Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [183]
Caravaggio, by then long gone, would never appear in court to answer the charges against him. But, as Baglione would later write, everyone else involved in the affair had run away from Rome too – everyone else except for the unfortunate Petronio Toppa. Onorio Longhi had fled to Milan. Giovan Francesco Tomassoni was nowhere to be found. Nor were the Giugoli brothers, whose father, Flaminio, paid caution money to the court on their behalf on 27 July.
The continued absence of so many of the participants casts considerable doubt on the story that the fight between Caravaggio and Ranuccio Tomassoni had been sparked by an argument over a tennis match. If that had been so, why would at least three apparently innocent bystanders, namely Longhi and the two Giugoli brothers, have defied court orders and gone into hiding? It made no sense.
The known facts of the case point to a very different explanation of the fight. The pattern of the evening’s events could hardly be clearer. Four men on one side, four on the other: two combatants, two seconds, four witnesses. An encounter on a tennis court, a flat field that was often also used as a fencing arena – as on the day back in 1600, when Onorio Longhi watched a fencing match take place on the French tennis court at Santa Lucia della Tinta. The fight between Caravaggio and Ranuccio Tomassoni was no chance row. It was a prearranged duel. The stories about a tennis match, a bet, a disputed call – they were all fabrications, tall tales put about by the participants themselves to hide what had really happened. It was an expedient pretence: duelling was illegal in papal Rome, and punishable by death.
By the end of June, when the first summonses were issued, Judge Angelo Turchi and his fellow investigators had rumbled the cover-up of a tennis match. By the second week of July, even some of the participants had given up pretending that it had been anything other than a duel. On 11 July 1606, a notary recorded Mario and Giovan Francesco Tomassoni’s acknowledgment of the writ served against Giovan Francesco. Writing in judicial Latin, he recorded their joint undertaking to do nothing in breach of the peace, in effect a vow not to take the law into their own hands – there were perhaps concerns that a vendetta might develop. He also recorded their plea for the conclusion of the investigation into Giovan Francesco, in ‘distant parts’. But the most crucial elements of this document are a couple of scraps of vocabulary. Not once, but twice, Mario and Giovan Francesco referred to the dispute between Caravaggio and their late brother as ‘a duel’.129
By the start of August, Petronio Toppa was well enough to undergo questioning.130 On 6 August 1606 Toppa called two witnesses in his defence. The first was Captain Francesco Pioveno, of Vicenza, who testified that he had known the Bolognese soldier for about twelve years. He gave a ringing endorsement of his former comrade in arms: ‘Captain Petronio, who’s been in the wars and has been a soldier with me in these two garrisons, in Lucca and Rome … I’ve known him as a soldier, and I’ve always considered him an honourable soldier.’
The second witness was Francesco fu Menici of Lucca. He gave his profession as a gentleman’s valet, although before that he had been a soldier. He had known Petronio Toppa for about eight years. They had fought together in the Hungarian campaigns of the 1590s. Unlike the first witness,