Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (9 page)

87.
The Raft of the Medusa
by Theodore Géricault.

88. Still from
Mean Streets
, directed by Martin Scorsese.

Maps

Preface and Acknowledgements

This book has taken me a shamingly long time to write, more than ten years in total. My excuse is that I have had a lot of other things to do at the same time. For the first five of those ten years I was responsible for two weekly articles for the
Sunday Telegraph
(latterly reduced to one, to make life workable); in 2007 I had to stop work on
Caravaggio
almost completely to finish a book about Michelangelo’s paintings in the Sistine Chapel; and throughout the past decade I have spent at least five months of every year writing and presenting various television series about the history of art for the
BBC
.

While often frustrating, the many delays and interruptions have, overall, worked to the book’s advantage. Had I delivered my manuscript more quickly, I might have caused my miraculously patient and long-suffering publisher, Stuart Proffitt, considerably less stress. But I would not have been able to take advantage of numerous recent archival discoveries – a set of remarkable finds that cumulatively have transformed our knowledge of Caravaggio, particularly of his later
years. Because those discoveries have emerged piecemeal, often in out-
of-the-way academic journals or private publications, I have found myself in the unusual and fortunate position of writing about one of the greatest artists ever to have lived fully four centuries after his death, yet able to draw on fresh and important documentary material unavailable to previous biographers.

As a result, I believe I have been able to shed light on aspects of Caravaggio’s life that have until now remained shrouded in mystery
to all except the scholars most closely involved – including the painter’s
sexuality, the circumstances that led him to commit the murder of 1606 that cast such a long shadow over the rest of his life, and the events surrounding his imprisonment on the island of Malta. In addition I publish here for the first time some hitherto overlooked descriptions of the Osteria del Cerriglio, the establishment in Naples where he was badly assaulted near the end of his life in a vendetta attack. By returning to other previously discovered documents I believe I have also been able to offer a convincing solution to the riddle of how Caravaggio met his death in the summer of 1610.

My principal focus throughout is on the artist’s paintings. I dwell on them at length because they are the main reason to be interested in Caravaggio, notwithstanding the tempestuous drama of his life. Attentive readers will notice that I am less generous in my attributions than many other scholars of Caravaggio’s work: I prefer to be too rigorous than over-inclusive. It may be assumed that if I do not mention a particular picture, for example the frequently proposed
Narcissus
from the Barberini Collection, it is because I am not satisfied that Caravaggio painted it. The main exception to this is
The Annunciation
in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nancy, which is indeed a Caravaggio, but one so badly damaged as not to be worth discussing here.

I have incurred many debts in writing this book, above all to the community of scholars whose researches have yielded so much new information over the past half-century or so, especially in recent years. I am deeply grateful to Sandro Corradini for helping to guide me through the labyrinth of Rome’s criminal archive and for sharing the fruits of his twenty years and more of research there. Maurizio Marini took me on a memorable tour of Caravaggio’s old haunts in the artist’s quarter of the city and made interesting suggestions, which I have developed, about the significance of damage done to the ceiling of
a particular room in a house in the present-day Vicolo del Divino
Amore. Maurizio Calvesi generously communicated his insights into the painter’s ‘pauperist’ religious orientation, and the role that members of the Colonna family may have played in the various events of his life. In Naples, Vincenzo Pacelli showed me his archival discoveries concerning Caravaggio’s last painting,
The Martyrdom of
St Ursula
, and shared some speculations about the painter’s final days.

My thanks are also due to Peter Robb, who met me in Naples and sent me on what proved to be anything but a wild-goose chase on the island of Malta. On Malta itself I profited from conversations with Fr John Azzopardi and Keith Sciberras, who have between them shed much light on Caravaggio’s ill-fated attempt to join the Order of the Knights of St John. John T. Spike, who received me at his home in Florence, allowed me to see an advance copy of the
CD
-
ROM
catalogue and bibliography that accompanied his monograph on Caravaggio: an invaluable guide to the vast literature on the artist. My old friend Mary Hersov, former Head of Exhibitions at the National Gallery in London, has talked and walked Caravaggio with me far beyond the call of duty.

Helen Langdon, whose own biography of Caravaggio appeared in 1998, has also been extremely supportive throughout the writing of this book. In particular, she generously allowed me to profit from the time-consuming work that she put into combing through Riccardo Bassani and Fiora Bellini’s sporadically fascinating but deeply flawed book of 1994,
Caravaggio assassino
– the curate’s egg of recent Caravaggio studies – sifting the true not only from the false but also from the outright invented. Helen also set me straight at a particular crossroads in my research into the painter’s second and final stay in Naples, for which I am very grateful.

I have not spoken to Sir Denis Mahon in the course of writing my book, but, like everyone engaged in serious study of Caravaggio, I have benefited enormously from his pioneering work. The shades of Walter Friedlaender and Roberto Longhi have given me much assistance along the way, as has that of my old tutor at the Courtauld Institute, Michael Kitson, whose wisdom I sought to absorb along with the smoke of many amiably shared packets of cigarettes. I have drawn rather more lateral inspiration from the work of John Michael Montias, whose
Vermeer and His Milieu
of 1989 is a truly remarkable work. The shape of my own book has been certainly influenced by his, as well as by a meeting with Montias at his home in New Haven in the autumn of 2001. Without laying any claim to Montias’s eminence as an archival scholar, I have myself tried to spin a ‘web of social history’, to use his phrase – to convey, through an account of one man’s life and milieu, some sense of an entire lost world, in this case the civilization of Italy at the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth. Charles Nicholl’s books about Marlowe and Shakespeare,
The Reckoning
and
The Lodger
, have been among my other touchstones.

Writing about Caravaggio has been an intellectual challenge, but it has also been an adventure, one which has led me into some fairly unusual situations. With John Azzopardi’s generous help and the loan of a slightly rickety ladder, I have inspected the stone well, or
guva
, in which Caravaggio was imprisoned on Malta (I can now laugh at the practical joke of his pretending to lock me in and leave me there, although it seemed less funny at the time). I have duelled (after a fashion) with master-swordsman Renzo Musumeci Greco in his Roman fencing school, in an attempt to understand the sort of manoeuvres that might result in the emasculation of a man during a swordfight. I have walked along the quays of the old port at Valletta with the Maltese naval historian Joseph Sciberras, to learn about transport by
felucca
in Caravaggio’s time. I have been allowed to inspect the book of the dead in the parish of Porto Ercole by local historian Giuseppe La Fauci. I have spent some happy hours poring over Caravaggio reproductions with the film director Martin Scorsese, who generously gave his time to open my eyes to the artist’s importance for modern cinema. To these and all the others who have gone out of their way to help me – the boy who lowered that ladder down the
guva
on Malta, the sacristan who got the keys to the church of Santa Lucia in Syracuse, the librarians and archivists in London, Rome, Naples, Milan and Malta who found so many books and documents – a heartfelt thank you.

Closer to home, I would like to thank my producer Silvia Sacco for devising a schedule for my television and other work that made the seemingly impossible possible. Without her constant encouragement, moral support and ruthless deadline-setting, I really might never have written the book at all. Without the help of my researchers, I would certainly never have been able to finish it. Opher Mansour did a first-
rate job of translating Corradini’s essential anthology of archival docu
ments,
Materiali per un processo
, from a mixture of legalistic Latin and often difficult sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italian vernacular slang. Opher also allowed me to read his enlightening doctoral thesis about censorship in Caravaggio’s Rome and unearthed several eyewitness accounts of the plague that ravaged Milan in the mid 1570s. In the very final stages of the book, Nicholas Stone Villani took time away from his own thesis to travel to Italy on my behalf, where he found out the seedy truth about the Osteria del Cerriglio. My principal researcher throughout has been Eugénie Aperghis-van Nispen tot Sevenaer, who has been unfailingly helpful, resourceful and thorough in carrying out what must sometimes have seemed a daunting series of tasks. She also did the picture research for the book and secured the reproduction permissions. While running her marathon, Eugénie was ably assisted by Kasja Berg, who on more than one occasion responded to my plaintive demands for particular texts or documents with exemplary calm and efficiency. My mother and father, far more knowledgeable about music than I ever will be, kindly brought their considerable erudition to bear on Caravaggio’s early paintings of musicians and lute-players, greatly to my advantage.

I will always remain affectionately grateful to Roger Parsons, with whom I first began to explore the complexities of Caravaggio’s world such an absurdly long time ago. Stuart Proffitt has made extremely valuable suggestions concerning style, structure and approach. Donna Poppy, my copy editor, has improved my original manuscript immeasurably with her rigorous and unsleeping eye for sense, proportion, perspective and detail. Finally I would like to thank my wife, Sabine, who must have read this book ten times while I was writing it once, for contributing so many emendations, corrections and indeed fresh ideas – and also my whole family, for helping me to keep my sanity and managing to keep their own while enduring the difficult birth of this long-gestated child.

London, February 2010