Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [100]
Once it was locked, he pushed me on to the edge of the bed with one hand on my breast, and he put one of his knees between my thighs so that I could not close them, and he lifted my clothes, doing so with much difficulty. He placed one of his hands with a handkerchief over my throat and my mouth so that I could not scream … and with his member pointed at my vagina he began to push it into me, having first put both his knees between my legs. I felt a terrible burning and it hurt me very much, but because of the gag on my mouth I could not cry out, though I tried as best as I was able to scream and call Tuzia. And I scratched his face and pulled his hair and before he could put it inside me again I grabbed his member so tightly that I even removed a piece of flesh. But none of this deterred him and he continued what he was intent upon, staying on top of me for a long time and keeping his member inside my vagina. And after he had finished his business he got off me.
Seeing myself free I went to the table drawer and took out a knife and moved towards Agostino saying, ‘I want to kill you with this knife because you have dishonoured me.’ And he opened his tunic saying, ‘Here I am,’ and I threw the knife at him; he shielded himself otherwise I would have hurt him and might easily have killed him. The outcome was that I wounded him slightly on the chest and he bled little because I had scarcely pierced him with the point of the knife. Then the said Agostino fastened his tunic and I was weeping and lamenting the wrong he had done me and to pacify me he said, ‘Give me your hand and I promise to marry you as soon as I am out of the mess I am in.’ He also said to me, ‘I warn you that when I take you as a wife I want no foolishness,’ and I answered him: ‘I think you can see whether there is foolishness.’
One of the most persistent trouble-makers in Caravaggio’s own immediate circle was the architect Onorio Longhi. He was just two years older than the painter and they had much in common. Onorio was from Viggiù, near Varese in Lombardy, close to where Caravaggio himself had been brought up. Longhi’s family had links with the Colonna dynasty. Onorio’s father, Martino, also an architect, had been called to Rome to work for the Colonna family. After Martino’s death in 1591, Onorio took on the family architectural practice, overseeing the completion of the church of Santa Maria in Vallicella in Rome, among other significant commissions. In between, he found plenty of time to get into trouble with the law. He was constantly in court, charged with disturbing the peace and a variety of other offences. G. P. Caffarelli, whose four-volume The Families of Rome was written between 1603 and 1615, described Onorio as ‘a little lawless leader for the youth’ (‘e un poco scapo scelerato per la gioventu’).59 He certainly seems to have been the ringleader of the group or gang that included Caravaggio. The architect and the painter were often seen together. Longhi was brash and talkative and generally took the lead, while Caravaggio tended to be more taciturn and veiled.
‘I am a gentleman … and I don’t care about anything, I just go to eat and drink.’ That was how Onorio defiantly introduced himself in a witness statement given in court on 4 May 1595.60 Like Caravaggio, he was all the more dangerous because he had connections with a powerful household. As a servitore of the Colonna family, he too could defy the general ban on carrying weapons issued by Pope Clement VIII. ‘I don’t carry a sword by day or by night,’ Longhi declared in a witness statement