Caravaggio: A Passionate Life

by Seward, Desmond

  He was here too for the greatest day in the city’s calendar, the feast of the Virgin Mary’s Assumption into Heaven on 15 August, when the Madonna was again borne through Messina, with even more splendor. Magistrates and patricians marched up and down the streets in her honor, followed by the garrison, to the music of drums and fifes, and then by priests and friars bearing relics. Finally came the Madonna della Lettera on an immense tower on wheels. As high as a house with several stories, the tower was dragged along by ropes pulled by hundreds of men; on one story were musicians, on the second a choir, and on the third “a tribe of singing patriarchs.” At the summit a young girl held a beautiful child, who represented the Virgin’s soul. The huge car was cheered by the crowds as it trundled past, cannon firing salutes. When it arrived at the cathedral, it was greeted by two statues of the city’s legendary founders, Madre and Griffone.

  Caravaggio might have continued at Messina for much longer. He was making all the money he needed, and it was a delightful little city. Before it was obliterated by a final earthquake, Augustus Hare wrote of “the exquisite glints of blue sea with white sails skimming across it, and a background of roseate Italian mountains, which may be seen down every steep street.”

  Since Caravaggio remained for several months, he was obviously not worried about being seized by the Knights. Yet the city was the Religion’s headquarters in Sicily and main transit depot for supplies from Europe. His old friend the prior of Messina, Fra’ Antonio Martelli, was here throughout his visit, having arrived in April 1608 and staying until September 1609. Fra’ Giacomo Marchese, at whose house he had been a guest when he first went to Malta, was also there during 1609. Bellori writes mysteriously that while Caravaggio was on Sicily, “fear hunted him from place to place,” but it cannot have been fear of the Order of Malta that made him leave Messina hurriedly at an unknown date, since he hoped that the Religion would eventually forgive him. When the Raising of Lazarus arrived at the church where it was to hang, the note recording its delivery described Caravaggio as “Knight of Jerusalem,” as he still called himself.

  According to Susinno, the artist left the city in 1609 because of a ridiculous incident in which he again lost his temper and used violence. “On feast days he would sometimes wander off in the company of a certain schoolmaster called Don Carlo Pepe, who often took his pupils to the arsenal to amuse them. Galleys were built there in those days … Michele went to watch the movements of the boys while they were playing, so as to find ideas for the figures [in his paintings]. But the schoolmaster began to worry about his motives and asked him just what he thought he was doing. The question so disgusted the painter that, to make quite certain that he did not lose his name for being a complete lunatic, he gave the man a wound in the head.”

  Clearly, Don Carlo had started to suspect that Caravaggio had sexual designs on his pupils. It is no less plain from Caravaggio’s furious reaction that he was outraged by the insinuation, especially from a schoolmaster; in seventeenth-century Italy schoolmasters had a very unpleasant reputation for pederasty. Even so, it was no excuse for stabbing poor Don Carlo, and, in consequence, the artist had to leave Messina in a hurry.

  An informed guess for the date of Caravaggio’s hasty departure from the city would be in late summer rather than in early autumn. The feast day on which the unfortunate quarrel with Don Pepe took place is most likely to have been the Virgin’s Assumption on 15 August, while Messina’s very flourishing and well-attended trade fair would obviously have provided a fugitive artist with an excellent opportunity for escaping. Ships arrived from all over the Mediterranean; some years later, a visitor to the fair counted not less than sixty galleys in the harbor, which would, of course, have been accompanied by many more lesser craft, such as feluccas. They gave him an unusually good chance of leaving Messina discreetly, though for a few days he may have had to hide on board. The Messinese authorities did not have the manpower to search several hundred vessels.

  If Caravaggio wanted to stay in Sicily, which seems not improbable in the absence of a pardon from Rome, the logical place for him to take refuge next was Palermo, Messina’s rival. Sailing very soon after the end of the the Messinese fair, he would have arrived there just before or during the last week of August 1609.

  XXXIII

  Palermo, 1609

  Frustratingly, there is even less detailed information about Caravaggio’s visit to Palermo than there is about his time at Messina. We know for certain that he had left Sicily altogether by early October 1609. Bellori and Susinno both say he went to Palermo and painted pictures there. Until thirty years ago, one of these might still be seen in the Palermitan church for which he had been asked to paint it. Yet although the artist’s stay was obviously very short, with his painter’s eye it must have been quite long enough for him to realize why Palermo deserved the affectionate name of La Felice.

  It lay at the edge of the Conca d’Oro, the “Golden Shell,” a vast and staggeringly fertile garden of olive groves, vineyards, and orangeries beside the Mediterranean, on a wide bay bounded by a great mountain to the north and a wooded headland to the south. Its situation surpassed even that of Naples. By all accounts, it was among the most beautiful and exotic cities in seventeenth-century Europe. Its bizarre architecture, an amazing blend of Byzantine, Romanesque, Arab, and African, was now being joined by Baroque, while the vegetation was almost Egyptian, with palm trees, cotton trees, locust trees, sugar cane, and cacti.

  Palermo was not only the crowning place of the kings of the Two Sicilies, but the island’s historic capital and administrative center. The viceroy’s palace was here, and the Sicilian parliament met in the city every three years. This was a period when Sicilian nobles were deserting their castles and moving into Palermo. In consequence, there was plenty of money circulating in the city, so that a famous artist like Caravaggio had every prospect of quickly finding valuable commissions.

  Almost as soon as he arrived, he produced a large Nativity for the church of the Oratorian Compagnia di San Lorenzo. He must have worked with amazing speed, or completed an already almost finished canvas that he brought with him in response to a specific invitation. Once again, there is a distinctly somber atmosphere in what is a traditionally joyful scene, as if in sad contemplation of the coming sorrows of Christ’s Passion. One suspects that it reflects the painter’s own melancholy.

  At the very end of September, or possibly the very beginning of October 1609, Caravaggio left Sicily for good. Bellori claims that, after painting the Nativity, Caravaggio did not feel safe about staying there any longer. But he appears to have exaggerated the artist’s fears in saying that he had hurried panic-stricken through the island. Even so, it does look as though he received news at Palermo that terrified him.

  Susinno tells us that Caravaggio “went back to Naples again, pursued by his injured antagonist.” Apparently, by “injured antagonist,” Susinno did not mean the unlucky schoolmaster whom the artist had assaulted at Messina but the unknown Knight of Justice with whom he had quarreled so disastrously on Malta. Presumably, the latter had by now recovered from the wounds inflicted during the duel and was reliably reported to be planning a revenge. One historian has suggested, as a reason for leaving, that “Palermo must have been less pleasant to visit than Messina: Spanish control was more evident, and life was dominated by the Inquisition.” Spanish control would be no less in evidence at Caravaggio’s next port of call, Naples, while there is not the slightest hint that he had reason at any stage of his career to fear investigation by the Inquisition, which dealt purely with deviations from Catholic doctrine and was not interested in mere moral lapses such as dueling or murder. What little information we have indicates that he fled from Sicily in fear for his life.

  Caravaggio must have had to return to Messina from Palermo, since it was the invariable point of embarcation for the crossing from Sicily to the mainland. If he made the crossing on board a merchant ship, he would have gone through the choppy waters of the Straits of Me
ssina, then northward out to sea. Convoys of large, well-armed merchantmen were equipped to deal with any corsairs they might encounter. After four days, they would put in at Ischia, reaching Naples the next day. But because Caravaggio was on the run, he presumably wanted to travel as unobtrusively as possible, so it is much more likely that he hired a felucca. If the crew noticed their passenger’s queer bundles of rolled-up canvas, they could not possibly have guessed that they were valuable.

  Since a felucca was too small to risk meeting a corsair, she had to sail by a different route after leaving the Straits of Messina, always keeping as close to the coast as possible. This was far slower than the direct route taken by the big ships, but it was much safer. It is unlikely to have been a comfortable voyage. Being at the end of September at earliest, stormy weather had probably begun to set in, so that it must have been well over a week before Caravaggio’s felucca reached Naples, perhaps even as long as a fortnight. During the last twelve months, the artist had made four sea voyages. Like Odysseus, he had passed between Scylla and Carybdis on more than one occasion. The symbolism may seem oddly fitting for someone whose life was quite so stormy. But, unlike for Odysseus, there was to be no happy ending for Caravaggio.

  XXXIV

  “The Neapolitan Shrug,” 1609

  Even today, there are few pleasanter places to approach from the sea than Naples, passing between Capri and Ischia. Perhaps the beautiful prospect raised Caravaggio’s spirits for a moment, but when he landed reality would soon catch up with him. Meanwhile, it seems that he went to stay at the Marchesa di Caravaggio’s palace on the Riviera di Chiaia.

  It was fear for his life that had brought him back to Naples. He was running from an implacable pursuer who, he must have known, was planning either to kill him or arrange for his death. Probably very few people were aware of the artist’s arrival in the city, and he would have been perfectly safe so long as he stayed inside the marchesa’s palace. Unfortunately, he was unable to resist the lure of the fleshpots. The famous tavern Osteria del Ciriglio beckoned irresistibly, with its delicious food and wine, uproarious good company, and “free-living ladies.” He must have known that the place was very dangerous, and that he would almost certainly be seen there by any enemy who was searching for him, but he took the risk.

  Murders occurred in Naples every day, frequently committed by the upper classes. There seems to have been a positive mania for feuding and dueling among the haughty, hot-tempered, revengeful nobility of the southern kingdom, and Knights of Malta were often all too prominent in countless bloodthirsty confrontations in the city’s narrow, dimly lit streets. At the same time, assassination was a highly efficient business, a murder being very easily and cheaply arranged, the famous “Neapolitan Shrug.” Its extremely sinister practitioners had a terrifying reputation throughout Europe, which was obviously well deserved; an English secret agent credited them with poisoning their victims by envenoming the scent of flowers, strangling them with a fragment of fine linen thrust down their throats, piercing their windpipes with a needle point, or pouring mercury into their mouths as they slept. Generally, however, the sword or the knife was used. It is clear that there was never any difficulty in finding such men.

  Caravaggio was about to fall victim to a relentless vendetta on the part of the Knight of Justice he had wounded so badly on Malta. There would be a deliberate, well-organized attempt to murder him. Probably the unknown knight was not personally involved in the actual attack. Since he had already been worsted in combat by Caravaggio, he can have had no wish to face him again at the point of a sword, and in any case he regarded him as a social inferior. It is therefore more than likely that he hired professional bravi to do the killing for him.

  On 24 October 1609, an avviso sent to Urbino reported, “We learn from Naples that the celebrated painter Caravaggio has been killed, though others say only wounded.” Bellori goes into more detail, recording how “he was stopped one day in the doorway of the Osteria del Ciriglio and surrounded by armed men, who attacked him and wounded him in the face.” Baglione tells the same story, adding that the sword cuts on his face were so deep that he was almost unrecognizable. He was very lucky to escape with his life, being no doubt mistakenly left for dead.

  He must have been dangerously ill for a long time. According to Bellori, he had not recovered from his wounds by the following July. Too weak to move, he could not leave where he was hiding, presumably in the marchesa’s palace. During his convalescence, there was no mention of him in the Neapolitan police records, or in the Roman avvisi, which regularly reported gossip from Naples. He was in no condition for brawling. However, a single document shows that at some moment before May 1610 he had started painting again and was ready to accept commissions.

  His last paintings are obsessively gloomy. He does not seem to have used models, perhaps because of his need to remain in hiding. It is unlikely that he could have produced all the pictures attributed to him during this second stay in Naples, although he may have sold some he had brought with him from Sicily, or even Malta. Perhaps he thought the Neapolitan nobles could afford to pay more than the Sicilian nobles. That his paintings were carried around may explain why so many have been mistaken for copies; rolling up the canvases made the paint flake, so that they had to be retouched.

  Bellori writes of at least one picture painted during this second stay in Naples: “And hoping to placate the Grand Master, he sent him as a gift a half-figure of Herodias with the head of St. John in a basin.” Perhaps it was accompanied by a plea for Fra’ Alof to call off the unknown knight. Sir Denis Mahon believes that this painting was begun by Caravaggio immediately after his arrival in Naples but had to be put aside after the attempted murder at the Osteria del Ciriglio. Caravaggio never stopped hoping for a pardon from the Religion, continuing to call himself a Knight of Malta until the day he died.

  When Caravaggio took refuge in Genoa in 1605, after attacking Pasqualone, he had declined to paint a fresco for Marcantonio Doria, the son of a former Doge. On 11 May 1609, Lanfranco Massa, the Doria family’s agent at Naples, wrote a letter to Prince Marcantonio, saying that soon he would be able to send a painting by Caravaggio to Genoa. This was the Martyrdom of St. Ursula. Massa explained that he was having to wait because the artist had applied the varnish so thickly; Massa had left the picture to dry in the sun, with disastrous consequences—it had had to be revarnished. (In the same letter, Massa refers to Caravaggio as Marcantonio’s “friend,” implying that they had met fairly frequently, no doubt in Rome.) The painting finally left Naples for Genoa on May 17.

  It was probably commissioned by Marcantonio Doria for the convent of his beloved stepdaughter, Sister Orsola. The story of the gruesome martyrdom that it depicts comes from The Golden Legend, which tells how the virgin Ursula was murdered by a king of the Huns for refusing to marry him, and how he shot her with an arrow. The king is a gnome-like figure in a Baroque cuirass, grimly clutching an oriental bow, while an impassive Ursula gazes with strange calm at the arrow in her bosom that has killed her.

  Cruelty of a different sort is in The Tooth-Drawer, a rare exception from Caravaggio’s usual religious themes. A 1637 inventory of paintings at the Palazzo Pitti in Florence lists such a picture, while in his Microcosmo della Pittura, published twenty years after the inventory, Francesco Scannelli relates how he saw in the grand duke of Tuscany’s apartments “a painting of half-length figures with [Caravaggio’s] accustomed naturalism.” Scannelli adds that it was in very bad condition. The Tooth-Drawer’s authenticity has been accepted only in recent years, and not by everybody. Dating from the artist’s second stay at Naples, it is notable for the grotesque spectators’ fascinated enjoyment of the patient’s agony.

  The Denial of St. Peter also dates from this second Neapolitan period, inspired by the Gospel of St. Mark: “Now when Peter was in the court below, there cometh one of the maidservants of the high priest. And when she had seen Peter warming himself, looking on him, she saith: ‘Thou also wast with
Jesus of Nazareth.’ But he denied, saying: ‘I neither know nor understand what thou sayest.’ ” An uneasy St. Peter and the suspicious maidservant have their faces illuminated by the firelight behind them, heightening the chiaroscuro, while a bystander’s face remains wholly in shadow.

  Another David and Goliath shows a handsome young David holding up an agonized head, which, however, wears a curiously reflective expression. Once again, it is a self-portrait. David holds a broad-bladed “sword-rapier” of the type that may have slashed Caravaggio’s face at the Osteria del Ciriglio. The picture has also been attributed to his second Neapolitan period. A tent flap at the top left-hand corner indicates that the scene is not the moment immediately after David killed Goliath, but another, described in the Book of Kings: “And when David was returned after the Philistine was slain, Abner took him in before Saul with the head of the Philistine in his hand.” No one can be unmoved by this painting.

  Some think that this interpretation of David and Goliath is meant to convey the artist’s foreboding of imminent death, since Goliath appears to see something we cannot. Both faces are self-portraits, Goliath being the middle-aged, sinful Caravaggio, while David is Caravaggio restored to his youthful innocence. The most likely meaning is that the painter is showing the pure, intelligent soul freed from the battered, sinful body, released from suffering and grief, redeemed by Christ. This is probably how most contemporaries familiar with alchemy would have read it. The picture was acquired by Cardinal Borghese, who remained one of Caravaggio’s greatest admirers.

  Another work, ascribed to the same period, although it may have been produced in Sicily, is an Annunciation. One of Caravaggio’s most mysterious and saddest paintings, it was his last altarpiece, commissiond by Duke Henry II of Lorraine for the high altar of the cathedral at Nancy. Inspired by the Gospel of St. Luke, it shows a strapping, winged angel hovering over a submissive, abject Virgin, as he brings his wonderful message to her: “And Mary said: ‘Behold the handmaid of the Lord: be it done to me according to thy word.’ ” What is striking is the Virgin’s haunted desolation, her look of utter dejection at the prospect of giving birth to the Messiah. The desolation may well reflect Caravaggio’s own wretchedness. If the Annunciation was painted in Naples, and not in Sicily, then the bed and the chair at the right of Mary’s chamber could be those of the artist’s sickroom.