Sudden Death

Basket of Fruit

Caravaggio had a third patron in his meteoric years: Federico Borromeo, cousin of Saint Carlo and at that point the youngest cardinal Milan had ever had. He was elected at age twenty-three because, with the ideologue of the Counter-Reformation dead, it was unimaginable that Milan’s cardinal seat could be occupied by a priest from another family.

Before Carlo Borromeo died — an ascetic and twisted spike, a terror, the fucking thought police avant la lettre—Federico had hoped to be a theology professor. His cousin’s almost instant canonization came as he was editing the Acts of the Council of Trent, which meant that choosing him was a logical as well as doctrinal decision: he was the only person who really understood what the hell the Counter-Reformation was about, now that it had Europe gushing blood. Also, Federico Borromeo was a key pawn in the pope’s chess game: he was on the side of the French in Milan, a city that Philip III had just seized back by force of arms for the Spanish empire.

It’s not surprising, then, that in the autumn of 1599, Federico Borromeo was living in exile at the Palazzo Giustiniani in the Piazza di San Luigi dei Francesi: he was present at the consecration of the Contarelli Chapel.

Cardinal Borromeo the Second wasn’t a sanctimonious or virtuous type — unlike the banker whose guest he was, he was a regular at his neighbor’s men-only masked balls — but he had a sainted last name to preserve.

Borromeo had his own collection of art, tasteful and well chosen, which was deposited in the Ambrosian Library upon his death. Unlike his cousin the saint, who left a trail of misery across Europe, Federico spent his time and money buying books and manuscripts his agents sent him from Greece and Syria for the library on antiquity he founded, which exists to this day. It’s to him that we owe much of our knowledge of the Hellenes.

When Borromeo the Second arrived in Rome, in small part to represent the interests of Milan at the Vatican and in large part because he definitely was not welcome by the Spanish government in his native city, Caravaggio had yet to turn to painting only what and as he liked: he was about to abandon the background noise of bucolic Mannerism that still suffused his sacred scenes before the absolute triumph of his Calling of Saint Matthew. Borromeo was his first private client: he bought a lesser painting, Basket of Fruit, before Caravaggio set the history of art on fire with the reds of Judith Beheading Holofernes.

Basket of Fruit was painted not as fruit appears in nature, but rather as it looks reflected from a certain distance in a concave mirror. In its time, the painting was considered a virtuosic work more in the manner of the Flemish artists than the Italians. Rather than represent a window with foreshortening toward the outside, as Renaissance optical realism tended to do, it occupied an interior three-dimensional space: to look at it was to see a basket on a shelf. To heighten the effect, Caravaggio painted the background the same color as the wall in Borromeo’s study at the Palazzo Giustiniani and even followed the small cracks and bulgings in the wall on which it hung. The background must have been painted in situ.

Painting the fruit, which was on the verge of rotting, couldn’t have taken Caravaggio more than two days of work in his studio. The piece measures twelve by nineteen inches, which means that it crossed the Piazza di San Luigi dangling from the artist’s fingertips by the upper inside stretcher of the mounted canvas, as the main figure was already drying. Merisi must have carried his paintbrushes and palette in the other hand, his mind fixed on how to reproduce the quality of light on the texture of a real wall.

The painting, likely transported with his usual air of provocation, was a revolutionary object in a way that those of us living afterward can’t imagine, because it’s always been present and we’ve seen it reproduced a thousand times without even realizing it. Not only does the perspective extend out into the room in which it’s hung, but no Italian artist had ever painted a still life before — that’s why the painting is called Basket of Fruit: the idea of a “still life” had yet to be conceived.

The artist must have entered the Palazzo Giustiniani by the entrance to the servant’s courtyard after midday — the light reflected on the wall isn’t white, but orangish, like Roman light on autumn afternoons. He must have passed the stable doors and come in through the kitchen. Surely he blew away the hair falling over his face before beginning the climb up the servants’ stairs. Then he must have arranged his cloak before going through the false wall that connected the lower realms with the piano nobile, pushing the door open with his hip. The office must have been made ready for him to do his work while Borromeo attended to business at the government offices of the Vatican.

It was there in Borromeo’s study that Caravaggio saw the object that changed his sense of color: one of the miters that a strange bishop by the name of Vasco de Quiroga, radical and possibly brilliant, had brought as a gift for Pope Paul III when he was called to the Council of Trent.