Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (51 page)

A month later Caravaggio was stopped again, late at night, walking along a narrow conduit called the Chiavica del Bufalo. The arresting officer filed his report on 18 November 1604:

Five hours after nightfall at the Conduit of the Bufalo, Michelangelo da Caravaggio, who was carrying a sword and dagger, was halted by my men. When asked if he had a licence, he answered, ‘Yes,’ and presented it, and so he was dismissed, and I told him he could leave, and said, ‘Goodnight, sir.’ He replied loudly, ‘You can stick it up your arse,’ and so I arrested him, since I did not wish to bear such a thing. I ordered my men to take him, and when he was bound he said, ‘You and everyone with you can shove it up your arses.’ And so I put him in the jail of the Tor di Nona.
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As always the evidence is fragmentary, but what we have of it at the end of 1604 strongly suggests a life going awry. Caravaggio is living in rented accomodation with only his apprentice Cecco for company. He has several commissions but works at them in sporadic bursts. He flares up at the merest hint of an insult. He goes looking for trouble late at night and even manages to pick a fight with the police when they are on the point of letting him go.

Winter came and went with little sign of Caravaggio doing much in the way of work: no pictures from his hand are known from these months. His former rival, Annibale Carracci, had fallen into a deep melancholy after the completion of the Farnese Gallery, so deep that it prevented him from working altogether. In the terminology of the time, Caravaggio was choleric rather than melancholic, but he too seems to have been afflicted by some form of painter’s block. By early 1605 his debts had begun to mount up. His rent was in arrears. His landlady, Prudentia Bruni, kept sending him reminders that he studiously ignored.

Meanwhile the city was in a state of political flux. Clement VIII took to his bed in February 1605 and died on 3 March after a short illness. The supporters of the French faction in Rome rejoiced when Alessandro de’ Medici was elected as Pope Leo XI, but he was frail and old and soon after his election he too died, on 27 April. Rome was a turbulent city at the best of times, but it was doubly unstable whenever the papal throne was empty. During this interregnum normal government was effectively suspended. According to long tradition, a blanket amnesty was given to the inmates of the city’s jails. The felons celebrated their newfound freedom with predictable exuberance. The regular civic authorities tried to maintain their grip on the population, but their jurisdiction was frequently contested at such times by the
caporioni
, the heads of the city districts.
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Three days after the death of the short-lived Medici pope Leo XI, simmering rivalry between the French and Spanish factions broke out into open street warfare. Soon there was a full-blown riot, with fighting spilling over from the Piazza della Trinità into the Via dei Condotti. The
bargello
of Rome, the city’s principal law enforcement officer, tried to restore order with his troops. But he was met, with equal force, by Giovan Francesco Tomassoni,
caporione
of the Campo Marzio district, his brothers Ranuccio and Alessandro, and their own ragtag militia. The ensuing argument revolved around jurisdiction over prisoners. The
bargello
wanted to take a number of men into custody, whereas the Tomassoni demanded that the men be handed over to them, for reasons that are not clear: they were either allies, whom the pro-Spanish Tomassoni intended to set free, or they were enemies, sought for the darker purposes of retribution.

The three Tomassoni brothers ended up in court over the incident. The outcome is unknown, but the testimony given by two eyewitnesses paints a vivid picture of the upheavals in Rome. The first to be called was Lieutenant Antonio Crepella, an officer under the command of the
bargello
who had been assigned to patrol duties on the day in question:

Sir, I was with the
bargello
of Rome, who was leading the entire constabulary, and we were walking slowly around Rome. When we were in Piazza Trinità we saw a large crowd of people towards Via de’ Condotti, who were quarrelling and had their swords out. So we hurried there and the people, when they saw us, ran off in all directions. Chasing after them, we caught seven or eight. We then led them off as
prisoners
towards Tor di Nona by order of the
bargello
. . . and when we were in the Piazza of Cardinal Borghese [Piazza S. Eustachio, in front of the Palazzo Borghese] the
caporione
of Campo Marzio, Captain Francesco Tommasoni da Terni, appeared in front of us, along with his brother Ranuccio, and another brother whose name I don’t know, but who is older than them, with a great crowd of people who were all from the militia, which Francesco captains.

He and his brothers were all three armed with swords, daggers and prohibited pistols. Some of the militiamen were armed with arquebuses, some with halberds, and some with other weapons. Their captain Francesco said to me, ‘Hey! What prisoners are these?’ I told him they were prisoners who had been fighting in Piazza della Trinità, where there had been people hurt, and someone may have been killed. He replied that I should stop, and that he wanted the prisoners himself, and that I should hand them over to him, because they were taken in his
rione
, and that he wanted to know what was going on, because it was up to him to account for these things. I replied: ‘Captain Francesco. Don’t get in my way. Let me go, and talk with Captain Girolamo, who is on his way. Don’t make [trouble]. These prisoners fought with us, and we can’t hand them over to you. Let us take them to prison, then go and talk to the Governor, and get satisfaction.

The said Captain Francesco answered me: ‘I want you to leave them with us,’ and put his hand to the pistol he was carrying, and his brothers also took their pistols, saying, ‘Leave them here! Leave them here, or we’ll cut you all into pieces, you fucking pricks!’ and their militiamen shouted, ‘To arms! To arms! Beat the drum!’ One of them pointed his halberd at my chest, saying: ‘Get away from here! What are you doing here? Get out of here!’ Finally, having surrounded us, the said Francesco, his brothers and the militiamen took the prisoners away from the
sbirri
and led them away themselves. Then they let us go, and I came straight here to the office to give my account.

The next, unnamed witness, another officer under the command of the
bargello
, was asked to identify the participants. He could only indicate Francesco and his brothers. His account differs little from that of the lieutenant, until he comes to the aftermath of the event:

And while we were waiting [at the ‘office’ where they had gone to report the incident] the
caporione
Captain Francesco Tomassoni came and said, ‘Go to the Heavens. The prisoners are mine.’ And we said, ‘Take them,’ but also that he would have to give us an account of it. Then he said, ‘Do us a favour, take us to the militia [Tomassoni’s own headquarters].’ And so we escorted him to his house in Piazza S. Lorenzo in Lucina. When we were inside we told him to make a list of the prisoners with their names and surnames, and someone who was dressed in long clothes began to write it. While they were being written down, I told him to make out the receipt saying that we had consigned them to him, and he replied: ‘I don’t want to make out a receipt, etc.’ Ranuccio, the
caporione
’s brother, came towards me and said: ‘I’ll talk with my brother Gian Francesco, who’s here in a house where the prisoners are, etc.’ Then the
caporione
and his people forced us to halt, saying, ‘Stop there! Stop there!’ and putting their hands to their swords and pointing them at us
sbirri
and prisoners. I know two of them, one of whom was Captain Ranuccio, and another one, an old man who is his relative.
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Giovanni Baglione was also a
caporione
during the period of the two Vacant Sees. His area of jurisdiction was the district of Castello. Perhaps his civic duties brought him into contact with the Tomassoni clan. Baglione would later describe Ranuccio Tomassoni as an honourable young man, which suggests that they may have been friends. Honourable or not, Ranuccio and his family were certainly well connected in Rome. When his brother Alessandro died later in the year of an unspecified illness, he was accorded the signal honour of burial in the Pantheon.
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On 29 May 1605 Camillo Borghese was elected as Pope Paul V. The new Borghese pope, considerably less severe than his predecessor, allowed the revival of the traditional nepotism of the papal court, ensuring that his nephew Scipione was elected to the cardinalate. The papal nephew loved food and art in equal measure and
would soon become an acquisitive collector of Caravaggio’s pictures.
But private and public domains were very different. The official religious style of the Borghese papacy would be far removed from Caravaggio’s simplicity and austerity. For major commissions, the graceful manner of an artist such as Guido Reni was preferred. The ground was being prepared for the soaring majesty of the full-blown Baroque style.

On the eve of Paul V’s coronation, Caravaggio was back in jail. He had been stopped yet again for bearing arms. When he failed to produce a licence for his weapons, he was taken to prison – not the Tor di Nona this time but the governor’s jail. The name of the arresting officer was Captain Pino. His testimony was brief:

Last night about seven hours after nightfall [3 a.m], as I was on patrol with my constables at Sant’Ambrogio on the Corso, there came a man by the name of Michelangelo, wearing a sword and dagger. Stopped and asked whether he had a licence to carry the said weapons, he said he had not. I had him arrested and brought to jail, and I now make my report, as is my duty, that he may be punished according to justice.

In the margin of his report, Captain Pino drew a little sketch of the offending sword and dagger. The questioning of Caravaggio followed. The court notary took down his responses and made a note of the outcome:

I was seized on the street of the Corso in front of the Church of Sant’Ambrogio. It may have been eight hours after nightfall [4 a.m.] for it was light, and I was seized because I had a sword and dagger.

I have no written licence to carry a sword and dagger. However, the Governor of Rome had given oral orders to the captain and his corporal to let me carry them. I have no other licence.

He recognized the weapons taken from him by the constables
.

He was allowed to go at large, with three days’ time to prepare his report
.
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Just what Caravaggio had been doing in the middle of the night is anyone’s guess. He is unlikely to have been up to much good. Six weeks later, on 19 July 1605, he was back in the Tor di Nona, having been cautioned for the crime of
deturpatio portae
, or defacing doors. A woman called Laura della Vecchia and her daughter Isabella lodged the complaint.

Deturpatio
was a specific legal term that can be translated as ‘house-scorning’.
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It was invariably a response to a perceived slight or injury. House-scorners generally operated in the dead of night, when they were less likely to be disturbed by the police. They often made a lot of noise, shouting insults or singing lewd songs as a prelude to the vengeful assault itself. Then they would throw stones, damaging shutters and blinds. Sometimes they would also hurl animal bladders filled with blood or ink to leave other visible marks of shame. Excrement was often smeared on to doors and door handles. Doodles were drawn, scurrilous graffiti in the shape of erect phalluses or cuckold’s horns.

The charges levelled at Caravaggio by Laura della Vecchia and her daughter do not specify which of these methods the painter had employed. The wording of the complaint against him suggests that the worst damage was done to the door of the house. That may in itself suggest the nature of the painter’s grievance. House-scorning was an almost exclusively male activity, and the most common perpetrators were men whose amorous attentions had been rejected by women. Had Isabella della Vecchia led Caravaggio on in some way, only to change her mind? Had Laura della Vecchia shut the door of her house – and therefore, metaphorically, the door of her daughter’s chastity – against the infuriated painter? Or perhaps Isabella was just one of the many whores with whom the abrasive Caravaggio mingled, and quarrelled. There is reason to believe that sex, in some form, lay at the root of the argument. As the spring turned to summer in the troubled year of 1605, even the painter’s relationships with women were going badly.

A CACKLING OF GEESE

Caravaggio did manage to start work on at least one picture in the heat of the Roman summer of 1605:
The Madonna of Loreto
, commissioned for the Cavalletti Chapel in the Roman church of Sant’Agostino some eighteen months earlier. Caravaggio’s painting was clearly shaped by his experience of visiting Loreto and its Holy House, which was said to have flown miraculously from Nazareth to Italy in the Middle Ages, eventually touching down in Loreto one night in December 1294. Protestants, predictably, dismissed the cult of Loreto as a sham. Even the credulity of many devout Catholics was strained by a legend according to which the childhood home of Jesus Christ himself had been aerially projected, by the force of miracle, from Nazareth to an obscure wood in the eastern Marches of Italy. The popularity of the shrine was sustained by its dramatic popular appeal, and by the persuasive rhetoric of its promoters. Louis Richeome’s influential tract
Le Pelerin de Lorette
was originally published in French in 1604, the year before Caravaggio painted his picture. Soon translated into Latin, Italian and a number of European vernacular languages, Richeome’s text was a bestseller that brought thousands more pilgrims to the doors of the Holy House.