Véronique Plesch – Encounters Across Time

Strolling through Rome at dusk on 1 February 2024, I looked up and saw a street sign, Via di Pallacorda. Knowing that I was in the centro storico, the old part of Rome, and having just returned from leading a tour of Sicily where I got to show my group several works by my beloved Caravaggio, I knew instantly where I was. The street name refers to the tennis courts that occupied the area in the early 17th century and it is believed that it was right there, on 28 May 1606, over a tennis match, that Caravaggio fatally wounded Ranuccio Tomassoni. Forced to flee Rome, Caravaggio began a journey that would take him down the Italian peninsula, all the way to Malta and Sicily, and then back north, to eventually die on Porto Ercole’s beach on 18 July 1610 (see details in my Winter 2022 Musings). That Caravaggio killed Tomassoni at a tennis match has been disputed, but the sport is forever associated with the artist’s tormented life. What is documented, though, is that Tomassoni was found dead in the nearby via della Scrofa.*

Less than two minutes later (as my photos timestamps show), I found myself on the Via della Scrofa. Not only is that the spot where Tomassoni died, but the street is mentioned in Caravaggio’s copious criminal records for a sword attack in November 1600. In fact, many of the artist’s misdemeanors took place in that very district which often involved being caught (usually late at night) carrying a sword without a permit.

East to Via della Scrofa, the Via della Maddalena runs parallel, site of yet another violent incident, this one rather humorous. On 24 April 1604 Caravaggio and two friends walked into a tavern popular with artists, the Osteria del Moro, and ordered artichokes, four cooked in oil and four in butter (April is a perfect time of year to enjoy artichokes in Rome!). When Pietro da Fusaccia, the garzone d’osteria, brought the eight artichokes on a single platter, Caravaggio asked him which ones were cooked in butter and which ones in oil. Quite flippantly, the waiter replied that he should just smell them. Obviously angered by this answer, Caravaggio threw the plate in the garzone’s face, who then proceeded to file a complaint with the police.

Keep walking south on Via della Scrofa and you’ll arrive at San Luigi dei Francesi, the church of the French community in Rome, for which Caravaggio was commissioned his first set of public artworks. One of the three paintings he completed for the Contarelli chapel is The Calling of Matthew. Coincidentally, this ground-breaking picture is about a decisive encounter: Christ calls upon Matthew, a tax-collector, to become one of his disciples. The encounter is also a temporal one: the biblical scene is set in the contemporary environment of a Roman tavern, with Matthew and a few other men clad in contemporary garb, while Christ and St. Peter are dressed all’antica, in toga-like outfits. It is also an encounter between Michelangelo Merisi and another Michelangelo—the Michelangelo everybody knows. Merisi pays homage to Buonarroti by modelling Christ’s gesture on that of God the Father in the Sistine Creation of Adam. It is of course a meaningful visual quotation: as God the Father infuses life into the first man, so does Christ, known as the New Adam, who summons the soon-to-be apostle to a new life.

But I don’t need to travel to Europe to experience encounters across time! I made a surprising discovery several years ago, when I was asked to contribute a few essays to a catalogue celebrating the Colby College Museum of Art’s fiftieth anniversary. As I was researching two of the works, I found out that four 17th-century artists, who at one point knew each other and interacted in Rome, happened to meet again across time and space, four centuries later in North America. This encounter is purely coincidental as their works entered the collections of the museum at different times and through different paths.

The first painting is itself the site of an encounter between two artists: Viviano Codazzi (1604–70) and Michelangelo Cerquozzi (1602–60). Codazzi was born near Bergamo in Northern Italy and most likely received his training in Rome. He specialized in quadratura, the perspectival rendering of buildings, and as a result was nicknamed “Viviano delle Prospettive”: “Viviano of the Perspectives.” He was to become one of the most important representatives of the genre known as “architectural pieces.” This type of painting, primarily meant for decorative purposes, reverses the function traditionally ascribed to the architectural backdrop: rather than complementing the action, the setting is the subject matter. Figures are mere “staffage,” helping to animate the composition. For them, Codazzi always relied on collaborators, such as Cerquozzi, with whom he frequently joined forces.

In Colby’s painting, Codazzi’s architectural setting is a ruined triumphal arch, an invented monument which is the result of observed elements assembled into a fanciful ensemble (many of these details reappear in other paintings by Codazzi). Against Codazzi’s backdrop, Roman-born Cerquozzi places nine figures: two women—one, on the left-hand side of the canvas, drawing water at a well and another standing under the central arch—and seven men, along with a dog and a couple of horses. On the right, we witness an encounter: an old beggar sits by the arch and extends a cup to a man who gives him alms. Further to the right and closer to the viewer, stand three men. One of them points towards the beggar. They have recognized him: he is the famous Roman general Belisarius, who was accused of conspiracy against emperor Justinian, and, although spared from death because of his many victories, was blinded and reduced to begging.

The scene chosen by Cerquozzi to complement Codazzi’s architectural setting is particularly fitting. Belisarius, a helmet next to him as only evidence of his past military glory, has become the human equivalent of both the decrepit triumphal arch and of the phrase “Roma quanta fuit ipsa ruina docet” (“Even ruins can teach what Rome once was”).

A landscape in which architectural elements are combined with figures who perform a secondary role is what we find as well in the next painting, by Gaspard Dughet (1615–75). Dughet, who was born in Rome of a French father and an Italian mother, is probably the best known among our four artists, and, coincidentally, he collaborated with Michelangelo Cerquozzi in the mid-1640s.

When Dughet was still a child, Nicolas Poussin, who was to become one of the most famous foreign artists living in Italy, arrived in Rome, was befriended by the Dughet family, and in 1930, married Gaspard’s sister Anne-Marie. From 1630 until 1635, the young Dughet apprenticed with Poussin. Known in his time as “Gaspard Poussin,” Dughet was indeed a true heir to Poussin, specializing in one of the genres his brother-in-law practiced, landscape. Not a slavish follower, he is credited with the invention of the storm scene.

Colby’s painting is a small-scale and poetic view of a distant group of buildings up on a hill, surrounded by lush vegetation. In the near distance, two men, loosely draped in colored cloaks, recline on a rock, while in the distance another figure walks away. It is very much a meditation on a distant and ideal past in which shepherds lived in perfect harmony with nature. This paysage composé (“composed landscape”) is the result of a careful assemblage of elements, both natural and architectural, that the artist had sketched in Rome and in the Campagna, the surrounding countryside. The genre, which was practiced by Nicolas Poussin, is credited to the Bolognese artist Annibale Carracci: his Flight into Egypt of 1604 is believed to be the first such landscape (see my Summer 2022 Musings). In Carracci’s foundational work, as in many of Poussin’s and Dughet’s compositions, we see an idyllic landscape with a group of buildings in the distance and just a few figures, who are placed away from the viewer and thus represented in small scale.

Gaspard Dughet knew another artist in the Colby museum, Jacques Courtois (1621–76). Dughet collaborated with Courtois’s brother Guillaume on seven large landscapes with religious scenes for the Pamphili family’s palazzo on the Corso (now the Galleria Doria Pamphili, a ten-minute walk from San Luigi dei Francesi). Jacques Courtois specialized in battle scenes like those Colby owns. The two paintings of matching dimensions betray the formulaic nature of Courtois’s art and display the Baroque fashion for pendants—pairs of paintings meant to be hung symmetrically, for instance on each side of a window or a piece of furniture, thus providing the happy owner with a convenient and esthetically pleasing way to decorate. In their focus on action and movement, with smoke billowing, clouds being pushed by the wind, horses caught in unstable poses, cannons and pistols being fired, Courtois’s paintings illustrate the Baroque love for the instantaneous and the fleeting. The subject matter is thus a mere excuse for a virtuoso and painterly display, aimed at a public of connoisseurs.

The youngest of our quartet, Courtois was born in the Eastern French province of Franche-Comté (he was erroneously nicknamed “Bourguignon” or “Il Borgognone,” “the Burgundian”). When he was fifteen years old, he traveled with his father and brothers (all painters) to Italy. After spending time in several cities (Milan, Bologna, Florence, and Siena), he was in Rome by 1640, where he befriended the Dutch painter Pieter van Laer. Nicknamed “il Bamboccio,” or “ugly doll,” van Laer attracted a group of artists who became known as the Bamboccianti and who specialized in genre scenes of low life. The Bamboccianti shared lodgings and gathered around the Via Paolina (now Via del Babuino) and the Via Margutta (where van Laer resided, a short walk northeast from the Via di Pallacorda). It is at this point that Courtois found his “niche” of battle scenes, the result of a combination of memories from his early work as a painter for the Spanish army and of an encounter with—surprise, surprise—Michelangelo Cerquozzi, who was the only Italian among the Bamboccianti, and had, earlier in his career, specialized in battle scenes (hence the nickname of “Michelangelo delle Battaglie,” “Michelangelo of the battles”).

And so our four artists hang out together again, not in a tavern on via Margutta, but on the museum walls of a liberal arts college in Maine. Their fortuitous encounter encourages the art lover to explore their biographies. As we retrace their connections, we travel in time, and the picture of artistic life in 17th-century Rome comes alive. For instance, we realize that the recent trend of specialization is the result of artists for the first time competing in an open art market. Some of the artists even take advantage of this new type of business: Cerquozzi is documented as a “rivenditore di quadri,” “reseller of pictures.” A few decades earlier, young Caravaggio as well created works to be sold by art dealers. This is how Cardinal del Monte, who was to become his major patron and who got him the San Luigi dei Francesi commission, first encountered his art. In the mid-1590s, Del Monte purchased Caravaggio’s The Cardsharps from Costantino Spata, whose shop was on the piazza by San Luigi dei Francesi (del Monte’s own residency, the Palazzo Madama, now seat of the Italian senate, is on the next street over, on the Piazza Navona). Likewise for our four artists, we see each of them finding their niche and basing a successful career on it. We also get a sense of how truly international Rome’s artistic community was at the time—it truly was the place to be.

On a more personal note, what the inquiry prompted by the posthumous reunion of these four artists reveals is the widespread use of monikers, a phenomenon probably associated with the specialization. All the artists mentioned in this essay had nicknames, which often relate to their art: Viviano delle Prospettive, Michelangelo delle Battaglie, Gaspard Poussin, Il Borgognone, and il Bamboccio. Even Caravaggio is a nickname—the name of the small town in Lombardy where he was born. Reflecting upon such details and uncovering the bonds between these artists, just like stumbling upon a street name in the historic center of Rome, is, I must confess, what I live for. It feels like touching history: past moments and figures take on a heightened reality and they become, literally, present.

 

Note

*There are plenty of uncertainties when it comes to details in Caravaggio’s life. For instance, Ranuccio’s surname is sometimes spelled Tommasoni and the date of the fatal brawl moved to the next day, 29 May. Caravaggio’s biographer Giovanni Baglione (1566–1643) is the first to mention the tennis game.

 

References

Baglione, Giovanni, Giovanni Pietro Bellori, and Giulio Mancini, Lives of Caravaggio. Los Angeles, The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2019.

de Bondt, Cees. “Caravaggio Blog.” In Real Tennis History website.

Graham-Dixon, Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane. New York: W.W. Norton, 2011.

Locker, Jesse. “Caravaggio’s Artichokes.” Gastronomica: A Journal of Critical Food Studies 19.4 (2019): 20–27.

Macioce, Stefania, and Antonella Lippo. Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio: fonti e documenti 1532–1724. Rome: Ugo Bozzi, 2003. (See pp. 138 and 194 for the artichoke incident and Tomassoni’s death.)

Plesch, Véronique. “Gaspard Dughet, A Wooded Landscape.” In Art at Colby: Celebrating the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Colby College Museum of Art. Waterville: Colby College Museum of Art, 2009. 46–47.

—–. “Viviano Codazzi and Michelangelo Cerquozzi, Ruined Triumphal Arch, with Belisarius Receiving Alms.” In Art at Colby: Celebrating the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Colby College Museum of Art. Waterville: Colby College Museum of Art, 2009. 40–41.

van der Sman, Gert Jan, and Michael Hoyle. “The Living Conditions and Social Networks of Northern Netherlandish Painters in Italy, c. 1600–1700: Evaluation of the Archival Sources.” Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 43.1/2 (2021): 87–118.

 

Acknowledgements

I dedicate this essay to my dear friends Janet Hansen and Bruce Drouin, with whom I walked through the streets of Rome in 2024 and who over the years and in too many Italian cities to count, have good-naturedly humored my love for Caravaggio!