Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (57 page)

On the night in question, Menici said, he had seen his friend Petronio sitting

in front of the Florentine ambassador’s, in front of the tennis court. He was with another Bolognese, who had only one eye, but I don’t know his name. I think they call him Paulo, but I don’t know his name and I don’t want to say what I don’t know [for sure] . . . I don’t remember exactly when the argument was, but it was a Sunday, and it could be about a month and a half or two months ago. I wasn’t present at the fight and I didn’t see who was in it or what happened. I passed through there because I was coming alone from the French ambassador’s house, and in passing I saw Captain Petronio and said to him, ‘At your service’ [this was possibly a deliberate irony, given Menici’s profession as a valet] and he returned the greeting and said, ‘Where are you going?’ I replied, ‘I’m going home,’ and he replied that he wanted me to wait, because he was waiting to perform a service, and that afterwards he would come too, but he didn’t tell me what service he wanted to do, and I replied that I couldn’t wait and was in a hurry.

So I left and went towards Campo Marzio, and the man who was with him left him and came with me up to Piazza Campo Marzio past the Manescalco, and said that he wanted to go and see a whore of his nearby. Then I went home. I don’t know if that man without an eye, who came with me up to Campo Marzio, returned from there to Captain Petronio. When I passed the captain I saw that there were
others
around him, besides the one I said, and they were armed with swords . . .

Toppa’s own testimony and his eventual fate are unknown. But the evidence given by the second witness called in his defence confirms that the contest between Caravaggio and Tomassoni was indeed a duel.

Thanks to the nature of Rome’s judicial processes there exist, in addition, four statements by those who saw and acted in the duel itself. Apart from Petronio Toppa, all the men involved had run away from Rome immediately after the swordfight. Having been subsequently summoned, to no avail, all were presumed guilty and sentenced to mandatory exile. Over the following months and years, each sought to bargain the terms of a return. As they did so, they were obliged to account for their actions on the night in question. The resulting evidence is patchily informative, but it does at least clarify the circumstances in which the second swordfight, between Giovan Francesco Tomassoni and Petronio Toppa – the duel within the duel – had started.

Ranuccio Tomassoni’s brothers-in-law, Ignazio and Giovan Federico Giugoli, revealed little as they submitted to the due process of law. In their petition for an end to their exile, they admitted that they had been present at the fight in which their kinsman had been killed, but said no more than that. The reason they gave for wanting to return to Rome was that their father, Flaminio Giugoli, who had paid the caution money for them, had died while they were away. They needed to sort out his affairs, or the family would fall into ruin.
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Onorio Longhi, from his native Milan, protested his total innocence in the killing. He had witnessed the fight but asserted that he had been there simply to keep the peace (hardly likely, given his record of inflammatory remarks, provocative behaviour and incitement to assault). He too said little of any substance about the duel itself and he finished, like the Giugoli brothers, by invoking his family:

Onorio Longhi in all humility declares to Your Holiness that in 1606 he was banished from Rome, as can be seen in the trial records of the Tribunal of the Governor of that city . . . because he was present at the murder committed by Michelangelo da Caravaggio on the person of Ranuccio Tomassoni, in which deed the speaker was not at fault. On the contrary, he accompanied Caravaggio as his well-wisher, so that no disorder should occur and to exhort him to make peace, as God and his conscience are witnesses. Thus, he has remained conscious of his own innocence and has obtained peace, and at this time is retained in Milan in the service of His Imperial Majesty and desires to return to his fatherland and to his wife and five children in order to serve the Holy Church and Your Holiness.
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Giovan Francesco Tomassoni’s plea for his own exile to be revoked was more informative. He acknowledged having intervened in the fight between his brother and Caravaggio, and accounted for his own actions in some detail:

When the speaker saw his brother injured, bleeding and thrown to the ground, [any] obligations to keep the peace or pledges not to offend were entirely dissolved. He and the said Michelangelo standing beside each other, he wounded him [Caravaggio] in the head with a sword and would perhaps have killed him in the presence of others, save that the aforementioned Captain Petronio, and others, were present. The said Captain Petronio defended Caravaggio with a naked blade, and he [Giovan Francesco] wounded him several times.
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From this patchwork of biographies, letters,
avvisi
and witness statements, a clear picture of the fight can now be established.

Because it is a matter of honour between Caravaggio and his long-standing enemy, they must be allowed to settle it alone. According to custom, the duellists’ seconds must promise not to intervene, while Onorio Longhi, the one-eyed Bolognese soldier Paulo Aldato and the Giugoli brothers must undertake to attend simply as witnesses. Once these formalities about ‘keeping the peace’ have been agreed, the duel can be arranged.

On the evening chosen for the settling of scores, the air is thick with foreboding. Toppa, the painter’s appointed second, is ready and waiting in front of the tennis court. As the evening wears on, he is joined by one man and then another. Having briefly wandered off, the one-eyed soldier from Bologna returns to complete the group. Every
one concerned is trying hard to look casual, but they emanate a power
ful sense of menace none the less. All are armed with swords, not a tennis ball or racket in sight. Somewhere nearby, Ranuccio Tomassoni is meeting his brother and his two brothers-in-law. As nightfall approaches, the vendetta is about to be settled.

The duel does not last long. Real swordfights are short and sharp, nothing like modern fencing matches. Tomassoni and Caravaggio are wearing no helmets or body armour, because that would have made their story about an argument over a tennis match completely implausible. They use the full width of the court, fighting in a channel formed by the two lines of their witnesses and seconds. At the climax of the duel, Caravaggio seizes the initiative and the tiring Ranuccio Tomassoni stumbles in his retreat. Caravaggio lunges at the groin of his fallen opponent, piercing his femoral artery. Blood spurts in jets from the wound. Caravaggio withdraws his sword and prepares to strike again, but at this moment Giovan Francesco Tomassoni steps out of line to help his ‘injured, bleeding’ brother. As luck would have it, the rhythms of the fight have placed him right next to Caravaggio at this critical moment. He draws his sword in a flash and strikes the painter in the head, preventing him from inflicting further damage on the stricken Ranuccio. Seeing this violation of ‘the peace or pledges not to offend’, Petronio Toppa draws his sword and saves Caravaggio’s life, at grave danger to his own. As he and Giovan Francesco engage, Onorio Longhi and the one-eyed Bolognese intervene to prevent further injury on both sides.

Meanwhile, Federico and Ignazio Giugoli do what they can to help their brother-in-law. Caravaggio, stunned by his injury, can fight no more. At this point the carnage stops and everyone disperses into the twilit streets. As Ranuccio’s friends carry his ominously still body towards the barber-surgeon’s on the Via della Scrofa, they unconsciously re-enact Caravaggio’s great altarpiece of
The Entombment
in the nearby Chiesa Nuova – solemn depiction of men struggling under the weight of a heavy corpse, stilled mirror-image of the scene in the street outside.

BANDO CAPITALE

None of the witnesses said anything to the investigating magistrate about the causes of the duel. Who had challenged whom, and why?

There are possible answers to those questions too in the extensive but partial dossier of archival evidence about the killing. Fabio Masetti, in his letter to Cesare d’Este of 31 May, had said that Caravaggio had ‘killed a man who provoked him’, which implies that it was Tomassoni who had challenged the painter. Mancini, the only other source with anything to say on the matter, spoke of Caravaggio ‘defending himself’, which also suggests that Tomassoni was the initiator of the fight.

The most telling clue to the nature of Tomassoni’s grievance may lie in the identity of his chosen witnesses. He chose his brother, a soldier, as his second, and the other men there were his two brothers-in-law. It may be that Tomassoni challenged Caravaggio over a question of family honour – a question, specifically, involving the honour of Ranuccio Tomassoni’s wife. Her name was Lavinia. The painter had already stolen or tried to steal one of the pimp’s whores, Fillide Melandroni. Had he compounded that insult by starting something with Lavinia Tomassoni too? If so, that would have made Ranuccio a cuckold – a
becco fotuto
, to use one of the painter’s favourite phrases. Since nothing has been found in the archives to connect Caravaggio directly with Lavinia Tomassoni, a verbal provocation is more likely to have been the cause of the trouble. Perhaps Caravaggio had heard that Lavinia Tomassoni was being unfaithful to her husband, and had taunted him by repeating that rumour to his face. We may never know exactly what lay behind the duel but some kind of insult concerning Lavinia is the most likely explanation. This would explain why Tomassoni wanted Lavinia’s brothers watching when he exacted his revenge – or so he hoped – on the troublesome painter who had dared to cast aspersions on his wife.

Whatever the precise truth, another chain of archival evidence suggests that Lavinia Tomassoni was hardly a model wife and mother. Less than a fortnight after Tomassoni’s death, arrangements were set in train for a close friend of the family, the lawyer Cesare Pontoni, to look after the couple’s only daughter. Her name was Felicita Plautilla Tomassoni, and she was still only a baby. Tomassoni’s widow, Lavinia, made the excuse that she was too young to bring up a child on her own. She said that she wanted to remarry (which she did, as another document in the archive reveals, within less than a year). Lavinia’s mother-in-law, Tomassoni’s mother, claimed that she was too old to look after the little girl.
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On 10 October 1606 the legal guardianship of Felicita was ratified and she became Pontoni’s ward.
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Only one other document has been found concerning her, the will of a relation who died on 17 August 1615. This reveals that the girl had by then dropped her first name, Felicita, which means ‘happiness’ in Italian, and had entered a nunnery. The document refers to her as Sr Plautilla of the convent of S. Silvestro in Urbe.
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One other detail suggests that the cause of the fight may have been some kind of sexual insult. Ranuccio Tomassoni bled to death from the femoral artery. Caravaggio had struck him a low blow, aiming perhaps at the groin and missing by just a fraction. Was the artist using his sword as if it were a paintbrush, attempting to mark out the most graphic of sexual insults on the body of his enemy? Wounds were meaningful, as Fillide Melandroni had graphically indicated when threatening to cut the face of her own love-rival, Prudenza Zacchia. A cut to the face was a
sfregio
, but it was by no means the only form of symbolic, premeditated injury that vengeful Italians inflicted upon their enemies.

The practice was sufficiently common to be mirrored in the provisions of the law, where widely differing penalties were specified for different forms of revenge wound. The fourteenth-century statutes of Florence set a fine of 50 lire for the loss of members including the foot, hand, tongue and eye – but for both eyes the penalty was much steeper. The mid sixteenth-century statutes of Caravaggio’s native Lombardy valued teeth at 50 lire apiece, and set a fine of 500 lire for the amputation of a hand. The loss of a single testicle was assessed at the same rate as four teeth or a tongue, namely 200 lire. The penalty for castration was understandably more than double that, at 500 lire.
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It is entirely possible that Caravaggio was not actually trying to kill Ranuccio Tomassoni, but attempting to make mincemeat of his testicles with a duelling sword.

Like many other aspects of the Roman judicial system, sentencing was irregular and inconsistent. All those involved in the duel were sentenced to exile, but the precise sentences are not known and can only be guessed at by the different dates on which the various convicted men petitioned for their return. On this evidence, it seems that those on Caravaggio’s side were dealt with more harshly than the supporters of Tomassoni: Giovan Francesco Tomassoni’s plea to return, duly granted, was filed on 9 December 1606, and that of the Giugoli brothers less than two years later, but Onorio Longhi felt able to seek his own return only in the spring of 1611.

The most serious penalty was reserved for Caravaggio. As well as being sentenced to indefinite exile from Rome, he was condemned as a murderer and made subject to a
bando capitale
, a ‘capital sentence’. This meant that anyone in the papal states had the right to kill him with impunity; indeed there was a bounty for anyone who did so. The phrase meant exactly what was indicated by the etymology of its
second
word, derived from the Latin
caput
. To claim the reward, it would not be necessary to produce the painter’s body. His severed head would suffice.