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respected him.
    Next among the rulers of Rome came the Princes of the Church, the cardinals who elected the pontiff and who held all the important offices. Caravaggio must have caught glimpses of them in their magnificent palaces,open to the public; or in their black carriages drawn by black horses; or riding sidesaddle on their mules with the skirts of their long scarlet trains pinned to their bridles. Invariably they were escorted by retinues of violet-clad monsignori and gentlemen in black.
    There were also the great lay princes of Rome. Although neither so powerful nor so wealthy as in the past, they were still enormously rich, with splendid palaces at Rome and immense estates in the Campagna. While they usually held some hereditary ceremonial office at the papal court, they were seldom in the city, preferring to stay at one or another of their many castles. Like the cardinals, the princes were surrounded by officials, servants, and hangers-on, so that it would need luck bordering on the miraculous for any of them to take notice of a ragged young painter in search of a patron.
    There was a whole host of other clergy at Rome, ranging from bishops to parish priests and seminarians, from abbots to monks and friars. The members of the new religious orders were especially influential. Those who stood out were the Theatines, Oratorians, and Jesuits. There is no record of Caravaggio being in contact with the Theatines, but he saw a good deal of the Oratorians and the Jesuits.
    The Oratorians, groups of priests and laymen, preached a cheerful, warmhearted religion, with emotional sermons on the need for simplicity and the value of inner voices. Marching through the streets to prayer meetings in the Catacombs or at some venerated shrine, they sang oratorios, antiphons set to music by composers such as Palestrina or Vittoria. Caravaggio may have come across the
Filippini
as a boy in Milan, where Borromeo gave them an enthusiastic welcome, helping them establish a Milanese Oratory. He may even have seen their founder, Filippo Neri, still alive when he came to Rome, at their church of Santa Maria in Vallicella.
    The Jesuit church, the magnificent Gesù, was still being built all through his stay in Rome. With his temperament, he must have been alarmed by the Jesuits’ uncompromising discipline but, like everyone else, could not have helped admiring their heroism. They trained their men to welcome death,encouraging them to become martyrs, which was why they commissioned scenes of martyrdom for their churches. The
Spiritual Exercises
, the Jesuit training manual, declared that “no wild animal on the face of the earth can be more ferocious than the enemy in our human nature.” It stressed the inevitability of death and brevity of human life. Dying was not to be dreaded but welcomed as the gate of Heaven.
    Although Caravaggio received important commissions from the Oratorians and only just failed to secure one from the Jesuits, there is no evidence that he ever belonged to a circle dominated by either order. Even so, he must have heard countless sermons by them; in Counter-Reformation Rome it was impossible to remain unaware of Oratorian and Jesuit ideals. The mature Caravaggio’s extraordinarily direct approach when painting, his uncompromising realism, probably owes much more than we realize to the Oratorians.
    Both orders were building churches. They required pictures urgently, to proclaim their message. Unfortunately for the young Caravaggio, so far they only wanted frescoes, and he did not know how to paint them.

VIII
    The Hack Painter, 1592–1596
    W hen Caravaggio reached Rome, he was penniless. He had brought brushes, paint, and canvases with him from Milan, but, according to Bellori, he could not afford to pay the modest fees charged by the models whom he then thought indispensable. He drifted into the Campo Marzio in the center of Rome, by all accounts one of the city’s poorest areas. While sleeping out of doors was not