Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (64 page)

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, Valletta 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 incomprehen
sible 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.
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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.
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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.’
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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.
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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 prohibitions 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.
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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 Knighthood, then strangled and thrown into the sea at night-time.’
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It would be harder to enter the brotherhood of Malta than Caravaggio had perhaps imagined. Knights of Justice were the elite of the order, from whose ranks the Grand Crosses who sat on the Venerable Council were drawn, but to be considered for such a knighthood the candidate had to be able to prove unbroken noble lineage of two hundred years. Below Knights of Justice came Knights of Grace, but they too had to prove a high degree of nobility. Considering his humble origins, Caravaggio could only aspire to the still lower Knighthood of Magistral Obedience, which was reserved for men of merit –
valent’huomini
, to use his own favoured terminology – and awarded at the discretion of the Grand Master. But just before Caravaggio’s arrival on the island, Wignacourt had introduced a statute putting an end to the conferment of such knighthoods. He had grown irritated by the number of applicants for them and felt they were cheapening the status of the brotherhood as a whole. Honorific knighthoods were viewed as being open to corruption, tradeable awards akin to a form of simony. On his travels in Palestine, Sandys was contemptuously amused by the sight of an apothecary from Aleppo being dubbed a knight in exchange for hard cash.

If Caravaggio were to become a Knight of Malta, special arrangements would have to be made by the Grand Master himself. Little is known about the artist’s activities during his first several months on the island. But on the evidence of three pictures that he painted during the second half of 1607, he was working hard to impress those in the upper echelons of the order. With each new commission, he moved closer to the centre of power.

SIGNED IN BLOOD

Soon after establishing a workshop on Malta, Caravaggio painted a sombre devotional picture for Ippolito Malaspina.
St Jerome Writing
had the same subject as the picture painted for the papal nephew, Scipione Borghese, two years earlier. The image of the saint, this time, is less a generic old man and more the portrait of an actual individual. Spotlit in the gloom of his study, Jerome has wispy grey hair scraped
across the sunburned crown of his head, deep wrinkles, a slightly cauli
flowered right ear – emphasized by the raking light – and a dimpled, beak-like nose. In contrast with his coppery, weathered face, his bare torso is pale and white. His physique is lean, although the skin at his ribs and belly has begun to sag with age.

The saint looks down at the pages of the book in which he is writing. In his right hand he holds a quill, in his left an inkpot. On the desk before him lie three symbolic objects: a stone the colour of a bruise – the stone with which, according to his legend, he used to beat his breast; a tip-tilted skull, eyes gaping and teeth glinting; and a crucifix on which a stretched figurine of the agonized Christ is represented in shadowy foreshortening.

To the saint’s right, his red cardinal’s hat hangs from a rudimentary peg. All else is in shadow. Semi-nude, swathed up to the waist in a sheet of red drapery, Jerome the scholar-saint looks more like a military man sitting up in bed before first light, writing out the orders of the day. The sinews at the juncture of neck and shoulderblade are taut with nervous energy. Did Caravaggio model him on Malaspina himself? One of Wignacourt’s closest advisers, Malaspina had been away from Malta for four years, and had returned on the same flotilla that had brought the artist to the island. Now in his late sixties, he had chosen to rededicate himself to the Order of St John, and to God. Caravaggio’s picture was perhaps intended to commemorate that decision.