94. See Keith Sciberras and David Stone, Caravaggio: Art, Knighthood and Malta, pp. 36–7.
95. See George Sandys, A Relation of a Journey, pp. 245–6.
96. Susinno as reprinted in Howard Hibbard, Caravaggio, from which the translation used here derives. See p. 382.
97. The documents recording this commission are now lost, presumed destroyed in the catastrophic earthquake that struck Messina in 1908. Before their destruction, they were transcribed and published. See V. Saccà, ‘Michelangelo da Caravaggio pittore. Studi e ricerche’, in Archivio storico messinese, vol. 7 (Messina, 1906), p. 58, and vol. 8 (Messina, 1907), p. 78.
98. There is proof positive that he was familiar with the knights’ book of statutes in his Maltese altarpiece, The Beheading of St John. The image of the prison, with inmates, is clearly drawn from one of the illustrations in the order’s book of statutes. See David M. Stone, ‘The Context of Caravaggio’s Beheading of St John in Malta’, Burlington Magazine, vol. 139, no. 1,128 (Mar. 1997), pp. 161–70. It should also be noted that the document of consignment in which he is referred to as a Knight of Malta is dated June 1609, a full seven months after his expulsion from the order. It therefore seems highly unrealistic to argue that he did not know about his expulsion.
99. See Helen Langdon, The Lives of Caravaggio, p. 84. Caravaggio had made a similar plea for his head to Scipione Borghese just after the murder. The London picture is much weaker than the Borghese David and Goliath, however. It is not Herodias (or Salome) with the head, but a female servant.
100. See V. Saccà, ‘Michelangelo da Caravaggio pittore. Studi e ricerche’. Caravaggio’s name is not mentioned in the document of 6 Dec., but, given his strong association with the poor orders and charitable ministries, and given Susinno’s remark that he left Messina soon after completing The Burial of St Lucy, which must have been ready by her feast day on 13 Dec., it is a reasonable assumption that Giovan Battista de’ Lazzari had Caravaggio in mind from the start. Indeed, he may have been spurred to make his undertaking by the very opportunity that Caravaggio’s arrival provided. I take the document of 6 Dec. as a terminus ante quem for Caravaggio’s arrival in Messina from Syracuse.
101. Susinno as reprinted in Howard Hibbard, Caravaggio, from which the translation used here derives. See p. 382.
102. As George Sandys noted, the Eastern faith was tolerated in Sicily: ‘Their religion is Romish yet there are not so few as ten thousand who are of the tollerated Greeke church.’ See George Sandys, A Relation of a Journey, p. 238.
103. Susinno as reprinted in Howard Hibbard, Caravaggio, from which the translation used here derives. See p. 384.
104. Ibid. See p. 385.
105. It can be found in countless icons of the Virgin and Child, one of the most famous examples being Russia’s most sacred icon, Our Lady of Vladimir, which was painted in Constantinople in the eleventh century and taken to Kiev a hundred years later to mark the conversion to Christianity of the peoples of Russia. Caravaggio will have been familiar with the motif from icons in Sicily, or from the rich traditions of Italo-Byzantine painting of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, examples of which were to be seen all over the Italian peninsula.
106. Susinno as reprinted in Howard Hibbard, Caravaggio, from which the translation used here derives. See p. 385.
107. Ibid. See p. 386.
108. Ibid.
109. Ibid.
110. Helen Langdon, The Lives of Caravaggio, p. 84.
111. I arrive at this date by common sense. We know that Caravaggio was seriously wounded by a gang of assailants in Naples in late Oct. 1609, as will be explained below, pp. 415–20. He was very badly injured indeed. The only two paintings that can be dated to after that time, The Denial of Peter and The Martyrdom of St Ursula, are so radically unlike his Sicilian paintings that the difference can only logically be explained by incapacity and illness. We also know that Caravaggio painted a large altarpiece for the Fenaroli Chapel in Sant’Anna de’ Lombardi during his second and last stay in Naples, i.e. after arriving there from Palermo in 1609. He cannot have painted it on his first visit to the city, because the patron had only acquired rights to the chapel on 24 Dec. 1607, when Caravaggio had already left Naples for Malta. In my opinion, it is clear from the visual evidence of The Denial of Peter and The Martyrdom of St Ursula that when he painted those works Caravaggio could barely wield a brush. On the empirical evidence of the pictures, his eyesight had been damaged as well as possibly his nervous system. It is therefore inconceivable that he could have painted any kind of large and ambitious altarpiece after the assault of late Oct. 1609. In other words, he must have painted the Fenaroli altarpiece in Naples before the wounding took place. Assuming he worked flat out, and assuming it was commissoned from him the moment he disembarked from Palermo, he still would have needed at least four to six weeks to paint it. Therefore, he must have been back in Naples from Sicily some four to six weeks before the wounding of late Oct. On that basis, I set a date some time around the first week of September for his return to Naples.
112. See Helen Langdon, The Lives of Caravaggio, p. 53.
113. Ibid., p. 84.
114. I make this assumption because we know for sure that Caravaggio left Naples from the Colonna Palace at the end of his second stay in the city, in July 1610: that fact is documented. Given that the early sources all say he went to Naples from Palermo because he was in fear of pursuit, it seems logical to suppose that he was at the Colonna Palace at Chiaia throughout his time there in 1609–10, under the protection of the Marchesa Costanza Colonna.
115. See Helen Langdon, The Lives of Caravaggio , p. 77.
116. For the reasoning behind these assertions concerning the date of the lost Resurrection, see n. 111 above.
117. See Charles-Nicolas Cochin, Voyage d’Italie … (Paris, 1758), vol. 1, pp. 171–2; the passage is quoted in Maurizio Marini, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio ‘pictor praestantissimus’, p. 568.
118. ‘orgie siffatte’: for a useful summary of the poem, see Giuseppe Ferrari, Opuscoli politici e letterari (Naples, 1852), p. 462. For the poem in full, see Giulio Cesare Cortese, Opere (Naples, 1666), 6 vols.
119. See Giambattista Basile, ‘Talia, overo lo Cerriglio’, Egloca III, Le Muse Napolitane, in Collezione di tutti i poemi in lingue napoletane, tome 21, vol. 2 (Naples, 1788), p. 267: ‘Lloco le Cortesciane / Fanno lo sguazzatorio: / E all’ uocchie de corrive, / A spesa de perdente / Ne sporpano tant’ ossa …’
120. As cited in Salvatore di Giacomo, La prostituzione in Napoli nei secoli XV, XVI e XVII: documenti inediti (Naples, 1899), p. 82.
121. See Giambattista Basile, ‘Talia, overo lo Cerriglio’, p. 257. Basile’s exact phrase is ‘dove trionfa Bacco, dove se scarfa Venere’: se scarfa is Neapolitan dialect, which I translate as ‘is shunned’, having taken specialist advice from Nicholas Stone Villani, who kindly consulted a number of experts in historical Neapolitan usage on my behalf.
122. See Salvatore di Giacomo, La prostituzione in Napoli, p. 83.
123. Ibid., p. 119.
124. See Walter Friedlaender, Caravaggio Studies, p. 292.
125. See Michele Maccherini, ‘Caravaggio nel carteggio familiare di Giulio Mancini’, p. 83.
126. See p. 63 and p. 180, above.
127. This translation is broadly that given by Friedlaender in Caravaggio Studies, p. 236. I use the word ‘affronted’ instead of ‘insulted’, because it is closer to Baglione’s usage in Italian, affronto, which I believe itself carries an implied meaning, as will be explained on p. 420, below.
128. This translation is again broadly that given by Friedlaender in Caravaggio Studies, p. 251. I have corrected Friedlaender’s mistranscription of ‘Herodias’ as ‘Salome’.
129. Susinno in Howard Hibbard, Caravaggio, p. 386.
130. Most notably Maurizio Marini. I am grateful to him for sharing his views with me during the course of a fascinating two days of excursions and peregrinations in Caravaggio’s Rome in th
e autumn of 2001. I should add that when Marini expressed his view that the Tomassoni might have been responsible for the attack, Keith Sciberras had yet to publish the facts of Caravaggio’s crime on Malta, which tilt the balance very much towards Malta as the source of the attack; in other words, Marini was not in possession of all the facts when we spoke.
131. See Keith Sciberras’s second chapter in Caravaggio: Art, Knightood and Malta, fn. 49.
132. Keith Sciberras, who made the discovery of Caravaggio’s crime on Malta, had to X-ray the book to get at the documents. In his account of his discovery, he notes that the records of the crime were covered over not long after they had been inscribed, i.e the coverings-over date from the early seventeenth-century, consistent with the idea that they might represent a cover-up arranged by Roero himself. See Keith Sciberras, ‘ “Frater Michael Angelus in tumultu”: The Cause of Caravaggio’s Imprisonment in Malta’, pp. 229–32.
133. See Michele Maccherini, ‘Caravaggio nel carteggio familiare di Giulio Mancini’, p. 83.
134. Only one other work in Caravaggio’s entire known œuvre is painted in the sadly attenuated post-assault style of his last year, and that is The Martyrdom of St Ursula, discussed below, pp. 423–4. That picture is securely datable on the basis of original documents concerning its consignment. These two works are utterly distinct in style, and they clearly show a tragic falling off in the painter’s manual dexterity that can only be accounted for by his injuries.
135. For all the documents concerning The Martyrdom of St Ursula, see Vincenzo Pacelli, ‘Caravaggio 1610: la “Sant’Orsola confitta dal tiranno” per Marcantonio Doria’, Prospettiva, vol. 23 (Oct. 1980), pp. 24–30. They are helpfully translated in John T. Spike, Caravaggio, in the CD-ROM catalogue entry on the picture.
136. The date of his departure can be inferred from the journey time by sea from Naples to Palo, where he tried to go on land with his things – roughly seven days – and the date of his death, which must have occurred sometime between 18 and 21 July 1610.
137. See Helen Langdon, The Lives of Caravaggio , p. 85.
138. The details of the deal emerge in Deodato Gentile’s letter to Borghese about Caravaggio’s death, of 29 July 1610; see below, p. 429.
139. See Walter Friedlaender, Caravaggio Studies, p. 292.
140. See Baglione’s original Italian, as reprinted in Walter Friedlaender, Caravaggio Studies, p. 233. I have given my own translation.
141. Baglione uses the words in cambio, literally, ‘in change’, a phrase that has frequently been misleadingly translated as ‘mistakenly’, on the assumption that Baglione meant to imply that Caravaggio was arrested ‘in exchange’ (so to speak) of someone else. But in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Italian usage, in cambio is most frequently a phrase of emphasis with little actual meaning, carrying more or less the same thrust as ‘in fact’. It can also sometimes imply the idea of a swift change, in which case the English word ‘suddenly’ is a good equivalent. Baglione probably meant it in this latter sense. The modern mistranslations take their cue from Bellori, who clearly based his own account of Caravaggio’s death on that of his predecessor, Baglione. He himself seems to have misunderstood Baglione’s use of in cambio, amplifying it into his own tale of a case of mistaken arrest – as will be discussed below, p. 427.
142. Apart from the word ‘suddenly’ – explained in the note above – I have used the translation given in Walter Friedlaender, Caravaggio Studies, p. 236.
143. See n. 141 above.
144. I have used the translation given in Walter Friedlaender, Caravaggio Studies, pp. 251–2.
145. Ibid., p. 258.
146. See Sandro Corradini, Materiali per un processo, document 138, 28 July 1610.
147. Ibid., document 140, 31 July 1610.
148. Much has been made of this reference to Procida, and many a paranoid theory has been erected on its shaky foundations. But whoever told Borghese that Caravaggio died there may just have been making a logical guess based on the knowledge that the painter had left from Naples. Boats from there hitting bad weather often took refuge in Procida. The English traveller George Sandys had exactly that experience when he left Naples to travel to Rome a few years after Caravaggio: he got caught in a storm and ended up making an unscheduled visit to the island before continuing on to Rome, via Nettuno.
149. Borghese’s side of the correspondence has been lost. But the content of his letter of 23 July can be inferred from Gentile’s letters back to him, which do still survive. All these documents were discovered by Vincenzo Pacelli, through brilliant sleuth work in the Neapolitan archives. They are conveniently brought together with much other archive material in Sandro Corradini, Materiali per un processo.
150. The courier must have travelled post haste, changing horses as he rode, since Naples is a little over 120 miles from Rome.
151. See Sandro Corradini, Materiali per un Processo, Document 139, 29 July 1610.
152. See, in particular, the fanciful closing sections of Peter Robb’s quasi-biography of the painter, M (Sydney, 1998), in which the pope, Costanza Colonna and the Knights of Malta are held to have conspired to have Caravaggio assassinated. Vincenzo Pacelli, who located Gentile’s correspondence with Borghese in the first place, also believes in a plot. In his view, the Knights of Malta, Costanza Colonna and Scipione Borghese conspired to have Caravaggio killed. He told me so in conversation in 2001. The plotters’ motive, according to Pacelli, was their shared belief that Caravaggio had not only become an atheist but that he was using his most important commissions to profess, as it were, in subtle code, his heretical non-belief in God. The prime example given to me by Pacelli of a supposedly atheist painting infiltrated by Caravaggio into a Catholic church was The Seven Acts of Mercy. I am grateful to him for sharing his theories with me, but I have to say that I find them implausible.
153. I am indebted to the Maltese naval historian Joseph Scibberas for explaining how transport by felucca really worked in early seventeenth-century Italy.
154. When George Sandys went there from Naples a few years later, he went via the much sleepier port of Nettuno (see n. 148, above) to avoid detection as an Englishman and a Protestant.
155. I noticed this on a visit to Palo in 2001. The old fortress is still in existence, although nowadays it is a luxury hotel patronized by prominent Italian politicians, playboys and their supermodel girlfriends. The insignia of the old postal service can still be seen on the wall.
156. Besides, to make the journey on foot would have been to defeat its very purpose, which was to get to Porto Ercole preferably before or, at worst, at the same time as the boat. If Caravaggio had arrived four or five days after leaving Palo, the boat would already have got to Porto Ercole, unloaded and left. So if a horse or horses had not been available, there would have been no point in his even attempting the journey.
157. He refused to record any of the names of the dead for the entire year of 1610. I am grateful to Giuseppe La Fauci for showing me the book of the dead for the relevant period in the archives of the town, and for explaining the absence of records for the year in question. The death certificate that was ‘found’ in 2001 in Porto Ercole, a separate piece of paper with Caravaggio’s name on it, is entirely inconsistent with the manner in which deaths were conventionally noted down in Porto Ercole – i.e., as entries in the book of deaths. I am sure that document is a forgery.
158. In Langdon, Caravaggio: A Life, p. 388, the author wrongly takes this phrase to mean ‘high seas’, as in tall waves, and suggests that a storm was brewing and the sea was swelling, which forced the boat to pull away from shore. However alto mare does not mean that; it simply means ‘the open sea’.
159. See Sandro Corradini, Materiali per un processo, document 141, 31 July 1610.
160. See Walter Friedlaender, Caravaggio Studies, p. 293.
161. See Sandro Corradini, Materiali per un processo, document 144, 10 Dec. 1610.
162. Quoted in Carlton Lake, In Quest o
f Dalí (Michigan, 1969), p. 46.
163. Martin Scorsese’s remarks have been directly transcribed from his conversations with the author in December 2005, which included an interview filmed for and subsequently transmitted by The Culture Show (BBC Television, directed by David Shulman).
Further Reading
Detailed references to nearly all of the many sources I have consulted in writing this book will be found in the Notes (see pp. 447–81 above). What follows here is a short list of texts that I would recommend to any non-specialist reader wishing to pursue an interest in Caravaggio and his world.
Wietse de Boer, The Conquest of the Soul: Confession, Discipline and Public Order in Counter-Reformation Milan (Leiden, Boston and Cologne, 2001). A fascinating, highly detailed account of the religious milieu created in Milan by Archbishop Carlo Borromeo during Caravaggio’s youth.
Maurizio Calvesi, Le realtà del Caravaggio (Turin, 1990). For those who can read Italian, this is highly recommended. A broad-ranging, discursive study of many aspects of Caravaggio’s life and work, full of biographical insights and intuitions that have been borne out, to a remarkable extent, by later documentary finds. Also worth reading for Calvesi’s many ingenious iconographical interpretations of the pictures.
Sandro Corradini, Caravaggio: materiali per un processo (Rome, 1993). Hard work, requiring a mastery of demotic Italian as it was spoken in Caravaggio’s day, as well the ability to read the judicial Latin used by the notaries of the time. Hard to get hold of too, since it was published in a tiny edition. But I cannot omit it from this list. Containing the fruits of more than two decades of privately conducted research in the archives of Rome, Corradini’s book is the essential anthology of documents concerning the darker and more violent aspects of Caravaggio’s life.
Walter Friedlaender, Caravaggio Studies (Princeton, 1955). Pioneering study of the painter’s life and work, superseded in some respects by the research of later scholars, but still remarkably fresh, and full of wise and heartfelt responses to the individual paintings. Contains useful translations of numerous primary documents as well as dual-language versions of Mancini, Baglione and Bellori’s biographies, and is supplemented by the short biographical remarks written by Karel van Mander and Joachim von Sandrart, also both in the original and in English translation.
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