Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (67 page)

Michelangelo Buonarroti had created a sculpture of Cupid to rival the masterpieces of antiquity. Now Michelangelo Merisi was vying with him by emulating that very act of classical emulation. Implicit in the gesture was the Renaissance conceit of the
paragone
, a contest between different art forms. Michelangelo, the sculptor, had given tangible form to his
Sleeping Cupid
. Caravaggio, the painter, could not do that. But he could create a greater illusion of flesh and blood, and he could use his mastery of chiaroscuro to evoke the light of approaching dawn.

The
Sleeping Cupid
is essentially a
jeu d’esprit
. But it is also a vitally important painting for the understanding of Caravaggio’s work as a whole, demonstrating his high degree of erudition and establishing beyond any doubt an explicit spirit of competition with Michelangelo, which had seemed at least implicit in so many of his Roman paintings, from
The Calling of St Matthew
onwards. Francesco dell’Antella made the comparison overtly when he went out of his way to show the picture to a great-nephew of Michelangelo named Francesco Buonarroti, who was also a Knight of Malta; and he then actually sent the work to Florence in the hope that the most celebrated member of the modern Buonarroti family, Fra Francesco’s brother, the poet and dramatist Michelangelo the Younger, would give his opinion of it. Michelangelo the Younger clearly did see this rivalrous homage to his great-uncle’s marble Cupid, because on 24 April 1610, dell’Antella wrote to him to say: ‘I value now more than before my Cupid, after hearing the praise of your Lordship for which I kiss your hand.’
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APELLES IN PRISON

The perennially spiky Caravaggio was celebrated on Malta. In his own estimation he had always been a
valent’huomo
. Now he was truly being treated like one. Alof de Wignacourt was delighted with the painter’s work for the order. According to Bellori, he was so impressed by the enormous new altarpiece for the Oratory of St John that ‘as a reward, beside the honour of the Cross, the Grand Master put a gold chain around Caravaggio’s neck, and made him a gift of two slaves, along with other signs of esteem and appreciation for his work’.
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Finally, Caravaggio had got his own gold chain.

It may only have been at this moment of apparent happiness and prosperity that the full implications of being a Knight of Malta finally dawned on him. Not only was he bound to the island by the Grand Master’s whim, but obliged to live in strict observance of the statutes of the order. Sexual indiscretions were liable to be tolerated as long as they were committed out of the public eye, but any other disorderly conduct would be ruthlessly dealt with under the knights’ code of law. That meant no shouting or trading of insults, no fighting, no duelling with swords. For a man like Caravaggio, that was never going to be easy, especially in a town like Valletta. The city teemed with proud young noblemen from the different national Langues, intensely conscious of the most minute differences in rank and status. As Alof de Wignacourt himself remarked in a letter to the pope, ‘It is impossible, in a place where so many are devoted to the profession of arms, and where so much importance is given to points of honour, that there should not be numerous fights and brawls.’
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Costanza Colonna and her son, Fabrizio Sforza Colonna, must have known that they were taking a calculated risk when they sent Caravaggio to Malta. Their hope must have been that the ruthless military discipline of the Order of St John would persuade him to keep his temper under control. Everything went to plan for a while, as Caravaggio painted for the central figures of the Maltese establishment. But the gamble did not pay off. The painter’s pride in his knighthood came before his greatest fall from grace. Caravaggio’s character had always been a volatile compound, an uneasy blend of Lenten piety and the raucous spirit of Carnival. This was never more true than on Malta.

It is impossible to know what triggered the outburst that undid him. Perhaps it was his shocked realization that Wignacourt indeed wanted ‘not to lose him’ – to chain him to the island, perhaps not forever, but for several more years. Whatever the cause, just weeks after admission to the Order of St John, Caravaggio lashed out against
its authority. In the space of a few hours he went from hero to villain.

The early biographers are vague on the subject of what went wrong for Caravaggio on Malta. Mancini does not even mention the incident. According to Baglione, who was better informed, the cause of the trouble was an argument with a Knight of Justice: ‘In Malta Michelangelo had a dispute with a Knight of Justice and somehow insulted him.’
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Knights of Justice were higher ranking than mere Knights of Magistral Obedience. So Baglione may have meant to imply an argument over status, which was just the sort of ‘point of honour’ liable to cause the frequent fights between brothers of the order mentioned by Wignacourt in his letter to the pope.

Bellori’s account is similar to Baglione’s, except that in his version of the story Caravaggio’s mercurial nature is the driving force behind the calamity. Like the hero of a Greek tragedy, he is a man ruinously undone by a fatal flaw of character: ‘He lived in Malta in dignity and abundance. But suddenly, because of his tormented nature, he lost his prosperity and the support of the Grand Master. On account of an ill-considered quarrel with a noble knight, he was jailed and reduced to a state of misery and fear.’
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Caravaggio certainly committed an offence on Malta, one serious enough to merit imprisonment. But for centuries the exact nature of that offence remained a mystery. Generations of historians combed the archives in Malta, where the great books of statutes, crimes and punishments are still preserved in the library of the Order of St John, but to little effect. One of the volumes stored there revealed much about the aftermath of Caravaggio’s crime, but nothing about the crime itself. Tantalizingly, a number of adjacent pages in that same book had been systematically and deliberately painted out with a thick layer of opaque pigment.

It was only in 2002, after the Maltese scholar Keith Sciberras had taken the initiative of X-raying some of those obscured pages, that the truth was revealed.
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The painter had indeed become embroiled in an altercation with ‘a noble knight’, just as Bellori had indicated. Baglione turned out to have been right too. The aggrieved party was indeed a Knight of Justice, Fra Giovanni Rodomonte Roero, the Conte della Vezza. He was seriously injured in the incident.

One of several documents thus uncovered was a report of the preliminary results of an enquiry ordered by Grand Master Wignacourt and the Venerable Council on 19 August 1608. The purpose of that enquiry was to outline the events of a ‘tumult’ that had taken place the night before. The incident had involved several knights, some of whom had smashed open the door of the residence of the Organist of the Conventual Church of St John, Fra Prospero Coppini.

As a result of that preliminary enquiry, a criminal commission was set up to investigate the incident in more detail. The three investigators were Fra Philiberto de Matha, Fra Giovanni Gomes de Azevedo and Antonio Turrensi. They established that a brawl, involving seven knights altogether, had broken out in the house of Fra Coppini, but since he himself had not taken part, he was absolved. The commission found that Fra Giovanni Rodomonte Roero, the Conte della Vezza, had been the victim of an assault by six aggressors, including Caravaggio.

The artist’s companions on the night in question included two senior figures in the Maltese hierarchy, both Knights of Justice like the victim, Roero. One was Fra Giulio Accarigi, who was originally from Siena but who had been a Knight of Malta since 1585. He had a reputation for violence and a criminal record to match, having spent two months in detention for assault in 1595 and a further two years in jail some ten years later. The other Knight of Justice involved was Fra Giovanni Battista Scaravello, from Turin, who had arrived on Malta in 1602 and had entered the Order of St John two years after that.

Two young novices were also implicated: Francesco Benzi, who had come to the island in 1606; and Giovanni Pecci, from Siena, who had arrived on Malta within a day of Caravaggio himself, on 13 July 1607. Both men would have known the painter as a fellow novice. One of the conditions of entry to the order was a rigorous programme of training in the selfsame Oratory of St John – also known as the
Oratory of the Novices – for which the artist had painted his altarpiece
of
The Beheading of St John
. Benzi and Pecci would have prepared for their knighthoods alongside Caravaggio.

No eyewitness description of the fight has been found in the Maltese archives, so the parts played by those involved have to be deduced from the punishments each received. Accarigi and Scaravello seem to have taken minor roles. Each would eventually be given six months in jail, a relatively mild sentence in the harsh context of Maltese justice (although it is also possible that they were let off lightly on account of their rank). Benzi and Pecci were condemned to two and four years in prison respectively. The main culprits appear to have been Caravaggio himself and a certain Fra Giovanni Pietro de Ponte, who was a deacon of the church, and another frequent offender.
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De Ponte was identified by the criminal commission as a prime mover of the assault. On the night of the fight he had been carrying a small pistol referred to as a
sclopo ad rotas
. It was a bullet or bullets from the
sclopo
that had inflicted serious wounds on Roero. De Ponte would be defrocked, deprived of his habit and denied forever his status as a Knight of Malta. Caravaggio was never sentenced for his part in the assault, for reasons that will become clear. But his crime was clearly deemed to be at least as serious as that of de Ponte, because the first report of the criminal commission into the case recommended that these two – but none of the others involved – be arrested immediately.

That report was submitted to the Venerable Council, whose members included Alof de Wignacourt, Fabrizio Sforza Colonna, Antonio Martelli and Ippolito Malaspina, on 27 August 1608. Present too would have been Wignacourt’s secretary, Francesco dell’Antella, for whom Caravaggio had recently painted the
Sleeping Cupid
. But Malta’s strict code of discipline, and the seriousness of the assault on the Conte della Vezza, would have given the artist’s patrons and supporters no choice but to order his immediate arrest. On 28 August 1608 Caravaggio was seized and imprisoned within the forbidding precincts of the Castel Sant’Angelo.

The timing of his offence could not have been more perversely precise. Caravaggio had managed to get himself thrown into jail on the eve of one of the most important days in the calendar of the Knights of Malta: 29 August was the Feast of the Decollato, the day on which the order gathered in the Oratory of St John to remember the decapitation of its patron saint. In 1608, it was also the day Wignacourt had chosen to unveil Caravaggio’s monumental altarpiece of
The Beheading of St John
. But instead of attending in his knight’s robes, the painter now languished in an underground cell.

The ‘tumult’ cast a long shadow over the celebrations of the feast of the Decollato. To make matters worse a dispute had arisen between the confraternity responsible for arranging those celebrations, the Compagnia di San Giovanni Decollato, and the musicians of the Conventual Church – including, coincidentally, Fra Prospero Coppini, the organist whose door Caravaggio had helped to kick in. The musicians were unhappy about their pay and most of them went on strike, so that on the feast day itself neither Vespers nor the solemn Mass was sung in the oratory before Caravaggio’s picture. The unveiling for which Wignacourt had planned so carefully could hardly have gone more badly wrong.

‘A ROTTEN AND DISEASED LIMB’

Caravaggio spent the entire month of September detained in the
guva
, an underground cell cut directly into the rock of the Castel Sant’Angelo. It is a bell-shaped chamber, eleven feet deep, sealed by a heavy trap door, and reserved for knights who had been guilty of serious offences. The traces of their presence remain in the form of several melancholy graffiti, one of which records the last-known words of a sixteenth-century Scottish Knight of Malta, one John Sandilands: ‘imprisoned forever, victim of evil triumphing over good – so much for friendship’.
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Caravaggio’s own thoughts were less mournful and more pragmatic
. Few had ever broken out of the Castel Sant’Angelo, while escape from the
guva
itself was unheard of, but he was determined to do so. Even if he could scale the walls of the rock-cut cell, he would then need to climb the ramparts of the castle itself. After that he would have to lower himself down a sheer 200-foot precipice to the sea. To do all this he would need help.

Getting off Malta itself would pose a whole tangle of other problem
s.
Caravaggio would need a boat, skippered by a brave and corruptible captain. But the boat would be unable to collect him at the bottom of the castle cliff, because the only way to the open sea from there lay through the narrow opening of Valletta’s Grand Harbour. Any vessel attempting to escape by that route would certainly have been spotted by the order’s patrols. The journey would have to be made from one of the island’s many small bays, and by night, to avoid detection. This meant that Caravaggio would have to swim round the promontory on which the Castel Sant’Angelo stood, then make his way to a quieter part of the island by foot, to wait for the vessel skippered by his accomplice. From there, the most logical destination would be Sicily, the nearest part of the mainland, some sixteen hours away with a favourable headwind.