Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [119]
In favour of Michelangelo Caravaggio, summoned and prosecuted for a sword wound which he had inflicted on the hand of Flavio Canonico, a former sergeant of the guards at Castel Sant’Angelo, with the complicity of Onorio Longhi, without danger to life, but with a permanent scar … the most Illustrious and Reverent Lord, the Governor [of Rome], in view of the accord and reconciliation obtained from the aforesaid Flavio who was the injured party, ordered that the lawsuit … and all other documents existing against the aforesaid [Caravaggio] for the above mentioned cause shall be cancelled and annulled and that the same [Caravaggio] shall not be molested any further on the ground of the aforesaid incident …17
Flavio Canonico was not Caravaggio’s only victim that winter. On 19 November 1600 the painter was charged with a nocturnal assault on a young art student named Girolamo Spampa from Montepulciano in Tuscany. This is what Spampa told the court:
You should know that last Friday night, three hours after nightfall, while returning from the Academy [the Accademia di San Luca], where I had been studying, when I got to the Via della Scrofa – Messer Orazio Bianchi was with me – and I was knocking at the candlemaker’s door to get some candles, the defendant came up with a stick and began to beat me. He gave me a good many blows. I defended myself as best I could, shouting: ‘Ah, traitor, is that a way to act!’ Some butchers arrived with lights, and then Michelangelo drew his sword and made a thrust at me, which I parried with my cloak, in which he made a gash, as you can see, and then fled. Then I recognized him, whereas previously I had not been able to recognize him.18
Spampa’s description of the attack was confirmed by his companion, Orazio Bianchi, who gave his own town of origin as Lyon in France; he was the moderately accomplished religious painter Horace Le Blanc. Le Blanc’s finest hour would come in 1622, long after his return from Italy, when he was commissioned to design sets for the triumphal entry of Louis XIII and Anne of Austria into Lyon. His decorously idealized paintings, and the pattern of his later career, when he served for years as master of Lyon’s guild of painters, identify him as a pillar of the academic establishment. Although he was only about twenty years old in 1600, he was already a member of the Accademia di San Luca.
Caravaggio’s attack on the industrious young Spampa and his aesthetically conservative friend was not a spur-of-the-moment fracas: it was a premeditated assault that reeked of vendetta. Caravaggio had clearly lain in wait for the young student, tailing him through the dark Roman streets as he made his way home from the Accademia di San Luca. Revenge attacks of this sort were often carefully calculated. The convention was that the punishment should fit the crime. Is it possible that Spampa, keen to nail his colours to the mast of the academy, had been parroting Federico Zuccaro’s criticisms of the Contarelli Chapel pictures? Had Caravaggio been tipped off by one of his own friends and allies? If so, his response had a certain brutal logic to it. Spampa had been guilty of back-stabbing. So Caravaggio attacked him from behind.
The case went no further, perhaps because of lack of evidence, perhaps because Cardinal del Monte intervened on Caravaggio’s behalf. But there were other incidents besides, including one sighting of the painter that suggests he himself had been on the receiving end of a beating.
In late October 1600 trouble had broken out again between Caravaggio’s friend Onorio Longhi and Onorio’s brother Stefano. The pair were still arguing over their contested inheritance. Stefano had charged Onorio with assault and threatening behaviour. In the course of a three-day investigation of his grievances and accusations, the court looked into a number of incidents in which Onorio