Sudden Death

The Banker and the Cardinal

Though Cardinal del Monte was Caravaggio’s official patron in the years when he burst onto the scene of Mannerist painting in order to annihilate it, del Monte wasn’t the primary collector of his paintings. He had the discernment to discover him, but not to understand what he would be capable of once he set about painting with absolute freedom and support, as he did once he had a studio at the Palazzo Madama and enough commissions to unleash his visual experiments. Back then, his brilliantly colored paintings must have looked very strange, with characters from sacred history portrayed as the lowly beings who crowded Rome at the end of the sixteenth century.

The banker Vincenzo Giustiniani, head of the Repostaria Romana and principal financier of the French crown, must have seen Caravaggio’s paintings in the Palazzo Madama’s music salon — he was a neighbor and good friend of Cardinal del Monte — and without ever encroaching on the cardinal’s patronage, he bought up all the works by the artist that were perhaps too scandalous to hang in the house of a prelate. These works — possibly too extreme for del Monte not only to display but even to understand — turned out to be plentiful. At the end of Merisi’s life, the cardinal had eight of his paintings and the banker fifteen.

Caravaggio’s work was just one of the realms in which del Monte and Giustiniani competed for objects that skirted the acceptable in Counter-Reformation Rome. If del Monte bought the second telescope produced for commercial purposes by his protégé Galileo Galilei, it was because Giustiniani had bought the first. At the cardinal’s grand parties, just as at the banker’s more spartan gatherings, the high point was always the moment when someone opened the door to the terrace and invited the guests to see the moon from as close up as the Selenites must have seen it.

Del Monte and Giustiniani couldn’t have been more different. The banker was a married man, terribly bored by the worldly obligations of his work as financier to the pope. When he could, he escaped to the scrubland of Liguria to hunt deer and wild boar. He was long and gaunt, with the kind of sharp face that betrays the true predator. He spoke little and read a great deal. Nothing could have been more unlike the cardinal’s gelatinous exuberance. The two men’s friendship — in addition to being genuine — was a fire-tested bond that made it possible for them to operate comfortably, though because of their French connection they were always in the minority at the Vatican.

Both were lovers of mathematics and sponsors of treatises on the mechanical sciences. Both invested time and money in a novel form of alchemy that didn’t seek the transmutation of metals or the elixir of youth but rather a knowledge of the essential elements of the earth — what we now call inorganic chemistry.

Anyone who believes that earthly objects are all composed of the same group of substances, and that transformations are accomplished only by mechanical means, will naturally perceive the voice of God in the filthy fingernails — nails that are of this world, a part of history — of Caravaggio’s saints and virgins. The voice of a god more brilliant than capricious; a god unlike God, remote and uninterested in revealing himself in miracles beyond combustion or the balance of forces; a true god for everyone: the poor, the wicked, the politicians, the rent boys, and the millionaires.

Caravaggio was to painting what Galilei was to physics: someone who took a second look and said what he was seeing; someone who discovered that forms in space aren’t allegories of anything but themselves, and that’s enough; someone who understood that the true mystery of the forces that control how we inhabit the earth is not how lofty they are, but how elemental. Del Monte and Giustiniani surrendered to Caravaggio. For the banker, it was the paintings; for the cardinal, the man. The two of them lived in palaces that faced each other across the piazza, at the end of which was the church of San Luigi dei Francesi, where Merisi’s first public works of art hang.

At the time of his leap to fame, the artist never had to walk more than three hundred yards to deliver the painting he had just finished.