Dirty Feet and A Crumbling Doorway: Caravaggio and the Madonna of Loreto at Sant'Agostino in Campo Marzio.

It’s September, and at 7.30 in the morning the air is crisp for the first time in months. On Saturday I scootered through the quiet, early morning, not-quite-back-to-school streets to the Campo Marzio to see Caravaggio’s Madonna of Loreto. For three days only, following a recent restoration and while the chapel was being prepared for its return, it was out of its frame and visible close up. It’s in Sant’Agostino, just around the corner from the river end of piazza Navona behind an elegant fifteenth century facade which reuses travertine from the Colosseum. The church also houses the tomb of St Monica, mother of the eponymous Augustine, and Sansovino’s statue of the Madonna of Childbirth. Oh, and there’s a Raphael too.

Caravaggio, Madonna of Loreto. Sant’Agostino in Campo Marzio. 3 September 2022.

In 1603 the heirs of Ermete Cavalletti commissioned the decoration of the first chapel on the left as a family chapel, most notably an altarpiece by Caravaggio. The subject is the Madonna of Loreto, or the Madonna of the Pilgrims. Loreto in the Marche is where, tradition says, the house of the Virgin was deposited by angels in the thirteenth century. It swiftly became an important point of pilgrimage and the medieval tradition of religious journeys (which had been so firmly eschewed by Martin Luther) was, together with the cult of the Virgin, emphasised ever more by the Roman Church in this post-Reformation period of fervour. For example, during the Jubilee year of 1600 some 210,000 pilgrims are recorded as having stayed at the hostel of the Trinità dei Pelligrini near Ponte Sisto.

Pilgrimage was a big deal, and Sant’Agostino was firmly on the route towards St Peter’s Basilica, the ultimate objective. The church occupies a small square just a stone’s throw from the beginning of the via dei Coronari, the road of the rosaries named for the shops selling trinkets to pilgrims as they were funnelled towards the Vatican. Passing pilgrims would have entered the church in their droves to touch the feet of Sansovino’s marble Madonna.

While there, they would have been greeted by Caravaggio’s astonishing painting. It shows two grubby, travel-worn pilgrims kneeling before the Virgin and Child. One is younger and male, the other older and female. They are perhaps transfixed by a vision to which we are also privy, or perhaps they are praying before the wooden statue of the Virgin at Loreto, animated into life by the force of their faith.

The setting could be any number of Roman streets of the Campo Marzio: the Virgin leans against the crumbling plaster and battered marble door case of a down-at-heel sixteenth century Roman palazzo. She wears contemporary dress, and the weight of the child she hoists on her hip is eminently plausible. His downy hair, and the flush of his cheek are vehemently tangible. This is no abstract image of divinity but one profoundly rooted in human experience.

A manuscript of Giovanni Battista Passeri’s Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects who have worked in Rome (written several decades later) makes reference to the model for the Virgin. Passeri says she was an unmarried neighbour of Caravaggio who lived near the Mausoleum of Augustus with her mother and is describes her as a Putta. We might prefer the term “courtesan”, and she has been identified as Maddalena Antognetti, referred to also as “Lena”.

When the Madonna of the Pilgrims was commissioned, Caravaggio had already given his neo-Realist treatment to St Matthew at Sant Luigi dei Francesi and to Saints Peter and Paul at Santa Maria del Popolo, but to show the Virgin as a mere mortal, walking our streets and breathing our air was a step even further beyond the bounds; to show her as a prostitute was positively outré. Many of Caravaggio’s paintings featuring the Virgin were rejected (the Death of the Virgin now in the Louvre; the Madonna dei Palafrenieri now in the Borghese), that the Madonna of Loreto is still hanging in its chapel is testament to the conviction of the Cavalletti in their commission.

The man presents us with the solid bottom and bulging calves of manual work. His dirty feet, so characteristic of Caravaggio’s paintings, jut out towards the viewer. Both he and the woman’s wrinkled faces glow with the reflected light of revelation cast by the infant Christ, and we are given an oblique glimpse of her eye shining with faith. This divine light also casts a shadow of the Virgin on the right hand side of the doorway. It is not merely the art of the divine: the natural light source from the facade of the church also comes from the left: divine light and natural light in symphony.

So we can imagine contemporaries of these weary pilgrims pausing at Sant’Agostino to touch the foot of Sansovino’s marble Virgin on the last leg of their long and arduous journey to the tomb of Peter and kneeling before this image. A communal moment of adoration before the image of the Virgin, depicted as a mother of the Roman demi-monde leaning against the door of a building that has seen better days. I scootered past such crumbling doorways to see the painting closer than ever, alone with the restorers, the weft and the weave of the canvas visible through the paint under strong lights.

As a small queue began to form just before eight I ducked out and went to have a coffee with some Carabinieri and the Mona Lisa in piazza Sant’Eustachio. Because Rome is really like that, sometimes it’s just too Rome for words.