Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [187]
Like many other aspects of the Roman judicial system, sentencing was irregular and inconsistent. All those involved in the duel were sentenced to exile, but the precise sentences are not known and can only be guessed at by the different dates on which the various convicted men petitioned for their return. On this evidence, it seems that those on Caravaggio’s side were dealt with more harshly than the supporters of Tomassoni: Giovan Francesco Tomassoni’s plea to return, duly granted, was filed on 9 December 1606, and that of the Giugoli brothers less than two years later, but Onorio Longhi felt able to seek his own return only in the spring of 1611.
The most serious penalty was reserved for Caravaggio. As well as being sentenced to indefinite exile from Rome, he was condemned as a murderer and made subject to a bando capitale, a ‘capital sentence’. This meant that anyone in the papal states had the right to kill him with impunity; indeed there was a bounty for anyone who did so. The phrase meant exactly what was indicated by the etymology of its second word, derived from the Latin caput. To claim the reward, it would not be necessary to produce the painter’s body. His severed head would suffice.
Caravaggio’s sword and dagger, drawn by a policeman (see p. 287).
PART FIVE
The Alban Hills, Naples, Malta, Sicily, Naples, Porto Ercole, 1606–10
A Knight of Malta being Defrocked by Wolfgang Kilian (detail). The ceremony of privatio habitus took place directly beneath Caravaggio’s altarpiece, which can just be made out here at the far end of the oratory.
ON THE RUN
Caravaggio had been seriously injured in the swordfight, but he needed to get out of Rome quickly. After having his wounds dressed, he returned briefly to his lodgings in the house of the lawyer Andrea Ruffetti to gather a few necessary possessions – clothes, painting materials, whatever money he could lay his hands on. But it was not safe to stay at Ruffetti’s overnight because the sbirri knew to look for him there. So, accompanied by Cecco, Caravaggio went to the neighbouring Palazzo Colonna and threw himself on the mercy of his family’s first protectress, Marchesa Costanza.
Bleeding, bedraggled, wild-eyed with adrenalin, he confessed to the murder and asked for her help. Despite the seriousness of his crime, she gave it. For all his sins, perhaps in her eyes he was still the lucky child – the boy whose birth on the feast day of the Archangel Michael had once seemed like such a good omen, and whose very name was like a prayer invoking her father’s famous victory at the Battle of Lepanto. Caravaggio and Cecco were given a bed for the night. Early next morning the injured painter and his boy left the palace in the marchesa’s coach and four, bound for the safe haven of a remote Colonna fiefdom in the Alban Hills. As the carriage clattered through the streets of the city, its blinds were firmly drawn.
No actual account of Caravaggio’s flight from the city survives, so all of the above is speculation. But something much like it must have happened. The fact of the matter is that within a day or two of the murder the painter had indeed been spirited out of Rome, deep into Colonna territory.
He probably went first to Zagarolo, and moved between there and Palestrina, both small towns owned and controlled by the Colonna, some twenty miles from Rome and suitably