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By Root 1435 0

had taken advantage of his absence to seize his possessions in lieu of rent, and change the locks on the house in Vicolo dei Santa Cecilia e Biagio. This occasioned the inventory of its contents, which was made on 26 August (see p. 271). ‘Two large pictures to paint’ were included on the list. Perhaps one of them was the half-painted canvas of The Madonna of Loreto, still in his studio but now frustratingly inaccessible. The other, most probably, was the incomplete and long-overdue Death of the Virgin, which had been commissioned by the jurist Laerzio Cherubini, to serve as the altarpiece for a chapel that he had acquired in the church of Santa Maria della Scala in Rome, all the way back in 1601.

Caravaggio decided to vent his rage on the landlady who had locked him out with another deturpatio. Just four days after he had signed his peace with Mariano Pasqualone, he was being prosecuted yet again, for throwing stones at her windows. The attack took place in the small hours of 1 September and later that day Prudentia Bruni was airing her grievances in court:

Last night at about the fifth hour [1 a.m.], the said Michelangelo came and threw so many stones at the shutters of my windows that he broke them all down one side, as Your Lordship sees.

[The notary adds: then she showed the wooden shutter broken in one part, and also some stones that were in the said window, which was noted down as evidence.]

And a little after this he came back with some others, playing a guitar; they stopped on the corner of the alley, and he talked with his companions, but I couldn’t hear the exact words they were saying.

The said Michelangelo did this because he rents a house of mine, which is beside my [own] house. Some days ago he wounded a notary of the Vicariate and left. I was owed rent for six [the notary adds: correction, four] months, and he had broken a ceiling of mine in the said house, so I had obtained a mandate … to take the things that were left in the house, giving a security in the form of the deposit, which I did. Because of this he broke my shutters in order to spite me. There were three others in company with him. So I am making this complaint, and demand that they be punished in conformity with justice …101

Four days later the magistrate examined two of the landlady’s neighbours, a woman called Francesca Bartoli and a lady called Lucretia, who was the widow of a certain Ferdinando, from Perugia. Each separately denied that she had seen or heard a thing on the night in question. But as Caravaggio’s recent neighbours, they of course knew what he was like.

Prudentia Bruni had referred to a damaged ceiling in the rented house. Might it have been caused by the painter’s unorthodox working methods? Caravaggio’s proto-cinematographic fondness for powerfully directed downlighting must have involved some ingenious studio set-ups. As we have seen, Bellori wrote that he placed ‘a lamp high so that the light would fall straight down’. Sandrart echoed Bellori’s remark, saying that Caravaggio liked to work in a dark space with a single source of light from above. In practice this might have involved a powerful flame, perhaps a torch made of pitch, the light from which might have been directed by the use of one of the mirrors in the studio. That would certainly have been enough to char the studio ceiling. Or Caravaggio may simply have taken advantage of the powerful, raking sunlight beating down on the roofs of the houses in his street. Perhaps he had got the effect he wanted just by blacking out his windows and smashing a hole in the ceiling to let the sunlight in.

The painter’s latest prosecution did nothing to lighten the mood of Cesare d’Este’s agent. On 7 September he sent yet another gloomy missive to his master in Modena. Neither of the two required pictures had even been started. There was no hope of getting anything from Annibale Carracci, who was completely incapable of working because of his depression. As for Caravaggio: ‘last Saturday, his contempt of court for wounds given to a notary was settled, but now there