Free Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane by Andrew Graham-Dixon

be increasingly out of tune with the times. His use of the idealized nude figure was considered scandalous and his famous cycle of paintings for the Sistine Chapel ceiling was systematically censored in the late 1550s with the addition of a multitude of decorously placed fig leaves. Religious art was a highly controversial subject. Protestant reformers had attacked religious images altogether, on the grounds that they violated the Second Commandment (‘Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven image’). The Catholic clerics who assembled at the Council of Trent had their own counter-argument, based on centuries of Church tradition. They resoundingly defended religious paintings and statues as divinely ordained tools for transmitting the messages of the Bible to the illiterate poor. But, at the same time, they acknowledged that many religious artists had forgotten their fundamental role to aid and assist devotion. It seemed clear to most of the leading formulators of Counter-Reformation policy that artists had become so caught up in abstruse ideas, so concerned to demonstrate their own ingenuity and originality, that they had forgotten the humility required of them as servants of the will of God. Not only was the Sistine Chapel ceiling censored, but the Venetian artist Paolo Veronese was publicly castigated for including all kinds of irrelevant details in a painting of The Last Supper . The Venetian Inquisition, which called Veronese to account for himself, was outraged by the presence in that picture of parrots, dwarfs, buffoons and, worst of all, Germans (regarded with detestation throughout Italy ever since Charles V’s army led by Lutheran Landsknechts had sacked Rome in 1527). The painter was forced to find an ingenious solution to the dilemma, which he did by changing both title and subject: Veronese’s Last Supper became instead a depiction of Christ in the House of Levi .
    Such developments marked a great shift in attitudes. During the Renaissance religious artists had come to believe that, within fairly loose constraints of Christian orthodoxy, they were free to interpret and depict the stories of the Bible as they liked. As a result of the Counter-Reformation, the Roman Catholic Church set new and stringent limits on the presumed freedom of artists. The principal aim of this policy was to replace the Renaissance cult of freedom and originality with the ideals of artistic duty and responsibility. The second half of the sixteenth century witnessed a widespread call to order – a movement intended to take religious art back to the values of an earlier and supposedly purer time. Carlo Borromeo was at its forefront. As well as containing recommendations of every kind about church architecture and decoration, his Instructiones set out his views on art with typical forthrightness. No animals or other distracting details should be included, unless actually mentioned in the biblical text that the artist had been instructed to illustrate. In the seventeenth chapter of his book, devoted to the correct representation of sacred events, Borromeo determined the appropriate fines and punishments for artists who failed to meet the strictest standards of decorum. In Milan, errant artists as well as heretics were liable to come to the attentions of the archbishop’s famiglia armata . No painter could be in any doubt about what was required of him. Images should be clear and direct. It was the job of art simply to educate spectators and move them to penance.
    Borromeo’s influence on art in his native Milan is well documented. Simone Peterzano, the feeble late Mannerist painter with whom Caravaggio would sign a contract of apprenticeship, developed a sparer and more austere style in direct response to Borromeo’s pronouncements. The archbishop himself owned a collection of paintings that, to judge by its contents, he is likely to have used in his meditations. According to an inventory of 1618, these included an Adoration of the