Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [203]
FLIGHT FROM NAPLES
Clearly Caravaggio was held in deep regard by his fellow painters in Rome, despite being under capital sentence for murder. But he still had his enemies there. All had not been forgotten and forgiven. There were those who claimed that Caravaggio was still up to no good, still making trouble in the city even though he was in exile from it. Within days of his arrival in Naples, he had been accused, in absentia, of another attempted murder back in Rome. It was said that an assassin named Carlo Piomontese, working to Caravaggio’s orders, had tried to kill a man who was on his way into church to hear Mass. Carlo Piemontese was a painter, a man also known as il Bodello, a nickname for sodomites. The victim of his alleged assault was none other than Caravaggio’s old adversary Giovanni Baglione.
Baglione’s accusations are to be found in a series of depositions recorded by a notary in a Roman court of law at the beginning of November 1606:
Last Sunday at the 14th or 15th hour I was walking to mass at Trinità de’ Monti. I was alone, and wearing a sword and a cape. I was walking down the stairs toward the Medici gardens when, as I set foot on the last step the said Carlo, who was hiding behind a pilaster on the stairs, attacked me with an unsheathed sword and struck me a blow that hit me on the shoulder, and tore my cloak and coat, as Your Lordship can see when I show you here … [Then I, the notary, saw a black cloak with a cut on the left shoulder, and a coat with a similar cut] Then he aimed a blow at my head, which struck me on the arm with the flat of the sword. Seeing myself attacked in this way I put my hand to my sword also. In grasping it he wounded me in the said right hand, as you can see … [Then I, the notary, saw a little scar on the index of the right hand] Then we exchanged some blows and my sword broke, because I think that he was wearing a breastplate, or something else of iron. Then some people came up, and we separated.39
Until this attack, things had gone well for Baglione in the autumn of 1606. In September he had been knighted as a Cavaliere di Cristo. In October he had received the further honour of being voted principe, or ‘head’, of the Accademia di San Luca. Baglione believed that his success in the elections for that post had provoked the attempt on his life. Three weeks before the attack, he said in his evidence, Carlo Piemontese had come to the academy and attempted to disrupt the vote: ‘As he was not one of the Congregation, was under twenty years of age, and had no reason at all for being admitted, I told him that he should go outside until the principe had been chosen. He answered me that he was a painter like the others, and as he was there already he wanted to stay, but he did it in such a way that he was not balloted, and did not vote in the creation of said principe, and nothing else occurred.’
That earlier incident had passed off without violence, but Baglione believed his election had continued to gnaw at Carlo Piemontese. The would-be assassin was friendly with two other painters, Carlo Saraceni and Orazio Borgianni, who were themselves close to Caravaggio. Baglione believed that the three of them had formed a cabal, to block his campaign and ensure that a member of Caravaggio’s faction be elected instead. When their plans were foiled, they resorted to violence. He knew this, he said, because on the day of the vote for principe, his groom had seen Saraceni and Borgianni standing outside the Accademia with Carlo Piemontese, stirring him up into a frenzy. He had also been told – although he did not say by whom – that the mastermind of the whole plot was Caravaggio himself:
My servant told me that, while he was outside holding my horse, there came out the aforementioned Carlo, Orazio and Carlo Veneziano, and that they incited the said Carlo by saying ‘that prick