• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Shortly after this, Salini added, Longhi challenged him to a swordfight again, ‘near the door of the friars’ cloister’. When he refused to rise to the bait, Longhi went to wait at Salini’s home on the corner of Via della Croce. When Baglione and Salini got there, he shouted at them to arm themselves, but still they refused to fight with him. Salini went to see his tailor and Baglione went into ‘the baker’s shop that sells bread, wine and charcoal’. (Were it not for this aside in Salini’s testimony, it might never have been known that bakers in the artists’ quarter of seventeenth-century Rome sold charcoal from their bread-ovens to painters.)

The tale of provocation ends there, with Salini trying on shirts and Baglione buying artist’s materials and the enraged Longhi left yelling in the street. The story as Salini had told it was confirmed by another eyewitness, Lazzaro Visca, a barber. True to his profession, he added one small tonsorial detail to the picture: the infuriated Longhi had a red beard.

A DAGGER, A PAIR OF EARRINGS, A WORN-OUT BELT

Onorio Longhi left the custody of the sbirri with a caution as the enmity between rival factions of artists rumbled on. Caravaggio had not been involved in the latest fracas, if only because he was away from Rome at the time. He had left the city shortly after the collapse of the libel trial, to research a new picture he had been asked to paint.

In early September 1603 the heirs of Ermete Cavalletti had acquired a chapel in the church of Sant’Agostino. Caravaggio was in prison at the time, but immediately after his release Ermete’s widow, Orinzia Cavalletti, commissioned him to paint an altarpiece depicting the Madonna of Loreto. Cavalletti’s late husband had been particularly devoted to the cult of Loreto, a small town in the Marches, east of Rome, which was home to the fabled Holy House of the Virgin Mary, and during the last year of his life he had organized a pilgrimage to the Holy House, then one of the principal pilgrimage sites in the Roman Catholic world. Caravaggio decided to familiarize himself with the shrine and its legend before starting work on the altarpiece, so he too followed the pilgrims’ trail. Orazio Gentileschi may or may not have asked him to pick up a few silver figurines when he got there.

While he was on the road, Caravaggio accepted another commission, this time to paint an altarpiece for the Capuchin church of Santa Maria di Costantinopoli in the town of Tolentino. The picture is lost and was nearly forgotten altogether, but in the late nineteenth century a scholar working in the town’s municipal archives stumbled on a letter about it. Dated 2 January 1604, it was sent to the priors of the town by a nobleman from Tolentino, Lancilotto Mauruzi, who was living in Rome at the time. He congratulated them on securing Caravaggio’s services and wanted them to know that he was ‘a most excellent painter, of great worth, in fact the best in Rome today’.65 He pleaded with them to treat the artist well, because if he created one of his ‘extraordinary’ paintings for Tolentino it would forever bring honour to the town. The fate of the work is unknown, but it must have disappeared some time after 1772, when the author of a local guidebook rapturously described it as ‘a singular and precious production of Knight Michelangelo Amerigi da Caravaggio, in which, in his strong and dark manner, he depicted St Isidora Agricola piercing a tree with a spike and miraculously bringing forth a fountain: the figure is so natural, seeming to be alive, such is the delicacy of the flesh tones … there are also other figures, transfixed by the sight of the miracle: in fact one could say it it is a miracle of art, so true to life does it seem.’66

Caravaggio went on to Loreto, for how long we do not know, but he was back in Rome by the beginning of 1604. In the aftermath of the libel trial, his life became increasingly unsettled. Having lodged for several years with powerful patrons, first del Monte and then the Mattei family, he was now living in rented accommodation. Not long after