Caravaggio

by Andrew Graham-Dixon

  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 …46

  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.47 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.48

  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.49

  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’.50

  By the beginning of July, the enemy vessels were still in Maltese waters, so Fabrizio Sforza Colonna continued to delay his departure for the last leg of the journey. Meanwhile, Grand Master Wignacourt sent a frigate from Malta to reinforce the flotilla. On 10 or 11 July the galleys of the order left Sicily. All on board would have been in a state of alert, fully armed for combat. In the event, the journey passed without incident. On 12 July, in the fierce heat of midsummer, Caravaggio arrived in the harbour of Malta’s capital city, Valletta.

  To a man in search of renewal and redemption, it must have been an inspiring sight. An entirely new city, built of honey-coloured limestone that glowed pink in the sun, Vall
etta had been constructed at breakneck speed in just forty years. After the turmoil of the Great Siege, the knights realized that they had to fortify the narrow headland known as the Xiberras Promontory, which connected the island’s two principal harbours. The construction of the new capital by an army of slaves, on the steepest incline of the headland, had been an immense undertaking but once complete it meant that the knights’ principal garrison was all but impregnable. It was named in honour of Jean de la Valette, Grand Master during the siege. The pope’s best military engineer, Francesco Laparelli, was responsible for the plan. The sheer stone fortifications of the citadel rose directly from the craggy outcrop of the island itself, with the sea acting as a moat on both sides.

  Within its walls, Valletta was laid out on the Renaissance model of the ideal city. The principal architect responsible for the buildings was Girolamo Cassar, who was from Malta but had studied in Rome. His palaces and churches were designed to reflect the knights’ ideals of Christian sobriety and military discipline, with long, severe façades of rusticated stone. The streets were laid out in a grid, with nine thoroughfares running across the peninsula and twelve running from top to bottom. Their strict geometry was softened by gardens and fountains, providing shade and water. Getting from the harbour end of Valletta, up the steep hill to the centre of town, and to the grand Cathedral of St John, was hard work even for the fittest. (Centuries later, the club-footed English poet Byron would bid farewell to Malta with the words ‘adieu, ye cursed streets of stairs’.)

  Approaching Malta for the first time, Caravaggio was surrounded by symbols of the island’s fierce rule of law. On the first promontory on the left of the harbour was the forbidding spectacle of a gallows. Within the harbour itself, prominent on the left-hand side, was the Castel Sant’Angelo, where many of the most famous events of the siege had taken place. By the time of Caravaggio’s arrival, it had become a prison for disorderly knights. Another hallowed site from the recent Maltese past was the Castel Sant’Elmo, where so many members of the order had lost their lives in 1565. A late sixteenth-century German visitor to Malta, Hieronymus Megiser, noted that some of the rocks there were still visibly sprinkled with gore. The stains were pointed out with pride by his Maltese hosts, as the glorious blood of Christian martyrs.

  Malta was a remote and harsh place, rocky and sun-parched, unlike anywhere Caravaggio had ever known. But it was also fertile, having been famous since antiquity for the quality of its cotton – Cicero had had his clothes made on Malta – as well as for the sweetness of its honey and its bounteous quantities of almonds, olives, figs and dates. As Megiser noted, the island encompassed two utterly distinct societies, ‘Malta Africana’ and ‘Malta Europeana’. The world of the indigenous islanders had remained unchanged for centuries. Its people were dark-skinned, spoke a language incomprehensible to Europeans and lived in humble settlements much like the tribal villages of nearby coastal north Africa. Cosmopolitan Valletta was utterly different, a flammable blend of extreme Christian piety, simmering military aggression and barely contained sexual dissipation.

  To the English poet and adventurer George Sandys, who unknowingly followed in Caravaggio’s footsteps four years later, the two Maltas were indeed worlds apart:

  The Malteses are little lesse tawnie than the Moores, especially those of the country, who go halfe-clad, and are indeed a miserable people: but the Citizens are altogether Frenchified; the Great Maister, and major parts of the Knights being French men. The women wear long blacke stoles, wherewith they cover their faces (for it is a great reproch to be seen otherwise) who converse not with men, and are guarded according to the manner of Italy. But the jealous are better secured, by the number of allowed curtizans (for the most part Grecians) who sit playing in their doores on instruments; and with the art of their eyes inveagle these continent by vow, but contrary in practise, as if chastitie were only violated by marriage. They here stir early and late, in regard of the immoderate heat, and sleep at noone day.51

  It is not known where Caravaggio lived during his time on the island. Prospective knights on their first tours of duty were given accommodation in the auberge belonging to their particular Langue, or country. Altogether there were eight Langues, of Italy, Provence, Auvergne, England, France, Aragon, Castille and Germany. The Italian auberge, with its long façade decorated with trophies and escutcheons, was close to the main city gate of San Giorgio. But Caravaggio is unlikely to have lodged there with the other Italian novices, because when he first arrived no one other than his Colonna protectors seems to have known of his plan to be elevated to a knighthood. It appears from the archive that his desire for the Cross of St John was not communicated to the highest levels of the order until the winter of 1607. So he probably lived in the household of Fabrizio Sforza Colonna, at least during the first months of his stay.

  Caravaggio was swiftly made aware of the sharp divide between public morality and the private behaviour of the knights and their companions. On 14 July, two days after his arrival on the island, a welcome party was thrown for him and a number of other new arrivals by a Sicilian knight named Giacomo Marchese. Marchese was overheard joking about a Greek painter who kept two wives. But for at least one of the other guests, it was no laughing matter. Judge Paolo Cassar, a doctor of civil and canon law, promptly denounced the unnamed painter to the Inquisition. On 26 July, Caravaggio was called by the Inquisitor, Leonetto Corbiaro, to answer questions about the identity of the alleged bigamist. He answered with his customary reticence, learned in the courts of Rome:

  About that which you ask me, most Reverend sir, I know nothing except that in the house of the Knight Fra Giacomo de Marchese there was staying a Greek painter who arrived with the galleys, but about the rest I have nothing to say concerning the said knight nor about anything which concerns the Holy Office [of the Inquisition] also I know nothing of the name of the said painter nor of which country he claims as his homeland.52

  The case fizzled out, but it was a clear sign of how easy it could be to get into trouble with the law on Malta. Even more fearsome than the Inquisition was the Grand Master, Alof de Wignacourt, whose rule on the island was absolute. ‘This man is a Pickard borne,’ Sandys would write, ‘about the age of sixtie, and hath governed eight years. His name and title, The illustrious and most reverent Prince my Lord Frier Alosius of Wignian-court, Greate Maister of the Hospitall of Sainte Johns of Jerusalem: Prince of Malta and Goza [sic]. For albeit a Frier (as the rest of the knights) yet is he an absolute Soveraigne, and is bravely attended on by a number of gallant young gentlemen.’53 Like all Knights of Malta, Wignacourt was bound by vows of poverty and celibacy. But he lived in grand style none the less, in the Grand Master’s Palace, an elegant building constructed around a courtyard garden, with walls frescoed with scenes of the Great Siege by a minor Italian artist named Matteo Perez d’Aleccio – who, like Caravaggio, had fled to Malta after getting into trouble in Rome. Wignacourt surrounded himself with young page boys, the flower of the European aristocracy. On his death, he bequeathed to the order more than 200 slaves and a fortune in ransom money.54

  As supreme authority on Malta, Wignacourt was answerable only to the pope. He presided over the Venerable Council of the order, composed of the eight Conventual Bailiffs – one for each Langue – and the Grand Priors. The Venerable Council framed the order’s statutes. Wignacourt was also in charge of the Criminal Council, which had the often demanding job of ensuring that those statutes were obeyed. As the leader of an all-male elite fighting unit, especially trained in privateering, pillage and kidnap, one of his main priorities was simply to preserve order. This was by no means easy, and a blind eye was diplomatically turned to certain habitual misdemeanours. Wignacourt made no attempt to close down Valletta’s many brothels: in 1581, when one of his predecessors had attempted to eliminate prostitution on Malta, the result had been a full-scale riot. But other offences were dealt with swiftly and ruthlessly, on a sliding scale of punishment.

  The list of pro
hibitions and mandatory penalties is itself a testament to the difficulty of maintaining order among several hundred proud Knights of Malta. Punishment for the offence of being incorrectly dressed, without the eight-pointed cross of the order, was the ‘quarantaine’, which insisted that the miscreant be confined to his auberge for forty days, during which time he was to fast in penitence and submit to regular public floggings by the vice-prior in the conventual church. Repetition of the same offence brought a three-month prison sentence. The penalty for rowdy behaviour inside the auberges was deprivation of seniority within the hierarchy of the knights. Insults traded between brother knights in the Grand Master’s presence meant the loss of three years’ seniority. More serious crimes were punished by defrocking, the permanent deprivation of a knight’s habit. This was the penalty ordained for a variety of offences, including assault on a fellow knight, heresy, apostasy, theft, duelling and the abandonment of comrades in battle.55 If a knight killed in anger, he was sentenced to a traditional Maltese death. The procedure was described by George Sandys: ‘If one of them be convicted of a capitall crime, he is first publicly disgraced in the Church of Saint John where he received his Knight-hood, then strangled and thrown into the sea at night-time.’56