Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (63 page)

The history of the order over the next three centuries would be no less bloody and no less embattled. The knights found a new home on the Greek island of Rhodes, a strategically vital maritime base at the crossroads of Europe, Asia and Africa. Having captured the island, they fortified it and set about creating a fleet of fighting ships. From that time on, they were no longer an army of Christian footsoldiers but a naval force. From their base on Rhodes they mounted raids on Turkish shipping and vulnerable coastal settlements, taking slaves and capturing hostages for ransom.

In the Islamic world they were regarded as brutal and pitiless marauders. In their monastic uniform of black robes, proudly emblazoned at the chest with a white eight-pointed cross, the Knights of St John represented a militantly aggressive form of Christianity. Their activities inevitably attracted reprisals. In 1480 a Turkish fleet laid siege to Rhodes, only to be repelled with crippling losses. Forty years later, in 1522, Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent once more sent a flotilla of ships to conquer Rhodes. After six months of attack and counter-attack, the knights were finally defeated and expelled from the island.

In 1530 the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V gave them another new home, on Malta, part of his Two Kingdoms of Sicily. His motives were part religious, part strategic. Charles V wanted to protect the southern flank of Europe and ultimately Rome itself against the might of Islam. His reasoning was that if anyone could hold Malta, the Knights of St John could. He ceded it to them in exchange for an annual tribute of a single falcon.

Thirty-five years later, in 1565, the Turks once more laid siege to an island garrisoned by their most hated adversaries. The Siege of Malta lasted for months and would forever be remembered, both for the ferocity of the fighting and for the atrocities committed on both sides. The official historian of the Order of St John, Giacomo Bosio, included a harrowing account of it in his three-volume
Dell’Istoria della sacra religione
, the last part of which was published in 1602, five years before Caravaggio arrived on Malta. At the height of the siege, Bosio recounted, having captured Fort St Elmo, the Turks proceeded to massacre their Christian captives. The day allotted for the killing was 24 June, the feast day of St John and therefore one of the two most holy days of the year for members of the order (the other being 29 August, the day that marked the saint’s decapitation at the whim of Salome). Making grim play of the significance of the date, the Turks turned the killing itself into an obscene parody of a Christian religious festival: ‘All the cadavers which by their clothing could be recognized as knights or men of importance were gathered up; and it was ordered that they be stripped nude, decapitated, and that their hands be severed. Then, out of disresepect for the Holy Cross and to make sport of the knights’ military overgarments, on each corpse four huge incisions were made with scimitars, making the sign of the Cross on both the fronts and the backs.’
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On a later occasion, in a similar spirit of vengeful parody, the Turks crucified a number of headless knights’ corpses and floated them into the harbour at Birgu. Bosio wrote that ‘after having had them lashed to various pieces of wood with their arms spread apart so as to form, similarly, the sign of the Cross, and bound in such a manner as to make one body tow the other in a long chain, they were then tossed into the sea. The water, it was thought, would carry them and this truly horrible spectacle over to our brethren at Birgu, and it in fact did so.’
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The intention was to strike terror into the last remnants of Malta’s Christian garrison. But the Grand Master of the Order of St John, a doughty Frenchman named Jean de la Valette, responded to the Turks’ flotilla of death with a fusillade of his own. He ordered his Turkish captives to be decapitated and had their heads fired from cannons at the Turkish soldiers occupying Fort St Elmo. In the end the knights held firm, despite their crippling losses, and the Turks were forced to withdraw. By the end of the siege just 50 Knights of St John survived. More than 7,000 defenders had lost their lives, but the last great effort of the Ottoman Turks to seize control of the western Mediterranean had been successfully repulsed.

Over the decades that followed there was a surge of new recruits to the Order of St John, lured to Malta by the dream of emulating the exploits of the heroes of 1565. Just six years after the siege, that other famous Christian victory, at the Battle of Lepanto, had fanned the flames of such enthusiasm yet further. Hundreds of young noblemen from the leading families of Europe travelled to Malta to seek knighthood, honour and glory. They wanted to fight, and if necessary die a martyr’s death, at the front line of conflict with the forces of Islam.

According to Bellori, Caravaggio too nurtured the dream of becoming a Knight of St John. He was ‘eager to receive the Cross of Malta’, in the words of the biographer.
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But why? His art had electrified Naples. According to sources in Rome, steady progress was being made in the negotiation of his pardon. It would seem like an odd moment to travel yet further south, to a barren and rocky island at the farthest frontier of Christendom. It is possible that the fantasy of becoming a knight had long been with him – after all, he was a keen and talented swordsman, who had been brought up in the immediate aftermath of the Battle of Lepanto. Or perhaps he still felt vulnerable to attack or apprehension by a bounty hunter, aware of the price on his head. By papal dispensation the Knights of St John were above the law, subject to their own unique legal code. In Malta, Caravaggio would be safe. Furthermore, if he could win a knighthood he would,
de facto
, have gained pardon for his crimes.

But there was probably more to it than that. Caravaggio had always been extremely touchy about status. At his trial for libel, he had contemptuously dismissed the rank and file of Rome’s artists by saying that hardly any of them deserved the title of
valent’huomo
, literally, a ‘worthy man’. Caravaggio took pride in his own worth. The poems attacking Giovanni Baglione, in which he certainly had had a hand, made much of the gold chain awarded to his rival. The perceived injustice of the honour clearly rankled with Caravaggio as much, if not more, than anything Baglione had actually said or done. But by the summer of 1607, nearly a year after the murder of Tomassoni, Baglione had just been knighted and his stock had risen yet further. Caravaggio, by contrast, was still a fugitive from justice. Even if he were pardoned and allowed to return, he would be going back to Rome as a man in disgrace. But to return, himself, with a knighthood – and not just an honorific papal knighthood but a knighthood in the Order of St John, proudly wearing the eight-pointed cross on his chest – that would be very different. If he could manage that, he could face his rivals down.

Joachim von Sandrart tells an undoubtedly apocryphal tale about the cause of Caravaggio’s decision to go to Malta, which, for all its evident fancifulness, may contain a kernel of truth. In Sandrart’s story, Caravaggio’s former employer Giuseppe Cesari, on horseback, passes him one day in the streets of Rome. Caravaggio challenges Cesari to a duel and tells him to dismount from his horse so that they can fight. But he is rebuffed:

Giuseppe answered . . . that it was not fitting for a knight, named by the Pope, to duel with someone who was not a knight. With this politely cutting answer, he wounded Caravaggio more than he might have with his sword, for this talk so stunned and confused Caravaggio that he immediately (as he did not intend to defer the matter) sold all his belongings to the Jews for whatever he could get, and set out for Malta and the Grand Master with the purpose of soon himself becoming a knight . . .
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The tale is clearly a fiction, because Caravaggio was nowhere near Rome when he decided to go to Malta. But it has the ring of psychological truth. The unpalatable thought of lesser painters being dubbed knight may well have impelled him on his Maltese adventure.

Malta was not, however, a place where someone could simply turn up unannounced. The whole island was a fortress, and security was tight. No one was allowed in from the mainland without a passport and papers prepared by the order’s network of receivers. The receiver in Naples was a high-ranking official named Giovanni Andrea Capeci.
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Capeci would have had to gain approval from the Grand Master of the order on Malta itself before completing the necessary paperwork, and such permissions, especially for a fugitive from papal justice, were no simple matter. One of Caravaggio’s friends in high places would have been needed to broker the arrangement with the Knights of Malta. Who helped him? There are a number of possibilities, because several people in the painter’s network of patrons and protectors turn out to have had links with the Order of St John.

In the summer of 1607, at exactly the same time as Caravaggio chose to go to the island, two cousins of the noble Giustiniani family – avid collectors of Caravaggio’s work in Rome – were on their way to Malta to offer the Grand Master a family property in Venosa, near Naples, as a naval base for the knights on the mainland. Perhaps they were prevailed on to put in a good word for the talented artist with a criminal record.

Ottavio Costa, the banker who had recently bought Caravaggio’s second
Supper at Emmaus
while the artist was in hiding in the Alban Hills, also had connections with the Knights of the Order of St John. His wife’s uncle was Ippolito Malaspina, an illustrious member of the heroic old guard of Malta, and something of a living legend. A veteran of the great Siege of 1565, Malaspina had gone on to captain one of the Maltese galleys at the Battle of Lepanto, in the year of Caravaggio’s birth. In 1603 he had been appointed commander of the papal fleet, as a result of which he temporarily delegated his responsibilities on Malta and moved to Rome for two years – years during which Caravaggio painted some of his most highly acclaimed Roman altarpieces. Malaspina would certainly have known of the painter’s work and may even have met him. By the summer of 1607 he had been reappointed to a number of senior posts in the order, including Prior of Naples. He was very close to the Grand Master himself, a Frenchman named Alof de Wignacourt, having played an important part in Wignacourt’s election in 1601. The possibility that Malaspina’s advocacy might have been instrumental in Caravaggio’s acceptance on Malta is strengthened by the fact that one of the first pictures the artist painted when he got there – another depiction of
St Jerome Writing
– was done for Malaspina himself: the Malaspina family crest is prominently painted into the right-hand edge of the canvas.

This was not the total of Caravaggio’s contacts with the upper echelons of the order. The idea of going to Malta, to seek redemption for crimes committed, almost certainly emanated from his most constant guardians and protectors, the Colonna dynasty. A prominent member of the Colonna family had recently done exactly the same thing himself.

In 1602 Costanza Colonna’s second son, Fabrizio Sforza Colonna, had been convicted of crimes considered so shameful that their precise nature was left unmentioned in the reports of the day. Following his arrest, he was taken to Rome and imprisoned while the pope considered his case. Costanza Colonna pleaded for mercy on her son’s behalf. In deference to his rank, the pope decided to give the noble prisoner a second chance. He was sent to Malta in ‘privileged exile’, on condition that he remain on the island for at least three years, placing himself at the service of the Christian faith. By 1605 this black sheep of the Colonna family was deemed to have expiated his sins, and had been elected co-Prior of Venice, a post that he shared with his uncle, Ascanio Colonna. The following year he was made a member of the governing Venerable Council of the order and elevated to the rank of General of the Galleys. There could hardly have been a better way for the grandson of Marcantonio Colonna, hero of Lepanto, to complete his return from disgrace and exile.
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A less exalted version of the same process of redemption seems to have been planned for Caravaggio. Costanza Colonna, who had seen things go so well for her son on Malta, may well have been the driving force behind the whole scheme. She had long taken a virtually maternal interest in Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, who was close to the same age as her own Fabrizio. What had worked for one difficult young man might work for the other.

A number of recently discovered documents place Fabrizio and Costanza Colonna in Naples in the summer of 1607. In fact they both arrived in the city just a matter of days before Caravaggio embarked for Malta. It has also emerged that he made the journey to the island in one of a flotilla of galleys commanded by none other than Fabrizio Sforza Colonna himself.

On his first voyage as General of the Galleys, Fabrizio Sforza Colonna
had travelled to Barcelona to take delivery of a new flagship and a
large number of slaves and convicts donated to the order by the Spanish crown. Discovering that the new Spanish flagship was poorly constructed, he had a replacement fitted out in the shipbuilding port of Marseilles. By the early summer of 1607 he was back in Italian waters, collecting his mother, Costanza, from the Torre del Greco near Naples, the spectacular seaside residence of the princes of Stigliano. The two of them carried on to Naples itself, where the final arrangements for Caravaggio’s journey to Malta would soon be concluded.
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So it was that on 25 June 1607, bearing with him the good wishes of his protectress, Caravaggio embarked for the island fortress of Malta. It is not known whether his faithful assistant and rumoured lover, Cecco, accompanied him. Probably, he did not: Cecco appears in no more of Caravaggio’s paintings after this date.

THE ISLE OF ST JOHN

The voyage to Malta was fraught with tension. The flotilla’s first stop was Messina, in Sicily, where Fabrizio Sforza Colonna received an urgent warning from Grand Master de Wignacourt. Seven large galleys from the Barbary Coast had just been sighted in the waters off Gozo, Malta’s sister island. Five of them had disembarked soldiers and mounted an unsuccessful attack on the order’s garrison there. Wignacourt suspected that the enemy had received intelligence about the imminent arrival of the flotilla from Naples and intended to engage them in battle. He was concerned about ‘the advantage that the enemy has because of the larger number of vessels and because our galleys are burdened and with provisions in tow’.
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