The Garden of Evil (41 page)

Author’s Note

T
HIS IS A WORK OF FICTION CONSTRUCTED AROUND SOME
certain facts, so I feel it is important to give a few guidelines on where this division is drawn. There is no painting entitled
Evathia in Ekstasis,
by Caravaggio or any other artist of the same period. Canvases close to its subject matter certainly did exist, however, among them Annibale Carracci’s
Venus with a Satyr and Cupids,
which remains in the possession of the Uffizi today. Erotic paintings, some by well-known artists, others pure graphic pornography, were popular throughout sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Rome among the richer classes and with influential men of the Church. The more risqué works would be kept in private rooms, covered by a curtain, and shown only to close and discreet friends. This penchant for private interests bordering on vice was not uncommon. Cardinal Francisco Maria Del Monte, Caravaggio’s patron and landlord for a while, did indeed tinker with the forbidden art of alchemy in the privacy of the casino of the Villa Ludovisi, and paid the artist to produce a unique fresco associated with his experiments there.

Caravaggio lived in turbulent and hypocritical times, variously fêted as the new saviour of the coming generation of Roman artists and vilified as a dissolute sinner who used prostitutes as the models for saints. His output while he lived in Rome—from 1592 until he fled a sentence of death for murder in 1606—was prolific but is in part uncharted. Like many of his colleagues and rivals, he veered between pious works commissioned by the Church and smaller, often more daring canvases paid for by private collectors seeking something for their galleries and intimate chambers, where visitors were allowed only by invitation.

The reputation of Caravaggio today stands, to a great extent, upon his religious paintings, some of which, such as
The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew
(San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome),
The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist
(Oratory of the Co-cathedral of Saint John, Valletta, Malta), and
The Crucifixion of Saint Peter
(Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome), remain on the very walls for which they were first painted. But the artist accepted private commissions as well. There is no doubt that he embraced a wider range of work when the money and the job interested him. The poet Giambattista Marino certainly owned a painting entitled
Susannah
by Caravaggio, now lost, which is assumed to have been a rare female nude. Caravaggio was prolific and temperamental, a difficult and violent man, willing to walk away from valuable projects simply because they failed to interest him. At the height of his career he was celebrated as the most famous artist in Rome, and hailed by poets as the defining spirit of a new age of painting. Within the space of a few years, however, he was impoverished, living in simple conditions with a single servant in the alley now known as the Vicolo del Divino Amore.

The Palazzo Malaspina depicted here is entirely fictional, though sprawling palaces similar to it do exist in Rome today. One of the most famous still in original hands is the Palazzo Doria Pamphilj, which contains the canvases mentioned in the book and is, in part, open to the public. A palace more reminiscent of the imaginary home of Franco Malaspina is the Palazzo Altemps in the Piazza San Apollinare. The residence of a powerful cardinal related to the papacy by marriage, this ornate and glorious property is on the edge of the area once known as Ortaccio, a red-light district created by the Vatican to be a zone for the city’s prostitutes. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the inns and lodgings of Ortaccio came to be popular with artists and writers, and were the scene of many brawls and arguments, feuds and vendettas.

Long-running enmities were common in this volatile community, and gangs such as the fictional Ekstasists depicted here certainly existed, taking their cue from the real-life knight’s handbook written by Domenico Mora, which argued for a violent, arrogant attitude towards others. It was a street fight that cost Caravaggio his career in Rome when, in 1606, he killed Ranuccio Tomassoni close to the Piazza di San Lorenzo in Lucina. The circumstances remain a mystery. Contemporary accounts are coloured by bias and riddled with lacunae, though the popular modern theory that the brawl stemmed from a dispute over a game of tennis is probably a myth. Tomassoni was indeed the
caporione
of his district and closely involved, sometimes intimately, with several of the women Caravaggio knew, among them the notorious Fillide Melandroni.

Alessandro de’ Medici ruled Florence briefly from 1532 until his assassination in 1537. It is generally accepted that he was the son of a black kitchen maid named Simonetta and the seventeen-year-old Giulio de’ Medici, who was to become Pope Clement VII. His lineage was carefully hidden in most portraits, though his enemies frequently referred to him as
il Moro,
the Moor. Ippolito Malaspina was a real figure and a genuine patron of Caravaggio in Malta; his coat of arms can be seen on the artist’s
Saint Jerome,
which remains in the co-cathedral in Valletta, for which Malaspina commissioned it. The Malaspina family was at one time powerful in Tuscan politics; an ancestor of Ippolito receives a mention in both Dante’s
Purgatorio
and Boccaccio’s
Decameron.
The aristocratic Malaspina dynasty disappeared in the eighteenth century. In the time of the Medici, however, the Malaspina clan had a visible and important presence in Florence. The favourite mistress of Alessandro de’ Medici was Taddea Malaspina. The depiction of Alessandro by Pontormo, which is now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, was originally his gift to her. In turn, she bore Alessandro’s only children.

Apart from the canvas of
Evathia
and the imagined lost portrait of the man pretending to be Ippolito Malaspina in Malta, all the paintings mentioned in this book are real and mostly on public view.

DAVID HEWSON
Rome, Kent, and San Francisco, October 2005-November 2006

About the Author

A former staff writer on
The Times,
David Hewson lives in Kent, where he is at work on the seventh Nic Costa crime novel,
Dante’s Numbers,
which Delacorte will publish in 2009.

The Garden of Evil
is the sixth novel in a crime series which began with the acclaimed
A Season for the Dead,
set in Rome and featuring Detective Nic Costa.

Also by David Hewson

The Nic Costa Series
A Season for the Dead
The Villa of Mysteries
The Sacred Cut
The Lizard’s Bite
The Seventh Sacrament
and
Lucifer’s Shadow

THE GARDEN OF EVIL
A Delacorte Press Book /August 2008
First published 2008 by Macmillan Publishers Ltd, Great Britain

Published by Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved
Copyright © 2008 by David Hewson
Title page photograph by Cardone Giovanni
Part title page photograph by Bert Glibbery

Delacorte Press is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.,
and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hewson, David, 1953–
                                    The garden of evil / David Hewson.
                                                                        p. cm.
                  1. Costa, Nic (Fictitious character)—Fiction.
                                    2. Police—Italy—Rome—Fiction. 3. Rome (Italy)—Fiction. 4. Art—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6058.E96G37 2008
823’.914—dc22

2007045762

www.bantamdell.com

eISBN: 978-0-440-33795-9

v3.0