to have solved or even fully articulated the problems of M’s fate in this book, but I hope that after reading it people may feel that M is a lot more serious than the libel of the criminal genius allows, and that questions about what happened to him need answers. And I hope the book will leave readers dissatisfied with the exquisitely academic orthodoxy that M’s life was, like his art, basically orthodox. The wildnesses of M’s life weren’t accidental but were intrinsic to the way he painted. The writer on M who’d known him best, his most disinterested contemporary biographer, remarked of M’s art that maybe that’s why the poor guy had so much trouble during his life.
Roberto Longhi, who did more than anyone to drag M’s art back into view, liked to call paintings the primary documents in art history Longhi said that unlike archival documents, the critic’s response to the art was the only thing that couldn’t be faked. M’s paintings are works of his time and for our own, and looking at them long and hard again has been my own primary research, along with retracing the trajectory of his life. The documentary part pieces together the findings of long years of research by many people, whose names are found in the list of sources at the end. M is implicitly a report on a great and unfinished collective work of rediscovery. Not that the people who found the documents and identified and dated the canvases would likely share its conclusions. Not that the researchers agree now among themselves, or ever did. Mine is a working hypothesis, a preliminary outline. Though the text is littered with weasel qualifiers, the scrupulous may still find here that likelihood hardens too quickly into certainty – if it weren’t so, the narrative would sink under the weight of discussions of the evidence. Conclusions I think are dry enough. There’s no romancing.
I owe particular thanks to the recent discoverers who kindly talked with me about what they’d found – John Azzopardi, Fiora Bellini, Maurizio Calvesi, Sandro Corradini, Maurizio Marini, Vincenzo Pacelli. Thanks for their kindness to Pino Bianco, Marco Ciatti, Mario Croce and Princess Odescalchi. For help with books to Enzo Bisso, Lady Drysdale, Rosario Würzburger. Helen Langdon has kindly pointed out two errors of detail that came from quoting corrupt transcriptions. These have been corrected from the original Australian edition of this book, whose publishers, Michael Duffy and Alex Snellgrove, and their staff Gail MacCallum, I deeply thank. I love working with people who know a wing and a prayer is the way to fly. Thanks to Rosemary Davidson and Jack Macrae for joining the wild ride in London and New York and for not falling off. And thanks to Michael Cilia, aged ten, who got the ladder and took me down into the guva and did not fear.
M
M? M WAS A PAINTER. This is a book about him. His usual name was Michelangelo Merisi. The first published account of his life, though – and it was by a contemporary who’d known him – called him Amerigi. The second called him Merigi. And when he was one year old and five years old his father’s name was recorded as Merici and then Morisi. The painter himself was named as Merisio in Roman court documents and Morigi in another written the year before he died. The further vagaries of the written tongue transmuted him variously into Morisius, Amarigi, Marigi, Marisi, Narigi, Moriggia, Marresi and Amerighi. M himself signed his name Marisi.
Friends uncertain of the surname just called him Michelangelo, or Michele or Michelagnolo, and people who felt uncertain about that as well or who simply knew him less intimately called him generically after the small town of Caravaggio in the province of Bergamo, just east of Milan – where he almost certainly wasn’t born but where he spent part of his childhood and where his parents’ families came from. M was most likely born in Milan and that was where he learnt to paint. He was born in 1571, although his friends thought he was born in 1573 and indeed so did everyone until recently, on account of M’s adjusting his age to make himself a couple of years younger when he went to Rome. Genius was more appreciated in youth and M in Rome was almost a late starter, still unknown when other painters his own age were at the top of the heap and employing him in assembly line work. He died in 1610 in an unidentified location, probably on July 18. M didn’t so much die as go missing. He disappeared and his body was never found. No one witnessed his death. Or those who did weren’t talking.
His fifteen surnames and the dates and places of his birth and death weren’t the only uncertainties about M’s life. A lot of what happened between those extremities was no less uncertain. What’s known today derives largely from the memories of two contemporaries writing a couple of decades after the events they recalled, ten years or so after M had died. Artists’ lives, in those days, were brief. Often in the living, always in the writing. A painter’s life was about as long as a who’s who entry or a note in a tourist guidebook. This was what artists’ recorded lives mostly were, chronological lists of works with a note on technique or the odd illustrative anecdote thrown in. The most intelligent and ambitious of these assemblages – Vasari’s in the mid sixteenth century and Bellori’s a hundred years later – elaborated an idea of painting that each artist’s career was used to illustrate. Neither the individual artist’s inner life nor the minutiae of his social existence – the staples of modern biography – was felt worth retailing to anyone interested in the work.
The idea of the inner life spread its dire wings a couple of hundred years after these painters’ lives were lived and written, and so did that related idea of unearned greatness now called celebrity. In the nineteenth century they called it genius. The matter of the artist’s daily round was ignored because everyone knew that a painter’s life was mostly hard and dirty yakka. Time later cast a patina on the old ways, but hard work never acquired real glamour. The early artists’ lives were remote, primitive and immensely sane. The people who wrote them were tolerably well informed, close to what they described, and in M’s case they’re still the main source of knowledge. Nevertheless the first published accounts of M were deeply self serving narratives, each cut and shaped to fit the author’s thesis. Each one’s version of M was wholly sus. The first was written by a painter he’d humiliated who was out to settle the
There are more reasons for knowing little about M than a seventeenth century lack of interest in other people’s private lives. M lived in a time of ideological cold war that’d split late sixteenth century Europe as deeply as any political divide has riven the old continent in the twentieth. The rise of protestant power in northern Europe had set off a defensive and totalitarian involution of power in catholic Italy. The counter reformation put Italian culture on a war footing – asserted the catholic church’s claim to total control of Italians’ minds and bodies. It was launched seven years before M was born and it conditioned his whole life. Coercion and persuasion were its twin prongs. The inquisition was the stick, a vast repressive machinery that worked through informants and secret courts to meet ideological deviance with humiliation, prison, torture and burning alive. Art was the carrot, and was enlisted to serve the purposes of the church militant by channelling the imagination’s energies into the runnels of catholic doctrine.
Italy wasn’t a society that adapted easily to totalitarian control and the church’s repressive ambitions were only intermittently and imperfectly realized. The terror network was patchy, and there were usually mitigating elements even in the very worst regime art. The terror and the art were pretty dire nevertheless. Fear and suspicion pervaded the culture. The imminence of terror lurked in what you read, what you did for sex, how you dressed, what you thought about religion, what you knew about science, where your political allegiances lay. It drove private life underground. M lived in a time of bureaucratic power, thought police and fearful conformism, in which arselickers and time-servers flourished and original minds were ferociously punished or condemned to silence.
In everyday life, this meant that – in a way people once hadn’t in Italy – you kept to yourself, made sure you didn’t talk loosely, and were even more careful about what you put down on paper. It wasn’t an age that encouraged gossip, speculation, table talk, wit, paradox or any of the freer and more playful activities of the mind – even among friends. Careless talk cost lives, usually your own. That kind of easy social trafficking was ended that’d once run between the powerful and the artists they patronized, between clergy and lay intellectuals, aristocrats and businesspeople, men and women, old and young. Venice kept up its dazzling promiscuity and Florence a vigorous cultural resistance, but they were now the exceptions and deeply suspect to Rome. The easy brilliance of Italian city culture was gone. Social life was wary, veiled, edged with mistrust. It wasn’t a time to leave traces of your private life. Particularly if your ideas and attitudes or your behaviour were likely to draw unwelcome attention. Things, it was understood everywhere, remained among friends. Even the higher clergy, who were anything but nonconformist, kept up their private correspondence in a kind of archly allusive doublespeak and when they were dealing in matters of state it was understood that letters would be destroyed, or the real information saved for word of mouth.
It wasn’t coincidental that though M had a cultivated and fluent hand, the only written traces he left of his life were a couple of scribbled receipts. Or that beyond the business accounts of a few commissions, the only records of his daily life should’ve come from police reports and court transcripts. It was in the nature of a police society that people – some people – ran to the authorities with complaints and denunciations on the slightest excuse, and their long, excited, voluble, angry or evasive verbatim statements are the only place where the very form and pressure of ordinary daily life in these years still lives. The record of ordinary life during the counter reformation in Italy was essentially the criminal record. And since M had his share of run ins with the authorities – more than his share, to be frank – the traces of these that have been found among the vast and worm-eaten record of people’s trouble with the law are all we know about how M lived from day to day.
The critics didn’t leave much. All the old accounts of M’s life and work, in their original Italian, German and Dutch, with introductions and parallel English translations, fit into forty or so pages, most of them on the paintings. Fifty years ago Roberto Longhi printed all the critical discussions of M’s work up to the early twentieth century, by Italian, French, English and German writers, in fiftyodd small pages. A good part of those pages were filled by his own commentary. Three hundred years of discussion of M’s art and life fit easily into fifty pages. M the man survives as a name in the archives, but the archival facts don’t add up to a fully upholstered life. They offer dots to connect, numbers to colour, grounds for hypotheses, data for a mind generated identikit, and what follows here is no more than such an outline. An hypothesis. The outline offered here will fade when more becomes known, but no imaginable archival finding is likely to make the painter M a reader friendly figure – people always found him prickly, his enemies found him violent. His intimates never talked. If you want to know M now, you can poke round a few palaces, alleys and prison cells, quite a few gloomy churches, some ports, a deserted beach or two. Which won’t tell you much. And you can look long and hard at the paintings.
The paintings. The art historians have hammered out a workable canon and a chronology of M’s work. It’s a great collective achievement and years and years of patient drudgery lie behind it. A hundred years ago M’s paintings were mostly still rotting in attics and cellars and decaying churches, hidden under crusts of filth, while M’s name labelled scores of clumsy copies and crass derivations by later painters who aped his work. Bringing M back to life and sight has been a long, complex and fraught undertaking. The soot of candle smoke, layers of yellowing varnish and crude overpainting have been removed from painting after painting. Rotting canvas, cracked paint, ripped fabric have been nursed back to stable material existence. Images that seemed beyond repair have come back to life, imperfect but real. There are still paintings to be found, doubts to be settled, works to be reordered. But now you can move through a fairly sure sequence of work and try to match the paintings to the known events of M’s life. It’s been like this for less than a decade.
The paintings are M’s great secret. They still have, for a lot of people, the peculiar inaccessibility of the wide open. They delight and disconcert by seeming, like certain works of Tolstoy and Chekhov, to have nothing to do with art at all. They seem to go straight to shocking and delightful life itself, unmediated by any shaping intelligence. The appearance, of course, misleads. In a time when art was prisoner first of ideas and then of ideology, M undertook a singlehanded and singleminded exploration of what it was to see the reality of things and people. He did it with a rigour that, like the work of Leonardo a hundred years before him, meant as much to the origins of modern science as it did to modern art – more so in a way, since what Leonardo wrote about in art only became real in M’s hands. M rendered the optics of the way we see so truly that four hundred years later his newly cleaned paintings startle like brilliant photos of another age. These images came out of an attention to the real that ignored the careful geometries of renaissance art as scrupulously as it excluded the dogmas of religion. No other painter ever caught a living bodily presence as M did.
And yet M was able to make art so breathtakingly objective only because he was peculiarly true to his own subjective way of seeing. His visual explorations laid bare his own psyche and his own susceptibilities with a touching frankness and courage – he knew quite well that what and how he painted showed as much of himself as it did of the people on the canvas. M’s peculiar personal honesty has more to do with Cézanne than with the painters who preceded him, and in the end it’s the reason he fascinates people today. M was the first modern painter. The enigma of M the man is that so little of the few known facts of his amazing life seem to match the subtle and penetrating mind his paintings mirror. Right from the outset of his fame, M the man was known around Rome in the first years of the seventeenth century as a difficult and violent and antisocial person – wild was the word most people used – and the later events of his life seemed to confirm the early judgement with devastating finality. The worst and most lasting effect of M’s personal history was that it fed back into his art – was fed back into his art by hostile intellectuals – to distort the nature of what he’d done. Yet M needed it, that hard shell, to defend his art and his person in a violent and intolerant time. There’d been years before the fame, when he was happy and secure and productive, when he drew no unwanted attention at all.
