In his testimony, Salini claimed that the painter Filippo Trisegni gave him the poems when he asked Trisegni what the artists in Rome were saying about Baglione’s altarpiece for the Church of the Gesù. The poems, Trisegni was supposed to have said, were written by Caravaggio, Gentileschi, and Longhi, and another painter, Ottavio Leoni. Concerned about the consequences of a possible scandal, Caravaggio, claimed Trisegni, had warned him not to let Baglione and Salini see the poems. But the temptation to show the verses to the men they defamed had proved irresistible. According to Salini, Trisegni reported that he’d gotten Caravaggio’s poem from the bardassa, a boy named Giovanni Battista, whose affections Caravaggio shared with Onorio Longhi. Bardassa was a pejorative term for a young male prostitute, a promiscuous professional who had sex for money, as opposed to an ordinary adolescent who, for reasons of the heart rather than the purse, became the lover of an older man. Later, Trisegni would deny the detail of the bardassa, and Salini remains the only source of this incriminating allegation.
In September, Caravaggio was arrested in the Piazza Navona and imprisoned on the libel charge, as were Gentileschi and Trisegni. The police failed to catch up with Longhi but nonetheless seized papers and evidence from his lodgings.
In his testimony, Trisegni admitted that he’d shown the poems to Salini, but denied revealing who had written them. Instead, he said, he had teased Salini, dropping hints, inviting him to guess, and rather touchingly agreeing to tell him the truth only if Salini showed him how to paint the way a figure cast a shadow. But Salini refused to give Trisegni the lesson he had requested, and so Trisegni kept the poets’ identities secret. Trisegni added that Gregorio Rotolanti, another painter, had informed him that one of the poems had been written by a young student of logic and medicine.
Orazio Gentileschi testified about the handwriting on some documents found in his home. And the next day, Trisegni and Salini were reexamined, in an unsuccessful attempt to resolve the discrepancies between their conflicting versions of events. The two men stuck to their stories, and Salini insisted with particular vehemence on the embarrassing and potentially damaging detail of Caravaggio’s officially illegal bardassa.
Caravaggio took the stand on September 13, 1603. To read his deposition is an almost eerie experience. It is the only time we hear him speak directly, and at some length, and yet our encounter with him is ultimately as elusive and frustrating as it must have been for the magistrates who examined him. It could hardly have been his finest hour; he had been imprisoned and was being required to defend himself in what we would now call a nuisance suit brought by a man whose work he considered beneath contempt.
His testimony is digressive, contradictory, and only marginally relevant to the central question of whether or not he helped write the verses defaming Baglione. On trial, with his freedom at stake, he cannot resist the chance to discuss, in a public forum, his convictions about painting. All he really wants to talk about is art: who are the artists in Rome, who are the good artists, what constitutes a good artist, what good art is. The question of whether or not he libeled Baglione seems to him inconsequential compared with the fact that Baglione is a terrible painter and that everyone knows it.
Caravaggio begins by saying that he has no idea why he was arrested in the Piazza Navona. He identifies himself as a painter, claims to know almost all the painters in Rome, and goes on to list eleven of them by name. Nearly all of them are his friends, he says, though he soon amends this by adding that several, including Cesari, Baglione, Gentileschi, and a certain “George the German,” aren’t speaking to him. In their testimony, both Caravaggio and Gentileschi go to some lengths to establish that they have not been in contact with each other and thus could not have co-authored the poems about Baglione. According to Gentileschi, their estrangement has lasted six to eight months, while Caravaggio says that they have not exchanged a word—oddly, for two close friends in Rome’s small artistic community—for three years.
In any case, Caravaggio continues, not all the painters he has listed are good artists. Asked to define a good artist, he replies, a bit redundantly, that he means an artist who knows how to paint well and who has an understanding of painting. More important—and Caravaggio is making a particular point here, staking out territory, advocating the realism in which he believed so strongly—a good painter is one who knows how to imitate nature. Among the good painters, he says, are d’Arpino, Zuccaro, Il Pomarancio, and Annibale Carracci—a puzzling statement, considering that he was known to despise d’Arpino, and had no reason to admire the conventional Zuccaro, who had made the infamous remark about Caravaggio having accomplished nothing that Giorgione hadn’t already done better. Perhaps Caravaggio was mocking the question, or perhaps the truth was that he considered none of them (with the exception of Annibale Carracci) to be good painters, and was merely choosing a few names at random to underline the pointlessness of this whole line of inquiry.
On the subject of Baglione, Caravaggio is comparatively terse. No one except Baglione’s friend Salini has ever had a good word to say about Baglione’s work, which Caravaggio has seen, nearly in its entirety. The new altarpiece in the Gesù is not only clumsy but the worst thing Baglione has ever done. In fact, no one but Salini has ever praised the painting. As for the libel charge, Caravaggio has never discussed Baglione’s painting with his friend Onorio Longhi. He hasn’t talked to Gentileschi for three years and has never spoken to Ottavio Leoni. Finally, he has never heard of the verses about Baglione, nor does he take any pleasure in writing poetry in Italian or Latin. And he has no knowledge at all of the so-called bardassa.
Returning for a second round of questioning, Gentileschi tells the story of how Baglione got his gold chain as a reward for his Divine Love, of his futile attempt to compete with Caravaggio, and of how Baglione repainted Divine Love after Gentileschi criticized it. After that, says Gentileschi, he and Baglione stopped speaking. Moreover Gentileschi claims not to have talked to Caravaggio for six or eight months, though during that time Caravaggio borrowed two studio props from him—a Capuchin’s robe and a pair of angel wings, which he returned around ten days before the trial. The loan of the props is exactly the sort of unnecessary detail that the unsuccessful liar can’t help adding, though it may also represent Gentileschi’s efforts to cover himself in case someone produced the messenger or servant who actually brought back the wings.
And that was that. The trial ended. Two weeks later, Caravaggio was released from the Tor di Nona prison with the proviso that he remain under house arrest and reappear before the court at some point during the following month.
But matters were far from settled between the two rival art gangs, the friends of Caravaggio and the less numerous supporters of Baglione. Returning to Rome, from which he had prudently absented himself during the trial, Longhi registered his opinion of the proceedings by assaulting Baglione with a brick, and was promptly jailed. Caravaggio left Rome, most likely for Tolentino, where he is thought to have painted an altarpiece—now lost—for the Capuchin Church of Santa Maria di Constantinopoli. Caravaggio’s trip to the Marches was the first in a series of hasty retreats from the capital, departures designed to let the latest scandal or feud cool down. But inevitably, on his return, he would plunge back into a climate that had only grown stormier and more inhospitable during his absence.
On April 24, 1604, a waiter at the Osteria del Moro, near the Church of the Magdalene, filed a formal complaint against Michelangelo da Caravaggio, a painter. According to the waiter, Caravaggio—who was eating lunch at the tavern with two friends—had ordered eight artichokes, four fried in oil, and four fried in butter. When Caravaggio asked which ones had been prepared with oil, and which with butter, the waiter suggested that he could tell quite easily by smelling them. (An eyewitness remembered the event somewhat differently, recalling that the waiter himself had picked up one of the artichokes and held it to his nose.) Caravaggio responded by throwing the earthenware plate of artichokes in the waiter’s fac
e and grabbing for his friend’s sword. Convinced that he was about to be attacked, the waiter fled—straight to the magistrate’s office.
Eventually the charges against Caravaggio were dropped. But in October, he was again arraigned, this time for throwing stones at the police. Caravaggio denied having committed the offense. He added that when he advised the constables to go look for the man who had actually thrown the stones, he never used anything like the vulgar language that he was charged with having employed. In November, he was arrested again and imprisoned in the Tor di Nona for cursing a policeman (the same man with whom he had been in trouble before, and with whom he was evidently feuding) after the constable asked to see his license to carry a weapon, a document that, on this occasion, Caravaggio was able to produce.
On May 28 of the following year, in the early hours of the morning, Caravaggio was seized on the Corso, in front of the Church of Sant’Ambrogio, and arrested for carrying a sword and a dagger. In his testimony, Caravaggio claimed that the governor of Rome had given him permission to bear arms. He was set free and given three days to prepare his defense. Again the charges were dropped.
Caravaggio was becoming more volatile and irascible, even as the police were obviously seizing every opportunity to harass and confront him in situations that would only lead to more arguments and insults, more arrests and imprisonments. Doubtless the constables were frustrated by their inability to make their charges against him stick—that is, to override the influence of the painter’s powerful supporters, like Del Monte, who could be counted on to intercede on his behalf.
The police and court reports conjure up the sort of dangerous game we’ve seen in all those B movies in which the cops are as obsessively determined to bring a bad kid to justice as the kid is hell-bent on eluding and defying the law. But among the details that distinguish Michelangelo Merisi’s case from that clichéd scenario are, first, the fact of his celebrity and genius, and second, the fact that he was hardly a kid. In 1605, the year in which his numerous arraignments may well represent a mere fraction of the incidents in which he was involved, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was thirty-four years old, and he appeared to be growing steadily more aggressive, impulsive, and hostile with age.
On July 20, two months after his arrest near the Church of Sant’Ambrogio, a group of his friends managed to get him released from the Tor di Nona prison on the promise that he would appear in court to face the charges brought by a woman named Laura and her daughter Isabella, both of whom he had allegedly insulted.
Nine days later, a clerk of the court recorded a deposition from a notary named Mariano da Pasqualone, who testified that, the previous evening, he had been walking in the Piazza Navona when he was attacked from behind and wounded by a sword blow to the back of his head. He was sure that his assailant was Michelangelo da Caravaggio, the painter, the only person with whom had had a dispute that might have provoked the assualt. The original altercation had taken place on the Corso over a woman named Lena. She was Caravaggio’s woman, according to Pasqualone, who then asked the clerk if he could be excused immediately so that he could dress his wounds. The clerk then deposed the notary’s friend, Galeazzo Roccasecca, who said that Pasqualone had been struck by a sword or hunting knife wielded by a man with a black cloak on one shoulder, who then turned and headed for the palace of Cardinal Del Monte.
Evidently realizing that the evidence against him was damaging, Caravaggio left for Genoa. Returning a month later, he extended a formal apology to Pasqualone. In the official document, he swore that he was sorry for the assault and begged for the notary’s forgiveness. This act of atonement, verging on self-abasement, was apparently sufficient to enable him to receive a pardon from the governor of Rome.
But his troubles, and his public contrition, did little to arouse the sympathies of his landlady, whom he had not paid any rent for the past six months. On the same day that his peace accord with Pasqualone was brokered, Caravaggio was evicted from his lodgings in the Campo Marzio. All his possessions were seized and inventoried. Once more, Caravaggio responded counterproductively, by throwing stones at his former landlady’s window, breaking her Venetian blinds and, together with some friends, purposely causing a disturbance in the street outside her house. On September 1, 1605, the woman, Prudenzia Bruna, filed a complaint, in which she mentioned the painter’s failure to pay his rent and the damage he had done to her ceiling.
If Carravagio’s outbursts and flare-ups were alarming, his subsequent silence in the face of insult and injury seems somehow even more frightening. On October 24, he was questioned by a court notary regarding an injury to his ear and his throat, wounds that, his interviewer reported, were completely covered by bandages. Caravaggio, who was now homeless and staying with a friend, a lawyer named Andrea Ruffetti, claimed that he had fallen down the stairs—unobserved, and in some unknown and forgotten location—and that he had hurt himself with his own sword. Otherwise, he had no idea how the accident had occurred, and neither had anyone else.
For all we know, the propensity for violence that Caravaggio displayed all through this period might have been equally extreme if his career had been proceeding smoothly. Perhaps he would have been just as aggressive had he not been obliged to deal with a series of professional setbacks that would inevitably have created some anxiety about his ability to maintain his standing at the top of the perpetually shifting hierarchy of artists then working in Rome.
Still, it’s tempting to suppose that at least some of those brawls, vendettas, and flashes of temper had some connection to the imbroglios and frustrations that had begun to surround so many of his religious commissions. Mancini connected Caravaggio’s “torment” with the inhospitable reception that The Death of the Virgin had received from the church that had commissioned it. And how could the painter’s rage and sorrow not have been intensified by the painful awareness—which surely he must have had—that the disputed and rejected works included some of his greatest masterpieces?
The problem with The Death of the Virgin, wrote Bellori, was that the dead Madonna looked too much like the bloated corpse of a real woman, and Baglione agreed about the indecorousness of showing the Virgin swollen and bare legged. Mancini, who would later try to buy the canvas when it came on the market, went a step further, combining an analysis of the painting’s subject with some additional thoughts on the damage it did to Caravaggio and to the artists who came after him. As an example of how badly some modern artists painted, Mancini cited those who, “when they want to portray the Virgin Our Lady, show some dirty whore from the Ortaccio”—that is, the prostitute’s quarter near the Mausoleum of Augustus—“which is what Caravaggio did in The Death of the Virgin for the Madonna della Scala, which is why the good fathers didn’t want it, and perhaps why the poor fellow [Caravaggio] suffered such torment in his life.”
“Some dirty whore from the Ortaccio.” The sweetness and grace of the beautiful young Madonna would alone be enough make us want to weep for her, and for ourselves, and for everything that is mortal, even if the apostles and the women who surround the bier on which she lies were not themselves so overcome by grief that our compassion is also aroused by our empathy for the living. The Virgin’s spirit seems to have abandoned the fragile and delicate shell of her body, barefoot and clothed in a simple red gown, so recently that she is still lit from within. Something about the way in which death has arranged the Virgin’s pose—one hand resting lightly on her breast, the other flung to one side—vaguely recalls the dead Christ in The Entombment of Christ, but, although both paintings portray the aftermath of a death, that is the only detail they have in common. If Nicodemus, Saint John, the Virgin, Mary Magdalene, and Mary Cleophas came together to share the work of easing Christ into his grave, each of the Virgin’s mourners is isolated in misery, cut off from the the others by a private grief. Crowded around her deathbed, they could not possibly be more alone.
The same Magdalene who stood radiant and in tears over the dead Christ can no lon
ger remain upright. Collapsed in a chair, sunk into herself, she hides her face, wiping her eyes with her sleeve, just as someone might when she no longer knows or cares if anyone is watching. Two of the apostles cover their eyes; their brothers regard the Virgin. But the light that shines on her does not and cannot reach them. A copper pan lies at the foot of the bed; otherwise the room is bare. Above the figures is a red curtain, a crude wooden ceiling, beams—a dark, empty, and frightening space. We notice, as we are meant to, the absence of heavenly light or of any suggestion of heaven, the lack of anything that might offer the slightest hint or promise of the cessation of sorrow and pain, let alone of redemption. Grief has never been rendered more accurately, or more movingly, or more faithfully to that moment when grief persuades us that there is nothing and never will be anything in the world but all-consuming and unending grief.
Perhaps it was the nakedness of that grief, rather than the bareness of the Virgin’s feet, that so alarmed and upset the “good fathers” that they felt they had no choice but to reject the painting. Or more likely it was the way in which the painting focused on the death of the body rather than the Virgin’s assumption into heaven, the ascension that guaranteed that she would remain as spotless and pure in death, as free from stain and corruption, as she was in life. For how could the priests preach the life eternal, the consolations of paradise everlasting, in front of a canvas depicting the dark tunnel of loss, grief, and death without a glimmer of light at its end? Once more Caravaggio’s work had taken a giant leap toward something more tragic, resonant, and universal, more emotionally overwhelming than anything he had done before. And once more the world had made it clear to him that he had captured something so real that no one wanted to see it.
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