Caravaggio - A Life Sacred and Profane: Interview with Andrew Graham-Dixon

hi everyone welcome to episode 14 of the book talk today podcast where today we'll be joined by andrew graham dixon one of the leading art critics and presenters of arts television in the english-speaking world where today we'll be discussing his book caravaggio are life sacred and profane andrew thank you very much for taking the time to sit and discuss the book with us it's a pleasure excellent so i would be remissed andrew if i didn't mention that my mum was incredibly excited to find out that i'd be speaking with you she did a degree in arts and she has been a longtime fan of your work actually and when i brought up your name she mentioned that you had done the italy unpacked series with georgio locatelli and she said to me do you remember watching that program with me with the two guys who went to italy i'm like no i don't remember watching this she's like you're speaking to one of them i'm like that's excellent that's excellent so firstly i wanted to find out a bit of the back story about your backstory for people who are listening or watching this that don't know who you are i think it'd be good to do a brief introduction to yourself and on the backside of that to just talk about your experiences with caravaggio and how you got into writing this specific book i uh i studied history of art um informally when i was young i went in those days because it was a bit less pressurized i guess between school and university you had the chance to to take some time out so i took a year uh i was going to read english literature which is what i did read at university but during the year off i went to italy and i looked all around and did a course on art history and a course on la lingua italiana and decided that i really just thought that art was something utterly fascinating and slightly regretted the choice of degree that i'd made but you know i that was fine and um so then i did a postgraduate degree in history of art and i was writing my phd but i was playing i actually got into playing a lot of snooker so i started playing snooker i'd always been into sport and and i was playing football and and so i'm not quite getting on with my phd um although it was sort of bubbling away in the background and uh i started doing some some writing and i and i got some work for the sunday times and then um there was a new newspaper launched in the uk called the independent and lucky me at the age of 25 i got the job of being their main operative so suddenly i was writing about art which i wanted to do i had some money i'd started a family so i needed to earn money so my phd went on the back burner and i became a journalist um and and and it all went very well the independent was a lovely place to work and uh i think some people at the bbc noticed what i was doing for the journalism so they started you know they offered me some work in television which um within about five years had turned into a big tv series called a history of british art which is my tutor at the courthold institute said was essentially my phd but in the form of a six part tv series so he couldn't give me a phd but he could give me a kind of you know pass on the back said well you kind of done it you know this is all right um no no honorary phd for you then no honorary phd sadly you know uh michael kittson lovely man um so you know then i embarked on on a career making a lot of television programs traveling around the world i've done we embark really on an attempt to remake or to revisit the subject matter covered famously in kenneth clark's series civilization but i felt extremely partially um for example he never mentioned spain in the whole of that you know covering of of civilization so we embarked on what turned out to be a 50-part television series although i don't think the bbc is even aware of the fact because the personnel have changed in editorial that they probably don't even know that it's one series but we did the uh history of british art we did the renaissance we did the art of spain the art of germany the arts of russia the arts of japan the arts of china the arts of america the elder scandinavia the highest of the low countries the art of france and they so say they went on but the whole thing if you anybody should ever watch it in in the right order is actually a 50 part series of i guess civilization but in the course of doing that i i embarked on um at one point i embarked on a three-part series um which wasn't uh a big series telling the story of a national art tradition it was three programs intended to flesh out the lives of three great artists caravaggio vermeer and constable all of whom had been the subject of fascinating specialist research which had never reached the general public and um so i made a program called who killed caravaggio that was the first of them and it was in the course of making that program it was in 1999 that the idea came to me of um actually writing this as a book and i spent the next ten years between my other commitments as a journalist and a television maker i spent the next 10 years writing the book that you just held up to the camera what was it specifically so i watched that documentary in preparation for this conversation and i was fascinated by it so my story with carrie roger just so you know as i did a essay in art history when i was at school on caravaggio specifically on the um the martyrdom of saint matthew and i that that's the one i chose so so the task was to pick one piece of art and you know you could choose it wasn't just on caravaggio it was just on on any piece of art and i came across that one and when i was reading the book i had no idea about the subtext of it and that's why i enjoyed reading your book is because when i was reading through the the backstories behind each of the works of art i thought to myself ah these are things that i obviously didn't pick up on on that pieces and his art always fascinated me because i always thought to myself it's almost as as if you're seeing something in real life and you can't even believe that it's actually been being painted so that was that was my backstory when when you were doing that documentary what was it that drew you to caravaggio even more throughout that that three-part series well um talk about vermeer inspired by the same project um as it happens so it's not just caravaggio but i mean the fact is that if you look at existing literature on caravaggio if you looked at the literature before i wrote my book um you know how often in one's life does one have a chance to write a book about one of the most loved most famous most celebrated most obsessed about artists of all time where you can tell a a totally amazing story be an amazing story that's not really been told before and c you can tell a story that completely changes one's view of what he's doing when he's doing it why he's doing it so you can't turn that down it seemed to me i mean what drew me to him more than anything else i suppose was i mean it's the work of sandra corradini is what drew me in sandra corradini i mean he is the the maestro of caravaggio's studies uh and his story is an extraordinary one he's the he's actually worked in the vatican or worked in the vatican as the devil's advocate lavocato del diablo and his job his day job was to find reasons why anyone from the distant past whom the present pope wishes to canonize his job as devil's advocate was to find reasons why they shouldn't be canonized dig the dirt so he spends his life spend his life in the archives in rome like give you at least in rome which is this amazing labyrinth of paper which has survived you know for all these centuries and it contains laundry lists it contains trial procedures it contains landlords suing their tenants it contains murder inquest it contains everything and and sandra's hobby when he wasn't digging the dirt on people up for canonization his hobby was caravaggio so today for 30 years well leagues in the vatican archives would go off and have their lunch their long italian lunch sandra would have a sandwich and then get into the archives and he once told me that he'd read all together he read everything every single archival document whether there was a lead suggesting it would go to caravaggio or not he just read it if it was in the right period of caravaggio's time in rome so 1592 to 1606 14 years he read every document i said how many documents he said eight million eight he must have scanned somewhere yeah i'm sure he's not sure you work out you must have just speed read but so he wrote eight million documents and at the end of which he published a book because he's very learned and he's part of a learned sort of clique of archival historians and they stick to themselves like i don't know people who are obsessed with phishing or whatever they've got their own newsletters their own means of communication so he published all of his findings which amounted to something like 242 documents related directly to caravaggio he published them in latin in a limited edition of a hundred in in the form of a book called materials towards a future trial and this book is like it is if you have the still waters of caravaggio studies up to sandra's time which is 1994 he published his book it's like a depth lodge because i mean it's got everything in it it prostitutes that caravaggio knew and and and had relations with and and maybe fought over fought to protect perhaps it's got the whole kind of uh story of his enmity with other artists who were competing for the plum jobs uh in rome which was kind of hollywood at the time it was where all the work was for artists so the holly rome was a kind of seething pit of artistic rivalry and caravaggio had this fierce rock it's got that it's got everything to do with the murder slash castration of ranutier thomasoni the pimp with whom caravaggio had his most landing feud it's i mean it's an amazing piece of scholarship and and yet it's probably written in an addition of 100. so to the people at large the the general public are so obsessed and fascinated by caravaggio this material was never going to reach them likewise there's a guy in malta who's a wonderful archival historical keith shibaros i mean and he he he uncovered caravaggio's dealings on malta towards the end of his life and you know the feud that he had seemingly with a knight of malta which in in in his view ended up with caravaggio murdered or or wounded so badly by that knight of malta in nipples in 1610 that he died from the wounds keith published that information in a footnote in a scholarly article you look for like footnote 73 this man may be man who killed caravaggio i work i mean if i found out who killed caravaggio i would be getting on the roof of my house and i would have a foghorn but so so it's it it's it was and then putting that together obviously with my own special uh i mean i think of myself as having a particular skill i don't mean to blow my own trumpet by i think i'm good at looking at pictures and talking about pictures and writing about pictures so i i wanted to put that together with a very sensitive so this book is not meant to be some kind of uh you know news of the world expose on on caravaggio or news the world doesn't exist anymore does it um you know not meant to be a sun expose of caravaggio his life's loves and and murder victims but but it's meant to be a book it's a book that's about a man who's lives in a dark and difficult dangerous place he has a dark and troubled past he is a troubled man and it's it's a book that aims to be as sensitive and sympathetic to him as it is possible to be within the context of his misdeeds um from from from the book and from reading it from my perspective it was interesting to read about his past and how that effective affected not only his environment and the people that he surrounded himself with his behavior but also the art inevitably because that early experiences really dictated how he went about approaching his art in particular when i was reading about for instance i didn't know about how he was affected by the bubonic plague and how in your research did you find his early life experiences really affect him as an individual well i mean the thing is you you're when you're talking about caravaggio's early life because he's not in people of that period you only know about them when they do something bad so there's very little documentary evidence about vermeer because he lived a clean life caravaggio the reason we got so much is because he was so often in trouble with the law so um you know if jackson pollock had lived in the 17th century we probably know a lot about him but we'd know nothing about barnet newman you know what i mean because pollock was a drinker and he got into trouble and he had fights that's how you know about people in those days but so when we're talking about caravaggio's early life obviously he's too young to be in trouble with an also so you're piecing things together from history and and uh the documentary evidence is very poignant caravaggio's father was a stone mason and the stonemason uh had his shop in milan and although they were from the village of caravaggio which is outside milan so caravaggio can be placed in milan with his father at the outbreak of this terrible uh plague which was brought to the city by the spanish ambassadors um milan was a spanish-controlled city it was part of the it was part of the habsburg empire so it came the city's put into total lockdown so no one can leave the plague multiplies there's an amazing description by a jesuit priest called paulo bishola who actually wrote an eyewitness account and he said that archbishop boromeo's firebrand counter reformation archbishop who wants everyone to mend their ways uh and and so he he says this is god's punishment on you you must all come out into the street you must all come out come out of your houses come into the main square take the paintings out of the churches take the sculptures out of the churches but we will make the whole square into a kind of outdoor arena of spiritual penitence so everyone would bring these paintings and sculptures out of the churches put them in the street it was the summer and then in the evenings they would light these great torches and barometer would talk for three hours to them about what they've done wrong and this priest paolo bishola he always he says and what's so strange is that although the people did such great repentance and although he spoke to them for three hours yet the next day the plague was even worse and even more people died because of course they didn't know about transmission of infectious disease particularly probably fleaborn you know so if you have a mass of people in the crowd and they've all got the plague bearing fleas then you're going to have everyone'll have the plague by the end of the meeting or the sermon but um and there's this sort of well as by the by you know when i was reading paulo bishop's description of this of these torches and and at the back there are these further torches and the grave carts are taking all the burial bodies to be buried in open pits because the cemeteries are all full so you've got torches and smoke and flame and people being carried in carts to their resting place you've got these torches and flares in the city square you've got the sculptures lit up you've got borromeo making us the whole thing sounds like the inspiration for caravaggio's great invention which is this extreme chiaroscuro light and dark spot lit cinematic lighting i mean the whole thing sounds like a piece of grisly terrible cinema um so i think it in that sense you know it seems to me that that imprinted itself on caravaggio's retina and his mental rating known as memory so that when he did you know because this happened when he was five years old so we need to wait 15 years later before he starts painting those you know it's a serious artist 17 years later but it's still there it must be it must be i mean yes there's examples there there are precedents for this type of beginning precedence for his type of extreme luminism in painting in venice which he probably visited in the work of tintoretto for example and um some of the other basanna the pasano workshop they did a lot of night painting but i still think that this sort of paroxysmal you know this inextremist i mean it's just like a caravaggio painting where someone is always in the extreme of their emotion and they're gesticulating and it's lit like that so i think that's one thing that influenced him the other thing is that if you very sad sort of chain of archival records in caravaggio itself the village because caravaggia's mother is very close to costanza colonel um because caravaggio's mother's sister costanza colonel is the great lady of the region because colonel family is one of the five most powerful families of italy and it still is today you can visit the kelowna palace it's still privately owned colonel family is amazing so caravaggio is very close to costanza colonna through his mother because his mother uh her sister was costanza colonel's wetness so although they're a humble family costanza colonna relied on caravaggio's aunt to see her through all her childbirth and costanza colano we know from another piece of archive actually went to this humble boy caravaggio's christening which by the way happens exactly a week before the battle of lopanto which is the greatest battle of the 17th century against the turk by the christian forces and guess whose dad costanza colonel's father marc antonio colonna is one of the victorious admirals in the battle of le panto and i've always wondered whether she doesn't costanza colana doesn't think that caravaggio is some kind of special child some kind of magic child because she goes to his christening and a week later he's christened michelangelo media caravaggio so he's christened after the avenging archangel of the christian faith archangel michael he's christened after him and then the great victory happens she may have put this together but anyway she looks after caravaggio all his life and his family all his life she never gets a painting from him and this is like um i don't know what the equivalent would be it would be it would be like one of the most powerful families in all of england looking after the son of a baker throughout his life but this is what happened and um but all basically because of that connection he's allowed with his family out of lockdown milan and they leave and then we know nothing but except five records in which we discover that within about a week they're in caravaggio and every single man in the family dies of the plague except for caravaggio and his brother so he loses his father his uncle his grandfather's every man in the family dies so on the one hand you've got these kind of images of fire and pestilence and plague with torches and spots and on the other hand you've got the death of all the men and caravaggio for the rest of his life remains kind of like a troubled man who doesn't have a father and there's no parental there seems to have been no parental influence so he's wild and he's bipolar and i think he feels as though he's been abandoned by god that's my sense yeah and then that would definitely come through in the way that he approached his art in particular i know in the in the in the book he referenced the fact that he wasn't actually trained he wasn't a formerly trained artist as opposed to his probably his counterparts in in rome in particular how do you feel like do you feel like he had a chip on his shoulder because of that in the sense that he wasn't trained like the others well he had the opportunity to be trained i mean it's my it's my conjecture that he wasn't trained if you read previous books on caravaggio they they go by the book because he did actually sign apprenticeship forms age 13 to paint with an artist called simon nepetagno who was a disciple of titian but the fact is this tsumone pettijana's specialist subject was fresco he was a fresco painter so had caravaggio a caravaggio is such a genius that if he did five years he's going to be really good when he starts in rome he's going to be really talented as a draftsman as a painter there are no drawings by his hand that survive whatsoever and his early paintings are really crude and suggest somebody who's feeling his way so i wouldn't say that he's completely untaught but i think you know he's the bad apprentice there's there's a little he's the apprentice who doesn't really turn up he plays truant he's out and about somewhere in milan he's selling off the little bits of land that were given to him by his father and his uncles we've got little transactions that take place he's getting a bit of money and then there's a a weird sort of marginalium written in the in this in the side pages of a biography that was later published but the manuscripts in the marchiana library in in venice and and in the manuscript of that which he never published it's a bar by a by um by a cne's physician called giulio mancini he was a friend of caravaggio he wrote a life of him but he never published this bit it's only in a ma and it says something like it's very hard to read but it says something like a policeman disfigured a prostitute dead caravaggio has a sword he's in prison and then he runs away but none of that gets into the official biography that's subsequently published but i think that's probably a much more like so i think fighting troubled you know in milan as a strong tradition and and this is a culture where the old hierarchies of p who does whatton who's well known and who isn't well known and who has to show respect to who they're all a bit up for grabs so i think caravaggio thinks perhaps because of this connection with the colonel he thinks he's higher up the scale than he is so he seems to always have a sword and you shouldn't have a sword unless you're a member of the nobility but he's the son of a stone mason so how come he's carrying a sword everywhere there are these sort of question marks but you know this sword carrying aspect of him doesn't go well um it certainly doesn't go well for the people he meets definitely on whom he uses the sword uh but so i think that he is he does have some degree of training by the time he gets to rome a little bit and he probably goes to venice because patriciano the teacher from whom he played truant i suspect would have told him to go to venice because pataciano always said oh tischentian you should go and look at titian to everybody he said that so i think when caravaggio ran away from milan on his way to rome i think he made a detour to venice which would make sense geographically and artistically if you think about tintaretto and bassano and people like that this luministic painting and also the tradition of painting without drawing that is venice and caravaggio made no drawings when it when it came to his move to to rome and his formidable time in rome specifically his transformation in the sense of the the art that he created and also the relationships that he made also the enemies that he made from your estimation when he was there what do you think the impact of the environment had on his relationships but also the art in general well it was a very competitive environment and he didn't arrive as it were with letters of preferment if you look back to the high renaissance say for example someone like raphael who arrives in rome he's got all the right letters from all the right people he's more or less straightaway introduced to the pope and within a couple of years he's painting the stanza for the vatican caravaggio is not like that he's some kid on the run from milan nobody's heard of him he's a right he's just gonna try and make it so he's coming in at the bottom level he's like one of the waiters who ends up turning into brad pitt you know he doesn't there's nobody he hasn't gone to the right acting school and turned you know he's just goes and he starts working and he works for all kinds of people and he's painting on the street and he gets into fights with these he's he he obviously feels a great sense for you can tell it from the beginning you know he he knows that he's something he knows that he can do something and he gets very frustrated he's painting baskets of fruit in the side of frescoes for a well-known artist called cavalieri tarpino and caravaggio gets really pissed off you know he wants to be painting the figures he wants to be given a bump up and and they don't give him a bump up because they know that he's better than them so they keep him down and then there's a fight and you know and so on and that's how it goes and he ends up painting pictures literally on the street for the pavements and he meets an enterprising guy called costanza spatter costantino sparta who's one of my favorite characters in the book and we only know him for a couple of he again he gets into trouble in the law that's how we know something from him and it's nothing no big deal but he says to the judge ah i've got two little girls who are at grammar school and i and i need the money and that's why i did this anyway this costanza spatter constantino espana he's got a picture shop and it's right opposite the palace of cardinal del monte who's the most avant garde in his taste of all the cardinals big avant-garde he's a massive revolutionist when it comes to music and science he's a patron of galileo and he's a patron of the new music he's his best friend is the man who writes possibly the very first opera so he's a pioneering guy and spatter knows that he's a pioneering guy and they do a little plan him and caravaggio we must paint a picture i'll put it in my shop window right like at the front and you paint a new kind of picture so he paints this picture called the card shops it's in for it's in kimball fort worth and it's a picture of two guys cheating a young man at cards but it's painted big and it's a kind of funny genre painting as they're now called but that kind of painting was totally new it's a painting of real people in real time in real life doing something although it does actually draw probably from the comedies and the and the musical comedies of the of the period it's quite theatrical it's all quite pantomime but nonetheless he does it it's a highly original it's very well done it's got that kind of immediacy that you were saying it feels like a scene from real life and delmont he sees it and suddenly caravaggio's in he does another picture called a the gypsy fortune teller which is again a street rogue female street rogue conning a man picking his pocket while she strokes his palm pretending to read it and sort of seducing him and stealing from him at the same time and and del monte clearly loves these pictures has them and then he has caravaggio to live in his house and and it's he you said that you know when you were young you wrote about the masters of santa when it's it's it's it's um cardinal del monte who gets that after sort of testing caravaggio for two or three years by getting him to paint this and getting him to paint that he thinks you're ready and he gets him that great commission because del monte is the cardinal working on behalf of the medici because all the cardinals have a kind of political aspect to them he works on behalf of the medici family the medici are very closely connected with france because the marriage immediately marries into the french royal family and so on so uh and they're also responsible for the conversion of um henry iv from protestantism to the catholic faith so uh this great french chapel in the french church which is where the matthew paintings are done for he he can get that for caravaggio because he's got all these french contacts so suddenly it's suddenly he is connected and he has got the possibility and he paints these pictures and they're just amazing and rome is knocked out by them it's like wow where was he you know it's like scorsese's first movie yeah the end part of the book where he you you mentioned that quote from scorsese was great i think um that really brought caravaggio's work into sort of the contemporary aspect of it i think which was really interesting one thing that was the underlying subtext of the for the book itself was caravaggio's relationship with thomas oni which i thought was a very interesting relationship um i think it would be good for you to talk about a bit about the uh the duel between caravaggio and thomas sony and that impact that that had on caravaggio specifically well it had a huge effect i mean basically renucce thomas only is a pimp and he's also the brother of the caparioni which is a kind of military position of the he's the military police enforcer for this particular district in other words he's connected he's a pimp but he's connected with the police because his brother is the capability and what it's a bit difficult to know exactly what happens but there's a lady called philadelphia and she appears she begins appearing in caravaggio's paintings she appears as saint catherine alexander she appears as um uh judith cutting the head off holophonies with erect nipples she's this sort of very sexy she she's she's kind of you know if if if scorsese had had bobby de niro caravaggio has filled her she's his central casting his dream but and and the thing is caravaggio works from life everything he does he sets the scene he he lights it he paints he he does it like a cinematographer so he needs real people for his work now with men that's not a problem but with women it's against the law it's against the law for a woman to pose for an artist because it's deemed to be the occasion for potential immorality so if you're an artist the only person you can get to paint for you is a woman that you pay are you a prostitute and caravaggio has loads of connections with prostitutes loads of connections but philadelph is a prostitute and she is a prostitute within renuccio thomas sony's so to speak group of prostitutes and she's the prize prostitute she's the one that is most she's the one who will graduate to become a courtesan and will be become basically the kept lady of one of the great families of florence the strozzi philippo strozzi will eventually take but and and save her from from this life that she's been living but in the meanwhile caravaggio and her they clearly have a rapport and she clearly i mean i think that she's caravaggio's lover she's certainly renucciated on the sony's lover at one point because she ends up in front of the magistrates for threatening to cut the face off another girl who's slept with tom with renuccia thomasoni and we've got this whole story which is in sandra's amazing archival collection of stories around caravaggio where she goes into root philida goes into ronu's house finds him in bed with another girl pulls this other girl naked out of bed and goes down the street with her threatening to cut her face so felida is the connection and caravaggio i i my own belief is that caravaggio himself becomes a kind of pimp i.e he doesn't pay the prostitutes that he knows he's always saying hello to prostitutes in the street whenever anybody says i saw caravaggio and he said hello to so-and-so and he said hello to sir and so you check with you certain says well they're all prostitutes so i think caravaggio is a kind of pimp he's and that these prostitutes are his models and instead of paying them he actually looks after them and he protects them possibly against their real pimps when their real pimps turn horrible and we know in that several cases caravaggio gets into trouble because he's attacked a man in order to protect a prostitute so there's this connection between caravaggio and thomas only which is an enmity because he's taken thomas oni's best girl and he's painting her and gradually this spreads again it spreads so that caravaggio's best friend is arrested for attacking thomas any best friend and thomas only is connected with the great spanish um families the spanish supporting families of rome that's his cardinal connection through his brother so the farnazy family whereas caravaggio runs with the medici and you have this sense that there's different gangs they're running the spanish lot are over there caravaggio's lots over here and gradually gradually gradually this comes to a head it seems to coincide with caravaggio being very disappointed because three of his paintings in a row get rejected by the churches for which they're commissioned possibly because we don't know exactly why but quite possibly because the churchill authorities get wind of the fact that the virgin mary in all of these paintings it's actually modeled on a prostitute so sorry you're gonna have to have this painting people have recognized that and they're talking about it but it's equally possible that caravaggio's enemies in the artist community actually tell the church this and it's not true necessary so you know we can't quite entirely get to the bottom of it but basically the bottom line is that about six years after the first skirmishes between caravaggio and thomas only it all comes to a head 1606 caravaggio's had some disappointments things have gone badly for him and there's some kind of dispute and he and three other men and tomisoni and three other men meet on the french ambassadors tennis court in the center of rome now the french ambassador's tennis court was a tennis court but it was also a place where for example i know from other archives that they had fencing matches so it's it's it's a good place to have a sword fight and this is a pre-arranged sword fight and then they start that fight and within seconds thomasoni is lying on the ground and there's this fountain of blood i mean he bleeds all of his life blood out in about 10 seconds 20 seconds because caravaggio has cut his femoral artery which is the artery at the groin and everyone is covered in blood everybody and thomas only's three seconds then all covered in blood they have a fight with caravaggio's seconds one of caravaggio's seconds has two fingers cut off and his ear cut off caravaggio gets very badly they say quite badly anyway wounded thomas only's dead they take him to the barber search and nothing can be done but and one of the subtexts or one of the themes of my book is is wounding and the nature of wounding and the nature of insult as in say for example um you know modern gang land cities in america like chicago you know the gangs have their codes and their ways and their rules and if you get wounded somewhere it's because you did something so if so if you insult my reputation i wound you on your face because reputation fronte it's the same word in italian face and reputation is it in english you say face you lose face so if you make me lose face i make you lose your face i will catch your face so and for example if you insult me behind my back i would not atta i would not do you the the honor of challenging you to a duel or fighting with you openly i would just wait till you weren't looking and i'd smashed you on the back of your head which is what caravaggio did to some kids young art students who who were mouthing off about that wonderful painting of um the the calling of matthew they were saying oh it's not very good it's just a venetian knockoff so he heard them and then he went up behind so with with thomas only i wouldn't say that it's a coincidence that caravaggio's cut him in the femoral artery because the femoral artery is very close to the male member i think caravaggio's attempting to castrate him or in some ways to deep to demand him sexually because because it's the matter of sexual sexuality now whether it's philadelphia we do know that they they'd fought over philadelphia that they disagreed with i don't know that it's necessarily up because another archive little horrible horrible dark snapshot is that after renuccio thomasoni is dead his widow is is told by the court that she has to look after their baby and she says i'm too young i'm too young to look after this baby and so then the judge turns to her mom and says you must look after this baby and she says i'm too old to look after this baby and the baby is then given to a family lawyer who has to put her into adoption takes her to a carmelite monastery and that's where she spends her life and she's she's born as she's she's her name is felicita which means happiness and she changes it to prudence as soon as she reaches the age of 18. this unhappy child who's abandoned by her mom whose father's you know is it possible that she was not actually i mean sandra at one point said to me i wonder if caravaggio is the father of that child because why on earth would would the widow give the child away i mean yeah why would you give your own child away white you know because it's a child of shame um or or it's possible that just caravaggio had heard on the grapevine that renuccio thomas only was being cookholded and he'd made the gesture of the horns and ranuccio had challenged him or it could have been philadelphia but whatever it was i think it was sexual because caravaggio's history is everything he does this is one of the things i wanted to try and write about to try and clear up because he's known as a kind of bad guy you know like a like a like a rolling stone of the of of the period but what i've tried to make clear in the book is that all his bad stuff that he does it's all completely logical and within the code and to a certain extent almost proportionate apart from the castration it's almost proportionate to what is done to him not just that he gets into trouble all the time nearly every time that he gets in trouble you can see why he did what he did and waiters insulted him and called him a lombard tosser so he's attacked the waiter but i mean that's what caravaggio is going to do because he's like that and he lives in this culture wherever you want you know no one talks about bernini the famous baroque sculptor as being a mad guy but i mean you know he tried to beat his brother to death with an iron bar after his brother slept with his girlfriend meanwhile he had his girlfriends severely scarred with a razor blade in her face for having slept with his brother so bernini lovely bernini is not quite so lovely these people you know this is a violent violent culture yeah and i think he did an excellent job in the book actually detailing that because like you said i i didn't really have that much of an idea about caravaggio only had an idea about his work not particularly his story but i think towards the end of the book you become somewhat sympathetic of the reason why he acted the way he acted which is which i think is a testament to the way that you wrote the book in particular what i wanted to discuss as well is his in the beginning of discussion we talked about his fact that he he came from a simple background but he was had close ties with nobility and his move to become a knight of malta and the reasoning of doing so do you believe it was because he had this inferiority in the sense that he was from a somewhat poor background but had associations with people that were quite rich up in nobility and wanted to have that status well we're going back to 1607 1608 just in the aftermath of the castration murder of thomas sony basically caravaggio is screwed because thomas sony is connected caravaggio's connected he's got his cardinal cardinal del monte and his cardinals got him off a load of stuff but this one you know you you've tried to castrate the guy and you've killed him we can't get you off this one you're gonna have to go and run and so caravaggio finds himself under a banda capitale from shippeoni borghese who's the head of the papal justice system who's also a collector of caravaggio's paintings but shipyoni borghese is compelled by thomasoni's position he has to set an example and he says right anybody who can bring me caravaggio's body will be given the reward and if you can't bring me the body just bring me the head bring me the head of caravaggio and i'll give you the board caravaggio goes up into the album hills why because that's where the colonna have their fiefdom near rome so he heads up into this wild mountain territory to this huge kalana controlled castle and he sends down the famous painting of david with the head of goliath which is caravaggio's own head which is now in the borghese gallery he sends that painting down and it's a plea bargain it's sent to shipping only borghese in the columns carriage here's a gift from the painter caravaggio what is it it's his head you ask for his head and in real life he's going to give it you in a painting spare him but he doesn't spare him he can't his hands are tied so caravaggio goes further south he goes to naples where the kalona again have a huge palace called the kaya the palace and again you know we are very blessed with archival information to do with caravaggio because very recently or you know 20 years ago what they discovered was this amazing little letter from one of the diplomatic envoys in naples saying costanza colonna is here at the moment she just arrived with her son who's called fabricius now fabricious forza colonna is the head of the knights of malta fleet he is the admiral of the fleet but not only that he is a reformed criminal he did something so terrible that he was sentenced to death by the pope and it was only when costanza colonel went on her knees to the pope pleading for mercy that the pope said okay i won't have him executed but he has to go to malta and he has to spend five years there and if he can show me that he's reformed i will pardon him and so colonel went to malta this is costanza's son same age as caravaggio went to malta and he did so well he became admiral of the fleet and we know from this amazing letter that he's there at the same time that caravaggio is there and if you look at the date when caravaggio would have been made a night of malta it's exactly a year after the date of that letter so in other words caravaggio must have gone to malta with fabrizio schwarzer costanza's son who had just picked up a boat from marseille a new galley and he was sailing to malta caravaggio must have gone because it was exactly a year to the day of arriving in malta that you could be made a night of walter so clearly what's happened here is that costanza has thought bloody hell caravaggio in trouble again how can i get this boy to behave well i know i'll do what i did with my son i will send him to malta fabricio take this boy caravaggio taken to malta beat some sense into him and maybe maybe he can be pardoned it's the only way that caravaggio is going to get a pardon if you become a knight of malta you are autumn the slate is wiped clean it doesn't matter what you've done if you become a knight of malta because you're you know the knights of malta are this sort of guerrilla warfare force they're a christian version of al qaeda they wreak terrorist havoc in morocco among the turkish and and african muslim populations that's what they do they do bad stuff but they do it on behalf of christianity they do the dirty work they're the last place at the final frontier of the christian world they've lost nearly their entire population to a siege they're the heroes the heroes so if you become one of them you're untouchable you're a made man in scorsese's terms you like the gangsters they always want to become a maid man yeah yeah you're untouchable that's what caravaggio would be if he managed to do it and of course it's it's great for malta because malta after the siege and malta became so famous money has poured into walter they've got this amazing new late renaissance baroque city valletta but no artists want to go there because it's such a god forsaken desert place and the only people there are kind of aristocratic thug lunatic terrorists and and prostitutes and a few people selling vegetables i mean that's what it is there's nothing there so the the the grand master of the maltese lodge has constantly tried to get artists and even get some of them to get as far as naples and then they never get on the boat they all say no i'm sorry i've got i've got i'm ill i don't feel well i don't want to so fine now he's got the best artist in the world in malta so it's all perfect and caravaggio paints these incredible pictures and they agree to make him a knight of malta the guy even the the grand master even writes to the pope asking permission to make him an eye to malta and it's all going to happen and then caravaggio has to screw it up do you feel like that is a theme in his life that he feel like he had to he had to do it the sense of self-annihilation because i think he referenced that in in the book as well the sense that there was so much darkness that it he almost felt like he had to do self-annihilation in order to keep himself free to some to some degree well so it's difficult you know when he's in malta for the first time you have to see he paints this amazing picture of framartelli it's it's sort of rembrandt portrait a hundred years you know 70 years before rembrandt i mean it's 50 years before remember it's amazing this portrait of martelly and martelly is this 83 year old battle-hardened survivor of the siege of malta who's about at the age of 83 to become the general of the entire florentine army and you can see caravaggio finally wow these are these these are men he respects these guys so you feel for the first time he's got maybe he's made a connection with a with a man who's older than him who can be like a father figure and and maybe this is all and it's all going to come back and everything's going to be okay and he's going to go back to rome not with his tail between his legs but with a knight of malta's gown and he won't have to apologize to anybody this could all be perfect and i was talking about this i gave a lecture about caravaggio's time in malta and a guy a very nice guy came up to me at the end of the talk and he said you know what i used to work with drug addicts in liverpool and there's a syndrome i can't remember the name of the syndrome but there's a syndrome where you get you help a recovering drug addict and generally their lives have been terrible ever since they were tiny and this is why they seek escaping drugs they're used to misery they are used to chaos it's what they know and he said you wouldn't believe the number of times you know that i've seen it somebody really gets to himself together they get you know finally we get them into a flat the flats there the tv's there there's furniture it's you know they're not living destitute with needles and all this terrible stuff and they start a job he said within a week it's amazing within a week that tv has been thrown out the window the drug dealers back and as soon as they really get it together that's the critical time that's the point because they don't know it it's uncomfortable and it's dangerous because if something's good it can be screwed up whereas if it's screwed up it's not dangerous well it is dangerous but this is the the mad logic of it and i i and i suspect and he said did you what you described with caravaggio it's like you're talking about one of my clients you know one of my people that i try to help and it's the same thing it's as if he couldn't bear the idea that he maybe would be okay but he couldn't almost bear the hope because hope leads to disappointment yeah um it's very difficult because you have to remember that if you're writing a biography of someone in this period so much of it is to do with how you interpret information you don't have you know if you're writing a biography of monk and you want to know what he's doing in 1906 read his letters he's probably written 50 letters to his best friend telling you about every mood that he's gone through you have none of that with caravans there are no letters there's no confessional aspect there's no diary there's nothing you know we haven't got a video of him but but this is this is so you're but in some ways i you know i really enjoy that i mean i find it a challenge and it's and i think and i think it's you know with caravaggio it's maybe you know i some people may say i pay too much attention to or i read too much into every tiny detail but then again if you look at his paintings his paintings are all about detail why is this why is this happening why is that happening why is that man not got his cat why has he got his cap on oh he's got his like in the suppressed emmaus the innkeeper has got his cap on yeah that's highly significant what that means is that he doesn't recognize that this before him is jesus christ because if he did he would have taken his cap off so it's only by reading these details and i think caravaggio's like that in his life everything is significant everything and you add it all up and you end up it's like in that in that um the essay that i wrote because i referenced the fact that caravaggio was in the back of the martian of saint matthew and i i referenced it very much similar to you did in the book and about the fact that it was more like a signature but when you read into it you look at his facial expressions you can see as if he's somewhat helpless in the situation and he's running away in the same in the same way that he's running away from everything that is happening in his life at the same time you know he's running awake he's running away guiltily there's a kind of it's almost like mayor culpa i am guilty i and he's saying well would you have helped if you'd been in the church would you have helped when matthew was being killed would you have stepped in when the terrorists took their swords out would you have dared to go and help i wouldn't i would have run away but which in fact in now that you say that i i actually think that if if if caravaggio had really been there when matthew was having his head cut off he probably would have been one of the very few people who would have gone in with his sword and tried to help he actually would have because when he came for somebody he did i mean that's the sad thing about his life as well the other sad thing people often obsess about whether caravaggio was gay or you know because his way of depicting men seems so you know he he he he makes men attractive in a way that just seems new compared to all art before even michelangelo um and i'm sure you know my feeling about that is that yes he he was attracted to men and and there's there's enough smoke there's no real fire but there's enough smoke to say that he's he probably did have a sexual relationship with his apprentice mao um is he called male i think he was um but no checko checker was his apprentice who who later became a painter because he probably there is enough evidence to suggest that he'd had an affair with him but all that they slept together although we know from the inventory that caravaggio and he had separate beds in the studio because caravaggio's landlady sued him and that's taken inventory of his possessions which is very handy it means we know everything that caravaggio had in his house including several swords and knives and a pair of eagles wings very little cutlery um and and no plates as far as i can remember so not much cooking but lots of fighting but but so but but i've sort of digressed but but yeah so he i think he had sexual relations with men but he i also think he had sexual relations with women but the most important thing about him at that level is that he had no settled relation with anybody so whatever he was you know if you want to sort of um sexually genderize him i mean i don't i think it would be highly ambiguous you know you'd have to what do they do now they they percentage it or whatever but i mean you you know he he's he's indefinable in that sense but what is definable is the fact that he feels profoundly abandoned and and won't hook up with anybody full time that lack of attachment i think is what keeps them somewhat free and i i know what you were saying in regards to the fact that it's difficult to piece things together properly just due to the the records but i think like you said and i reiterate what you're trying to say that mystery aspect of it is what keeps it interesting and what keeps the story somewhat alive to a degree because if you knew everything then it's just like a documentary in in a way that it's just one step to the other but you're guessing and and you're thinking about oh what does that mean what what does that mean the context of situations has so much to play absolutely i mean i i hope when i wrote the book what i wanted it to be as well as being my interpretation of what happened and how to read it it's also so i quote the archive information at great length so i don't summarize it i don't say he said this i give you what the words were so that when you get the libel trial you get 30 pages of transcript so in other words i try to give the primary evidence to the reader so the idea of it is absolutely that it should remain a life that can still be alive and anybody reading my book and it happens quite often um can write to me and say well do you know what i think i i've got a different thank you for giving me all the information because if you've got it you can make your own interpretation so it's a kind of kit from which you could make up your own biography of caravaggio which which might well be quite different from mine that's the aim of it is to be an open-ended i mean it's very clear what i think but you you could make from it your own thing so that all the paintings are there and all more or less all of the most essential archive information i think is that it's not so much about his paintings it's more about his motives for the actions that he did yeah absolutely i think it's really interesting but again you know i the chapters that deal with those sorts of things i i would suggest that if you you know you could cut the pages out and you could make an evidence room you know you could make that's what i'm saying is you could make your own evidence from on the basis of what i've written and you could then by say oh andrew hasn't thought of that maybe that could have been the reason which is fine that's what i'd like i think that's how a book stays alive as well yeah book isn't pretending to be you know the end of the story then there's more to find in it definitely definitely for for those who are interested in learning more about caravaggio obviously your book is is a is a place to go and and get that perspective of of the arguments that you're that you're that you're showing and the story of caravaggio uh i would recommend people go watch the the documentary as well that you did on caravaggio uh and about his death and particularly that fencing scene he did was particularly funny that was actually that was actually the rome that was actually the uh the rome based olympics um fencing federation of italy so i was i was so it was the the head of the of the olympic italian fencing team which is a very good fencing team showed me how in his opinion and he's a historian of fighting with swords how you would try to cut a man's balls off in a sword fight and i have to say that if if we had really been doing it he would have really managed it i wouldn't be talking like this but i'm all right yeah good that's good to hear all the fact that that that the supposed duel was now is now a garage yes oh yes i know that was i like those moments of pathos i i enjoy that about television was when you you know i think michael wood made a wonderful program at once about um the terrible things that were done to the aztecs by the spanish and and you know the very worst sort of atrocity committed happened as it turned out exactly on the site where you've now got mexico's main emergency hospital you know so these kind of ironies of history i i i can't help finding them interesting in iran and you sort of stand there and you think hang on this was a tennis court it's an underground car park but rome's like that you know everything changes in rome all the time yeah definitely anyway thank you so much for the conversation um i definitely recommend uh people if they're interested in caravaggio and you have to read the book what are you currently working on at the moment uh i'm i have been working for many years but not full time but i've been working for a long time on a book about vermeer um and and my the the point of the book is to try to connect vermeer to the history and to the times in which he lived and to put together information again again in a way similar to the caravaggio there was a great scholar called john michael montias who um collaborated with me on a film um very near the end of his life and and and and before he died he didn't say to me that he felt that he'd done this amazing archival work on on vermeer's life and very near the end of his life he did say to me that he felt there might be room for somebody to take this material and put it into a into a reinterpretation of vermeer's work which he hadn't done because he was an archival historian there's a certain elements of a wonderful wonderful man great great book so my book he's in a way my corodini although he's he's much more publicly known his book is well known but i believe that no one has really put this together so it's a book about vermeer and vermeer and and and a society in trauma vermeer and war the subject which almost never is mentioned in connection with vermeer and it's a book that i i hope if if it works you know no one reading it will will end up with the same idea about those paintings that they have when they begin it that's what that's when you know that you've done it yeah that's what you know you've done you've done you've done the job well well i certainly see i certainly see the paintings very differently now myself i just have to write it up when when is that due for for i'm still embedded in in my documentary research so i i just don't know i mean i i would love to get it written by the end of next year so it might be published the year after but i just don't know we'll have to we'll have to wait and see yeah andrew thank you very much for your time it was excellent speaking with you thank you for having me it was a pleasure

Channel: Book Talk Today with Aun Abdi

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Keywords: book recommendations, bookreviews, author interviews, author podcasts, book recommendation, books to read, which books shall i read, what book should i read, nonfiction books, business books, podcast, magazine, books, book review, books i should read, reading more books, how to read more books, reading books, benefits of reading books, read more, book tube, caravaggio, Alexander graham dixon, Italian art, Caravaggio art, who was Caravaggio?, classical art, art history

Id: L1LZbVVzI9k

Length: 62min 41sec (3761 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 16 2020