Caravaggio was Not a Pimp!

I’ve always felt that fiction can give a clearer, more honest picture of a person or event than written history. Caravaggio is a good example.

Historians study primary sources- ledgers, letters, court documents, paintings, and secondary sources- other historians’ writings, and they study the milieu and they come to conclusions that can be verified with their primary source documents. When they make an educated guess, they usually tell us they are guessing. Only in the last generations of historians, though, were conclusions so carefully documented.

Andrew Graham-Dixon wrote the biography of Caravaggio titled A Life Sacred and Profane. It’s an excellent book, very well researched, very exciting to read. I am not convinced, though, by some of his conclusions. He concluded that Caravaggio’s time spent with prostitutes, as evidenced by his many paintings in which a prostitute stood in for the Virgin Mary or various saints, and his penchant for roaming the streets at night armed with a sword, and his tendency to get into fights, suggest that Caravaggio was a pimp.

Mr. G-D, you are such a man! I love your book, don’t mistake me, but Michelangelo Merisi has not been proven to be a pimp by your evidence. Insomnia might cause a man to roam the streets at night, as he did not have TV to watch, and you do not have to either sleep with the girls or run them as their pimp to hire them as models. I bet they had good stories to tell. They were probably charming company. If I was a prostitute in 1602, in Rome, I might like to hold the baby Jesus and be painted for days rather than my usual occupation.

Peter Robb made a similar masculine-historian mistake when he discussed M’s obvious love affair with Cecco, the young boy he painted in Amor Vincit Omnia. This adorable painting was taken as evidence that Michelangelo Merisi had taken this boy as his lover. Because God knows men do not love boys in any way but sexually? Hello? Anyone heard of a father?

As a fiction writer, and as a mother, I have to look at these bits of evidence in different ways. What does love look like, anyway? Does it have a different color or a different smell, if it belongs to the world of sexual love? Is love a different animal between mother and child and between painter and the boy who grinds his paints? How would the man who painted those paintings look at the world? What would he see, that’s different from what I normally see? How is he going to look at this delightful rascal of a boy, and what is he going to do with what he sees? He’s going to paint him, of course, as the most gorgeous little imp of love. There is nothing sexual in this painting, but it is all about love.

Caravaggio painted Cecco as the little Cupid because of the way he sees the world. He painted the prostitutes of Rome as saints and virgins, because he saw their divinity, their beauty and grace. And I think he recognized that we could all walk different sides of that line, depending on circumstance. Looking around at a culture where family and race and rank were everything, he saw we were mostly alike. And then he painted what he saw. Maybe he enjoyed sticking a sharp thorn in the backsides of the wealthy and the noble. Ahem! Who doesn’t?

Maybe I’m looking at his actions through the lens of how I see the world. I’m always willing to give a person the benefit of my doubt. I am going to approach Caravaggio with the assumption that he is not the worst case scenario (pimp and pedophile). My experience has been that I see the world as covered with a dark cloud when I’m in a piss-poor mood, not when the sky is actually dark with cloud. So I try to step back and reserve judgment, and remember that people are basically good, and will usually turn toward love, like they turn toward the sun, when they have the chance.

His paintings tell me a story of a man who sees with a clarity and a light that the rest of us might be missing. So to bring the truth about Caravaggio to the page, I’m going to read about those primary and secondary sources, and read all the conclusions, and study the paintings. And then I’m going to step into his skin and try to see what he sees- and tell a story about this man. That’s what fiction writers do that historians do not, and why we get the facts wrong but the truth right.