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

Magi by Titian, an Agony in the Garden by Antonio Campi and an Annunciation to the Shepherds by Jacopo Bassano (all three paintings can be seen, today, in Milan’s Pinacoteca Ambrosiana). Such works reflect his taste for the art of Venice and the Veneto, and his marked preference for small-scale devotional pictures. But the most intriguing aspect of Borromeo’s taste, for the student of Caravaggio, is his implicit rejection of high art in favour of more traditional, popular visual representations aimed squarely at the promotion of mass piety. Within five years of becoming Archbishop of Milan, he had sold his entire personal collection of art and given the proceeds to charity. This was an act consistent with his personal asceticism, indicating that Borromeo shared the widespread belief – propounded by supporters and opponents of the Reformation alike – that money spent on ‘dead’ images of Christ, i.e. paintings, could be yet better spent on Christ’s ‘living’ images, namely the real flesh-and-blood poor.
    THE SACRED MOUNTAIN
    Borromeo was not against religious art per se , but he had forceful likes and dislikes. There was a powerfully retrospective cast to his thought. He believed that the best solution to the problems of the modern Catholic Church lay in a return to the past. As a corollary to that, he favoured popular spectacle over the intellectual abstractions of supposedly sophisticated ‘High’ Renaissance art. Long after he had sold his own paintings, Borromeo continued to sponsor and support particular forms of popular Christian visual spectacle – events and phenomena that were literally ‘vulgar’, in the sense of being aimed directly at the vulgus , the crowd, the general mass of people. Borromeo himself staged numerous theatrical performances of his own extreme ideal of Christian faith. In times of trouble or pestilence for the city, he would march barefoot through the city of Milan with thousands of his supporters, all in sackcloth and ashes. Such processions might themselves be seen as a form of choreographed visual art.
    Borromeo’s theatricality was another reflection of his belief in the value of constantly remembering and re-enacting the life of Christ – whether actually or in the mind’s eye. It was deliberately unsophisticated, direct and immediate, and that was part of its point. Borromeo was intentionally attempting to revive the emotive methods of the itinerant medieval friars such as Francis of Asissi and his followers. The teachings of Francis had unleashed a flood of early Renaissance painting on the walls of churches throughout fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy, clear images bringing Christ’s message to the poor. But Francis had also helped to found yet more popular and rabble-rousing forms of artistic expression – not only penitential processions of the kind imitated by Borromeo, the pious medieval equivalent of performance art, but also a very particular type of folkish mise-en-sc è ne in which painted statues were arranged to conjure up events from the Bible. The first and most widely copied example of this was the crib that Francis created at the monastery of Greccio for the Christmas of 1223: a three-dimensional mock-up of the Nativity, complete with painted carvings of Mary, Joseph and the infant Christ, it was all done, in his words, ‘to bring home to the people of Greccio what the birth of Christ at Bethlehem was like’.
    Francis’s innovation of celebrating the Nativity with the creation of a crib proliferated and mutated. Over the following centuries it produced other, far more elaborate traditions of folk art, including the so-called sacro monte , or ‘sacred mountain’. It was here that several of the most vital elements of popular piety – including the practice of empathetic visualization of the life of Christ, the ideal of religious meditation and a much enlarged version of the sculptural arrangement devised by St Francis in the crib – all