Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (58 page)

Caravaggio’s sword and dagger, drawn by a policeman (see p. 287).

PART FIVE

The Alban Hills, Naples, Malta, Sicily, Naples, Porto Ercole, 1606–10

ON THE RUN

Caravaggio had been seriously injured in the swordfight, but he needed to get out of Rome quickly. After having his wounds dressed, he returned briefly to his lodgings in the house of the lawyer Andrea Ruffetti to gather a few necessary possessions – clothes, painting materials, whatever money he could lay his hands on. But it was not safe to stay at Ruffetti’s overnight because the
sbirri
knew to look for him there. So, accompanied by Cecco, Caravaggio went to the neighbouring Palazzo Colonna and threw himself on the mercy of his family’s first protectress, Marchesa Costanza.

Bleeding, bedraggled, wild-eyed with adrenalin, he confessed to the murder and asked for her help. Despite the seriousness of his crime, she gave it. For all his sins, perhaps in her eyes he was still the lucky child – the boy whose birth on the feast day of the Archangel Michael had once seemed like such a good omen, and whose very name was like a prayer invoking her father’s famous victory at the Battle of Lepanto. Caravaggio and Cecco were given a bed for the night. Early next morning the injured painter and his boy left the palace in the marchesa’s coach and four, bound for the safe haven of a remote Colonna fiefdom in the Alban Hills. As the carriage clattered through the streets of the city, its blinds were firmly drawn.

No actual account of Caravaggio’s flight from the city survives, so all of the above is speculation. But something much like it must have happened. The fact of the matter is that within a day or two of the murder the painter had indeed been spirited out of Rome, deep into Colonna territory.

He probably went first to Zagarolo, and moved between there and Palestrina, both small towns owned and controlled by the Colonna, some twenty miles from Rome and suitably off the beaten track. The Colonna Palace at Zagarolo still looms today over thickly wooded hills, a forbidding fortress in a wild and remote landscape. It is exactly the sort of place where a man in fear of his life might choose to take
refuge. Mancini stated categorically that this was, indeed, Caravaggio’s
first stopping place on his flight from Rome: ‘He first reached Zagarolo, where he was secretly housed by the prince.’ Bellori echoed Mancini, adding the detail that the painter was being pursued: ‘Fleeing from Rome, without money and being followed, he found refuge in Zagarolo under the protection of Duke Marzio Colonna.’
1

We do not have much information about his first few months of exile. All three early biographies refer to a picture of Mary Magdalen that the artist supposedly painted while he was in the Alban Hills, but it has never come to light.
2
Mancini and Bellori also mention a
Supper at Emmaus
from the same period, which does survive. A solemn and introverted work, it now hangs in the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan. This second
Supper at Emmaus
is strikingly different from the painting on the same subject in London, created just five years earlier. It seems to announce a change within Caravaggio himself, and certainly marks the transformation of his style. With this troubled picture begins the last phase of the painter’s life and work.

The older Caravaggio would often revisit themes and motifs that he had painted before. But only on this occasion did he rework the entire composition of a picture from earlier in his career. The second painting is almost identical in size to the first, the figures are the same scale, and virtually repeated – with the addition, in the Brera version, of the innkeeper’s wizened wife, waiting to serve a rack of lamb. The tablecloth and the Turkish rug over which it has been laid are almost the same. But in this later painting it is as if someone has turned off the lights, so deep are the shadows.

Christ is no longer the beardless youth of five years before, the Apol
lonian judge calmly looking forward to the end of time. He is the conven
tional type of Jesus, with light beard and shoulder-length hair, but pushed to the point of exhaustion. He is a pained and troubled figure, a Man of Sorrows who has suffered much and struggles even to raise his hand, poised just inches above the table, in the revelatory gesture of blessing.

The first
Supper at Emmaus
, a spotlit drama of sudden recognition, has blurred to an image from a dream. The theatre of Caravaggio’s early Roman painting has contracted to a space that seems more like the inside of the artist’s mind, a space of memory or mental projection. That some of the figures in the picture almost certainly
were
painted from memory, rather than from life, enhances the effect. The innkeeper resembles the innkeeper in the earlier version of the picture, but seen at one remove or through half-closed eyes. The figure of his wife, so beaten down by existence, was surely based on Caravaggio’s recollections of the old woman who had recently modelled for St Anne in the
Madonna of the Palafrenieri
.

The lamb on the dish that she holds is a scrap of meat so shrivelled and inconspicuous that it barely performs the iconographic task required of it – the scantest of allusions to Christ’s sacrifice and the death of all flesh. Even the still life on the table has been reduced to a bare, eucharistic minimum, just some broken loaves and a chipped majolica jug. Darkness surrounds the huddled figures seated at this simple meal, but there are no shades of transcendence here: no halo is cast on the wall behind Christ, no pattern of the divine is suggested in the shadows that fall on the drab white tablecloth. The invigorating light of a miraculous dawn has weakened to the feeble gleams of the end of the day.

The paint has been applied thinly and the colours muted to earths and ochres. The faces of all the figures are less sharply differentiated than they are in any of Caravaggio’s earlier pictures. Many of the technical departures of the artist’s later work are related to his circumstances: he stops painting from models, in all but a few cases, because he has no time to find them or money to pay them, and he paints quickly because he has to move on.

The disciple sitting with his back to the viewer is seen only as a silhouette, a few stray curls of his tousled hair picked out against the folds of Christ’s blue-green robe. His hands express surprise but also uncertainty, as if he cannot quite believe the miracle to which he is a witness; his right hand is a shadowy form set against shadows, light glimmering in the interstices between the fingers. This recalls similar passages in the darkest paintings of Tintoretto, and indeed an eloquent Venetian indistinctness enters Caravaggio’s painting at this time.

The wiry, sunburned disciple seated to Christ’s left is fiercely intent.
He grips the table hard with both hands, grasping for a sense of reality
.
Can it really be true? Can he really be performing this one last miracle?
Can he really have come back from the dead? The tendons in his neck stand out as he stares with desperate intensity at the half-lit face of Christ. But there is a stoop in his shoulders, a defeated weariness about him, suggesting that in his heart of hearts he still cannot quite bring himself to believe in the miracle, that it would be too much to hope for. Christ himself seems about to disappear into the surrounding blackness of the inn – as indeed he does, in the gospel of Luke, at the very moment when the disciples realize who he is. This dark and occluded picture has the quality of a confession. How much harder Caravaggio now finds it to see the possibility of salvation.

One other painting survives from the early months of Caravaggio’s exile, a depiction of
David with the Head of Goliath
, which has traditionally been misdated to the end of his life.
3
Its subject is David’s well-known act of giant-slaying, recounted in the Old Testament (1 Samuel 17:48–51): a familiar story, but treated by Caravaggio in a strikingly unfamiliar way. The sombre young hero is intriguingly unexultant in his moment of triumph. He holds his grisly prize at arm’s-length, staring down almost absently at the trails of blood still pouring from the severed neck of his vanquished foe. Mild disgust is mingled, in David’s complicated and contemplative expression, with gentle sadness. Cecco modelled for this figure, as he had for the
exuberant
Omnia vincit amor
. But what a change has come over him.
He looks older, more drawn. His brow is furrowed and there are bags under his eyes. Exile and flight had taken their toll on him too.

The disembodied head of Goliath seems still to be screaming, in an extension of his death agony. Light glints on his irregular row of front teeth and is reflected in the wetness of his lower lip. The extreme tenebrism of Caravaggio’s technique isolates these few charged details, distilling the drama to a compelling vignette while casting everything extraneous into darkness. Having reduced the story to an apparent bare minimum of incident, the painter deepens the meaning of his picture by deftly weaving in other layers of association. David’s earlier act of hurling his shot at the giant’s head is subtly implied by the way his white shirt has been looped through his belt to shape a kind of sling. His vulnerably naked torso and softly compassionate, almost Christ-like expression hint at the larger perspective of theological meaning in which the slaying of Goliath was to be understood.

David evokes the youthful Christ, because the story of David slaying Goliath was often seen as an Old Testament prefiguration of Christ subduing Satan. The inscription on the blade of the sword held by David spells out the letters ‘H.
OC
.S’. This is the acronym of a phrase from St Augustine’s commentary on Psalm 33, in which he remarks that ‘As David overcame Goliath, this is Christ who kills the Devil.’ The Latin phrase used by Augustine is
humilitas occidit superbiam
: ‘humility kills pride’.

The most insistent of the picture’s meanings is carried by its most blatant detail. The death’s head of Goliath is a self-portrait, a depiction of Caravaggio himself
in extremis
. There is a terrible, ambiguous intensity behind his fixed stare. He seems, horribly, half dead and half alive, his right eye glazed over and closing while his left eye is still bright with outrage and pain. He is like one of the damned souls glimpsed by Dante in the
Inferno
, an outcast moaning forever in torment.

The last piece in the puzzle of this haunting picture is furnished by the identity of its intended owner. Caravaggio painted the
David and Goliath
for Scipione Borghese, papal nephew and the chief administrator of papal justice – the man who, more than any other, had the power of life and death over Caravaggio himself. The
David and Goliath
was Caravaggio’s darkly ingenious plea to the one man who could save him: his way of saying that Borghese was welcome to have his head in a painting, if only he would let him keep it in real life.

Thanks to the help of his protectors, Caravaggio was able to despatch his pictures to Rome. The second
Supper at Emmaus
was sold to the banker Ottavio Costa;
4
the
David and Goliath
, a precious gift to Scipione Borghese, may have arrived in Rome in the same Colonna carriage. It was likely to have been well appreciated: the papal nephew
already owned Caravaggio’s severe
St Jerome
Writing
, which the painter
had probably also given to him as a gift, in exchange for helping to resolve the affair of his assault on the lawyer Pasqualone; and within less than a year he would sequester the entire art collection of the unfortunate Giuseppe Cesari, largely in order to get his hands on two early pictures by Caravaggio, the
Boy with a Basket of Fruit
and the moonlit
Self-Portrait as Bacchus
.

News of the
David and Goliath
’s arrival at the Palazzo Borghese was kept quiet. Scipione Borghese did not actually hang the picture for several years, perhaps because he did not want the artist’s death’s-head petition to him to be too widely known.
5
But as the summer of 1606 turned to autumn, it seems that he was indeed working behind the scenes on Caravaggio’s behalf. News of the painter’s presence in the Alban Hills had spread to Rome, where it was rumoured that there were plans for Caravaggio to make a swift return. On 23 September the Este agent Fabio Masetti wrote to his masters in Mantua that ‘Caravaggio, having committed the murder previously reported, is staying at Pagliano with the plan of coming back soon. I will get repayment from him of the 32 scudi . . .’
6

But though Caravaggio had support in Rome, he also had enemies. Bellori’s brief comment about his ‘being followed’ on his flight from the city is a reminder that certain people were determined to see him brought to justice. The Tomassoni clan may have sent men after him. Within Rome itself their voices must have been raised against an early pardon for Caravaggio. Whatever deal was being brokered on his behalf, by the end of September it had fallen through and the painter had resigned himself to a lengthy period of exile.

Caravaggio probably used the proceeds of the sale of the second
Supper to Emmaus
to pay his way to Naples. Certainly by early October he was living and working there, where he felt safe enough to show his face in public. But the fear of reprisals stayed with him. He was careful to remain under the protection of the Colonna family, who maintained a powerful presence in the city. With their help, he would attempt to repair his damaged and disordered life.

IN THE CITY OF BEGGARS

Naples at the start of the seventeenth century was the largest city in southern Europe. Its population was 300,000, three times that of Rome,
and would soon grow to half a million. Founded by the Greeks in ancient
times, and built around the crescent of a natural bay, Naples had always
been a port town. Its lifeblood was maritime commerce. Although Muslim corsairs and Barbary pirates continued to make predatory forays from their bases along the African coast, the seas had become safer for Neapolitan traders since the victory of the Christians over the Turks at Lepanto. Ships from Naples travelled to Flanders, Holland, England and Germany, as well as to Sicily, Spain and northern Africa.