Sudden Death

Theft

In 1620, the doctor and artists’ biographer Giulio Mancini devoted an entry in his book Considerazioni sulla pittura to Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, whom he had once treated after a rather flamboyant accident involving knife slashes and horse kicks. The brief biography of the artist begins like this: “Our age owes much to the art of Merisi.”

From Giulio Mancini we learn that Caravaggio had reached Rome in 1592, at the age of twenty-one. He went to live at the loggia of the Colonna family and was employed by Camilla Montalto, sister of Pope Sixtus V. The artist must have come to her on the recommendation of Princess Costanza Colonna, who had employed his father as a master stonemason in Milan. The Lombardy noblewoman had always shown a great weakness for Caravaggio: she had protected him as a boy during the terrible plague that took his father, and spent her life applying for work and clemency for him at his frequent request.

It’s no surprise, either, that the Colonnas were interested in introducing a painter into the explosive city of Rome at the end of the sixteenth century. Lombardy had turned out great bankers, brilliant generals, and pedigreed priests, but its status wouldn’t be secure for all eternity if it didn’t also furnish a native of Milan capable of decorating the walls of a Roman church.

Caravaggio was a painter of undistinguished images of saints during the period in which he lived in the Colonna loggia. Camilla Montalto put him to work for Pandolfo Pucci, the miserable bastard priest who made him paint in return for sustenance that scarcely deserved the name: in his household, the servants ate nothing but lettuce.

Says Mancini: “Salad for the first course, the main dish, dessert, and even for toothpicks.” On Caravaggio’s already formidable drunken sprees, compensation for the rigors of trying to make a life as a young artist in a city to which all the young artists of Europe had already moved, he would call his patron “Monsignor Insalata.” The fact that Mancini knew this suggests that in his own youth he must have been something less than a paragon of good behavior.

Naturally, Merisi soon left the service of Camilla Montalto and her Monsignor Insalata. Before he left, he took the Boleyn ball as recompense. He wasn’t interested only in its chest, which he surely sold off cheap to a cut-rate jeweler. Next to painting, pallacorda was the great passion of his life and a source of income.

It was his dirty-nailed fingers that emerged from the field of ashes left by the blaze of the Counter-Reformation, only instead of opening to the sun like a butterfly of flesh, they snatched up the ball, hiding it away in a pocket.