Caravaggio Read Online Free Page B

industry except for the few wool and silk mills Sixtus helped to establish. As a result of the zeal with which new churches and palaces were being planned and constructed, the building trades provided the principal opportunities for employment. But still there were not nearly enough jobs for the poor who begged in the streets, their desperation increased by the plagues and famines of the 1590 s, their numbers swelled by the hordes of indigent pilgrims who flocked to the city’s shrines.
    Confraternities of priests and lay brothers were founded to aid beggars and pilgrims, and to bury the anonymous paupers who simply dropped dead on the street. Exemplary figures like Saint Filippo Neri sought to make the teachings of the church accessible to the common man, an ideal that would later guide Caravaggio as he conceived his great religious paintings. Meanwhile the rich—aristocrats, bankers, financiers, church officials—were actively setting new standards of ostentation and display, cultivating a taste for luxury and ornamentation that expressed itself in their jewels, clothes, carriages, daughters’ dowries, and the decoration of their palaces. Under the reign of Clement VIII, who had been chosen pope earlier in the same year in which Caravaggio arrived in the Eternal City, the Roman cardinals became avid art collectors and patrons.
    This was the world Caravaggio entered when he moved from Milan to Rome—poor himself, but possessing a skill that might prove useful and amusing to the rich. With its stark divisions between the indigent and the privileged, the culture provided him with the high contrasts that he observed meticulously and incorporated in his art. For among the qualities that made, and continue to make, his work so original and enduring was an acute power of observation: the ability to see how age and gender, social status and occupation, expressed themselves not only in gesture and dress but in tendon and knuckle, elbow and wrist, in the depth of a furrow and the droop of an eyelid.
    Every social class makes at least a cameo appearance in his work, but in his final and greatest Roman paintings, the poor have claimed center stage. He lived with them and understood them. By the time he painted his Madonna of Loreto for the Church of Sant’Agostino—a scene in which a stately, graceful Madonna appears with her son in a doorway of an ordinary house that evokes so many doorways in Rome—the calloused, bare, filthy feet of the pilgrims who kneel before her strike us as being as familiar to Caravaggio as the back of his own hand.
    In his choice of models he worked his way up from the demimonde to the world of the honest laborer and the pious, devoted poor. Near the start of his career he was drawn to portray cardsharps and thieves, criminals at work, pretty-boy musicians, and his Roman neighbors dressed up in the costumes and attitudes of saints. If his art depended on observing nature, on paying close attention to the visible world, there must have been plenty of opportunity to witness the full range of illicit activity in the taverns and streets around him, and to find visually arresting faces and characters that required only a costume change for their transformation from street whores into repentant Magdalenes and virginal Madonnas resting on the flight into Egypt.
    According to a census taken in 1600 , the population of Rome was approximately 110 , 000 . It was a city of men, a fact that will become important when we consider Caravaggio’s social and sexual life. Males outnumbered females, of whom there were 49 , 596 . Of that number 604 were prostitutes by profession. A decade before, it had been reported—apocryphally, it is now believed—that the courtesan population of Rome totaled 13 , 000 . Throughout the countryside, banditry had reached epidemic proportions, and in the city, crime was so rampant that Pope Sixtus V decreed that robbers should be beheaded and their