Caravaggio's police records

The exhibition at the State Archives, in which restored documents from Caravaggio's extensive rap sheet are presented, is pretty remarkable.  Here are two samples.

First, a poem. Caravaggio and a couple friends were arrested for writing slanderous verse insulting a rival painter, Giovanni Baglione.  [A representative line: "Without a doubt you could call him John Testicle."  Um, good thing Caravaggio stuck to painting.] When the charges were brought to trial, the judge copied the poem by hand, pictured below, with the original tucked into the spine.

Second, here's a pretty gruesome drawing.  In 1600 the philosopher Giordano Bruno was executed in Campo de' Fiori. He had been imprisoned for several years for heresy and other beliefs considered dangerous to the church. On February 17 of that year, the authorities marched him to the Campo under the cover of night, stripped him and burned him alive. If you've ever been to Campo de' Fiori, the towering hooded statue in the center is of Bruno. The document below was written by an eyewitness to the execution. Notice the drawing in the margin of a man in flames.

Methods, mirrors, and a model having a cigarette for lunch

A friend sent me an email last night praising Caravaggio's mastery of facial expression and asking what I knew about his methods. I'm no art historian and I'm one of the worst visual artists alive, but I have done some reading about what experts have discovered regarding Caravaggio's approach to the canvas.

During his early years in northern Italy he learned to paint faces and still lifes. Many of his first works in Rome explored these subjects.  Here are "Boy with a Basket of Fruit," "Boy Bitten by a Lizard," and "Still Life with a Basket of Fruit."

Notice that the fruit in the first painting is so ripe, or over-ripe, that it's bursting open, which makes the portrait even more sensual. In the third painting, the produce is past its prime -- the leaves are withered, there's a worm-hole in the apple, and the pear should be eaten immediately.

Part of Caravaggio's appeal is that he didn't idealize, even in his later religious works. It was especially controversial when he used prostitutes as models for Saint Catherine of Alexandria or the Virgin Mary, as in "Madonna of Loreto" below.

Here's what Helen Langdon, who wrote the best biography of Caravaggio, has to say about this painting: "Caravaggio's Madonna is warmly human, and brought close to the pilgrims, who are separated from her by only a step.... And yet we are aware that she is a vision; she is lit from above, and towers over the pilgrims, her size, as in medieval art, conveying transcendence, and her strange, weightless pose suggesting that she has just alighted in the doorway.... She is a deeply ambiguous figure, warm, fleshy (we feel the imprint of her fingers against the child's body), yet with an unreal grace, and encircled by mysterious light and shade. Caravaggio weaves together layers of reality and illusion; she is a housewife, welcoming the pilgrims in a dark Roman vicolo; she is a statue framed in a niche, suggesting the wooden statue within the shrine at Loreto, brought to warm life; she is truly the Madonna of Loreto, on the threshold of the Holy House, and born from the faith and in the imagination of the pilgrims."

But the simplicity of the Virgin and child, and especially the dirty feet of the pilgrims, outraged many of Caravaggio's contemporaries. It was rare to paint religious works in which the figures were depicted as being so human. Here's a little more from Langdon: "It was entirely new for the humble poor to appear centre stage in a public altarpiece, and the people 'made a great fuss over it.' Cardinal Paleotti had written that the naturalism of religious art should not shock or disturb, and perhaps the people missed a more consoling and traditional splendour. The picture shows no hint of the squalor in which the Roman poor truly lived. Yet at a deep level it is in harmony with Oratorian spirituality, thrusting the poor, and their simple faith, before a courtly elite, insisting on a low style, and moving the viewer to that love and compassion through which he might win salvation."

As for Caravaggio's methods, there are a few interesting facts and theories. Scientific testing has discovered that he didn't draw or sketch on his canvases; he just went straight in with the paintbrush. And many experts now believe that he used mirrors in the studio, and maybe even worked with a camera obscura to project images onto the canvas. The best argument for his use of these techniques is that a disproportionate number of his figures appear to be left-handed.

I'm sure I've failed at answering the original question, but there you have it.

Yesterday, when I tracked down the address of Fillide Melandroni, Caravaggio's beloved courtesan, I discovered that her street is now the poshest shopping strip in Rome. Designer stores flank the avenue as it pours into the Piazza di Spagna. I leaned against a storefront, avoiding the masses with their fistfuls of purchases, and tried to imagine Caravaggio strolling up Via Condotti towards Fillide's house, looking up at her window to see if she was alone or otherwise engaged. In front of me, they were setting up a photo shoot to advertise a new line of handbags. You can see the model below enjoying a cigarette break.

Caravaggiomania!

It's been a terrifically productive couple of days.  I've probably walked 20 miles, zigzagging the city, tracking down Caravaggio's old addresses, favorite taverns, and the alley where he murdered Ranuccio Tomassoni after a game of pallacorda, which is an early form of tennis.

There's a remarkable thing happening in Rome regarding Caravaggio.  Though famous during his lifetime, he was largely forgotten or ignored for a few centuries after his death, which is often the case with geniuses. His resurgence in popularity is dizzying. Italians seem to have decided that he's their most valuable tourist attraction, their best export. Why is he so attractive to our modern sensibility? I guess that's what I'll explore with this novel. There's something dangerous and sexy and tragic and familiar about his life and his art. Suddenly 400 years after he died, we can't get enough of him.

This year, the 400th anniversary of his death, has brought many new exhibitions, some of them great, some of them not. I was in Rome a year and a half ago.  Caravaggio was popular then, but nothing like now. Yesterday morning I saw three of his works at the Galleria Doria Pamphilj, then as I walked north on Via del Corso to locate the apartment of the courtesan he loved, Fillide Melandroni, I passed this piece of street art, a sidewalk re-creation of his "Sick Bacchus," which is an eary self-portrait. After it you'll see Caravaggio's original.

Not bad, right?  I used to teach middle school, and I could barely write my name with chalk.  But the remarkable thing is that this painting is recognizable enough to passers-by that it makes financial sense for the street artist to choose it, rather than something like Michelangelo's Creation of Adam. Caravaggio's images have entered the public consciousness at a new level.

Finally, here's a photograph of Castel and Ponte Sant'Angelo.  It was on this bridge on September 11, 1599, that Caravaggio, along with all of Rome, watched the beheading of Beatrice Cenci.  But first, yesterday I saw this portrait of Beatrice by Guido Reni, which supposedly he painted in her jail cell just before the execution.

All right, here are the Sant'Angelo and Tiber at dusk.

Landed in Roma

Hello Kickstarters, and whoever else finds their way here.  After 21 hours of travel, I arrived in Rome yesterday evening.  I got in too late to head to the city, so I spent a fitful suburban night sleeping on a friend's couch.  Lots of dogs howling and birds squawking.  My friend is a Finnish violinist who's dating a Sicilian drummer, and I would have stayed with them longer if they didn't live so far from the city center (half hour by car).  So today I made my way to the heart of the centro storico and settled into an apartment 50 meters off Piazza Navona.  A very generous guy named Alessandro is letting me stay here three nights for practically nothing.  For the next few days, I'll be living right in Caravaggio's old stomping grounds.  If I walk to the corner, I can see the spot where he was arrested for carrying an unlicensed sword.

This afternoon I visited the smaller of the two current exhibitions about Caravaggio.  This one, in the Palazzo Venizia, presents the results of xray testing on three of his paintings.  The study reveals earlier versions of these works, underneath the final images, and it allows us to understand Caravaggio's artistic process more clearly.

But tomorrow I'll see the main exhibition, which presents dozens of police records for the first time, including new information about where he lived in Rome, the murder he committed, and his death.

For now, I'm going to shrug off this jetlag with a stroll to the Tiber to catch the last of the sunset.

I'm really filled with gratitude to all my patrons for helping me get here.  And I'm feeling good about the work ahead.  More news soon...

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