Caravaggio Read Online Free Page A

spending what remained of his inheritance.
    The next thing we know is that he left Milan for Rome in the autumn of 1592 . Perhaps he sensibly realized that for a painter the opportunities for employment and advancement would be greater in the epicenter of ecclesiastical and aristocratic power. Or, like any ambitious young man, he resolved to follow his luck to the source of influence and wealth. He may have been tired of Milan with its painful associations, its gloomy history of misery, plague, and famine. Several of his biographers suggested that he murdered a man in Milan and had to leave town in a hurry. Possibly he had already begun the first of the successive cycles of violence, escape, flight, and exile that would recur, with increasingly disastrous consequences, throughout his life.
    Mancini states that Caravaggio’s hot temper frequently made him act in outrageous ways. Bellori reports that because of his turbulent and quarrelsome nature, and because of certain disputes, he left Milan and traveled to Venice, while a note on another manuscript mentions that he fled the city after killing a companion. Still another inscription on yet another manuscript, this one in an almost indecipherable scrawl, refers to an incident involving a whore, a slashing, daggers, a police spy, and a jail term.
    Something happened. He left Milan. He decided to go to Rome.
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    In the Salone Sistine, at the Vatican, there is a fresco depicting the Piazza Santa Maria del Popolo around the time when Caravaggio first arrived in Rome. The scene suggests the main square of a prosperous rural town on a day when the farmers’ market happens not to be in session. The animals—donkeys pulling overloaded carts, horses, a flock of sheep—nearly outnumber the humans. In the lower right-hand corner, a man is spreading an impressive quantity of laundry out to dry on grassy bank. In the background is the Church of Santa Maria del Popolo, where, less than a decade after Caravaggio arrived—from the north, through the Porta del Popolo, then the principal gateway into the city—he would paint the masterpieces that now adorn its Cerasi Chapel. Bisecting the fresco is the obelisk from the Circus Maximus, which Pope Sixtus V ordered erected in the square, and which remains the fixed point around which the street life of the modern piazza swirls. You can use these landmarks to orient yourself as you try to stretch your imagination far enough to encompass the fact that the semibucolic public space portrayed in the fresco is the same one that—swarming with pedestrians dodging buzzing motorini , surrounded by stylish cafés at which there is still an occasional movie-star sighting—occupies its site today.
    Paradoxically, the tranquillity of the scene in the Vatican fresco was an indication of fresh energy, of recovery and resurgence. In 1527, Rome had been entirely destroyed, looted and razed by the army of Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor. Churches and palaces were burned to ashes, citizens tortured into surrendering the last of their wealth. It was said that not a single window in Rome was left unshattered. Some 45 , 000 Romans—including many artists and cultural figures—fled their ravaged city, which promptly lapsed into ruin and decay.
    Only in the last decades of the sixteenth century had the city begun to rebuild, largely under the direction of the visionary Pope Sixtus V, who launched an ambitious progam of urban revitalization, building monuments, reorganizing neighborhoods, replacing the tangles of alleyways with broad avenues connecting the major basilicas. But late-sixteenth-century Rome was still a long way from the urban paradise that Sixtus envisioned.
    A wave of migration from rural areas—inspired less by the capital’s attractions than by the hope of escaping the grim cycle of bad weather, crop failure, and famine—severely overtaxed the resources of a city in which there was virtually no