Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (68 page)

Somehow, Caravaggio did indeed manage all of this. By the end of October 1608 he was in the Sicilian port town of Syracuse, some sixty miles from Malta. Bellori describes the artist’s great escape in a single terse sentence: ‘In order to free himself he was exposed to grave danger, but he managed to scale the prison walls at night and to flee unrecognized to Sicily, with such speed that no one could catch him.’
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Baglione adds that a rope ladder was used in Caravaggio’s escape, but neither writer makes any suggestions about who might have helped his getaway. He must have had help from someone on the inside in the Castel Sant’Angelo, but who that someone was remains a mystery.

Caravaggio was officially declared missing on 6 October, when

was heard the complaint of Lord Brother Hieronymus Varays, Procur
ator for the Treasury of the Order, made against brother Michael Angelo
Marresi [
sic
] de Caravaggio who while detained in the prison of the Castle of St Angelo fled from it without permission of the most illustrious and most exalted Lord the Grand Master and departed secretly from the district, against the form of the Statute 13 concerning prohibitions and penalties: the most Illustrious and most exalted Lord the Grand Master and Venerable Council commissioned the Lord Brothers Joanni Honoret and Bladius Suarez that, through the agency of the Master Shield-Bearer, they should see that all due diligence is shown in finding out the said Brother Michael Angelo and in summoning him to appear, and should gather information about his flight . . .
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There is a strong implication here that an expeditionary force was sent to recapture Caravaggio and render him up to the Maltese court to face sentence both for the assault on the Conte della Vezza and for his defiance in fleeing the island. The Grand Master was known to be extremely severe on knights who transgressed Statute 13 of the order’s legal code by leaving Malta without his permission. He insisted that all fugitives be returned to Valletta at once, preferably in secrecy. It was his normal practice in such cases to write to all the order’s
receivers
in the major cities and ports of Europe to demand the immediate detainment of the renegade knight.
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Yet seven weeks later Caravaggio was still at large in Sicily, having evaded whatever attempts had been made to rearrest him. On 27 November, his trial on Malta went ahead in his absence. The Venerable Council determined that he had escaped from prison using ropes. It decided to disgrace him and deprive him of his habit. At the same time, the council heard and passed judgement in the case of the August assault. Four of the six guilty knights were sentenced to jail terms, while the church deacon, Giovanni Pietro de Ponte, was to be defrocked like Caravaggio.

According to Maltese custom, criminal trials and ceremonial punishments were carried out in the Oratory of St John, where Caravaggio’s
Beheading of St John
now hung directly over the main altar. So four days after the trial, on 1 December 1608, the ritual defrocking known as the
privatio habitus
took place in that very room. The archive records that ‘a General Assembly was summoned of the Venerable Bailiffs, the Priors, Preceptors and Brothers in the Church and Oratory of St John our patron, at the sound of the bell, according to the ancient and praiseworthy custom of the Holy Order of St John of Jerusalem . . . the information inspected and carefully read out against Michelangelo Merisi de Caravaggio . . .’
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Wolfgang Kilian’s mid seventeenth-century engraving of a criminal trial on Malta conjures up the scene of Caravaggio’s
privatio habitus
. On either side of the Oratory of St John sit the massed ranks of the order’s Grand Crosses. In December 1608 they would have included not only the artist’s most prominent patrons such as Antonio Martelli, but also many other veterans of the great sea and land battles of recent European history – survivors of the Great Siege, of Lepanto, perhaps even the Spanish Armada. Before this assembly of heroes, Caravaggio’s greatest humiliation was to take place.

In Kilian’s engraving, the Grand Master sits, just as Alof de Wignacourt would have done, at the near end of the church. At the far end, the guilty knight kneels, directly beneath Caravaggio’s depiction of St John’s decapitation. Because Caravaggio was to be defrocked
in absentia
, a wooden stool draped with the habit of a Knight of Magistral Obedience would have been placed at the altar end of the church – more or less directly beneath Caravaggio’s own signature, flowing in blood from the neck of John the Baptist.

Before the conclusion of the ceremony, there was one last formality to be gone through: ‘The Lord Shield-Bearer . . . repeated in a loud voice in the Public Assembly so that the said Brother Michael Angelo de Caravaggio being personally summoned once, twice, thrice and a fourth time, an abundant notice, did not appear nor as yet doth he appear . . .’ The oratory fell silent for the brief, necessary moment of Caravaggio’s inevitable non-appearance. Then the robe of a Knight of Malta, so proudly but so briefly worn by him, was stripped from the stool by Grand Master Wignacourt himself, and the last damning words were written in the record: ‘the said Brother Michael Angelo de Caravaggio was in the Public Assembly by the hands of the Reverend Lord President deprived of his habit, and expelled and thrust forth like a rotten and diseased limb from our Order and Society.’
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THE BURIAL OF ST LUCY
AND A BLACK DOG NAMED CROW

Caravaggio was on the run for the second time in his life. His destination was the port town of Syracuse at the western edge of Sicily, where his old fellow apprentice, Mario Minniti, had established a thriving studio. Minniti had contacts in the town Senate. If they could be persuaded to look favourably on Caravaggio, they had the power to protect him from Maltese law. He had never been in more trouble than now. This time he had managed to alienate his entire network of supporters, not only the Colonna and their allies, who had manoeuvred to get him to Malta, but also the formidable Alof de Wignacourt and his army of knights. Caravaggio desperately needed some new friends in high places.

There is evidence that he took a deliberately circuitous route, landing at one of the island’s smaller and more southerly ports, such as Pozzallo or Scicli, before working his way north-east. En route, he stayed in the little town of Caltagirone, some sixty miles inland from Syracuse. A recently rediscovered eighteenth-century document records that Caravaggio was seen visiting a church there, Santa Maria di Gesù. He was impressed by the beauty of a sixteenth-century marble Madonna by Antonello Gagini on one of its altars. ‘Whoever wants her more beautiful, should go to heaven,’ he reportedly said.
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Caravaggio was continuing to measure himself, as he had done throughout his life, against the standard of Michelangelo and his school: Gagini had been one of Michelangelo’s most gifted pupils, and was said to have assisted the sculptor on his final version of the tomb of Pope Julius II, in the Roman church of San Pietro in Vincoli.

As the painter made his way from Caltagirone to Syracuse, he found himself once more within a realm ruled distantly by Philip III of Spain. The island had been praised for its warm climate and natural abundance since antiquity, but under the Spanish the majority of its people suffered great privations and hardship. Part of the reason was Spain’s own economic crisis, caused by the sudden dwindling of its vast revenues from the silver mines of Latin America, under the pressure of competition from other European nations. A succession of Spanish viceroys in Sicily were encouraged to bleed it of its natural resources. The people became poorer as their rulers enriched themselves, concealing the true nature of this unequal transaction behind the grandest of architectural façades. During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, cities such as Syracuse, Messina and Palermo became stage-sets for the performance of the rituals of absolute Spanish power. Splendid new churches and palaces were built in an extravagant local version of the Baroque style. Grand axial routes were ruthlessly cut through the fabric of Sicily’s medieval cityscapes, distracting attention from the miserable lot of the poor, and allowing the rich to move serenely through each city without ever seeing its warren of slums.

Travelling to Syracuse by land from the southern tip of Sicily was the best way of avoiding the pursuing knights, but Caravaggio exposed himself to other risks. Such was the discontent with Spanish rule that by the early years of the seventeenth century much of the island’s interior had degenerated into lawlessness, with many regions at the mercy of competing clans of
banditti
. The Spanish authorities had retaliated against these roaming gangs with a degree of success, but travel in the rural hinterlands of Sicily was still considered dangerous by George Sandys in 1615: ‘This Vice-Roy hath well purged the country of Bandities, by pardoning of one for the bringing in or death of another: who did exceedingly, and yet do too much infest it. Besides, the upland inhabitants are so inhospitable to strangers, that betweene them both there is no travelling by land without a strong guard; whom rob and murder whomsoever they can conveniently lay hold on.’
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Despite the dangers, Caravaggio made it to Syracuse safely around the middle of October 1608.

The main source of information about Caravaggio’s activities in Sicily is a manuscript of 1724 entitled
The Lives of the Messinese Painters
, written by a priest and amateur painter called Francesco Susinno. Susinno’s sources were in the painters’ studios of Sicily, where memories of Caravaggio’s unprecedentedly emotive style of painting and perplexing personality were still strong more than a century after his death. In Susinno’s words, Caravaggio ‘was welcomed by his friend and colleague in the study of painting, Mario Minniti, a painter from Syracuse, from whom he received all the kindness that such a gentleman could extend to him. Minniti himself implored the Senate of that city to employ Caravaggio in some way so that he could have the chance to enjoy his friend for some time and be able to evaluate the greatness of Michelangelo, for he had heard that people considered him to be the best painter in Italy.’
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A commission from the Senate would mean protection from the Knights of Malta. The knights maintained an active presence in Syracuse, but so long as he was working for them, the city’s fathers would look after him. Once again, Caravaggio’s predicament would be his patrons’ opportunity. Once again, he would be given the chance to paint his way out of trouble.

The timing of his arrival in Syracuse could hardly have been more opportune. Previously strained relations between the religious authorities and the Senate had improved in the early years of the seventeenth century, as a result of which the city had embarked on a vigorous programme of renovating its churches and monasteries, commissioning new altarpieces and boosting the cults of local saints.

One of the most actively venerated of those saints was the fourth-century martyr St Lucy, a native of Syracuse said to have met her end during the persecutions of the Emperor Diocletian. In the severe climate of the Counter-Reformation, with so many in the Roman Catholic faith calling for a return to the simple piety of the early Church, the cults of the ancient Christian martyrs were resurgent. A statue of St Lucy had already been placed on the ramparts of Syracuse, and the Senate had agreed to finance the creation of a costly silver reliquary to house some of her supposed remains. Not long before Caravaggio’s arrival in the city, the authorities had also decided to restore the church most closely associated with her, the medieval basilica of Santa Lucia al Sepolcro. The church lay outside the city walls, having been built directly above the ancient Christian catacombs where, according to her legend, the virgin martyr had been interred. A local archaeologist and historian, Vincenzo Mirabella, had made a study of the site, re-emphasizing its significance in the sacred history of ‘Syracuse the Faithful’. The newly restored church would need a painting telling the story of Lucy’s martyrdom for its main altar. Who better to create it than ‘the best painter in Italy’? The altarpiece that he produced can still be admired in the Franciscan church outside the old city walls.
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The subject given to Caravaggio was
The Burial of St Lucy
, the final episode in the story of her martyrdom and one seldom painted. There was a logic behind the choice. The civic and religious authorities of Syracuse were especially keen to reinforce the local cult of St Lucy, which had been severely damaged by the theft of the saint’s remains during the Middle Ages. Rival cults of Lucy had been established elsewhere, most notably in Venice, where ownership of her relics was now being claimed. The authorities wanted Caravaggio’s picture to remind the world that wherever her bones might have been taken, Syracuse was the original site of Lucy’s miracles and the place where she had first been laid to rest.

The fullest account of her martyrdom is to be found in
The Golden Legend
. Lucy, a virgin of noble lineage, born in Syracuse, resolved to imitate the poverty and humility of Christ. She swore a vow of chastity and steadily gave away her possessions to the poor. Her former husband-to-be, a non-believer, failed at first to realize that she had converted to Christianity and suspected her of courting another man with her wealth. When she informed him that she was now a bride of Christ, he denounced her to a Roman judge named Paschasius. The judge punished the saint by giving her over to ‘the ribalds of the town’, instructing them ‘to defoul her, and labour her so much till she be dead’. But when they came to take her away to a brothel, they could not move her. Paschasius sent for reinforcements, even for a team of oxen, but ‘she abode always still as a mountain, without moving.’ Then the judge ordered a great fire to be lit around her immobile form, commanding his torturers to pour boiling oil and resin on her. Throughout her ordeal, she prayed to God, so infuriating her tormentors that they thrust a sword straight through her throat. Even then she did not die, or even budge an inch, until Holy Communion was offered to her: ‘Lucy never removed from the place where she was hurt with the sword, and died not till the priest came and brought the blessed body of our Lord Jesu Christ. And as soon as she had received the blessed sacrament she rendered up and gave her soul to God, thanking and praising him of all his goodness. In that same place is a church edified in the name of her . . .’