Caravaggio

by Andrew Graham-Dixon

  The picture in question was The Death of the Virgin, another rejected altarpiece from Caravaggio’s Roman years. Laerzio Cherubini, who had commissioned the work only to reject it in the summer of 1606, wanted to recoup his outlay. He had put it on the market in January 1607 and it had been snapped up by Caravaggio’s future biographer, Giulio Mancini. The fragmentary evidence of Mancini’s correspondence suggests that he paid 200 scudi for it, and that he intended to sell it to an unnamed purchaser in his home town of Siena. His letters to his brother, who was helping him with the negotiations for the sale there, show that he was concerned that Caravaggio’s indecorous depiction of the Virgin might cause a stir. ‘Someone knowledgeable will reprove us, but as it is for the service of God and the embellishment of the city, I will pay no attention to complaints.’37

  But by the middle of February, Mancini was considering other options. The Duke of Mantua, one of Rubens’s most valued patrons, had shown interest in buying the picture. His agent in Rome, Giovanni Magno, had opened negotiations with Mancini and was taking advice about the painting from, among others, Rubens. It seems likely that it may have been Rubens’s idea to acquire the picture for Mantua in the first place.

  On 17 February, Magno wrote a cautiously encouraging letter to the duke’s secretary, Annibale Chieppio, about the potential acquisition. While he himself found The Death of the Virgin rather difficult and unpalatable, it had been greatly praised by the experts and connoisseurs: ‘Last Sunday I saw the painting by Caravaggio, proposed by Signor Peter Paul Rubens who, when he saw it again, was still more satisfied by it … It pleased me to a degree corresponding to the concordant judgement of the professionals. However, because people of little experience desire some pleasure to the eyes, I was more impressed by the testimony of the others than by my own feeling which is not sufficient to understand well certain occult artificialities which place this picture in such high esteem. The painter, however, is one of the most famous for the collectors of modern things in Rome, and the picture is held to be one of the best paintings he has ever made. Thus, presumption is in favour of this painting in many respects, and really one can observe in it certain very exquisite parts …’38

  In Magno’s next letter, of just a week later, he told the duke’s secretary that the price for the painting had been agreed by Rubens at 280 scudi. Mancini would make a profit of 80 scudi on the deal. He was content with that, and at this point the prospective purchaser in Siena disappears from the story. By the end of March, Magno was writing to confirm that he had taken possession of the picture on behalf of the Duke of Mantua.

  Within a week, the painters of Rome had heard about the purchase and were clamouring to be allowed a sight of Caravaggio’s painting before it left the city. It had been removed so quickly from its intended altar in Santa Maria della Scala in the summer of 1606, just before the murder of Ranuccio Tomassoni, that almost no one had had a chance to view the work. On 7 April 1607 Magno reported to his masters in Mantua that

  I found it necessary, in order to gratify the painters’ guild, to let the purchased picture be seen all week long. Many of the most famous painters have been flocking there with a good deal of curiosity because this picture was the talk of the town, but scarcely anybody had been allowed to see it. It has certainly been a great satisfaction to me to let it be enjoyed by the public because it has been commended for the exceptional art with which it was done. It will be forwarded next week.

  In the event, despatch of the painting was delayed because Rubens wanted to be sure that it survived the journey. On 14 April, Magno wrote to say that ‘The purchased picture is at Sr Peter Paul Rubens’s disposal, ready to be forwarded. But he, in order to preserve it from injuries, is having I know not what sort of case constructed, which will necessarily delay the shipment until after the holidays.’ By May, The Death of the Virgin had reached Mantua.

  FLIGHT FROM NAPLES

  Clearly Caravaggio was held in deep regard by his fellow painters in Rome, despite being under capital sentence for murder. But he still had his enemies there. All had not been forgotten and forgiven. There were those who claimed that Caravaggio was still up to no good, still making trouble in the city even though he was in exile from it. Within days of his arrival in Naples, he had been accused, in absentia, of another attempted murder back in Rome. It was said that an assassin named Carlo Piomontese, working to Caravaggio’s orders, had tried to kill a man who was on his way into church to hear Mass. Carlo Piemontese was a painter, a man also known as il Bodello, a nickname for sodomites. The victim of his alleged assault was none other than Caravaggio’s old adversary Giovanni Baglione.

  Baglione’s accusations are to be found in a series of depositions recorded by a notary in a Roman court of law at the beginning of November 1606:

  Last Sunday at the 14th or 15th hour I was walking to mass at Trinità de’ Monti. I was alone, and wearing a sword and a cape. I was walking down the stairs toward the Medici gardens when, as I set foot on the last step the said Carlo, who was hiding behind a pilaster on the stairs, attacked me with an unsheathed sword and struck me a blow that hit me on the shoulder, and tore my cloak and coat, as Your Lordship can see when I show you here … [Then I, the notary, saw a black cloak with a cut on the left shoulder, and a coat with a similar cut] Then he aimed a blow at my head, which struck me on the arm with the flat of the sword. Seeing myself attacked in this way I put my hand to my sword also. In grasping it he wounded me in the said right hand, as you can see … [Then I, the notary, saw a little scar on the index of the right hand] Then we exchanged some blows and my sword broke, because I think that he was wearing a breastplate, or something else of iron. Then some people came up, and we separated.39

  Until this attack, things had gone well for Baglione in the autumn of 1606. In September he had been knighted as a Cavaliere di Cristo. In October he had received the further honour of being voted principe, or ‘head’, of the Accademia di San Luca. Baglione believed that his success in the elections for that post had provoked the attempt on his life. Three weeks before the attack, he said in his evidence, Carlo Piemontese had come to the academy and attempted to disrupt the vote: ‘As he was not one of the Congregation, was under twenty years of age, and had no reason at all for being admitted, I told him that he should go outside until the principe had been chosen. He answered me that he was a painter like the others, and as he was there already he wanted to stay, but he did it in such a way that he was not balloted, and did not vote in the creation of said principe, and nothing else occurred.’

  That earlier incident had passed off without violence, but Baglione believed his election had continued to gnaw at Carlo Piemontese. The would-be assassin was friendly with two other painters, Carlo Saraceni and Orazio Borgianni, who were themselves close to Caravaggio. Baglione believed that the three of them had formed a cabal, to block his campaign and ensure that a member of Caravaggio’s faction be elected instead. When their plans were foiled, they resorted to violence. He knew this, he said, because on the day of the vote for principe, his groom had seen Saraceni and Borgianni standing outside the Accademia with Carlo Piemontese, stirring him up into a frenzy. He had also been told – although he did not say by whom – that the mastermind of the whole plot was Caravaggio himself:

  My servant told me that, while he was outside holding my horse, there came out the aforementioned Carlo, Orazio and Carlo Veneziano, and that they incited the said Carlo by saying ‘that prick’ and other insulting words [about me]. They did this because they wish me ill, now and in the past, and are adherents of Caravaggio, who is my enemy. I heard that he gave them something, and someone else another thing, and told them to kill me, and to bring the news to Caravaggio, who would give them a fine reward.

  The final judgement of the case is unknown. Two of the accused, Saraceni and Borgianni, made unusually large donations to the Accademia di San Luca on St Luke’s feast day in the following year, which suggests that the affair may have been settled out of court.40 Bagli
one’s accusation was potentially very damaging for the absent Caravaggio: at the moment of his arrival in Naples, just as he was taking what he hoped would be the first steps on the way to a pardon, his name was once more associated with violence and murderous intent.

  But behind the scenes it seems efforts were being made on Caravaggio’s behalf by the Colonna and his other allies. In May 1607, some six months after the assault on Baglione and just as Rubens was packing up The Death of the Virgin for transport to Mantua, it was again rumoured that he would soon be returning to Rome. The Este agent, Fabio Masetti, still fretting about the 32 scudi he had advanced to him sixteen months earlier, had remained alert for new developments. Reporting back to Modena from Rome on 26 May, he sounded a distinctly hopeful note: ‘It has not been possible to recover the money because of a homicide committed by the said painter, on account of which he has been banished. However, as the said homicide was accidental and the painter was badly wounded too, a reprieve is being negotiated and a pardon is hoped for. So, when he is back, I shall not fail to recover the said 32 scudi.’41

  ‘The said homicide was accidental’ and ‘the painter was badly wounded too’ – Masetti was no doubt repeating the same arguments, perhaps even the very same phrases, that were being used in Caravaggio’s defence. By the start of June, Masetti was sufficiently optimistic to let the painter himself know that he would be waiting for him when he got back to Rome. ‘I have written a letter to Caravaggio the painter for the restitution of the 32 scudi,’ he informed his superiors in Modena, ‘although it was not the first one, and the other time he failed to send a reply.’42

  Yet again the hapless Masetti was to be disappointed. Caravaggio, painting The Crucifixion of St Andrew, once more failed to reply. By the end of June, unpredictable as ever, he had left Naples by boat and was travelling ever further away from the city of Rome. His destination was the island of Malta, southernmost bastion of the Christian faith against Turks and Corsairs, and home to the military Order of the Knights of St John.

  Just why Caravaggio took the extraordinary decision to go to Malta is one of the many puzzles of his later years. Piecemeal clues in the historical archive suggest that he went in the hope of finding freedom and forgiveness. He appears to have believed that by allying himself with Malta’s formidable militia of warrior knights he might win permanent redemption for his crimes. But in the tough world of the Christian soldier he would be undone, once again, by his own volatility.

  THE FRIARS OF WAR

  To become a Knight Hospitaller of the Sovereign and Military Order of St John of Jerusalem, Rhodes and Malta, Custodian of the Poor of Jesus Christ and Servant of the Sick, was to join one of the most venerable and powerful organizations in the Christian world. The order’s roots lay deep in the medieval past, when the religious zeal of the pilgrim and the aristocratic ethos of chivalry became closely interwoven. In the year 1070 a group of noblemen from Amalfi, in Italy, founded a hospital in the city of Jerusalem to care for fellow Christians weakened by the long pilgrimage to the Holy Land. After the First Crusade, and following the capture of the Holy City, they were formally constituted as a nursing and military order. ‘The Friars of War’, as they became known, were dedicated both to the service of the sick and to the defence of the Christian faith against the threat of Islam.

  Within less than a century, the Knights of St John had established a vast network of hospitals and fortifications along the pilgrim routes leading from Europe to Jerusalem. Over the next two hundred years, they developed into a formidable army of aristocratic Christian warriors, building and defending a long chain of castles to safeguard the land frontiers of the Holy Land, from Asia Minor to Egypt. The Knights of St John were the crack troops of Christendom, but they also bore the brunt of wave after wave of attacks from the armies of Islam. By the end of the thirteenth century they had been made to relinquish almost all of their hard-won possessions. When the Christians were finally forced out of the Holy Land altogether, the knights were the last to leave, finally defeated at the Siege of Acre in 1291.

  The history of the order over the next three centuries would be no less bloody and no less embattled. The knights found a new home on the Greek island of Rhodes, a strategically vital maritime base at the crossroads of Europe, Asia and Africa. Having captured the island, they fortified it and set about creating a fleet of fighting ships. From that time on, they were no longer an army of Christian footsoldiers but a naval force. From their base on Rhodes they mounted raids on Turkish shipping and vulnerable coastal settlements, taking slaves and capturing hostages for ransom.

  In the Islamic world they were regarded as brutal and pitiless marauders. In their monastic uniform of black robes, proudly emblazoned at the chest with a white eight-pointed cross, the Knights of St John represented a militantly aggressive form of Christianity. Their activities inevitably attracted reprisals. In 1480 a Turkish fleet laid siege to Rhodes, only to be repelled with crippling losses. Forty years later, in 1522, Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent once more sent a flotilla of ships to conquer Rhodes. After six months of attack and counter-attack, the knights were finally defeated and expelled from the island.

  In 1530 the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V gave them another new home, on Malta, part of his Two Kingdoms of Sicily. His motives were part religious, part strategic. Charles V wanted to protect the southern flank of Europe and ultimately Rome itself against the might of Islam. His reasoning was that if anyone could hold Malta, the Knights of St John could. He ceded it to them in exchange for an annual tribute of a single falcon.

  Thirty-five years later, in 1565, the Turks once more laid siege to an island garrisoned by their most hated adversaries. The Siege of Malta lasted for months and would forever be remembered, both for the ferocity of the fighting and for the atrocities committed on both sides. The official historian of the Order of St John, Giacomo Bosio, included a harrowing account of it in his three-volume Dell’Istoria della sacra religione, the last part of which was published in 1602, five years before Caravaggio arrived on Malta. At the height of the siege, Bosio recounted, having captured Fort St Elmo, the Turks proceeded to massacre their Christian captives. The day allotted for the killing was 24 June, the feast day of St John and therefore one of the two most holy days of the year for members of the order (the other being 29 August, the day that marked the saint’s decapitation at the whim of Salome). Making grim play of the significance of the date, the Turks turned the killing itself into an obscene parody of a Christian religious festival: ‘All the cadavers which by their clothing could be recognized as knights or men of importance were gathered up; and it was ordered that they be stripped nude, decapitated, and that their hands be severed. Then, out of disresepect for the Holy Cross and to make sport of the knights’ military overgarments, on each corpse four huge incisions were made with scimitars, making the sign of the Cross on both the fronts and the backs.’43

  On a later occasion, in a similar spirit of vengeful parody, the Turks crucified a number of headless knights’ corpses and floated them into the harbour at Birgu. Bosio wrote that ‘after having had them lashed to various pieces of wood with their arms spread apart so as to form, similarly, the sign of the Cross, and bound in such a manner as to make one body tow the other in a long chain, they were then tossed into the sea. The water, it was thought, would carry them and this truly horrible spectacle over to our brethren at Birgu, and it in fact did so.’44 The intention was to strike terror into the last remnants of Malta’s Christian garrison. But the Grand Master of the Order of St John, a doughty Frenchman named Jean de la Valette, responded to the Turks’ flotilla of death with a fusillade of his own. He ordered his Turkish captives to be decapitated and had their heads fired from cannons at the Turkish soldiers occupying Fort St Elmo. In the end the knights held firm, despite their crippling losses, and the Turks were forced to withdraw. By the end of the siege just 50 Knights of St John survived. More than 7,000 defenders had lost their lives, but the last great effort of the
Ottoman Turks to seize control of the western Mediterranean had been successfully repulsed.

  Over the decades that followed there was a surge of new recruits to the Order of St John, lured to Malta by the dream of emulating the exploits of the heroes of 1565. Just six years after the siege, that other famous Christian victory, at the Battle of Lepanto, had fanned the flames of such enthusiasm yet further. Hundreds of young noblemen from the leading families of Europe travelled to Malta to seek knighthood, honour and glory. They wanted to fight, and if necessary die a martyr’s death, at the front line of conflict with the forces of Islam.

  According to Bellori, Caravaggio too nurtured the dream of becoming a Knight of St John. He was ‘eager to receive the Cross of Malta’, in the words of the biographer.45 But why? His art had electrified Naples. According to sources in Rome, steady progress was being made in the negotiation of his pardon. It would seem like an odd moment to travel yet further south, to a barren and rocky island at the farthest frontier of Christendom. It is possible that the fantasy of becoming a knight had long been with him – after all, he was a keen and talented swordsman, who had been brought up in the immediate aftermath of the Battle of Lepanto. Or perhaps he still felt vulnerable to attack or apprehension by a bounty hunter, aware of the price on his head. By papal dispensation the Knights of St John were above the law, subject to their own unique legal code. In Malta, Caravaggio would be safe. Furthermore, if he could win a knighthood he would, de facto, have gained pardon for his crimes.

  But there was probably more to it than that. Caravaggio had always been extremely touchy about status. At his trial for libel, he had contemptuously dismissed the rank and file of Rome’s artists by saying that hardly any of them deserved the title of valent’huomo, literally, a ‘worthy man’. Caravaggio took pride in his own worth. The poems attacking Giovanni Baglione, in which he certainly had had a hand, made much of the gold chain awarded to his rival. The perceived injustice of the honour clearly rankled with Caravaggio as much, if not more, than anything Baglione had actually said or done. But by the summer of 1607, nearly a year after the murder of Tomassoni, Baglione had just been knighted and his stock had risen yet further. Caravaggio, by contrast, was still a fugitive from justice. Even if he were pardoned and allowed to return, he would be going back to Rome as a man in disgrace. But to return, himself, with a knighthood – and not just an honorific papal knighthood but a knighthood in the Order of St John, proudly wearing the eight-pointed cross on his chest – that would be very different. If he could manage that, he could face his rivals down.