Caravaggio (17 page)

He was hardly in hiding. His stays in Syracuse and Messina were relatively lengthy, and in both cities he did work that was widely discussed and that added to his fame and reputation. In Messina the patron who financed
The Resurrection of Lazarus
had close ties with a local member of the Knights of Malta. Moreover, Caravaggio consistently presented himself as a knight, conveniently failing to mention the fact that he'd been expelled from the order. In fact the Palermitans apparently believed that the artist who had so briefly graced them with his presence was a Knight of the Brotherhood of Saint John. Perhaps word of that was what finally galled the knights into tracking him down.

Or perhaps it was simpler and less romantic than any of those scenarios. Perhaps he made new enemies everywhere he went, every-place that, as Susinno said, he stamped with the mark of his madness.

 

Finally, one grim fact would become clear, beyond speculation or dispute: The danger that Caravaggio believed himself to be in was not merely a figment of his paranoid imagination. A few months after his arrival in Naples, where he was greeted warmly and invited to stay in the grand palazzo of the Marchesa di Caravaggio, he was ambushed by a group of armed men in the doorway of a popular tavern, the Osteria del Cerriglio. In the subsequent attack he was so severely injured that it was rumored that he had been killed; his face was so deeply slashed and disfigured that he was said to be virtually unrecognizable. Bellori suggests that the Maltese were behind the attack.

This time, Caravaggio's stay in Naples lasted just over seven months, time he spent recuperating and, amazingly, painting. Five of these canvases have survived, three have been lost, and there may have been others for which he received commissions. Understandably the scale of the works is less monumental than that of his great Sicilian paintings. He must have been in pain for part of this period, but, more important, at least some of these works needed to be portable, small enough to be sent or given to those—Grand Master Wignacourt, his former patrons in Rome—whose favor he desperately needed to regain in hopes of procuring help in his quest for a pardon.

Once more, his style changed radically. The bands of figures dwarfed beneath expanses of emptiness give way to claustrophobically intimate dramas of violence, death, and decapitation. The thinly painted earth tones are replaced by glossy, thick black; the dark tones are even darker. The population of the world he portrayed had narrowed to victims and their killers; the expressions on their faces range from indifference to resignation, from exhaustion to remorse, compassion, and grief.

Two of the extant paintings,
The Crucifixion of Saint Andrew
and
The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula
, focus on the moment of death, or, more precisely, on the moment when the inevitability of death is revealed and even desired. Saint Ursula stares down with sorrowful detachment at the sword wound that her murderer has just inflicted; behind her stands Caravaggio, in a pose almost identical to that in which he portrayed himself in
The Taking of Christ.
But whatever seemed excited or curious in the former self-portrait has disappeared, and the expression on the painter's face is that of someone barely managing to hold back tears. The saint at the center of
The Crucifixion of Saint Andrew
is so close to death—already his eyes have taken on a milky vacancy—that the soldier and the two onlookers at the bottom right of the canvas seem to be trying, as we are, to figure out if the old man is still alive.

Among the paintings that remain from those final months in Naples, two more focus on the aftermath of a beheading. Grief and guilt stream from the three figures—Salome, a servant, and the executioner—pictured in
Salome Receiving the Head of John the Baptist.
Unable to bear the sight of what she has done, Salome turns from the saint's severed head, while the old woman and the executioner contemplate it with such horror and pity that, though they could hardly be physically closer, they seem to be looking on from a great distance: the span between life and death.

Perhaps the most powerful and personal work that Caravaggio completed during his final months in Naples is his
David with the Head of Goliath
. Everything that Caravaggio knew about youth and age, cruelty and compassion, life and death, sex and suffering, has been poured, without hesitation or holding back, into this image of the delicate boy—probably the same one who modeled for the brooding
Saint John the Baptist
now in Rome's Galleria Borghese—holding, at arm's length, the head of the the bearded, shaggy, middle-aged man whom he has slain. The head of Goliath is Caravaggio's last self-portrait. His features are thick and misshapen. One of his eyelids droops. On his forehead is a bloody wound, presumably the mark of the fatal stone from David's slingshot, but which also suggests the disfiguring injuries the painter received when he was attacked at the Osteria del Cerriglio in Naples.

It is, we find ourselves thinking, the face of a man so reckless and desperate that, just a short time later, he would imagine that it was possible to travel in the heat of July, through the miles of swampland that separated Palo (the port where he was detained in prison) from Port'Ercole, and that he could walk from there to Rome. Death has already frozen Goliath's features into a rigid, Medusa-like mask, and what's most disturbing is that death has given him no peace, no relief, no release from the agony and horror of his dying moments, from the shock of having been murdered by a boy so much like the youths whom, in more peaceful and less desperate times, Caravaggio would have loved.

 

By that summer, the welcome news had reached Naples: Caravaggio had been pardoned, thanks in part to the intercession of two powerful cardinals, the art collector Scipione Borghese, and Ferdinando Gonzaga. Caravaggio was still, or still felt himself to be, in danger, threatened by the Maltese or possibly the Spanish. But with the promise of Gonzaga's protection, he appears to have felt safe enough to undertake the journey to Rome.

In a small boat, a two-masted felucca, the painter set sail from Naples. The ship stopped briefly in Palo, at that time a desolate outpost between Civitavecchia and Rome. It was there that the painter was probably mistaken for someone else, arrested by the Spanish soldiers, and detained until after the felucca had sailed away. Released from prison, Caravaggio set off in pursuit of the boat, which had gone on to Port'Ercole with his paintings on board, canvases he desperately needed as gifts for the influential Romans who had arranged his pardon.

As Bellori commented, “Bad luck did not abandon him.” Caravaggio resolved to catch up with the felucca in Port'Ercole, to travel sixty miles up the coast in the blistering heat of summer, and to retrieve his paintings. And so began the last in the series of mishaps that, this time, ended in death—a lonely and miserable death, most likely in the infirmary of the pretty fortress town of Port'Ercole, a town that has now become a fashionable and popular seaside resort.

Like so much else about Caravaggio's life, even his last hours have become the subject of fervent debate. It has been claimed, for example, that he didn't die of natural causes—of malaria—but that he was murdered by the Knights of Malta. But the documents that have been discovered make this theory seem improbable.

As soon as reports of Caravaggio's death reached Rome, his collectors—principally cardinal Scipione Borghese—became obsessed with the fate of the lost paintings. Several works were discovered in Naples, while some were found in the possession of the prior of Capua, who had seized them on the grounds that they were the rightful property of the Knights of Malta. Eventually, Borghese secured the
Saint John the Baptist
that is in the Galleria Borghese, and by
1613
, he had also, in his collection, the magnificent
David with the Head of Goliath
.

 

Even on the quietest of days at the Galleria Borghese in Rome, there is always a crowd around the image of the brooding young David holding the severed head of the murdered giant. From the canvas, Caravaggio's face—weary, tormented, injured—confronts us with such magnetic intensity that it's hard not to be drawn in, hard not to lose ourselves in the rough beauty of his haggard features.

All these centuries later, the sense of connection, of communication—of communion—that we feel with the long-dead painter seems almost vertiginously direct and profound. Having spent his brief, tragic, and turbulent life painting miracles, he managed, in the process, to create one—the miracle of art, the miracle of the way in which some paint, a few brushes, a square of canvas, together with that most essential ingredient, genius, can produce something stronger than time and age, more powerful than death.

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M
uch of this book was written
while I was at the American Academy in Rome. I would like to thank everyone connected with the academy, especially Dana Prescott, Ingrid Rowland, Pina Pasquantonio, Lester Little, Leela Gandini, Chris Huemer, and Adele Chatfield-Taylor. I would also like to thank Ingrid and Dana for the walking tour of Rome's Caravaggio sites, and for Ingrid's suggestion that Helen Langdon's marvelous Caravaggio biography,
Caravaggio: A Life
, be referred to as the ultimate authority on much-debated questions concerning Caravaggio's life. This book could simply not have been written without Langdon's thoughtful and lucid work. Shilpa Prasad was immensely helpful and generous in agreeing to read the manuscript and offering incisive corrections and suggestions. Finally, I'd like to thank my editors, Terry Karten and James Atlas, my agent, Denise Shannon—and, as always, my family.

FRANCINE PROSE
is the author of fourteen books of fiction, including, most recently,
A Changed Man and Blue Angel,
which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her works of nonfiction include the national bestseller
The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women and the Artists They Inspired.
A recipient of numerous grants and awards, among them Guggenheim and Fulbright fellowships, Prose was a Director's Fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She lives in New York City.

 

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