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the story of Caravaggio’s jealous attack on a Florentine painter called Domenico Passignano. Passignano’s sin had been to secure the coveted commission to paint an altarpiece for St Peter’s. One day his assistant was alone with the unfinished picture, which was still curtained off from public scrutiny, when Caravaggio went to take a look. Showing ‘no respect for place or person’, he drew his sword, cut a slit in the fabric and poked his head through the hole. His assessment of the work in progress was predictably caustic: ‘As bad as I thought, from a painter like him’.70 The message was presumably passed on to Passignano by his startled apprentice. The legend was soon absorbed into the collective memory of the Italian artist.

Caravaggio was picking fights with other people too. On 24 April 1604 he got into an argument with a waiter at one of his local restaurants, the Osteria del Moro, or ‘Tavern of the Blackamoor’. In the course of an altercation concerning artichokes, he smashed a plate against the man’s face. Stopping only to have his wound dressed at the barber-surgeon’s, the waiter took his grievance straight to court. He gave his name as Pietro de Fossaccia and declared that he was originally from Lago Maggiore. This is his testimony against Caravaggio:

At about seventeen hours [half past twelve] the above-named defendant with two other men was eating in the Tavern of the Blackamoor, near the Church of the Magdalen, where I am employed as a waiter. I had brought him eight cooked artichokes, to wit, four cooked in butter and four in oil, and the said defendant asked me which were done in butter and which in oil. I replied: ‘Smell them, and you will easily know which are cooked in butter and which in oil.’ Thereupon, he flew into a rage and without further words seized an earthen plate and flung it in my face. It hit me here in the left cheek, wounding me slightly. Then he got up and snatched the sword of one of his companions, which was lying on the table, perhaps with intent to strike me. But I got away from him, and came here to the office to file a complaint.

A copyist called Pietro Antonio de Madii, from Piacenza, had also eaten at the Tavern of the Blackamoor that lunchtime. He was called as an eyewitness. He partially corroborated the waiter’s story. But, in recalling the exact words that had been exchanged, he shed new light on the incident. The verbal precision of his evidence may have reflected the habits of his work, as a transcriber of others’ words:

I was dining at the Tavern of the Blackamoor. On the other side of the room there was Michelangelo da Caravaggio, the painter. I heard him ask whether the artichokes were done in oil or butter, they being all in one plate. The waiter said: ‘I don’t know’, and picked one up and and put it to his nose. Michelangelo took it badly and sprang to his feet in a rage, saying: ‘It seems to me, you fucked-over cuckold, that you think you’re speaking to some kind of vulgar provincial [barone].’ And he seized the plate and threw it at the waiter’s face. I did not see Michelangelo grasp the sword to threaten the waiter.71

Caravaggio was being touchy about status again. The fight may have been sparked by a question about butter and olive oil, but the argument was really about something else. The painter was accusing the waiter of a quasi-racist insult. The Romans were proud of their olive oil – Montaigne had remarked on its quality when he visited the city – and scorned northern Italians for lacking the discrimination to appreciate its fine but faintly bitter taste. Lombards were easily caricatured as cowherds from far-off plains and mountains, who thought a meal was not a real meal unless it was dripping with butter and cheese. The painter accused the waiter of taking him for a barone, which has been imperfectly translated above as ‘vulgar provincial’. Its literal meaning is ‘baron’, but used ironically, in the language of demotic insult, it means the opposite – a low parody of an aristocrat, somebody from the sticks who thinks he has taste but actually has none.