Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (48 page)

Shortly after Caravaggio gave his evidence, Baglione decided to concentrate his attack on Gentileschi. He came back to the court that afternoon with another exhibit for the prosecution. It was an angry letter to Baglione from Gentileschi, written earlier that summer. Baglione had been on a pilgrimage to the shrine at Loreto and Gentileschi had asked him to bring him back some silver figurines of the Madonna. Baglione had given him two figures, but they were in lead, which Gentileschi had taken as a slight. Having explained the background to the court, Baglione then produced the letter:

To Giovanni the painter,

I am not returning your Madonna figurines as you deserve but will keep them for the devotion they represent. However, I consider you a man with just about enough courage to buy them in lead. Your other actions have shown everyone all the riches you are made of and I don’t give a hoot about you.

I’d like you to do me a favour by hanging some offal on that chain you wear around your neck as an ornament to match your worth. I told you that if you sent me one in silver I would pay you for it. I would never under any circumstances send one in lead to a courteous gentleman, like the ones you see worn on hats.

And with this I take leave of you and return your friendship and who is saying this to you cannot be a blackguard.

This was conclusive proof of Gentileschi’s enmity. The robust style of the letter also showed that he had misled the court when he said he could barely string a sentence together on paper. Most incriminating of all, however, was the reference to Baglione’s chain. ‘In the sonnets written against me he mentions a neck chain saying I ought to wear an iron chain instead,’ Baglione told the court. ‘In this note he also speaks about the neck chain saying I should hang some offal in place of the chain. I steadfastly insist that it must have been him . . .’

The next day, as a final throw of the dice, the examining magistrate recalled Orazio Gentileschi. If he could be made to crack under cross-examination, the case would suddenly be thrown wide open.

At first the magistrate lulled Gentileschi into a false sense of security, asking him a series of questions about other artists, which Gentileschi parried with ease. It was at this point in the trial that he blithely volunteered the story about Baglione bringing his picture of
Divine Love
to the annual artists’ exhibition, to compete with his own
St Michael the Archangel
. He presumably wanted to demonstrate that he had nothing to fear from a discussion of the rivalry between them. He was happy to admit to the occasional disagreement with Baglione, but he also took care to distance himself from Caravaggio, complaining that both men had a habit of looking down on him:

I haven’t spoken to the said Giovanni Baglione since the St Michael affair and especially because he expects me to raise my hat to him on the street and I expect him to raise his hat to me. Even Caravaggio, who’s a friend of mine, expects me to salute him, and although both of them are my friends, there’s nothing more between us. It must be six or eight months since I’ve spoken to Caravaggio, although he did send round to my house for a Capuchin’s robe and a pair of wings I lent him. It must be about ten days since he sent them back.

Gradually the magistrate turned the conversation towards the incriminating note, although for the time being he kept the document itself up his sleeve. Did Gentileschi ever remember Baglione leaving Rome? Had Baglione ever given anything to him? The accused stumbled slowly but surely into the trap. Gentileschi told the court that Baglione had gone to Loreto and that he had brought him back some lead figurines ‘like the ones that are worn on hats’. He had hoped for silver ones, but he had thanked Baglione graciously none the less. What about a note? Had he written a note? Gentileschi pretended to struggle to remember. Baglione had written to him first, as he recalled, saying that he had heard that Gentileschi was complaining about the figurines. He had felt obliged to reply. ‘I answered him in a note that I held devotion dear, that I was surprised that he would write these things to me, that I had thanked him in the presence of several people . . . and that he shouldn’t think I was interested in all that silver nonsense.’

After a little more sparring the magistrate suddenly produced the note itself, to Gentileschi’s evident consternation. At first he tried to deny that he had written the note, then realized that the handwriting was so evidently his that he had better own up to it. But when confronted with the line about hanging offal on Baglione’s chain, he panicked and half-heartedly denied authorship of the letter once again. Drowning in his own inconsistency, all he could find to cling to was an implausible insinuation that the letter was a forgery. His testimony rapidly descended into incoherence. ‘It seems to me,’ he stammered, ‘yet it doesn’t, that I wrote about offal and chains, but the handwriting looks like mine. I recognize this letter by my handwriting. It’s true I wrote about someone who had done something bad and that he face up to it but I don’t think I’ve written about chains and offal.’

At this point the notary reported, ‘
He got confused
.’ Again and again the magistrate pressed him for the truth about the letter, but Gentileschi just went round and round in ever-decreasing circles: ‘it doesn’t seem to be in my hand, but I know I haven’t written this note in this manner: it is like my handwriting but I don’t know of having written these things . . . the handwriting looks like mine, but I don’t think I’ve written this letter in this way, but it is my handwriting . . .’ It was not quite a confession, but he must have signed such a testimony with a heavy heart.

But just as the case seemed to have swung decisively against them, the defendants were reprieved. Someone must have told the Governor of Rome to call off his hounds, because on 25 September 1603 Caravaggio was suddenly released from prison. He was bailed under guarantee from the French ambassador, which strongly suggests that Cardinal del Monte, friend to the Medici and to France, had engineered his release. The condition of bail was that he ‘was not to leave his habitual residence without written permission . . . at the risk of being condemned to the punishment of galley slave’.
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He was also obliged to make himself available for a further hearing in a month’s time. In another document of the same date, Ainolfo Bardi, Count of Vernio, undertook to ensure that Caravaggio would offend ‘neither the life nor the honour’ of either ‘Giovanni Baglione, painter’ or ‘Tommaso, alias Mau [
sic
]’.
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In the event, there were no further hearings and the case was dropped. But that was not quite the end of the affair. By November 1603 Caravaggio’s friend Onorio Longhi was back in Rome. He wanted revenge for the ordeal of the lawsuit and tried to pick a fight with Baglione and Salini. This time, Longhi was the one who ended up in court, arrested for threatening behaviour by a
sbirro
who signed himself ‘Tullio, assistant to the head of police’. The events leading up to the arrest were described by Salini in his deposition to the court:
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I was in the church of Minerva together with my friend Messer Giovanni Baglione. We wished to hear Mass and while we were waiting I saw Onorio Longhi who was standing in front of us staring at me saying something very softly with his mouth that couldn’t be heard. Then he beckoned me with his head and I went over and asked him what he was calling me for. He started to say, ‘I’d like to make you swing from a wooden scaffold, you fucking grass.’ To which I answered that he was insulting me so in church but that outside he wouldn’t have dared say such a thing. Then, raising his voice, Onorio told me to come outside and said I was a fucker and a grass if I didn’t and that I should come out and he’d be waiting for me.

He immediately went out of the rear door of the Minerva and picked up a stone saying, ‘Come out, you scum you grass.’ Then I told him he was lying through his teeth and that he should put down the brick or we’d be uneven. And then the said Messer Giovanni Baglione came out and held me back and Onorio began to say, ‘There are two of you’, and a companion of the said Onorio, a procurator from Truffia who lives in Montecitorio, turned towards Messer Giovanni and seeing him with a dagger said, ‘Put the dagger down.’ Onorio, likewise, said ‘Get the dagger off him’, . . . and the said procurator approached him [and punched the said Messer Giovanni in the chest
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] . . . and all at once Onorio threw the brick at Messer Giovanni, which hit his hat but didn’t hurt him. Then he turned towards me, but having a stone in my hand I told him to stop or I’d knock him down. All the same he came towards me saying, ‘You fucking grass’, and so I called him a liar and entered the church and he went off with the said procurator.

Shortly after this, Salini added, Longhi challenged him to a swordfight again, ‘near the door of the friars’ cloister’. When he refused to rise to the bait, Longhi went to wait at Salini’s home on the corner of Via della Croce. When Baglione and Salini got there, he shouted at them to arm themselves, but still they refused to fight with him. Salini went to see his tailor and Baglione went into ‘the baker’s shop that sells bread, wine and charcoal’. (Were it not for this aside in Salini’s testimony, it might never have been known that bakers in the artists’ quarter of seventeenth-century Rome sold charcoal from their bread-ovens to painters.)

The tale of provocation ends there, with Salini trying on shirts and Baglione buying artist’s materials and the enraged Longhi left yelling in the street. The story as Salini had told it was confirmed by another eyewitness, Lazzaro Visca, a barber. True to his profession, he added one small tonsorial detail to the picture: the infuriated Longhi had a red beard.

A DAGGER, A PAIR OF EARRINGS, A WORN-OUT BELT

Onorio Longhi left the custody of the
sbirri
with a caution as the enmity between rival factions of artists rumbled on. Caravaggio had not been involved in the latest fracas, if only because he was away from Rome at the time. He had left the city shortly after the collapse of the libel trial, to research a new picture he had been asked to paint.

In early September 1603 the heirs of Ermete Cavalletti had acquired a chapel in the church of Sant’Agostino. Caravaggio was in prison at the time, but immediately after his release Ermete’s widow, Orinzia Cavalletti, commissioned him to paint an altarpiece depicting the Madonna of Loreto. Cavalletti’s late husband had been particularly devoted to the cult of Loreto, a small town in the Marches, east of Rome, which was home to the fabled Holy House of the Virgin Mary, and during the last year of his life he had organized a pilgrimage to the Holy House, then one of the principal pilgrimage sites in the Roman Catholic world. Caravaggio decided to familiarize himself with the shrine and its legend before starting work on the altarpiece, so he too followed the pilgrims’ trail. Orazio Gentileschi may or may not have asked him to pick up a few silver figurines when he got there.

While he was on the road, Caravaggio accepted another commission, this time to paint an altarpiece for the Capuchin church of Santa Maria di Costantinopoli in the town of Tolentino. The picture is lost and was nearly forgotten altogether, but in the late nineteenth century a scholar working in the town’s municipal archives stumbled on a letter about it. Dated 2 January 1604, it was sent to the priors of the town by a nobleman from Tolentino, Lancilotto Mauruzi, who was living in Rome at the time. He congratulated them on securing Caravaggio’s services and wanted them to know that he was ‘a most excellent painter, of great worth, in fact the best in Rome today’.
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He pleaded with them to treat the artist well, because if he created one of his ‘extraordinary’ paintings for Tolentino it would forever bring honour to the town. The fate of the work is unknown, but it must have disappeared some time after 1772, when the author of a local guidebook rapturously described it as ‘a singular and precious production of Knight Michelangelo Amerigi da Caravaggio, in which, in his strong and dark manner, he depicted St Isidora Agricola piercing a tree with a spike and miraculously bringing forth a fountain: the figure is so natural, seeming to be alive, such is the delicacy of the flesh tones . . . there are also other figures, transfixed by the sight of the miracle: in fact one could say it it is a miracle of art, so true to life does it seem.’
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Caravaggio went on to Loreto, for how long we do not know, but he was back in Rome by the beginning of 1604. In the aftermath of the libel trial, his life became increasingly unsettled. Having lodged for several years with powerful patrons, first del Monte and then the Mattei family, he was now living in rented accommodation. Not long after his release from prison he had moved into a small two-storey house in the Vicolo dei Santa Cecilia e Biagio (now the Vicolo del Divino Amore), a narrow curved street flanked on one side by the walls of the Palazzo Firenze. The palace was part of the machinery of Medici power in Rome, serving among other things as the post office for Tuscany, and del Monte was often required to be there in the course of his duties. It seems that despite his changed circumstances the painter was still keen to stay close to his protector.

Unlike many Roman streets, the Vicolo was, and still is, unshaded by any large church or monastery. In high summer the sun beats down on to the roofs and through the windows of the houses there, creating dramatically Caravaggesque effects of light and shade. The painter’s new home had a cellar and a small courtyard garden with its own well. His landlady, Prudentia Bruni, charged him the modest sum of 40 scudi a year in rent. His reasons for moving are not known. Perhaps he wanted privacy. He was living alone with his one assistant, according to a communion census carried out for the parish of San Nicola dei Prefetti. The document in question, part of a
Status animarum
, or report on ‘the state of souls’, records that ‘Michelangelo, painter’ had taken communion as required, together with ‘Francesco, his servant’
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– Cecco, the model for
Omnia vincit amor
, the source of all those rumours about Caravaggio’s homosexuality that would still be current half a century later. There must have been talk, but Caravaggio was paying no attention to it.