Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane by Andrew Graham-Dixon Read Free Book Online Page B

and was, in essence, the Catholic Church’s concerted response to the multiple challenges to its authority posed by the Protestant Reformation.
    It was at the Council of Trent that the Catholic Church reaffirmed the importance of the sacraments and the role of the priesthood; that it insisted on the importance of good works as well as of faith, in con tradiction of Martin Luther’s belief in ‘justification by faith alone’; that it pronounced its own interpretation of the Bible final, branding any Christian with the temerity to substitute his or her own interpretations a heretic; and that it reaffirmed a multitude of Catholic practices that had been criticized by reformers in the north, such as pilgrimage and the veneration of saints and their relics. These were the basic principles that would underpin the Counter-Reformation, as it became known, the Catholic riposte to Protestant reformers. Yet such was the mood of contention surrounding the questions under debate, in which nothing less than the future of the Catholic Church was at stake, that there were many times when it seemed as though agreement might never be reached. First summoned in 1537, the council was concluded only in 1562–3. Carlo Borromeo was one of the men who saved it, at the last, from breaking down altogether.
    He was a hard worker, who rarely slept for more than five hours and often went without food due to the permanent backlog of papal business requiring his attention. But to those who did not know about his punishing regime he may well have seemed like just another corrupt cardinal-nephew, the latest in a long line of such self-serving placemen. The pope appointed him to a dazzling array of positions, including the Protector of Portugal, of Lower Germany and of the seven Catholic cantons of Switzerland; as well as Protector of the Carmelites, Franciscans, Humiliati, Canons Regular of the Holy Cross at Coimbra and of the orders of St John and Christ in Portugal. 15 He was also the absentee abbot of a number of monastic foundations. From these sources and his family estates he derived an annual income of around 50,000 scudi, a princely sum in mid sixteenth-century Italy. He was a keen and energetic huntsman who spent lavishly on his horses and hounds, and equally lavishly on his household, which he turned into a magnificent manifestation of his innate asceticism and sobriety: he kept one hundred and fifty servants and retainers, all dressed from head to toe in a uniform of funereal black velvet.
    Borromeo in his youth was a volatile combination of pride and piety, but it would take a personal tragedy to transform him into one of the most fervent and inventively radical priests of the Counter-Reformation. His elder brother, Federico Borromeo, died suddenly in 1562. Carlo, who was administrator of the pope’s native diocese, the Archbishopric of Milan, was widely expected to give up his career in the Church, renounce his vows of piety and continue the family line by marrying in order to father a son and heir. Instead, he concluded that all man’s earthly hopes and aspirations amounted to no more than a handful of dust. He gave up the trappings of wealth, sacked the majority of his household staff and forbade those remaining in his service to wear garments of silk or to indulge in any other luxuries. He took holy orders and briefly considered retreating from the world altogether, to a monastery. Eventually he decided that it was his role in the divine plan to revive and reform the Roman Catholic Church – and he set about the task with the evangelical zeal of a man convinced that he had God on his side.
    It was only after the death of his brother that Carlo Borromeo’s influence would really be felt in Milan. In 1565 he was consecrated Archbishop of Milan. He signalled his intentions by making his triumphal entry into the city wearing archbishop’s robes, rather than dressed as a cardinal. It was his way of indicating that he came with his own