The same thing had happened to him once before, in 1602, when Vincenzo Giustiniani had stepped in to buy the first St Matthew. But on that occasion the picture had been for a burial chapel in the church of the French and Caravaggio had been invited to paint another version. This time the picture was for St Peter’s and he was given no second chance. It was a watershed in his career. Thereafter he became an increasingly isolated figure – an artist whose work would be tolerated, even admired, in private, or at the provincial margins of the Catholic world, but not at its centre.
Despite this enormous setback Caravaggio refused to change his approach. Shortly after delivering The Madonna of the Palafrenieri, he finally completed his long overdue altarpiece of The Death of the Virgin.113 This huge and deeply moving picture is stark evidence of the painter’s reluctance to compromise, and of his moral resilience.
Never before in the history of Christian painting had Mary, mother of God, been made to seem as poor and frail and vulnerable as this. Wearing a simple red dress, unlaced at the bodice to make her more comfortable in her last moments, she lies stretched out on the makeshift bier of a plank of wood. She looks shockingly dead. The apostles have gathered around her lifeless form, to pay their last respects. They are grave and serious men in the winter of their lives, each expressing pain and sorrow in his own different way. Those nearest the body are the most convulsed by grief. One man cries and rubs at his tears. Another covers his eyes and holds himself by the throat as if to choke off his own sorrow. Two others stare intently at her prone body, as if rapt in contemplation of the miracle that once grew within this mortal flesh.
Caravaggio suggests that the Virgin’s own last thoughts had been of that miracle, and that even now she might be dreaming of it. Her right hand rests gently on her own slightly swollen stomach, remembering the sacred baby that once grew in the blessed womb. Standing slightly to one side, St John the Evangelist, his head propped on one hand, is the picture of melancholy reflection. Mary Magdalen sits shuddering with grief on a chair pulled right up to Mary’s bed. She must have been the last person to hold the dead woman’s hand. As some crowd round the body, others must wait. At the back of the room, more men can be seen, talking quietly among themselves or simply thinking their own grave thoughts. Perhaps they have just come in. Once more, Caravaggio evokes the messiness of actual life. People have always mourned their dead like this, and always will.
The Death of the Virgin is the most bleakly mundane of Caravaggio’s sacred dramas, the deathbed scene of a poor and ordinary woman. It drew another of Longhi’s pithy metaphors: ‘a scene from a night refuge’, he called it. The Virgin’s dwelling is certainly poor and humble, with its rough plastered wall and simple ceiling of coffered wood. Her feet, bare like those of the apostles, poke out straight and stiff from the folds of her dress. There is perhaps a hint that rigor mortis has begun to set in. The copper basin on the floor of the room adds a final note of pathos. The body of the Virgin, too, is an empty vessel, and there is little hint of transcendence.
There is a stratagem behind the painting’s apparent mood of hopeless bereavement: it invites the viewer into the darkness and doubt of death. It even dares to suggest – the deepest fear of all, in an age of faith – that perhaps this meagre life is all that there is. But peer into the gloom and all is not as it seems. Just as he had done in The Supper at Emmaus, with its mystical shadowplay, Caravaggio weaves a sense of the miraculous into hard and ordinary reality. The signs of salvation have to be looked for, even if at first sight they appear to be lacking. The Virgin’s face is much younger than those of the apostles, which indicates that she has been spared by God the ravages of age. The thinnest of haloes, shining in the dark air, encircles her head. Above her a great swag of drapery hangs from the ceiling of the room. Literally, it is the canopy of the Virgin’s bed, but spiritually it is a sign from above. Its colour relates to her body, while its form tells the story of her soul. It is being drawn upwards, whirled to heaven by unseen energies.
The church of Santa Maria della Scala, for which the painting was intended, belonged to the order of the so-called Discalced Carmelites, the shoeless Carmelites. This may have encouraged Caravaggio to believe that his uncompromisingly severe depiction of the Virgin and apostles as shoeless paupers might find favour there. But he was once again disappointed. No sooner was his painting delivered than he learned that it too had been rejected.
Giulio Mancini watched the whole situation unfold and even took the trouble to talk to the Fathers of the Carmelite order about why they had rejected the picture. In his biography of Caravaggio, he baldly states that ‘the fathers of that church had it removed because Caravaggio portrayed a courtesan as the Virgin.’ Had they simply got wind of the fact that the painter had modelled his Madonna on a prostitute, and found it scandalous? Caravaggio would certainly not have publicized his method, since the practice had been explicitly condemned in Cardinal Paleotti’s Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images.114 Maybe one of the Carmelite fathers simply recognized the girl in the painting as a local streetwalker, or perhaps one of the painter’s enemies helpfully pointed it out to them. She is not Lena, who had modelled for The Madonna of Loreto and The Madonna of the Palafrenieri. Mancini seems to have known her identity, although he does not give her a name. In marginal notes to the manuscript of his life of Caravaggio, he elaborates tantalizingly on the bare bones of the story: ‘the fathers rejected it because he had painted, in the person of the Madonna, the portrait of a courtesan whom he loved – and had done so very exactly, without religious devotion.’115 It is impossible to establish the true nature of Caravaggio’s relationship with the girl – lover, pimp or simply employer.
But the model’s identity cannot have been the sole reason for the rejection of the painting. One painted face can easily be substituted for another, a detail that could have been altered in less than a day’s work. It seems it was Caravaggio’s fundamental approach to the subject – essentially, his blunt portrayal of the Virgin as an actual dead woman – that the fathers could not bear. In the autumn of 1606 Mancini talked to the Carmelite fathers and subsequently wrote a letter to his brother in Siena in which he alluded to the picture being ‘compromised by its lasciviousness and lack of decorum’. Later in the same document he reiterated that it was ‘well made but without decorum or invention or cleanliness’.116 To say a picture had been created ‘without invention’ was shorthand for saying that it had been painted from reality rather than the imagination. The other two objections, about cleanliness and decorum, were versions of the same criticism. This was the heart of the fathers’ objections. The Madonna had been made to look dirty and indecorous. She had been made to look real.
The best evidence for this is the picture that eventually ended up on the altar of the church. Having sacked Caravaggio, the church fathers passed the commission on to an artist called Carlo Saraceni. Taking his cue from images of the Virgin as the Queen of Heaven, such as Annibale Carracci’s Assumption of the Virgin in the Cerasi Chapel, he depicted an ecstatic Mary being translated to heaven at the moment of her death. But even that was not a sufficiently happy ending for the Madonna. The Carmelites of Santa Maria della Scala wanted a choir of angels to waft her to heaven, so Saraceni had to cook up a second version of his own sweet confection, adding a topping of cherubs. His picture, finally completed in 1610, can still be seen in the church today. Caravaggio’s painting is in the Louvre.
Coming so soon after the rejection of his altarpiece for St Peter’s, this second disappointment must have cut Caravaggio to the quick. Looking back on it years later, Mancini wondered if the refusal of The Death of the Virgin might not have been the tilting point of the painter’s whole life. ‘Perhaps consequently Caravaggio suffered so much trouble,’ he wrote. It is just an aside, but it should not be taken lightly. Mancini was there at the time. He had seen what happened next. In the immediate aftermath of the two rejections, Caravaggio committed the darkest of his many crimes, the crime that would bli
ght the rest of his life. He killed a man.
DEATH ON A TENNIS COURT
For several years Caravaggio and Ranuccio Tomassoni had been heading obscurely towards their final confrontation on the streets of Rome. Exactly what happened, and why, has been the subject of much speculation, but one thing is certain. On 28 May 1606 Caravaggio killed his enemy in a swordfight.
The earliest account of the murder is contained in a document in the Roman archives, which dates to the day of the killing itself. It was a Sunday, and the anonymous author saw Caravaggio’s crime as part of a sinister pattern, as rowdy festivities across the city threatened to spiral dangerously out of control:
The celebrations began for the [anniversary of the] coronation of the Pope … towards evening at Ripa Grande there were celebrations and fighting with boats. In the midst of the festivity and the contest, someone gave somebody else a knock, and was stabbed to death. In Campo Marzio the same evening the painter Michelangelo Caravaggio wounded and killed Ranuccio da Terni with a sword-thrust through the thigh; he had barely confessed before he died, and was buried in the Rotonda [the Pantheon] the next morning. After that his brother, Captain Giovan Francesco, unsheathing his sword, killed another soldier (formerly a captain) of the Castel Sant’Angelo. The above-mentioned Giovan Francesco, Michelangelo and one other were also wounded in the same quarrel.117
Until quite recently the only known accounts of the murder were those given by Caravaggio’s three principal biographers. They were written long after the event itself, and give only the sketchiest sense of what might really have happened, but each contains vestiges of a complicated truth.
Mancini insinuates, as we have seen, that at the time of the killing Caravaggio was even touchier than usual because he had been upset by the rejection of The Death of the Virgin. He also implies that the painter was provoked, and he places the perenially hot-headed Onorio Longhi at the scene of the crime: ‘Finally, as a result of certain events he almost lost his life, and in defending himself Caravaggio killed his foe with the help of his friend Onorio Longhi and was forced to leave Rome.’118
Baglione moralized the murder, describing it as the predictable outcome of Caravaggio’s innate criminality. He also explained its cause. An argument over a tennis match had got out of hand:
Michelangelo was quite a quarrelsome individual, and sometimes he looked for a chance to break his neck or jeopardise the life of another. Often he was found in the company of men who, like himself, were also belligerent. And finally he confronted Ranuccio Tomassoni, a very polite young man, over some disagreement over a tennis match. They argued and ended up fighting. Ranuccio fell to the ground after Michelangelo had wounded him in the thigh and then killed him. Everyone who was involved in this affair fled Rome …119
Bellori echoed Baglione’s account, adding a colourful account of the fight itself: ‘during a tennis match with a young friend of his, they began hitting each other with their rackets. At the end he drew his sword, killed the young man, and was also wounded himself.’120
The idea that the fight was in some way connected to a game is seemingly confirmed by two avvisi, small booklets that were the rudimentary forerunners of the modern newspaper. They were sold on the streets of the city, especially around the statue of Pasquino, to the cry of ‘Nove e Avvisi!’, or ‘News and Notices!’121
One of these avvisi, written on 3 June 1606, six days after the murder, establishes the scene of the crime. It also confirms the involvement of the two other men who had been mentioned in the very first report of 28 May. According to the avviso of 3 June, Ranuccio Tomassoni’s brother, the former soldier and caporione Giovan Francesco Tomassoni, had indeed joined the fight, drawing his sword on another soldier. But this avviso contradicts the earlier document’s statement that the other man had been killed, saying instead that he had been seriously wounded and was now in prison awaiting trial. It also provides his name, and specifies that he was a companion of Caravaggio:
because of a game near the palace of the Grand Duke [i.e. the Palazzo Firenze] an argument arose between the son of the late Colonel Lucantoni da Terni, and Michelangelo da Caravaggio, the famous painter; Tomassoni was killed by a blow given to him while, retreating, he fell on the ground. Then his brother, Captain Giovan Francesco, and Petronio the Bolognese, Caravaggio’s companion, entered the fray; Giovan Francesco seriously wounded Captain Petronio, and wounded Caravaggio in the head. Caravaggio saved himself by running away, and Petronio was put in prison, where he remains.122
This would appear to confirm Baglione’s account of an argument over a tennis match. The avviso mentions a game near the Grand Duke of Tuscany’s palace. There were indeed tennis courts directly opposite the Palazzo Firenze: although they have long since disappeared, the street where they once stood is still the Via di Pallacorda, i.e. ‘Tennis Street’.123
The other avviso that mentions the murder was written on 31 May 1606. It does not name Caravaggio’s wounded companion, simply describing him as a Bolognese captain serving in the papal fortress of the Castel Sant’Angelo. It confirms that he had been wounded rather than killed, and had now been put in prison. This report also blames the fight on a game, on which money had been wagered. But it also makes the fight itself sound more like an outbreak of gang warfare than a chance fracas. A total of eight people are now said to have been involved, two bands of four:
On the aforesaid Sunday night a serious quarrel took place in the Campo Marzio, with four men on either side. The leader of one side was Ranuccio of Terni, who died immediately after a long fight; and of the other Michelangelo da Caravaggio, a painter of some renown in our day, who reportedly received a wound, but his whereabouts [are] not known. Severely wounded, however, and taken to prison, was one of his companions whom they call the Captain, from Bologna, and who was a soldier of Castel Sant’Angelo. The incident is alleged to have been caused by a dispute over a game involving 10 scudi which the dead man had won from the painter.124
A number of other documents found in the Roman archives confirm many elements of the accounts given in the two avvisi. On 29 May 1606, the notary responsible for the registry of births and deaths in the parish of San Lorenzo in Lucina recorded that Ranuccio Tomassoni had been murdered in the Via della Scrofa.125 Since the fatal blow had actually been struck on a tennis court in the nearby Via di Pallacorda, this reference must be to Tomassoni’s place of death – presumably at the shop of a barber-surgeon, who was unable to stem the flow of blood from the stricken man’s wounds. The mortal thigh wound mentioned by several sources is consistent with this. Caravaggio must have caught Tomassoni high in the leg, near the groin, severing or at least seriously rupturing the femoral artery. It is very difficult to stop the bleeding from such injuries, which make the tying of an effective tourniquet all but impossible. Tomassoni would have died quickly, as the sources indicate, but it is unlikely that he would have had time to confess, as the author of the first report of 28 May optimistically suggested.
While Ranuccio Tomassoni’s companions were taking him and his brother Giovan Francesco to the barber-surgeon’s in the Via della Scrofa, Caravaggio’s friends were tending to Captain Petronio Toppa from Bologna. They took him to another barber-surgeon, a man called Pompeo Navagna,126 who treated him for a cut in his left arm so deep that seven pieces of bone had to be removed before it could be dressed. He had eight stab wounds in his left thigh, one in his left shin, and another in his left heel. Taken altogether, Navagna concluded, these were life-threatening injuries, and despite them Toppa had subsequently been taken to the prison of Tor di Nona for questioning.
Meanwhile, Fabio Masetti was still keeping his eye on Caravaggio and reporting the latest developments back to Cesare d’Este in Modena. In a letter of 31 May he confirmed that Caravaggio had been wounded, and that he had fled Rome. According to Masetti’s spies, the painter was on his way to Tuscany, a logical destination, given his links with Cardinal del Monte and the Medici. Masetti even found cause for a certain grim optimism i
n this sudden turn of events: ‘The painter Caravaggio has left Rome badly wounded, having killed a man who provoked him on Sunday evening. I am told that he is heading in the direction of Florence, and perhaps will also come to Modena, where he will give satisfaction by making as many paintings as are wanted.’127
On the same day, another letter was written by another representative of the Este in Rome, Pellegrino Bertacchi. He too had heard that a game of tennis had been the cause of all the trouble: ‘the fight was over the question of a penalty, while we were playing at racquets, near the [palace] of the Ambassador of the Grand Duke [i.e the Palazzo Firenze].’ He had also heard that the painter ‘lay down his head, mortally wounded’ and that ‘two others were dead.’128 Clearly all kinds of wild rumours were flying about.
But a month later some of the smoke had cleared and the sbirri had begun to get to the bottom of the whole murky business. As the avviso of 31 May had stated, eight men had been involved. By the end of June the authorities had established the names of everyone on Ranuccio Tomassoni’s side. He had been accompanied by his two brothers-in-law, Ignazio and Federigo Giugoli, as well as by his brother Giovan Francesco. Between 28 June and 8 July, summonses were issued to all three, instructing them to appear before the court and remain resident at their customary addresses. Caravaggio’s partners in crime were Petronio Toppa, another Bolognese soldier by the name of Corporal Paulo Aldato and – just as Mancini would later report – his old friend Onorio Longhi. There was no need to call Toppa, who was in jail already, still recovering from his injuries. No one seemed to know anything much about Paulo Aldato, save for the fact that he had only one eye. So just two further summonses were sent, to Caravaggio and Longhi.
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