The set square, the saw, the adze, the white rag, lie there unused, a memento mori, oblique memorial to an ordinary man who left an extraordinary child to fend for himself. This is Caravaggio’s last still life. These are among his last truly meaningful, eloquent brushstrokes. The picture is almost unbearable.
‘LIKE A CRIMINAL ESCAPING FROM HIS GUARDS’
It is hard to know what Caravaggio did during his time in Messina, other than paint. Susinno says that he paraded himself as a heretic: ‘Apart from his profession, Caravaggio also went about questioning our holy religion, for which he was accused of being a disbeliever …’107 But he also tells that dark story of the painter’s visit to a Messinese church, where he refused holy water on the grounds that it was only good for washing away venial sins. ‘Mine are all mortal’ were Caravaggio’s words, hardly those of a man untroubled by questions of salvation or damnation. Regrettably, there is no hard evidence about his beliefs. In religion, as in so much else, Caravaggio was perhaps a man divided – torn between doubt and faith, angry rebellion and sullen obedience.
He stayed longer in Messina than he had in Syracuse. He had won the favour of the Senate – which commissioned and paid for the Adoration, according to Susinno – and perhaps that added to his sense of security. But his behaviour remained erratic. ‘He used to have his meal on a slab of wood, and instead of using a tablecloth, most of the time he would eat on an old portrait canvas; he was foolish and crazy, more cannot be said.’108
Susinno’s weirdest story about Caravaggio concerns his alleged sexual interest in a group of adolescent schoolboys who used to play near the dry docks at the eastern end of Messina. It is an unusual anecdote in the context of the Sicilian author’s Lives, which are not otherwise salacious:
He used to disappear during holy days to follow a certain grammar teacher called Don Carlo Pepe, who escorted his pupils for recreation to the arsenal. There galleys used to be built … Michele went to observe the positions of those playful boys and to form his inventions. But the teacher became suspicious and wanted to know why he was always around. The question so disturbed the painter, and he became so irate and furious … that he wounded the poor man on the head. For this action he was forced to leave Messina. In short, wherever he went he would leave the mark of madness.’109
Having seemingly implied that the schoolteacher was accusing Caravaggio of an indecent interest in his pupils, Susinno himself asserts that the painter’s real motive for following the boys was artistic. The priest-biographer ends up by writing off the whole incident as yet another instance of Caravaggio’s mental instability. But because of its very oddity and untidiness, the story has the reek of truth. Caravaggio was hunted, haunted and lonely in Messina. It is by no means inconceivable that he should have sought companionship, even sexual solace, in the company of young men. Susinno’s anecdote might even help to explain one of the most enigmatic and homoerotic paintings of Caravaggio’s Sicilian period, his last depiction of St John the Baptist, now to be seen in the Borghese Gallery. Was this one of Don Pepe’s pupils? Did Caravaggio persuade him to model for him, and perhaps more?
Placed in a cursory wilderness, landscape lost in shadow, accompanied by a cursory lamb of God, the boy reclines on a swag of red drapery and fixes the viewer with a sullen, sultry, knowing gaze. Is this really John the Baptist, prophet and seer, possessor of secret knowledge, or a swarthy Sicilian boy, older than his years and conscious of his sexual appeal? The artist still had the picture with him when he died: it was in the inventory of his last effects, which suggests that it was not painted to order but on impulse.
Caravaggio had evaded capture, first in Syracuse, then in Messina. He may have been forced to leave Messina because of the fracas with the schoolmaster, but he was probably planning to leave anyway because he suspected that his enemies were closing in on him. According to Bellori, ‘misfortune did not abandon Michele, and fear hunted him from place to place. Consequently he hurried across Sicily and from Messina went to Palermo, where he painted another Nativity for the Oratorio of San Lorenzo … The Virgin is shown adoring her newborn child, with St Francis, St Lawrence, the seated St Joseph, and above an angel in the air. The lights are diffused among shadows in the darkness.’110
From this moment on in the painter’s story, the light is diffused among a great many shadows. But certain facts are clear. As Bellori said, Caravaggio left Messina for Palermo, sometime around the height of summer 1609. Once again, he painted an altarpiece for the Franciscans, this time for an oratory in the possession of a confraternity known as the Compagnia di San Francesco. Perhaps in deference to the sensibilities of its members he painted a rather sweeter version of the heartbreakingly bare Adoration in Messina. The Virgin is still weary, still seated on the ground, but without the same sense of desolation and isolation. Comparison between the two works is no longer possible, since the Palermo version was allegedly stolen by order of a Sicilian Mafia boss in 1969, and has never been recovered.
Caravaggio did not stay long in Palermo. Within two months, at most, he was on the move again. By the middle of September 1609 he was back in Naples.111 Baglione says he left because ‘his enemy was chasing him’.112 Bellori agrees: ‘he no longer felt safe in Sicily, and so he departed the island and sailed back to Naples, where he thought he would stay until he got word of his pardon allowing him to return to Rome.’113
On his return to Naples, Caravaggio stayed in the Colonna Palace at Chiaia.114 With its vast terraced gardens, close to the sea, it was an idyllic retreat from the cares of life, with the added bonus of thick walls. The fact that Caravaggio had evidently been accepted back into the Colonna fold suggests not only that Marchesa Costanza had forgiven him, yet again, but also that she had negotiated some kind of truce with Alof de Wignacourt and the Knights of Malta. Her own son, Fabrizio Sforza Colonna, remained in post as admiral of the Grand Master’s galleys. He owed both his liberty and the rescue of his reputation to Wignacourt. In such circumstances, it would have been inconceivable for Costanza Colonna to have protected a known fugitive from the order. Whatever it involved, a deal must have been struck on Caravaggio’s behalf. He would presumably have been required to send some paintings to the Grand Master, as well as putting an end to the absurd pretence that he was still a Knight of Magistral Obedience.
News that Caravaggio was back in Naples soon got around and offers of work followed. ‘In Sant’Anna de’ Lombardi he painted the Resurrection,’ Bellori wrote.115 The picture does not survive, because the chapel that once housed it in the Neapolitan church of the Lombards was destroyed by an earthquake at the turn of the nineteenth century. But documents and eyewitness accounts confirm that Caravaggio, himself a Lombard by origin, did indeed paint a large altarpiece of The Resurrection of Christ for Sant’Anna. To judge by the praise heaped on it, it was a strange and morbidly enthralling picture, the lost masterpiece of Caravaggio’s later years.
Caravaggio’s patron, Alfonso Fenaroli, had obtained the rights to the third chapel on the left side of the church on 24 December 1607, six months after the painter had left for Malta at the end of his first stay in Naples. Fenaroli must have commissioned the new altarpiece as soon as the artist arrived back from Palermo, probably sometime around the beginning of September 1609. Working in the abbreviated and fluent style of his Sicilian altarpieces, Caravaggio finished it before the end of the following month.116 Nearly a hundred and fifty years later, the travelling French connoisseur Charles-Nicolas Cochin was bowled over by it. By then the picture had darkened with age, and the identity of its creator had been forgotten. Cochin had every reason to pass it over, but it seemed so bizarrely original, so memorable and so sinister, that it drew him in:
In the third chapel on the left, one sees a painting representing the resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is a singular invention, Christ is not even shown rising into the air and he walks past the sentries [who guard the holy sepulchre]. All of which gives a low idea of him, and makes him look like a criminal escapi
ng from his guards. Also, he has been given the character of a scrawny suffering man. From a purely pictorial point of view the composition is really beautiful and the style is strong and felt with great taste. It is much blackened. No one knows the name of the artist. This piece is beautiful.117
Only in these words is the vivid ghost of a great painting preserved. Cochin was unaware of the painter’s identity, his flight from Rome, his escape from Malta, his restless peregrinations through Sicily – yet still, purely from the power of his work, he sensed the depth of Caravaggio’s unease. The painter had made Christ ‘look like a criminal escaping from his guards’. Just as he had done in his haunting Sicilian pictures, Caravaggio was putting his own memories and emotions at the heart of his work. Whatever he set out to paint – the death of a martyr, the infancy of Christ or his resurrection – he always ended up painting himself.
THE KNIGHT’S REVENGE
His work had never been bleaker or more emotionally naked. But in the autumn of 1609 Caravaggio had some grounds for optimism. Alof de Wignacourt seems to have been appeased, which lifted the threat of sudden rendition to Malta, and negotiations were reopened for the papal pardon that would allow him to return to Rome at last. Emboldened, perhaps, by the sense that his fortunes were about to change, Caravaggio fatally let down his guard. He paid an ill-advised visit to the Osteria del Cerriglio, a Neapolitan tavern frequented by artists and poets and much celebrated in the popular literature of the time.
The Cerriglio was located in a narrow alleyway behind the Neapolitan church of Santa Maria La Nova. There are a number of theories about the original meaning of its name, which may have derived from the cierro, local slang for the long forelock worn by the cut-throats who were often to be seen there; from the merry appearance (cera) of those who had enjoyed its hospitality; from an oak forest (cerrillo) that had once stood nearby; from the cerilleros, the vagabonds and wastrels who caroused at the tavern; or simply from the name of its owner. It was famously a place where the wine flowed more freely than water, but a number of hitherto overlooked documents reveal that the Osteria del Cerriglio was also notorious as a brothel. Giulio Cesare Cortese, an exact contemporary of Caravaggio, wrote a mock-epic poem entitled La conquista del Cerriglio, in which the imaginary moment of the tavern’s foundation is marked by ‘huge orgies’.118 Real orgies took place there too: another of the painter’s contemporaries, Giambattista Basile, called it ‘that place where the courtesans / wallowed / in front of disapproving passersby / stripping the gullible to the bone’,119 while yet another poet of the period, Giovan Battista del Tufo, added the detail that ‘moreover, for gentlemen, / There is a door for entering secretly.’120 The Cerriglio was especially popular among men seeking sex with other men, to judge by the insinuation in Basile’s description of it as a place ‘where Bacchus reigns and Venus is shunned’.121
The nineteenth-century Neapolitan poet, playwright and historian Salvatore di Giacomo, whose work on the underworld of seventeenth-century Naples has been largely forgotten, unearthed several incriminating references to the tavern in the archives of the city. ‘The Cerriglio was not wholly frequented by well-mannered individuals, and the innkeeper would often turn a blind eye if not turn his back altogether,’ he wrote in his pioneering study of 1899, Prostitution in Naples.122 Elsewhere, di Giacomo described just what ‘gentlemen’ such as Caravaggio might find when they walked though the brothel’s discreetly concealed door and entered its upper rooms: ‘These rooms nowadays would be called higher chambers. Since the end of the 16th century, by which time the Cerriglio was already famous, they had made up a separate quarter [of the tavern] … in one of these little rooms, in circa 1671, a slave was caught practising what are nowadays referred to as certain psychopathic sexual acts, which were thought of in less scientific terms in the seventeenth century and punishable with beheading.’123 The only sexual act punishable by beheading was sodomy. The Cerriglio clearly catered for a wide range of sexual appetites.
Caravaggio’s problems arose when he tried to leave the tavern. He had been followed there by a group of armed men, who waited for him in the street outside as he took his pleasure within. As soon as he walked out of the door, they ambushed him. On 24 October 1609, a Roman newspaper included the following notice: ‘Word has been received from Naples that Caravaggio, the famous painter, has been murdered. Others say disfigured.’124 The rumour of his death turned out to have been exaggerated. He had not been killed, but he had been severely injured.
Within days of the publication of the newspaper report, Caravaggio’s old friend and biographer, Giulio Mancini, put out his own antennae. Mancini did not yet know the full truth, but what he did know filled him with anxiety. He wrote to his brother Deifebo in Siena: ‘It’s said that Michelangelo da Caravaggio has been assaulted by 4 in Napoli and the witnesses say he has been given a facial scar. If so it would be a sin and is [the next word, which begins with a d but is illegible, could be ‘disturbing’ or ‘a disgrace’] to everybody. Let God make it not so.’125
Mancini wrote that Caravaggio had been sfregiato, cut on the face, which in the honour code of the day was an injury inflicted to avenge an insult to reputation.126 The same word had been used by the writer of the Roman news report. It lends both brief accounts of the assault a grim specificity, and explains the other detail gleaned by Mancini: that Caravaggio had been attacked by a group of four men. This was no drunken fracas but a premeditated act, a vendetta attack ruthlessly executed: three men to hold him down, one man to cut the marks of shame into his face.
Years later, the painter’s biographers gave their own terse versions of what had happened. They were unanimous on two points. It was a coldblooded attack – a hit – and it was perpetrated by a man or a group of men from Malta.
Baglione’s report of the assault at the Cerriglio follows seamlessly from his account of Caravaggio’s incarceration on Malta and his subsequent escape. It is clear that Baglione believed the two episodes were linked as surely as cause and effect:
In Malta, Caravaggio had a dispute with a Knight of Justice and in some way affronted him. For this he was thrown into prison. But he escaped at night by means of a rope ladder and fled to the island of Sicily. In Palermo he executed several works, but because he was still being pursued by his enemy he had to return to Naples. There his enemy finally caught up with him and he was so severely slashed in the face that he was almost unrecognisable.127
Bellori, writing considerably later than Baglione, thought the cause of the assault lay elsewhere. In his account it was not the revenge attack of an insulted Knight of Justice, but a mission carried out by implication on the orders of Alof de Wignacourt:
[Caravaggio] felt that it was no longer safe to remain in Sicily and so he left the island and sailed back to Naples, intending to remain there until he received news of his pardon so that he could return to Rome. At the same time seeking to regain the favour of the Grand Master of Malta, he sent him as a gift a half-length figure of Herodias with the head of St John the Baptist in a basin. These attentions availed him nothing, for stopping one day in the doorway of the Osteria del Cerriglio he found himself surrounded by several armed men who manhandled him and slashed his face.128
Francesco Susinno, writing still later, but from a position considerably closer to the events on Malta and Sicily, leaned towards Baglione’s version of events: ‘‘The fugitive arrived in Palermo, and in that city also left excellent works of art. From there he moved again to Naples, chased there by his angered antagonist, and was badly wounded on the face.’129
To these counterposed explanations of the attack may be added one other possibility: that its origins lay not in Malta but in Rome, and that it was carried out either by or on behalf of the aggrieved relations of the late Ranuccio Tomassoni. There is no suggestion that this was the case in any of the early biographies, nor in any contemporary source. In fact there is no hard evidence of any kind to support the hypothesis. But the theory has been advocated by at least one
influential scholar of Caravaggio’s life and work in recent years.130
A great deal of archival research has been done on Caravaggio over the past half-century. Many new discoveries have been made, and it is striking how in almost every case the historical facts have tended to confirm the accounts of one or other of Caravaggio’s early biographers. Baglione has generally proved to be more accurate than Bellori, which is not surprising: he was part of Caravaggio’s own circle, and although the two men were enemies they took more than a passing interest in each other’s activities. Baglione knew who Caravaggio’s friends and allies were in Rome, and understood the complicated and violent codes of honour by which he lived and died, whereas Bellori was simply baffled by them. A fairly straightforward process of elimination establishes Baglione’s account of the assault in the Osteria del Cerriglio as the most credible explanation of the whole dark business.
The modern suggestion that Ranuccio Tomassoni’s relations were the aggressors lacks merit on the grounds of chronology, geography and logic. The attack in the Cerriglio took place more than three years after Caravaggio had murdered Tomassoni. Even if it is assumed that the Tomassoni clan was still bent on revenge, which in this case would have been a dish served very cold indeed, it is unlikely that they would have attempted an attack on the painter in distant Naples: far better to wait until his heralded return to Rome, where they could watch his movements and plan their strike with a greater certainty of success. The most powerful argument against their involvement is the nature of the wounding Caravaggio suffered. He had been cut in the face. In the language of vendetta, the sfregio was punishment for an insult to honour and reputation. But the painter had murdered Tomassoni, not merely insulted him. An eye for an eye: if the Tomassoni had been behind the assault in Naples, Caravaggio would have been killed, not disfigured.
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