Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [149]
The accused were kept apart, in order to prevent them getting their respective stories straight before the trial. Gentileschi was held at the crumbling Corte Savella. Caravaggio and Trisegni were kept in solitary confinement at the Tor di Nona. Their dark, single cells were on the first floor. Nearby was another prison known as the galeotta, so called because it housed convicts who had already been condemned to row in the papal galleys. It was a vivid reminder of the fate awaiting Caravaggio and his associates if Giovanni Baglione had his way.
Filippo Trisegni was the first of the accused to give evidence. He began by pretending that he barely knew Mao Salini: ‘I know a painter called Tommaso but I don’t know his surname. He lives near me on Via della Croce. I usually call him Mao and I believe he’s from Rome.’ But there was an immediate surprise in store for him. Salini had provided the court with a note written to him by Trisegni, requesting the loan of an iron helmet. The judge produced the note, which surely implied that Trisegni and his neighbour were closer than he had just said. He had written the note, had he not? Wrongfooted, Trisegni backtracked hurriedly. He could not deny that the note was in his handwriting. On reflection, he added, ‘the said Tommaso is a very good friend of mine, who lent me chalks and anything else I needed.’
It was not an auspicious beginning. But Trisegni managed to recover his composure when questions were asked – as he must have known they would be – about certain scurrilous verses. His responses were teasing and ambiguous, clearly intended to deflect attention away from himself, as well as from Caravaggio and the other suspects. He implied that a mysterious man called Gregorio Rotolanti had commissioned the verses from a yet more mysterious and unnamed man, a student of physics or logic – Trisegni was not sure which. Here is the main body of his testimony:
I heard some insulting poems about the said Tommaso told by Gregorio Rotolanti, and since Tommaso is my friend I pretended to like them and begged the said Gregorio to give me a copy. And so I went to his home and he let me copy some verses but I don’t remember exactly what they said. The wife of the said Tommaso was mentioned in it and he was called Mao and it said ‘Your pictures are woman’s work’ or something similar and I think they were on a quarter-page. After I copied them I went to see the said Tommaso and told him that he ought to be aware that while he was going around speaking badly of other people’s paintings people were speaking badly of him too. Then I told him I wanted to show him something that had been written against him and so I showed him that poem. I gave it to him and [Mao] pressed me to tell him who had given it to me and who had written it, but I never wanted to tell him because I didn’t want to cause trouble.
Yet he pressed me and named a lot of people and especially Michelangelo of Caravaggio, Bartolomeo, who was Michelangelo’s servant, and Orazio Gentileschi, a man from Parma called Ludovico Parmigianino, another called Francesco Scarpellino, and he asked me if the person could be one of them. I said to him ‘It could be any one of them – it might be one of them but I don’t want to tell you his name.’ I had been waiting for him to teach me how to do figures in cast shadows and then I would have told him. But he never taught me, and so I didn’t tell him.
But he did beg me to tell him if I heard anything else about him. And so I spoke to the said Rotolanti, who said that he had another poem against the said Tommaso. Then on the following day we met on Via della Croce and went into the apothecary, where he let me copy some more verses that I think began with, ‘Johnny Bollock’. It was in a nice style and well written. But I don’t know much about verse