Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [173]
Masetti’s next letter, of 24 August, shows that the Este agent was now trying to put pressure on Caravaggio through del Monte:
When I heard that Caravaggio had appeared in Rome in hope of a settlement, I petitioned Cardinal del Monte to command him to despatch Your Highness’s painting, which he promised me would be ready quickly, though one can’t rely on [Caravaggio]. It is said that he is funny in the head [‘e uno cervello stravantissimo’; literally, ‘he is a very extravagant brain’] and also that Prince Doria sought to have him paint a loggia for him [in Genoa] and wanted to give him 6,000 scudi for it, but that he didn’t want to accept, though he had almost promised. It occurred to me to sound out whether, under these circumstances of his non-attendance [in Rome], he would be happy to move there [to Modena], where he could have given every satisfaction to Your Highness. But seeing that he is so unstable I have done no more.98
Caravaggio’s refusal of a prince’s ransom for the small task of decorating a loggia struck Masetti as typically capricious. But the painter had never learned to work in fresco, so he could not have accepted the commission even if he had wanted to. Besides, he had business to attend to in Rome. Apart from anything else, he needed to arrange some more modelling sessions with Lena and finish off the overdue Madonna of Loreto.
Caravaggio was indeed back in Rome a week or so before the end of the month. On 26 August he signed a judicial peace with Mariano Pasqualone. Damages had probably been paid, although the legal conventions governing such documents made it sound like a gentleman’s agreement: ‘the above-named parties, exhorted and persuaded by mutual friends, determined to make peace as befits good Christians …’99
In exchange for a pardon from the Governor of Rome, Caravaggio put his name to the declaration:
I, Michelangelo Merisi, having been insulted by Messer Mariano, clerk of the Vicar’s Court, as he would not wear a sword in the daytime, resolved to strike him wherever I should meet him. One night, having come upon him accompanied by another man and having perfectly recognized his face, I struck him. I am very sorry for what I did, and if I had not done it yet, I would not do it. I beg him for his forgiveness and peace, and I regard the said Messer Mariano with a sword in his hand as a man fit to stand his ground against me or anybody else. I, Michelangelo Merisi, do affirm all the above.100
Pasqualone’s lawyers must have insisted on some of the more humiliating phrases in this fulsome apology. Did Caravaggio sign it through gritted teeth? Or did he simply regard it, phlegmatically, as a means to an end? Assault with a lethal weapon was a serious crime. He had been let off lightly. Intriguingly, the judicial peace was actually signed at the Palazzo Quirinale, in the antechamber of the papal nephew, Scipione Borghese. It is possible that the new Borghese cardinal had helped to arrange Caravaggio’s truce with Pasqualone. It was at around this time that Caravaggio’s darkly penitential depiction of St Jerome Writing entered Scipione Borghese’s collection. Perhaps the work was a gift, in recognition of a favour received. It is a strikingly sombre painting. The wizened and emaciated figure of Jerome sits in semi-darkness, writing in a great book. His deeply shadowed face and the bald dome of his head are modelled so severely, in chiaroscuro, as to resemble the skull that lies on the desk before him as a memento mori. It is a morbid visual rhyme.
Getting on with his life turned out to be more difficult than Caravaggio might have hoped. While he was away in Genoa, his infuriated landlady