Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [163]
For his part, the perfume-maker said that he had had nothing to do with any of it. He had never been in prison before, he said. It was unfair. He had only been going for a walk on the Via del Babuino. During his one night in jail, he had clearly been struck by Caravaggio’s confidence in his powerful patrons. The perfumier remembered the painter saying, ‘Whatever happens, I’ll be out tomorrow.’
It is clear from Caravaggio’s testimony that this had been only one of several run-ins with the police in the autumn of 1604. He was accused of using offensive language to the sbirro who had arrested him, Corporal Malanno. Caravaggio answered that the said Malanno had a grudge against him. The policeman was hostile and insulting whenever he bumped into him, the painter complained, but he stoutly denied having called the arresting officer a ‘cocksucker’ on the night in question.
A month later Caravaggio was stopped again, late at night, walking along a narrow conduit called the Chiavica del Bufalo. The arresting officer filed his report on 18 November 1604:
Five hours after nightfall at the Conduit of the Bufalo, Michelangelo da Caravaggio, who was carrying a sword and dagger, was halted by my men. When asked if he had a licence, he answered, ‘Yes,’ and presented it, and so he was dismissed, and I told him he could leave, and said, ‘Goodnight, sir.’ He replied loudly, ‘You can stick it up your arse,’ and so I arrested him, since I did not wish to bear such a thing. I ordered my men to take him, and when he was bound he said, ‘You and everyone with you can shove it up your arses.’ And so I put him in the jail of the Tor di Nona.76
As always the evidence is fragmentary, but what we have of it at the end of 1604 strongly suggests a life going awry. Caravaggio is living in rented accomodation with only his apprentice Cecco for company. He has several commissions but works at them in sporadic bursts. He flares up at the merest hint of an insult. He goes looking for trouble late at night and even manages to pick a fight with the police when they are on the point of letting him go.
Winter came and went with little sign of Caravaggio doing much in the way of work: no pictures from his hand are known from these months. His former rival, Annibale Carracci, had fallen into a deep melancholy after the completion of the Farnese Gallery, so deep that it prevented him from working altogether. In the terminology of the time, Caravaggio was choleric rather than melancholic, but he too seems to have been afflicted by some form of painter’s block. By early 1605 his debts had begun to mount up. His rent was in arrears. His landlady, Prudentia Bruni, kept sending him reminders that he studiously ignored.
Meanwhile the city was in a state of political flux. Clement VIII took to his bed in February 1605 and died on 3 March after a short illness. The supporters of the French faction in Rome rejoiced when Alessandro de’ Medici was elected as Pope Leo XI, but he was frail and old and soon after his election he too died, on 27 April. Rome was a turbulent city at the best of times, but it was doubly unstable whenever the papal throne was empty. During this interregnum normal government was effectively suspended. According to long tradition, a blanket amnesty was given to the inmates of the city’s jails. The felons celebrated their newfound freedom with predictable exuberance. The regular civic authorities tried to maintain their grip on the population, but their jurisdiction was frequently contested at such times by the caporioni, the heads of the city districts.77
Three days after the