Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [101]
One cause for his many court appearances was a festering dispute with his brother Stefano, which broke out into actual violence on more than one occasion. Onorio had been away when their father had died, and he believed that Stefano had failed to pay over his full share of the inheritance. In 1599 Onorio succeeded in having Stefano imprisoned for four or five months for non-payment of the debt. In the autumn of 1600 Stefano issued a counter-suit, in which he claimed that on 7 July 1598 Onorio had come to his lodgings with three armed companions, possibly including Caravaggio, and had tried to break down the door, shouting, ‘You cuckolded thief, I want you to die by these hands!’63
That was by no means the only accusation levelled against Onorio. The investigators who looked into Stefano’s counter-suit of 1600 also examined evidence linking him to a number of other unsavoury incidents. They were particularly interested in a long-standing grievance between Onorio and a certain widow called Felice Sillano. Under questioning, Onorio told them that he knew her and that she was a respectable woman. But he denied that he had once tried to beat her door down while shouting, ‘You whore, you slut, you coward!’64 That interrogation itself went back to an older, unresolved case. Another set of transcripts, from 1599, reveal that Felicita Silano (sic) had already sued Onorio – together with ‘Claudio, the stone-cutter’ – for threatening behaviour:
It is now two nights ago that the said Onorio came to my doors saying: ‘Open, you baggage and slag.’ Having left, he came back and wanted to kick down the door, threatening me with further insults. He said that if I spoke he would beat me over the head with his sword. This same Claudio came and did the same thing five or six months ago, inciting others, and particularly Onorio, to cause trouble at my door. I am not a woman to put up with such treatment, and therefore I am now bringing the matter before the court.65
The record of the outcome does not survive; probably, the case petered out.
One of Longhi’s biographers said of him that ‘he was naturally bizarre and had a head that smoked.’66 The quarrel with his brother and the dispute with Felice Sillano were a fraction of his misdemeanours, which ranged from the extremely serious to the utterly trivial. He would be present when Caravaggio committed murder. But he was just as likely to be found getting into fights with passers-by who made the mistake of bumping into him in the street, or shouting insults at tradesmen for showing him insufficient respect. Case transcripts for 1595 record a scuffle in a cake-maker’s shop, after he had gone in to buy ‘a certain type of soft white meringue’.67
The violent words and deeds of Caravaggio and his contemporaries may now seem random and chaotic. In fact, the behaviour recorded in Rome’s criminal archive conformed to a particular set of codes. To attack a woman’s house, to threaten to break down her doors, was also to insult her honour, because, according to the mores of the time, people’s dwellings represented the occupants themselves. A common way to cast aspersions on someone’s name was to commit the crime of deturpatio: daubing paint – or sometimes excrement – on to the doors or windows of their home. In such cases the front of the house metaphorically represented the face. But the locked home also represented the human body, secure in virtue, hence Artemisia’s emphasis, in her account of being raped, on the carelessness of the masons