by Matt Rees
‘I recognized what you depicted,’ Martelli said. ‘I saw your suffering and your hope for salvation.’
‘Let our young knights see it, too, Maestro.’ Wignacourt stroked at the buttons on Caravaggio’s doublet and brought his face very close. ‘Let them see it, and you shall be made a Knight of our Order.’
Caravaggio flinched in astonishment. The two old men watched him with a knowing pleasure, like merchants certain of an inflated price.
Caravaggio brought his materials to the palace for the portrait of Wignacourt. At the centre of the room allocated as his studio, he stared at the armour in which the Grand Master wished to be portrayed. He lifted the visor and imagined his own face looking out at him. He whispered a prayer with the fervour of a warrior before battle. To be dubbed Knight would release him from the threat of capital punishment. It would be a pardon for soul and body. He gripped the shoulders of the armour like an old comrade and regarded it with the firmness of a man entering the deadly fray. He would paint such works on this island that the knights would make him one of their own. He would be free. Saved.
Wignacourt came into the chamber with the gaunt knight named Roero. The gold chain of office around the Grand Master’s neck looked heavy enough to moor the galleys in the harbour. ‘Maestro Caravaggio, this is a day blessed by Our Lord. This morning I was able to persuade the landlord of another brothel to close.’
Caravaggio attempted to imbue his bow with admiration. He wondered what alley would now serve the whores who had been turfed out of their rooms.
‘Our Maestro is an artist.’ Roero’s voice grated, dry like that of a man waking from sleep. ‘Perhaps your news displeases him, Your Serene Highness. Whores would have no employment if it weren’t for painters.’
Wignacourt affected to peruse Caravaggio’s brushes.
Roero’s infected eyes glimmered with suspicion through the glassy redness that shrouded them. So the Grand Master brings his guard dog to goad me a little, Caravaggio thought, to test my temper. ‘You mean that painters use whores as models?’
‘I don’t mean that at all.’
‘Oh, I see. Then I think you’ll find a whore’s main source of income is not artists, but soldiers like you.’
Roero dropped his voice, gritty and growling. ‘Don’t compare me to a common soldier, nor to a mere craftsman such as yourself. I am the Count della Vezza. My line is as noble as time.’
Caravaggio bowed low. When I’m a knight, I won’t have to listen to this arrogance any more. I’ll be the equal of Costanza’s sons – and of this bastard, too. ‘I humbly beg your Lordship’s pardon.’
Wignacourt touched his beard. ‘Brother Roero refers perhaps to reports from Rome – of your involvement with the ladies of the Evil Garden.’
‘It was against a pimp that I fought the duel of honour for which I now suffer a price on my head.’
‘Attend on me in the antechamber, Brother.’ The Grand Master gestured for Roero to leave. With another hard glance at Caravaggio, Roero went into the corridor and shut the door behind him.
Wignacourt picked up a thick hogshead and brushed the bristles against his palm. ‘Brother Roero is most solicitous of my safety. He has little respect for those who may not claim noble descent. Don’t be perturbed by his zeal.’ He opened the door. With his back to Caravaggio, he said, ‘But don’t be heedless of it, either. Tomorrow, begin the portrait.’
When he was alone, Caravaggio closed all the shutters and lit the lantern.
By late afternoon, the canvas was prepared. Caravaggio rubbed his eyes. They were tired and stinging. He wondered if Roero had passed on his infection just by looking at him. He was about to return to the Inn of the Italian Knights when a messenger entered.
Caravaggio rotated the lantern. The messenger raised his arm to cover his face from the glare of the light. Caravaggio let go of the lamp, his grip loosened by shock. Across the messenger’s doublet was a black and white cross, each branch ending in a three-budded trefoil to represent the Holy Trinity: the coat of arms of the Inquisition.
The herald lowered his arm and peered at Caravaggio, as the light swung before him. ‘Michelangelo Merisi of Caravaggio? The Roman painter?’
‘Who wants him?’ he whispered.
‘Are you him?’
Caravaggio opened his arms and let them fall.
‘Inquisitor Leonetta della Corbara commands your presence tomorrow,’ the herald said.
Caravaggio knew better than to ask why. Whether he was witness or accused, he wouldn’t know until he stood in the Tribunal Chamber.
The arc of the lantern grew shorter and faster. His heartbeat kept pace. He touched the grain of the blank canvas on his easel. The Grand Master would have to wait another day for his portrait.
That night Caravaggio lay on his pallet, fearful of the Inquisition, staring at the high ceiling of the Inn of the Italian Knights. When eventually he drowsed, he dreamed of Naples. He had been on his way to the Pio Monte della Misericordia to sign the contract for Our Lady of Mercy when he had passed two jailers carrying a corpse out of the prison. The dead man’s feet dangled, their bloodless soles ridged with filth. The jailers dropped the body on the steps of the law courts next door. They stretched their backs and squinted in the morning sunlight.
Naples was a dangerous place, not somewhere for passers-by to interfere with strangers. But Caravaggio had come out of the dingy mêlée of the street towards the jailers. ‘You’re leaving him here?’
One of the men frowned. ‘Who?’
Caravaggio pointed to the corpse. ‘Him.’
‘Someone from his parish’ll come to bury him.’ The jailers moved away. ‘Eventually.’
A scruffy brown dog gnawed at the thin calf muscle of the corpse. Caravaggio kicked it. The dog clamped its teeth to the bone and growled, as if Caravaggio were a rival who wished to feed off the dead man. Another kick and a shout, and the animal retreated.
Caravaggio squatted beside the corpse and closed its eyes with the side of his hand. He sensed motion on the man’s face. He recoiled. Something touched his fingers. As his breath stilled, he saw the lice crawling in the dead man’s beard. With a shudder, he brushed them from his palm.
At the Inn of the Italian Knights, he twisted naked in his sheet, sweating through the sackcloth of his pallet, dampening the straw within. His dream passed now beyond his memory of the steps of the jail and into the unfathomable fictions of nightmare. The dog ripped at the corpse. Caravaggio chased it away. The lice itched all over him. They crawled across the features of his dead father. He knelt beside the body, waiting for someone to take it for burial. But no one came. His father’s eyes opened. Each time Caravaggio shut them their lids lifted once more, as if his father wished to observe him. ‘I’m still watching, Papa,’ he sobbed.
Then his dream took him to the Church of the Pio Monte. He made a few final touches to Our Lady of Mercy, the highlights on the toes of the cadaver which was carried into the picture to represent the Christian duty to bury the dead. With each stroke of the brush, he squirmed, ticklish, as if the feet of the dead man were his own. The jailers came into the church and lifted him. He would have protested, but he could neither move nor speak. They dropped him into a plague pit. A woman stood in silhouette on the lip of the grave. She shovelled lime over him.
He jolted upright in his bed, coughing as if to clear the quicklime from his throat. Still thinking himself in a dream, he stared about his room. It had been Lena at the graveside.
Slowly, he understood where he was. The room was empty. He was sorry to have woken. He would rather have been dead and have her there with him.
Outside the Inquisitor’s Palace, a Maltese man walked by in a tall hat he wore as a punishment from the Inquisition. The hat was painted with the image of a sinner kneeling before Satan. Egged on by demons, the Devil prepared to skewer his terrified victim with his pitchfork. The man paced slowly up the street to the amusement of those passing, his eyes lowered in shame.
&n
bsp; A balcony over the gate bore the arms of the Inquisition, the only adornment to the façade of the palace. A Dominican priest led Caravaggio to the head of the stairs. He pushed open a low door and jerked his head. ‘Through here.’
The door was built to enforce humility and to instil fear. Caravaggio had to bend double to enter the Tribunal Chamber. A notary sat at a low desk under a simple canvas of the crucifixion. Beneath two shuttered windows, the Inquisitor slouched on his throne. It was built into the centre of a five-man choir chair with a high oak back and a gold crucifix set above the Inquisitor’s head.
Slumped to his right, his body formless in a black cassock, the representative of the Roman Inquisition raised his eyes, a signal for the notary to begin.
‘You’re Michelangelo Merisi, Roman painter?’ The notary dipped his pen in the well. When Caravaggio answered that he was, the notary started his note-taking, translating into Latin as he went along. ‘Come forward and face the Inquisitor.’
Inquisitor della Corbara adjusted his black skullcap. In the dim light, his skin was shadowed deep, as though a charcoal stick had shaded around his eyes, beneath his cheekbones, in the cleft of his chin. His lips were tight, round and ribbed, like a sphincter. He shifted as if to stretch his lower back. Then he reclined into his slouch.
‘Undoubtedly you’re the greatest artist to have reached these humble shores.’ He spoke into his hand. He was slovenly and stealthy like a battered street cat. His breath wheezed out of one side of his mouth. ‘I wonder why you’d come here?’ He gave no opportunity for an answer. ‘I have questions I would put to you. But they’re not for the record.’
The notary shut his ledger and left the room.
A smirk progressed over the Inquisitor’s face, like a cloud blotting the moon. It passed slowly as if some private puzzle were being resolved, a chess player seeing his victory five moves ahead.
Caravaggio had faced judges and even the possibility of torture many times before. Yet he had always done so with a sense of his own cunning and an almost theatrical pleasure in his performance. In front of della Corbara, he was disturbed to find his legs as unsteady as they had been when The Capitana rocked on the swells in the Straits of Messina.
The Inquisitor rose to his feet as though lifted by strings like a puppet. He slid his hands into the sleeves of his robe. ‘Come with me.’
They went along the hall. Della Corbara’s left foot was bent outwards. A broken shin must have been badly set. With each step, the foot landed a beat later than it should have. At the head of the main staircase, the walls were laden with the family arms of the eighteen Inquisitors to have preceded della Corbara in Malta. Beneath these were hung a collection of canvases portraying the deaths of the great Christian martyrs.
‘Plenty of ways to kill a man, are there not?’ The Inquisitor tipped his head towards the gallery. ‘But then you know all about killing.’
‘I’m no saint, that’s true.’
‘Good. Because you’ve painted enough martyrdoms to know what happens to saints.’ Della Corbara turned down his lips. ‘Anyway, what’s death to us? We’re all no further from meeting our demise than a cough or a sneeze or an encounter with a violent stranger. Like the martyrs.’ He went along the hall, passing beneath the paintings. ‘Here’s St Sebastian, shot full of arrows, St Agatha, having her breasts cut off, and now St Lawrence, cooked on a griddle.’
‘It’s horrible.’
‘Lawrence didn’t think so. As he died, he joked with his persecutors, to show that he welcomed martyrdom. “Turn me over, I’m done on this side,” he said.’ The Inquisitor’s laugh was a vulgar snigger.
Now that he was out of the Tribunal Chamber, Caravaggio relaxed a little. Perhaps he wasn’t being investigated. He looked at the Inquisitor’s lean, thieving features and reminded himself to be wary. This one would prosecute you for your dreams, he thought, and God knows mine wouldn’t pass the examination of the most kindly of priests.
‘I don’t mean that the story is horrible,’ he said. ‘I’m guided by you in such matters, Father. I mean that these paintings are very poor.’
Della Corbara shrugged his head from side to side. ‘They’re not to my taste, it’s true. I saw your St Catherine of Alexandria in Rome at Cardinal del Monte’s gallery. It takes the viewer into the thoughts of the saint.’
‘I’m gratified, Father.’
‘Though that may be a heresy in itself. A saint should be more mysterious.’
Caravaggio forced himself to look away from the mediocre canvases, to concentrate on the man who stood in the shadows beside him. Just because he used the word heresy in jest doesn’t mean he wouldn’t laugh at the flames while I burned. Beside him, I can almost feel the heat, as if he were the pyre.
‘It’s in the eyes. Am I right?’ della Corbara said. ‘That’s how you do it? Not with extravagant gestures or beatific faces looking heavenward, like this rubbish here. In your paintings, the eyes tell us all we need to know.’ He stared into Caravaggio’s face. ‘When you paint a martyrdom, your saints think too much. They ought simply to suffer. The danger, you see, is that worshippers in the churches will start thinking too.’
The priest went into the light at the head of the stairs. ‘What are they thinking about, though? Your saints, at the moment of their death.’ He squinted into the sun. ‘In del Monte’s gallery I also saw some of your early canvases. The ones of buggered boys. Unlike the saints, who proclaim their martyrdom, your youths seem to cry out for something quite different. I imagine the Lords of the Knights of St John would enjoy such paintings.’
Caravaggio had been pretending to examine the canvases on the wall. His eyes snapped back to the Inquisitor. Here’s the trap.
The Inquisitor’s smile was faint and pitying. ‘I hear you’ll be asked to paint St John, the patron saint of the Order of Knights.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m to paint the Grand Master.’
Della Corbara rubbed his eyebrows softly. ‘The doctrine of the Church applies to images of the saints, not to portraits of blustering old soldiers – which means that such paintings may be judged heretical.’
Caravaggio’s throat seized up. In Rome, Baglione had couched his dislike in the language of the art critic. It had led to the rejection of Caravaggio’s paintings, but it had never been a threat to his person. Now an Inquisitor was interpreting his art. ‘Heretical? Why?’
‘As soon as you paint the saint, you’ll be in my hands. It’ll be easy for me to show that your portrayal violates the guidelines of the Council of Trent. I’ll have other questions to ask you – about the habits of the Knights and their leaders. I’ll expect those questions to be answered, if I’m not to pursue my misgivings about your art.’
Caravaggio felt a shudder of apprehension for Wignacourt and Martelli. And for himself. If the Knights think I’m an informant for the Inquisition, he thought, it’ll be my neck. Della Corbara nodded, as if he were translating a trail of anguish crossing Caravaggio’s face.
‘The Holy Office would consider it a great prize to have more . . . control over the knights – to reduce their independence. It’s a wealthy Order.’ The Inquisitor descended the wide stairs to the first landing.
Caravaggio came behind him, unsteady, leaning on the smooth, carved banister.
‘Of course, there may be something in it for you, beyond escaping the fires of heresy. You see, I report to the head of the Holy Office of the Inquisition directly,’ della Corbara said. ‘To Cardinal-Nephew Scipione.’
Caravaggio felt like a sheep shoved into a wolf’s jaws. Was this why Scipione had sent him to Malta? To plant a spy within the Order of Knights?
‘We all of us hang midway between the beasts and the angels, Maestro Caravaggio.’ The Inquisitor took his hand and led him down the last flight. ‘It’s my job to lift those who drop too far. If I ask anything of you, it’s only so that I may save the souls of those who’ve done wrong. The poet Dante showed us that God’s justice is absolut
e. It’s no use, he wrote, being a good-hearted man who sometimes sins. A sinner is a sinner, forever consigned to the Inferno, no matter what else he does right.’
Caravaggio stumbled. The Inquisitor held his arm. His strength was surprising and he smiled because he saw that the painter noticed it.
‘Yet our proximity to the beasts dictates that the Inquisition presumes guilt. I investigate and, if that brings no result, I torture until the accused calls out “The guilt is mine.” Then the presumption of guilt is removed.’
‘Only by the confession of guilt.’
‘Well, no one is innocent.’ The priest squeezed his arm as they reached the bottom of the stairs. ‘If you’re a good Christian, you needn’t fear me. Do you want to paint for these hooligans in the Order the rest of your life?’ He came close. His breath rustled Caravaggio’s beard. ‘You know something bad, I can smell it.’
‘That’s just linseed oil for thinning my paints.’
‘It’s the stink of secrets. But the reek doesn’t have to cling to you. Purification can be through pain or through fire. But also by simple confession.’ The Inquisitor pulled him down the corridor to a narrow doorway. ‘The torture room.’
Caravaggio resisted the Inquisitor’s grip.
‘Don’t worry, it’s not for you,’ della Corbara said. ‘Not now.’
A pair of torturers held a manacled African. The notary was at his desk to record the questioning. On a stool in the corner, a doctor waited to repair the man’s shoulders after the coming dislocation of the strappado.
The African stared at Caravaggio as though he expected rescue. When Caravaggio looked away, the man’s chin dropped to his chest.
‘I get a lot of Mussulmen like this in here, and Maltese witches. The Jews, of course, have money, so the knights keep them for ransom.’ The Inquisitor gestured towards the torturers. ‘I pay these Maltese to come and work for me. The doctor gets five scudi, too.’
