Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [154]
At this point the notary reported, ‘He got confused.’ Again and again the magistrate pressed him for the truth about the letter, but Gentileschi just went round and round in ever-decreasing circles: ‘it doesn’t seem to be in my hand, but I know I haven’t written this note in this manner: it is like my handwriting but I don’t know of having written these things … the handwriting looks like mine, but I don’t think I’ve written this letter in this way, but it is my handwriting …’ It was not quite a confession, but he must have signed such a testimony with a heavy heart.
But just as the case seemed to have swung decisively against them, the defendants were reprieved. Someone must have told the Governor of Rome to call off his hounds, because on 25 September 1603 Caravaggio was suddenly released from prison. He was bailed under guarantee from the French ambassador, which strongly suggests that Cardinal del Monte, friend to the Medici and to France, had engineered his release. The condition of bail was that he ‘was not to leave his habitual residence without written permission … at the risk of being condemned to the punishment of galley slave’.61 He was also obliged to make himself available for a further hearing in a month’s time. In another document of the same date, Ainolfo Bardi, Count of Vernio, undertook to ensure that Caravaggio would offend ‘neither the life nor the honour’ of either ‘Giovanni Baglione, painter’ or ‘Tommaso, alias Mau [sic]’.62
In the event, there were no further hearings and the case was dropped. But that was not quite the end of the affair. By November 1603 Caravaggio’s friend Onorio Longhi was back in Rome. He wanted revenge for the ordeal of the lawsuit and tried to pick a fight with Baglione and Salini. This time, Longhi was the one who ended up in court, arrested for threatening behaviour by a sbirro who signed himself ‘Tullio, assistant to the head of police’. The events leading up to the arrest were described by Salini in his deposition to the court:63
I was in the church of Minerva together with my friend Messer Giovanni Baglione. We wished to hear Mass and while we were waiting I saw Onorio Longhi who was standing in front of us staring at me saying something very softly with his mouth that couldn’t be heard. Then he beckoned me with his head and I went over and asked him what he was calling me for. He started to say, ‘I’d like to make you swing from a wooden scaffold, you fucking grass.’ To which I answered that he was insulting me so in church but that outside he wouldn’t have dared say such a thing. Then, raising his voice, Onorio told me to come outside and said I was a fucker and a grass if I didn’t and that I should come out and he’d be waiting for me.
He immediately went out of the rear door of the Minerva and picked up a stone saying, ‘Come out, you scum you grass.’ Then I told him he was lying through his teeth and that he should put down the brick or we’d be uneven. And then the said Messer Giovanni Baglione came out and held me back and Onorio began to say, ‘There are two of you’, and a companion of the said Onorio, a procurator from Truffia who lives in Montecitorio, turned towards Messer Giovanni and seeing him with a dagger said, ‘Put the dagger down.’ Onorio, likewise, said ‘Get the dagger off him’, … and the said procurator approached him [and punched the said Messer Giovanni in the chest64 ] … and all at once Onorio threw the brick at Messer Giovanni, which hit his hat but didn’t hurt him. Then he turned towards me, but having a stone in my hand I told him to stop or I’d knock him down. All the same he came towards me saying, ‘You fucking grass’, and so I called him a liar and entered the church and he went off with the said procurator.