Travelogue 1133 – 29 May
Golden Years

So the sun shines on in Italy. It always did. Despite the evidence of the gloomy scenes he painted, the bright Mediterranean sun shone on Michelangelo Merisi from Caravaggio, too. His chiaroscuro, his browns and heavy shadows may have come to define the era, at least in my mind, but they never actually diminished the sun. Maybe his colours were informed by his lifestyle as much as anything. It may have been bright outside, but interiors in the 1590s were still lit by candles. And the famous carouser may not, in fact, have seen much daylight. But when the sun did occasionally find him, it shone on him with equal grace, at least until the fateful summer day in 1610 when a fever swept him away.

By the time he died, Caravaggio had been on the run for four years. He died while on his way back to Rome. He had been hoping for a papal pardon. In 1606, he had murdered a rival in a fight over a woman, some say in the process of castrating the man, and a death sentence had been imposed on him. On his final journey, he was carrying new paintings to offer the urbane Pope Paul V, hoping for the best.

Popes still figured prominently in the lives of top-tier Italian painters in this period, as they had throughout the Renaissance. But things had changed since the days when Caravaggio’s namesake, Michelangelo, had argued with the fiery Pope Julius II in the Vatican. Things were cooler and more distant in 1600 than they were 1500. Courts, royal and papal, had evolved into grand productions. There was a lot more money. And much of it was Spanish.

In Julius II’s day, Portugal and Spain were staking out claims to the New World. It amounted to little more than a diplomatic exercise for the popes of the day, and a rather academic one at that, because there was so little knowledge about the extent of the new discoveries. The Portuguese and Spanish had been bickering over territories all over the Atlantic in their race for new trade routes and ports. It was only a question of commerce then, and who would inherit the type of trade wealth that Venice had monopolized for centuries. The corrupt Borgia pope, Alexander VI, who was born in Spain, had brokered a rather abstract deal drawing a line on the map, dividing the western hemisphere between the two maritime powers. A dozen years later, Julius II himself was dragged into the affair, ratifying an adjustment to the deal and a new treaty with a bull called “Ea quae pro bono pacis”, which means roughly, “in the interest of promoting peace”. I’m sure the whole thing seemed trivial to the no-nonsense Julius, whose attention was entirely absorbed by the petty wars among the Italians.

By 1600, Europe was awash with colonial gold. Everyone was getting a taste of it. Courts and kings were spending lavishly. Everywhere there was more pomp and circumstance. The pope was Clement VIII, a cultured and competent Florentine who had taken on a lot of building projects. Though Caravaggio never met the pope personally, that I’m aware, his ambitions and the pope’s dovetailed nicely and Caravaggio flourished in Rome.

Travelogue 1132 – 26 May
Setting the Stage

The weather has been changeable. There’s a spot or two of rain for us almost every day. There is usually a spell a sunshine, too. And when the sun does shines, I am nearly overcome. This is how I have become, living in a cloudy place. The simplest thing is miraculous; a moment of strong sunlight is a holy visitation.

We returned a few weeks ago from Italia, and the sun there was – dare I say it? – magical. It haunts me, even as the Netherlands puts on its late spring face, even as temperatures rise and the sun warms the pavements. That is because there is something unique about the Italian sun. It is bright. It leaves a mark on the memory, like the afterglow of light inside your eyelids. It’s like stage lighting. Of course history would be a grand drama there.

Dutch light is softer. It rarely dazzles. It soothes and warms. What the Netherlands offers in May is the vibrancy of the colour that I think I now love most: green. It is such a radiant and light shade of green, that it embodies spring, as though the leaves above and the grass below are pulsing with absorbed sunlight and lush with plentiful water.