This article is taken from the October 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
Many artists, especially the more callow ones, like to feel that their calling gives them licence to indulge in a bit of transgressive behaviour. But high jinks in the Groucho Club or a bit of drunkenness on television are small beer when compared to the misdeeds of their ancestors.
The Soho coterie of the postwar years did their bit. Francis Bacon liked to be beaten up by his rough-trade pick-ups and was once thrown through a plate-glass window; the “Two Roberts” — Colquhoun and MacBryde — were violent in their cups, pounding one another. MacBryde once, under the guise of a handshake, crushed a glass into the palm of the poet George Barker, whilst Lucian Freud consorted with the Krays and stole the gold coins his father had secreted when he fled Nazi Germany.
Elsewhere, Picasso commissioned a thief to steal some early Iberian sculptures from the Louvre; Egon Schiele was jailed for indecency with a minor. Carl Andre, the man responsible for the Tate’s bricks controversy, was acquitted of second-degree murder when his wife, the artist Ana Mendieta, fell to her death from their apartment building after an argument: neighbours had heard her, just prior, shouting “No”.
Renaissance artists were no better behaved. After some slighting words, the sculptor Pietro Torrigiano broke Michelangelo’s nose — “I felt bone and cartilage go down like biscuit beneath my knuckles; and this mark of mine he will carry with him to the grave” — and fled to England and then Spain, where he died in prison.
Meanwhile, the great goldsmith-sculptor Benvenuto Cellini boasted of murdering four men, one of whom was a member of the Roman Watch who had killed his brother in self-defence.
It was, however, the 17th century that really forged the link between artists and violence. The visceral nature of the times is everywhere apparent in Baroque art. Even Nicolas Poussin, a serene classicist, turned his hand to brutality.
One of the most disturbing paintings of the century is his Martyrdom of Saint Erasmus (1628-29) for St Peter’s in Rome, which shows the saint tied to a bench as his entrails are extracted by a windlass.
Rome at that period was a menacing place: a superabundance of clerics, a large cadre of prostitutes and their pimps, a culture of bravos, an influx of different nationalities made for a febrile atmosphere.
This was heightened by Ottoman incursions around the Mediterranean, and the knowledge that just north of the Alps, the Thirty Years War — a conflict marked by atrocities — was just getting going.
Caravaggio is the best-known artist-thug. He had a long charge sheet for assault, affray and other misdemeanours (during one of which he was injured himself and memorably told the authorities, with a straight face: “I wounded myself with my own sword when I fell down these stairs. I don’t know where it was and there was no one else there”).
He was guilty of at least two murders, including that of a pimp called Ranuccio Tomassoni who died when Caravaggio severed his femoral artery trying to castrate him during a duel. The painter’s own death was hastened through his weakness following a revenge attack in Naples, during which unknown assailants hacked his face with extreme violence.
The nature of the wounds inflicted and received referred to the honour code of the time: the attempted castration was literally to unman his enemy because a woman lay behind their enmity; the facial wounds were to deface him because he had caused a Knight of Malta to lose face.
The same thinking was at play in 1638 with another great artist of the day, Gian Lorenzo Bernini. The sculptor was having an affair with Costanza Bonarelli, the wife of one of his assistants, when he discovered that she was also sleeping with his own brother Luigi, whom he attacked with a blunt object — probably a crowbar — and a sword: Luigi saved himself from death by taking sanctuary in a nearby church.
Bernini then instructed a servant to slash Constanza’s face with a razor: her face had attracted him so he made sure it would attract no one else. Constanza’s ordeal was not over; she was imprisoned for fornication whilst Bernini got away with a fine.
Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione is recorded in at least 12 trial documents and his crimes include beating a nephew close to death, supposedly throwing his sister off a rooftop, firing an arquebus at an artist who had poked fun at him, and an offence so serious — probably murder — that he left Rome in such a hurry that he forgot his underwear.
His temper was in public view when, after a disagreement with the Doge of Genoa, he took out a knife and slashed one of his own paintings in front of him.
Meanwhile, the “Cabal of Naples” — the painters Jusepe de Ribera, Battistello Caracciolo and Belisario Corenzio — went to extremes to protect their hold on commissions. They threatened outsider artists with death and painted over their works.
One of Guido Reni’s assistants was brutally attacked and, despite promises of protection from the Viceroy, the painter Domenichino told friends he feared he would be stabbed or poisoned then died mysteriously shortly afterwards. The Cabal was thought to be behind both attacks.
It wasn’t just painting and sculpting that all these men had mastered — they had bloodshed down to a fine art too.
