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the painter’s future quarrels with the pimp. But they shed a good deal on the murky world in which both men moved. Ranuccio’s contacts and alliances may also be significant. His family’s patrons, the Farnese, were supporters of Spain against France, so the Tomassoni clan was closely connected with Rome’s pro-Spanish faction. This was true of Ranuccio’s friends too. Politics could have been one cause of bad blood between him and Caravaggio. But the artist’s relationship with Fillide may have been another: a mere painter was hardly a desirable client for Ranuccio’s most beautiful courtesan.

PAINTING FILLIDE

Fillide had been miscast as the virtuous heroine of Martha and Mary Magdalen, which is perhaps why that picture seems less than completely convincing. On two other occasions Caravaggio painted her more as the historical record suggests she truly was – tough, passionate, with a capacity for violence. Even though she only appears in devotional pictures, her presence in them tips the balance of his art from sacred to profane.

In 1598 or 1599 Caravaggio painted a startlingly sado-erotic Judith and Holofernes, with Fillide in the leading role. Like that of David and Goliath, the biblical story of Judith was a parable of underdog virtue triumphing over tyrannical might: the Jewish heroine of the tale seduces the ruthless Assyrian general and then slays him, with his own sword, in his tent. It was a subject that had been treated by many celebrated artists. Michelangelo had depicted Judith and her maidservant elegantly bearing aloft the tyrant’s severed head, as his corpse writhed in darkness, in one of the four paintings at the corners of the Sistine Chapel ceiling. The great Florentine Renaissance sculptor Donatello had created a famous bronze Judith in which the heroine hacks implacably at the neck of her victim. But even Donatello’s stark and visceral image pales by comparison with Caravaggio’s clinically violent conception of the subject.

Once again, the painter brought a scene from the biblical past into the world of his own time, but never before had he done so with such brutal, shocking immediacy. Sanctified execution in an Assyrian tent has become murder in a Roman whorehouse. The bearded Holofernes, lying naked on the crumpled sheets of a prostitute’s bed, is a client who has made a terrible mistake. He wakes up to realize that he is about to die. Fillide pulls on his hair with her left hand, not only to expose his neck but to stretch the flesh taut so that it will part more easily under the blade. In her right hand, she holds the oriental scimitar – Caravaggio’s one concession to historical accuracy – with which she has just managed to sever her victim’s jugular. She frowns with grim concentration, as he screams his last, and as the blood begins to spray from the mortal wound in bright red jets. A theatrical swag of dark red drapery hovers directly above the act of murder.

Caravaggio has imagined the whole scene as a fantastically extreme version of the kind of violent incidents in which he and his companions were often embroiled. ‘I want to cut you! I want to cut you!’ Fillide would yell at her rival Prudenza. Here, the threat is fully carried out. The heroine’s grizzled maidservant, readying herself to bag up the bloody trophy of a severed head, reinforces the impression that the action is indeed taking place in a darkened brothel somewhere in Rome. She is the stock figure of the procuress, the whore’s wizened partner in corruption.76 Caravaggio adds a sexual frisson to the thrill of bloody violence: beneath the diaphanous fabric of her tight-fitting bodice, Fillide’s nipples are visibly erect. It is the sort of detail that Cardinal Paravicino may have had in mind when he made his remark about pictures that he ‘would not have wanted to see from a distance’.

Judith and Holofernes divided Caravaggio’s contemporaries. Annibale Carracci’s succinct condemnation of the work encapsulated the reservations of all those who found Caravaggio’s realism rude and indecorous. ‘When pressed to speak his opinion on a Judith