Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [184]
On the night in question, Menici said, he had seen his friend Petronio sitting
in front of the Florentine ambassador’s, in front of the tennis court. He was with another Bolognese, who had only one eye, but I don’t know his name. I think they call him Paulo, but I don’t know his name and I don’t want to say what I don’t know [for sure] … I don’t remember exactly when the argument was, but it was a Sunday, and it could be about a month and a half or two months ago. I wasn’t present at the fight and I didn’t see who was in it or what happened. I passed through there because I was coming alone from the French ambassador’s house, and in passing I saw Captain Petronio and said to him, ‘At your service’ [this was possibly a deliberate irony, given Menici’s profession as a valet] and he returned the greeting and said, ‘Where are you going?’ I replied, ‘I’m going home,’ and he replied that he wanted me to wait, because he was waiting to perform a service, and that afterwards he would come too, but he didn’t tell me what service he wanted to do, and I replied that I couldn’t wait and was in a hurry.
So I left and went towards Campo Marzio, and the man who was with him left him and came with me up to Piazza Campo Marzio past the Manescalco, and said that he wanted to go and see a whore of his nearby. Then I went home. I don’t know if that man without an eye, who came with me up to Campo Marzio, returned from there to Captain Petronio. When I passed the captain I saw that there were others around him, besides the one I said, and they were armed with swords …
Toppa’s own testimony and his eventual fate are unknown. But the evidence given by the second witness called in his defence confirms that the contest between Caravaggio and Tomassoni was indeed a duel.
Thanks to the nature of Rome’s judicial processes there exist, in addition, four statements by those who saw and acted in the duel itself. Apart from Petronio Toppa, all the men involved had run away from Rome immediately after the swordfight. Having been subsequently summoned, to no avail, all were presumed guilty and sentenced to mandatory exile. Over the following months and years, each sought to bargain the terms of a return. As they did so, they were obliged to account for their actions on the night in question. The resulting evidence is patchily informative, but it does at least clarify the circumstances in which the second swordfight, between Giovan Francesco Tomassoni and Petronio Toppa – the duel within the duel – had started.
Ranuccio Tomassoni’s brothers-in-law, Ignazio and Giovan Federico Giugoli, revealed little as they submitted to the due process of law. In their petition for an end to their exile, they admitted that they had been present at the fight in which their kinsman had been killed, but said no more than that. The reason they gave for wanting to return to Rome was that their father, Flaminio Giugoli, who had paid the caution money for them, had died while they were away. They needed to sort out his affairs, or the family would fall into ruin.131
Onorio Longhi, from his native Milan, protested his total innocence in the killing. He had witnessed the fight but asserted that he had been there simply to keep the peace (hardly likely, given his record of inflammatory remarks, provocative behaviour and incitement to assault). He too said little of any substance about the duel itself and he finished, like the Giugoli brothers, by invoking his family:
Onorio Longhi in all humility declares to Your Holiness that in 1606 he was banished from Rome, as can be seen in the trial records of the Tribunal of the Governor of that city … because he was present at the murder committed by Michelangelo da Caravaggio on the person of Ranuccio Tomassoni, in which deed the speaker was not at fault. On the contrary, he accompanied Caravaggio as his well-wisher, so that no