Caravaggio: A Passionate Life by Desmond Seward Read Free Book Online Page A

died after taking one. Like Paracelsus, anticipating modern psychologists, he was convinced that a dynamic spirit was at work beneath human nature. Caravaggio, who decorated del Monte’s laboratory, may have used alchemicalsymbolism in some of his paintings. He certainly acquired a smattering of the divine science from his patron, giving his dog the alchemical name of “Raven,” a symbol of melancholy—“the bird of Hermes that never rests.”
    Like all members of the Accademia degli Insensati, Cardinal del Monte was fascinated by Neoplatonism, a philosophy based on the belief that things are more than they seem, and that each possesses an inner reality of its own. It was reflected in the period’s taste for emblems, which were intended to alert beholders to hidden meanings within a work of art.
    Studies of Caravaggio often credit his complex, subtle patron with homosexual tastes, but their evidence is highly dubious. It consists of no more than a misreading of a report in an
avviso
of 1624 and a single innuendo in the
Relatione della citta di Roma
by Dirck Ameyden, a collection of his
avvisi
that was published in 1642. Handwritten news sheets, the
avvisi
are no more reliable than modern tabloids as historical documents. Pope Clement grumbled that they “spread lies and calumnies.”
    The report in the
avviso
of 1624 merely says that a cardinal had given a banquet at Palazzo della Cancellari for three other cardinals, including Cardinal del Monte, and for various gentlemen “in the usual fashion.” It relates how “for recreation there was dancing after dinner in which the best dancing-masters took part. And because there were no ladies, many youths dressed as women participated, providing no little entertainment.” This tells us nothing about del Monte’s sexuality.
    Dirck Ameyden came from the Spanish Netherlands but was brought up in Rome, where he spent the rest of his life. He claims that del Monte “loved the company of young men, not I think from evil urges, but out of natural friendship.” However, Ameyden insinuates rather more by adding that the cardinal hid feelings of this sort until the election of Urban VIII in 1623, when he “indulged openly in his tendencies.”
    Examination of Ameyden’s
avvisi
shows him to have been both untruthful and malicious. The near-contemporary continuators of Chacon’s history complained that Ameyden “spoke ill of almost all the cardinals and veryunjustly.” As a Spanish agent, he was eager to discredit the pro-French Pope Urban and pro-French cardinals like del Monte. His sly reference to del Monte’s private life is contradicted by a Venetian ambassador’s description of the already aged cardinal in 1617, “a living corpse … wholly given up to spiritual exercises, perhaps to atone for the licence of his younger days.” Moreover, del Monte himself revealed a taste for girls in a letter written to a friend in 1608, which wistfully recalled their youth together and “all the honeyed moments with the Artemisias and Cleopatras.”
    There is no whisper of scandal about the cardinal in any other
avviso
, which is significant, since they were notorious for spiteful fantasy. It was a standing joke in Rome that del Monte’s friend Cardinal Alessandro Farnese had created the three most beautiful things in the city—the church of the Gesù, the Palazzo Farnese, and “La Bella Clelia,” his natural daughter, Clelia Facia Farnese, begotten in the unregenerate days before the Counter-Reformation.
    Gossip surpassed itself when del Monte’s closest friend, the former cardinal Ferdinando de’ Medici, inherited the grand duchy of Tuscany. He was popularly rumored to have poisoned his brother, Grand Duke Francesco, and his sister-in-law, Grand Duchess Bianca. According to one story, Bianca offered a poisoned tart to Ferdinando at a banquet and, after he insisted on his brother tasting it first, she had swallowed a piece in despair. In reality, both Francesco and Bianca