A Name in Blood by Matt Rees

Author:Matt Rees [Rees, Matt]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780857896780
Publisher: Atlantic Books Ltd

5

The Madonna with the Serpent

He painted them as a family. Lena as his Madonna, her skirts hitched up for work around the house, leaning forward to support Domenico, her bare foot on the head of a serpent, demonstrating how to kill it. The naked boy represented Christ, and the viper crushed under his weight was the image of evil. Caravaggio set Lena’s mother beside them as St Anne, the Saviour’s approving grandmother, pausing in her housework to watch the destruction of wickedness.

When he had painted Lena as the dead Virgin, Caravaggio had done with her as he wished. As if she were a whore, he thought. Perhaps I behaved towards every woman I’ve known that way. The love between them seemed pure, cleansed now. She did things to please him, unbidden.

He had never been so happy. Something had been freed in him. He ascribed this to the liveliness the Antognettis brought to his studio and his love for them. The way Lena tickled the boy when Caravaggio wasn’t watching, the boy’s fascination with the painter’s mirrors, the old woman’s pride in the talent of her daughter’s man. He could see his own contentment in the paint too, feel it in his brush. On the canvas, every fold in the women’s skirts seemed entirely true to him. He wanted to step into the painting. He knew the Madonna would welcome him. In spite of all the wrong he had done in his life, she would draw his head to her breast, just as Lena did every night.

He seldom stopped working or even left the house. He was glad that he didn’t. Onorio informed him of the tension in the streets, the crowds gathering outside the palaces to brawl or throw stones. The conflict continued between the Farnese and the Colonna, the Pope prevaricating between the two sides. Each morning dogs chewed on the corpses in the open sewers.

‘I stand at the edge of these battles,’ Onorio said, one day when he had come with news of another street fight.

‘That doesn’t sound like you.’ Caravaggio glanced down from his stepladder, where he was texturing the ceiling above his Madonna, a rough green like oxidized copper.

‘Once in a while, someone just asks to have his head split open and I oblige. But mostly I don’t bother with it all. It’s no fun without you.’ The shame that racked Caravaggio after his rages was alien to Onorio. He accepted his own furies. They were in the nature of things and confirmed that life was neither more nor less immoral than him. He was in tune with the imperfect world. Those who believed in a better existence or who restrained what flowed through them were, he believed, the same blockheads who would sacrifice themselves for a lost cause. He tossed back a mouthful of wine and swirled what was left in the bottom of his cup. ‘Ranuccio’s always there, when the trouble starts.’

Caravaggio put his brush between his teeth and worked at the paint with his fingers.

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