1 Ingrid D. Rowland Guilt 1600: Case Study Caravaggio/Bruno In 1655, the city of Rome, in the person of Pope Innocent X, undertook a thoroughgoing reform of its prison system. One stimulus for this project may have been the Jubilee of 1650, a ceremony that occurred every 25 years, drawing hundreds of thousands of pilgrims to the Eternal City to seek special pardon for their sins. The faithful were especially encouraged to make a devotional tour of seven ancient churches over the course of two days, an activity that would earn them a plenary indulgence, that is, full remission of the penalty their sins would otherwise have earned them in Purgatory. The pilgrimage of the Seven Churches left no part of the city unexplored, from the basilica of San Lorenzo in the northeast to San Sebastiano to the south. It took in the four patriarchal basilicas of St. Peter’s, St. Paul’s, Santa Maria Maggiore, and St. John Lateran, as well as the old Imperial property of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme.1 Pope Innocent must have felt that the city’s prisons, easily visible along the way, left a good deal to be desired, and he became all the more convinced in 1652, when the managers of one of these facilities, the Corte dei Savelli, asked to review their lease.2 The penitentiary’s central location on the main road from the Vatican to the Capitol, the Via Papalis, was its chief, and perhaps its sole, attraction. There is almost no surviving record of what the Corte dei Savelli actually looked like. Its name literally means “the courtyard of the Savelli”, an old Roman baronial family that produced two popes; hence, the penitentiary itself was what we would now call an example of privatization. Indeed, the Savelli family had contracted with the Vatican since the late Middle Ages to house a law court, police station, and prison in the a run-down medieval hulk that was only one of their many palazzi in Rome. Leonardo Bufalini’s 1551map of Rome seems to show the building as a typical palazzo, but that benign appearance is probably deceptive. Conditions were notoriously bad for the people who languished behind bars in the “Savelli Courtyard”; at the same time, by charging rents and collecting fees, the Savelli family itself profited handsomely from managingwhat was, in effect, the chief police station for the southern half of Rome.3 In any event, Pope Innocent found the Corte dei Savelli 2 so appalling that, rather than renewing the venerable contract with the Savelli family, he confiscated their property, tore down the building, and gave a goodly chunk of the land to the Venerable English College next door—which had been complaining for generations about the rowdy neighbors.4 All that survives of the Corte dei Savelli today is a plaque, placed there in 1999 to commemorate one of the prison’s most illustrious residents,who was also, sadly, one its most unfortunate. Beatrice Cenci, the daughter of another Roman baronial family, was arrested in 1599 along with her stepmother, her brothers, and a friend of the family for conspiring to murder Beatrice’s odious father, Francesco, a violent, sexually abusive tyrant who had sequestered his wife and daughter away in one of his remote castles.5 When Francesco Colonna was found dead at the bottom of the castle’s steep rampart, it looked at first like an accident, but on closer examination his wounds suggested that he had been brained with a hammer and then pushed over the parapet. The papal sbirri, or police force, arrested Beatrice, her stepmother, and her brothers. In the Corte de’ Savelli, Beatrice, her brother Giacomo, and her stepmother Lucrezia were all tortured for evidence, not in a dark dungeon, but rather on the top floor of the palazzo, where the rope and pulley for the strappado, the usual Roman choice for judicial torture, could be hung from a high rafter. The prisoners’ hands were tied behind their backs and fastened to the cord; pulling on the cord’s other end raised them off the ground, and then the torturer let them drop abruptly, usually dislocating shoulders and painfully tearing ligaments. Half an hour of this excruciating treatment was the standard application. When it came Beatrice’s turn, the police duly recorded her piercing cries; the records survive to this day.6 Confessions were easy to obtain by this method; victims would admit to anything in order to make the torture stop. Obtaining the truth, as most early modern jurists were well aware, was infinitely more difficult. Under duress, Beatrice named the family castellan, Olimpio Calvetti, and admitted that he was also her lover. In the Cenci case, all of the accused, except Beatrice’s twelve-year-old brother Bernardino, had probably taken part in plotting the murder of Francesco Cenci, with Calvetti probably striking the fatal hammer blows. But the papal court would find 3 even Bernardino guilty and sentence him to death along with the rest of his family. Meanwhile, an assassin took care of Calvetti. Many of the people convicted of capital crimes in the Corte dei Savelli were simply hanged from the iron grates of the prison windows; others were taken to the execution ground in the nearby Campo de’ Fiori. But Pope Clement VIII wanted to make an unforgettable example of the Cenci and the challenge they posed to the idea that a Roman lord’s patriarchal rights over the rest of his family were absolute, no matter how dissolute, cruel, or violent he might be. To prolong the spectacle of their punishment, Clement ordered that Beatrice Cenci, her brothers, and her stepmother be paraded through the streets of the bankers’ quarter to another of Rome’s execution grounds: the piazza of Tor di Nona, the open square where the ancient Roman Ponte Sant’Angelo crossed the river Tiber to the Vatican. The Tor di Nona itself was Rome’s other important prison, built over an ancient Roman granary tower that had been erected on the bank of the Tiber to store grain shipped downriver--“Nona” was a shortened form of the ancient Latin word for grain supply, Annona.7 Its waterproof concrete was so durable—and so difficult to remove--that it still survives today beneath the modern embankment. In the early modern period, however, the Tor di Nona had been transformed into a prison serving the northern half of Rome. Because of its proximity to the Vatican, it was also the place where the Roman Inquisition’s convicted heretics waited for execution once they had been sentenced and handed over, as the legal formula went, to the secular arm of the pontifical system of justice.8 Sometimes the prisoners from Tor di Nona were executed on the spot in the piazza just outside its entrance gate, and we can see a series of heads and bodies on display in Antonio Tempesta’s 1593 image of the piazza. This graphic manifestation of local justice greeted pilgrims bound for St. Peter’s even before they spotted the statues of Rome’s patron saints, Peter and Paul, gracing the bridgehead of Ponte Sant’Angelo. It is probably significant that Étienne Dupérac’s map of 1575, tracing the pilgrimage route of the Seven Churches, has carefully omitted exposed bodies and body parts from the bridge to St. Peter’s, even though he engraved his image two decades before Beatrice Cenci and her family met their deaths on this very same spot. 4 For some of Tor di Nona’s prisoners, however, death came, like Beatrice Cenci’s, at the end of a parade. Convicted heretics, for example, were marched down the Via Papalis to Campo de’ Fiori, riding on a donkey. Many of them could no longer walk, whether because of torture, or fear, or weakness, or, often, because they had been discreetly strangled in prison to spare them the agony of death by burning.9 This, famously, was the trajectory taken by the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno on February 17, 1600, the first Thursday in Lent of the Jubilee Year. If the architecture of the Corte dei Savelli remains a mystery, the layout of Tor di Nona is documented in detail, not least because the pope who finally destroyed that prison in 1667, Alexander VII, was one of the most conscientious archivists the Vatican has ever known. Thanks to his meticulous records, we know the prison’s plan, from the distribution of its dank riverside cells, where flood waters and rats found such easy entrance, to the siting of its torture chamber on the top floor, so that the fiscal procurator could string the cord of the strappado high.10We even know the nicknames for its various cells: “the little nun”, “Purgatory”, “Hell”, “Glory”, “the Florentine”.11 Within the span of a few years, therefore, both of Rome’s busiest working prisons were not only replaced; they were utterly erased from the face of the earth. The part of the Corte dei Savelli that was not swallowed up by the Venerable English College became a thoroughly modern seventeenth-century residential palazzo. The redoubtable concrete of the ancient Tor di Nona lent its strength to the foundations of a new theatre, the Apollo—whose early patrons would include Queen Christina of Sweden, and where Giuseppe Verdi’s Il Trovatore would make its debut in 1853.12 The Apollo Theatre fell at last to the flood control operations of the late 1880’s in Rome, but the Tiber embankment still curves out to make room for the flattened remains of the old Tor di Nona.13 The New Prison that replaced the Corte dei Savelli, with its dramatic Egyptian-revival lines, is now the headquarters of Italy’s national anti-Mafia operations—its halls may be light and spacious, but they are also secure.14 This resolute push for prison reform in seventeenth-century Rome was part of a larger effort to rehabilitate the city in visitors’ eyes; for the stories of Beatrice Cenci and Giordano Bruno, those two famous residents of Rome’s two infamous prisons, 5 had quickly taken on lives of their own. The pageants of guilt that were designed to portray the abused girl and the exuberant philosopher as terrible criminals managed instead to suggest that the condemned were themselves victims of legal violence, and legal shortsightedness, in short, of injustice. In many ways, the Jubilee of 1650 and the prison reforms of the 1650’s and 1660’s were attempts to redress the extreme positions that Pope Clement VIII had come to adopt during the Jubilee of 1600.15 But there were also critics far closer to hand in time and space, none, perhaps, more subtle and more sensitive than the painter who was a well known in the halls of Tor di Nona and the Corte dei Savelli as he was in the salons of the city, Michaelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. It is hard to think of Caravaggio’s strong, determined Judith slaying Holofernes without thinking about the Cenci trial, and many scholars do link the painting with the trial—it was taking place at the same time that Caravaggio painted this striking picture.16 But Judith, the Hebrew widow who seduces and slays the Assyrian warlord Holofernes, was a great Biblical heroine, a model to be followed. Does this choice of subjects mean that Caravaggio is suggesting that Beatrice was also an avenging Judith for her tormented family? About one point we can be certain; Caravaggio, for all the violence of the life he led in Rome, Naples, Malta, and Sicily, was a painter of extraordinary compassion, and compassion is what most Romans, if not the Pope, felt for Beatrice Cenci. They feel it still.17 Caravaggio may well have watched her die, along with her brother Giacomo, tortured in public, and finally finished off with a hammer, the weapon they themselves had turned against Francesco Cenci. Beatrice and her stepmother were beheaded, and not neatly. Only her twelve-year-old brother Bernardino was released after witnessing the destruction of his entire family and hearing that he himself would be condemned to serve as a galley slave rowing under the whip—a dread sentence that was eventually commuted.18 Multiple executions like these were a rare, and extremely serious, spectacle, usually involving conspiracies to kill the Pope.19 The execution of Giordano Bruno must have been even more controversial than the beheading of Beatrice Cenci. It was aborted at least once before it finally took place, and it was carried out early in the morning, a quick auto-da-fé before the ashes of the philosopher and his pyre could be swept up and dumped into the Tiber 6 like the victims, human and animal, of the ancient Roman arenas.20 It is hard to know what Caravaggio might have made of Giordano Bruno, who was sequestered in yet another Roman prison, the prison of the Holy Office, except for the final week of his life, when he was held in the Tor di Nona. For one brief moment on the morning of February 17, the painter might have seen him parade down the Via Papalis to the stake at the end of the Campo de’ Fiori.21What Caravaggio knew about Bruno, aside from the fact of his condemnation, is hard to gauge. The inventory of goods from the artist’s last Roman houseincludes a chest with twelve books, almost the same number as Lucrezia Borgia, who had fourteen.22 Sixty years later, Gianlorenzo Bernini would own four hundred volumes, and Francesco Borromini a thousand.23 In any case, Bruno’s books were banned by the Inquisition shortly after his death. On the other hand, like Lucrezia Borgia, Caravaggio may have had only a handful of personal books because he had access to such good libraries. Certainly, the artist kept extremely learned company, including his patron Francesco Maria del Monte, the Florentine cardinal for whom he painted an alchemical symbol, the Rising Dawn, Aurora Consurgens, embodied by the three Olympian brothers Jupiter, Neptune, and Pluto.24 This enigmatic painting, on the ceiling of what is now called the Casino Ludovisi after a subsequent owner, is nothing if not learned, and the glassy sphere that surrounds its representation of the Sun and Moon may not be drawn quite as directly from Aristotle’s old-fashioned cosmology as it seems to be.25 In some crucial respects, in fact, Bruno and Caravaggio seem to have been thinking along similar lines, whether because of indirect contacts or, as seems more likely, because of the general Zeitgeist.26Despite his early romance with the Platonic world of transcendent Ideas, Bruno had concluded by the 1580’s that God and the universe existed only in the world we see here and now.27His philosophy was thus a harbinger of Galileo’s world of experiment—what Galileo himself called experience—the spirit of scrutiny that ushered in the scientific era, and more than incidentally drove the change in late sixteenth-century artistic taste that separated the conscious artifice of a Bronzino, or a Salviati, or a Cavaliere d’Arpino, from Caravaggio’s immediacy. 7 Bruno, moreover, believed in a universe of infinite immensity, not a single Copernican solar system, but a numberless multitude of solar systems whirling through space that consisted of a single, all-pervading world soul, a spirit of love and creation that had become Bruno’s real definition of God.28 The stars and planets and everything on them were made of atoms that combined and recombined in an endless cycle of change, but the system itself, like God, was immortal. This was the philosophy that Giordano Bruno intended to tell the world, and he expected the world, and of all people, Pope Clement VIII, to hail him as a liberator for freeing them from the shackles of a finite universe.29 Columbus, he noted in one of his philosophical dialogues, The Ash Wednesday Supper, had only crossed the sea, but he had penetrated the cosmos.30 As Bruno brought philosophy into the here and now, so Caravaggio brought painting. A painting like Francesco Salviati’s Deposition,from the Roman church of Santa Maria dell’Anima, revels in artifice; the artist could not make his debt to Michelangelo more explicit if he tried. The flesh of these holy figures looks more like Carrara marble than skin over muscle, and deliberately so. Their beauty consists in their unreality, their artfulness. Caravaggio’s portrayal of the same scene for the Chiesa Nuova in Romeis no less indebted to sculpture, in this case to an antique sarcophagus depicting the death of Meleager, but what strikes any viewer, even before the figure’s theatrical pose, is their modern dress. This Christ has been crucified in Rome yesterday, not sixteen centuries earlier in Roman-occupied Judaea. When Raphael, in his Madonna of Foligno (Pinacoteca Vaticana), shows the Madonna and Child appearing over Foligno in 1512 as his patron Sigismondo de’ Conti looks on, a pale golden circle indicates that she has just come down from the depths of heaven, and the azure circle of cherubs keeps her firmly within a different, higher reality than that of the luxuriant Umbrian countryside she has intervened to protect. When the Madonna and Child appear in Caravaggio’s Seven Works of Mercy, that protective celestial sphere has disappeared; the holy figures have descended into the misery and chaos of a Neapolitan street to become the acts of compassion that begin, on a tiny scale everywhere, to relieve that terrible state of violence and deprivation. It was on these same streets that Giordano Bruno first conceived his idea 8 of a God who lived in everything rather than beyond everything, and it certainly easy to think, looking at this powerful painting, that Caravaggio shared his conviction.31 And whether or not Caravaggio saw Giordano Bruno’s execution, he understood the tragic overtones of any death at the hands of authority.In many ways, Bruno presented a more complex and potentially a more dangerous case for Pope Clement’s Jubilee than Beatrice Cenci, whose death was enacted in public in order to uphold the rights of a paterfamilias—any paterfamilias, no matter how cruel and depraved-- over the rest of his family. The Cenci were brought to trial and killed fairly quickly, over the course of a few months. Bruno, on the other hand, languished in the prison of the Holy Office from 1593, when he was extradited from Venice, to the first week of February 1600. Inquisitorial prisoners were kept in conditions that later came in for sharp criticism within the Church; the prisoners were fed and clothed decently, and confined to rooms rather than cells, with windows.32 Bruno’s first prison, in Venice, was a section of the old thirteenth-century Dominican convent of San Pietro in Castello— another prison that no longer exists. Napoleon leveled it in 1799 and turned the site into a garden. It is now called Parco Garibaldi.33 In confinement, Bruno was still able to beckon his cellmates to a window and point out the stars, declaring as he did so that each one of those celestial lights was a world—by which he meant a planetary system orbiting around a sun.34 The Holy Office in Rome seem to have provided Bruno with more spacious conditions than the prison in Venice, where the population sharing his cell had grown to as many as six inmates at once. Nonetheless, the central corridor of the Inquisitorial prison in Rome led straight to the torture chamber, with its familiar rope and pulley hung from the rafters.35 Nothing could quell the prisoners’ fears, or soothe the injuries many of them sustained in ferreting out evidence that often bore no relationship to the truth. The conditions of these inquisitorial prisons show how difficult it could be to define heresy—often a crime of thoughts and words rather than actions. Some of the people who ran afoul of the Inquisition in their own lifetimes were eventually made saints, from Bernardino of Siena to Bruno’s fiercest adversary, the Jesuit theologian Robert Bellarmine.36 9 For the most part, Bruno’s trial seems to have proceeded with scrupulous attention to legal procedure, though our information about the trial is incomplete.37 The proceedings of the Venetian Inquisition are still preserved in the Venetian State Archive, but the records of its Vatican counterpart were carted off to Paris by Napoleon, who regarded Bruno’s trial and execution as abominable. The papers that document his destruction at the hands of the Inquisition may well have been made into cardboard in 1814, or else have fallen into a ditch somewhere between Paris and Rome. The only record to survive in any detail is a summary made for the Inquisitors’ use in the last stages of the trial; this was rediscovered in the Vatican Secret Archive (“secret” in this case meaning “private”) by its prefect, Angelo Mercati, and published with an alarmingly virulent commentary in 1941. From this Sommario it is clear that the one occasion on which the Roman Inquisitors departed drastically from correct procedure during Bruno’s trial came in his seventeenth interrogation, when they ordered that he should be questioned stricte, that is, under torture.38There were only two circumstances under which the Roman Inquisition admitted torture: when the accused continued to deny holding an objectionable opinion, and when the accused was clearly hiding the names of accomplices. Bruno was never reluctant to voice his opinions, although he refused to identify his ideas as heretical, and he had no accomplices, for he jealously claimed his philosophy as his own. Hence the Cardinal Inquisitors who conducted his trial lacked any valid legal reason to torture him, and Pope Clement VIII overruled their decision. Clearly the Cardinals, frustratedby the philosopher’s intransigence (and by his skill at argumentation), could only try to exert their power over his physical person. The text of Bruno’s sentence shows how deeply his criticisms continued to cut, most of all, perhaps, his refusal to recognize their right to judge him.39 In any case, the Inquisitors had their revenge when they read him the verdict of their deliberations. They met for this final occasion in the house of one of their number, Cardinal Madruzzo, who had a palazzo on Piazza Navona. Here they forced Bruno to his knees and read him his condemnation to death.40 To this he replied, “Perhaps you are more afraid to read me that sentence than I am to receive it.”41 That 10 quickness of tongue may have been the reason that they decided to gag him on his way to the stake.42 But the ceremony of sentencing did not end there. For another two hours, the philosopher was subjected to the harrowing rite known as degradation, in which he was dressed in every insignia of his priestly and religious calling, and then ceremonially stripped of them one by one as a priest—who was well paid for these strenuous efforts-- forbade him to participate ever again in the communal life of the Church. Off came his priestly stole, his deacon’s scapular, his Dominican habit, and at last, a barber shaved his head and beard, destroying his friar’s tonsure—which he had let grow out some twenty-four years earlier.43 It was as a bald man dressed in sackcloth that Bruno entered the prison of Tor di Nona, where teams of friars would spend the next eight days trying to convince him to repent, Franciscans, Augustinians, and his own Dominicans, until at last they gave up and passed him on to the Confraternity of St. John the Beheaded. These laymen, dressed in hooded robed that disguised their identity, fed him his last breakfast of almond cookies and Marsala before putting him on the mule that would carry him to the Campo de’ Fiori and escorting him to his pyre.44 A cold, “a light catarrh”, added to the miseries of his final week.45 Interestingly, when Caravaggio painted arrests and martyrdoms, he often painted himself into the scenes, which take place in any case, in a world that belongs recognizably to his century rather than to that of Christ, or Saint Matthew. Caravaggio is a martyr of a different sort: the Greek word means “witness”, and this sad, often violent, but deeply compassionate man looks out on circumstances he cannot control, on injustices he cannot stop, but to which he can still bear witness. He testifies to the slaying of Saint Matthew in a Roman bath (Martyrdom of Saint Matthew, Church of San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome), and to the arrest of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane (The Taking of Christ, National Gallery, Dublin); he holds up a mirror to his viewers and asks them if they will be any more courageous than he in the face of all this pain and all this courage. If ever there has been a painter who understood repentance, it is Caravaggio. He points up the guilt of human frailty, as Baroque painters like Simone Cantarini would do in the figure of Saint Peter, weeping bitterly at how swiftly fear could make him deny Christ.