Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (56 page)

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.
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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.’
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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 . . .
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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.’
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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.
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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’.
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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.
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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.
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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,
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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 in 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.’
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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.’
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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.

Caravaggio, by then long gone, would never appear in court to answer the charges against him. But, as Baglione would later write, everyone else involved in the affair had run away from Rome too – everyone else except for the unfortunate Petronio Toppa. Onorio Longhi had fled to Milan. Giovan Francesco Tomassoni was nowhere to be found. Nor were the Giugoli brothers, whose father, Flaminio, paid caution money to the court on their behalf on 27 July.

The continued absence of so many of the participants casts consid
erable doubt on the story that the fight between Caravaggio and Ranuccio Tomassoni had been sparked by an argument over a tennis match. If that had been so, why would at least three apparently innocent bystanders, namely Longhi and the two Giugoli brothers, have defied court orders and gone into hiding? It made no sense.

The known facts of the case point to a very different explanation of the fight. The pattern of the evening’s events could hardly be clearer. Four men on one side, four on the other: two combatants, two
seconds
, four witnesses. An encounter on a tennis court, a flat field that was often also used as a fencing arena – as on the day back in 1600, when Onorio Longhi watched a fencing match take place on the French tennis court at Santa Lucia della Tinta. The fight between Caravaggio and Ranuccio Tomassoni was no chance row. It was a prearranged duel. The stories about a tennis match, a bet, a disputed call – they were all fabrications, tall tales put about by the participants themselves to hide what had really happened. It was an expedient pretence: duelling was illegal in papal Rome, and punishable by death.

By the end of June, when the first summonses were issued, Judge Angelo Turchi and his fellow investigators had rumbled the cover-up of a tennis match. By the second week of July, even some of the participants had given up pretending that it had been anything other than a duel. On 11 July 1606, a notary recorded Mario and Giovan Francesco Tomassoni’s acknowledgment of the writ served against Giovan Francesco. Writing in judicial Latin, he recorded their joint undertaking to do nothing in breach of the peace, in effect a vow not to take the law into their own hands – there were perhaps concerns that a vendetta might develop. He also recorded their plea for the conclusion of the investigation into Giovan Francesco, in ‘distant parts’. But the most crucial elements of this document are a couple of scraps of vocabulary. Not once, but twice, Mario and Giovan Francesco referred to the dispute between Caravaggio and their late brother as ‘a duel’.
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By the start of August, Petronio Toppa was well enough to undergo questioning.
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On 6 August 1606 Toppa called two witnesses in his defence. The first was Captain Francesco Pioveno, of Vicenza, who testified that he had known the Bolognese soldier for about twelve years. He gave a ringing endorsement of his former comrade in arms: ‘Captain Petronio, who’s been in the wars and has been a soldier with me in these two garrisons, in Lucca and Rome . . . I’ve known him as a soldier, and I’ve always considered him an honourable soldier.’

The second witness was Francesco fu Menici of Lucca. He gave his profession as a gentleman’s valet, although before that he had been a soldier. He had known Petronio Toppa for about eight years. They had fought together in the Hungarian campaigns of the 1590s. Unlike the first witness, Francesco Pioveno, Menici had been in the vicinity of the tennis court on the evening of Ranuccio Tomassoni’s death. He said he had not seen the fight itself, but he gave an account of the prelude to it.