Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [185]
Giovan Francesco Tomassoni’s plea for his own exile to be revoked was more informative. He acknowledged having intervened in the fight between his brother and Caravaggio, and accounted for his own actions in some detail:
When the speaker saw his brother injured, bleeding and thrown to the ground, [any] obligations to keep the peace or pledges not to offend were entirely dissolved. He and the said Michelangelo standing beside each other, he wounded him [Caravaggio] in the head with a sword and would perhaps have killed him in the presence of others, save that the aforementioned Captain Petronio, and others, were present. The said Captain Petronio defended Caravaggio with a naked blade, and he [Giovan Francesco] wounded him several times.133
From this patchwork of biographies, letters, avvisi and witness statements, a clear picture of the fight can now be established.
Because it is a matter of honour between Caravaggio and his long-standing enemy, they must be allowed to settle it alone. According to custom, the duellists’ seconds must promise not to intervene, while Onorio Longhi, the one-eyed Bolognese soldier Paulo Aldato and the Giugoli brothers must undertake to attend simply as witnesses. Once these formalities about ‘keeping the peace’ have been agreed, the duel can be arranged.
On the evening chosen for the settling of scores, the air is thick with foreboding. Toppa, the painter’s appointed second, is ready and waiting in front of the tennis court. As the evening wears on, he is joined by one man and then another. Having briefly wandered off, the one-eyed soldier from Bologna returns to complete the group. Everyone concerned is trying hard to look casual, but they emanate a powerful sense of menace none the less. All are armed with swords, not a tennis ball or racket in sight. Somewhere nearby, Ranuccio Tomassoni is meeting his brother and his two brothers-in-law. As nightfall approaches, the vendetta is about to be settled.
The duel does not last long. Real swordfights are short and sharp, nothing like modern fencing matches. Tomassoni and Caravaggio are wearing no helmets or body armour, because that would have made their story about an argument over a tennis match completely implausible. They use the full width of the court, fighting in a channel formed by the two lines of their witnesses and seconds. At the climax of the duel, Caravaggio seizes the initiative and the tiring Ranuccio Tomassoni stumbles in his retreat. Caravaggio lunges at the groin of his fallen opponent, piercing his femoral artery. Blood spurts in jets from the wound. Caravaggio withdraws his sword and prepares to strike again, but at this moment Giovan Francesco Tomassoni steps out of line to help his ‘injured, bleeding’ brother. As luck would have it, the rhythms of the fight have placed him right next to Caravaggio at this critical moment. He draws his sword in a flash and strikes the painter in the head, preventing him from inflicting further damage on the stricken Ranuccio. Seeing this violation of ‘the peace or pledges not to offend’, Petronio Toppa draws his sword and saves Caravaggio’s life, at grave danger to his own. As he and Giovan Francesco engage, Onorio Longhi and the one-eyed Bolognese intervene to prevent further injury on both sides.
Meanwhile, Federico and Ignazio Giugoli do what they can to help their brother-in-law. Caravaggio, stunned by his injury, can fight no more. At this point the carnage stops and everyone disperses into the twilit streets. As Ranuccio’s friends carry his ominously still body towards the barber-surgeon’s on the Via della Scrofa, they unconsciously re-enact Caravaggio’s great altarpiece of The Entombment in the nearby