Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [207]
Giuseppe answered … that it was not fitting for a knight, named by the Pope, to duel with someone who was not a knight. With this politely cutting answer, he wounded Caravaggio more than he might have with his sword, for this talk so stunned and confused Caravaggio that he immediately (as he did not intend to defer the matter) sold all his belongings to the Jews for whatever he could get, and set out for Malta and the Grand Master with the purpose of soon himself becoming a knight …46
The tale is clearly a fiction, because Caravaggio was nowhere near Rome when he decided to go to Malta. But it has the ring of psychological truth. The unpalatable thought of lesser painters being dubbed knight may well have impelled him on his Maltese adventure.
Malta was not, however, a place where someone could simply turn up unannounced. The whole island was a fortress, and security was tight. No one was allowed in from the mainland without a passport and papers prepared by the order’s network of receivers. The receiver in Naples was a high-ranking official named Giovanni Andrea Capeci.47 Capeci would have had to gain approval from the Grand Master of the order on Malta itself before completing the necessary paperwork, and such permissions, especially for a fugitive from papal justice, were no simple matter. One of Caravaggio’s friends in high places would have been needed to broker the arrangement with the Knights of Malta. Who helped him? There are a number of possibilities, because several people in the painter’s network of patrons and protectors turn out to have had links with the Order of St John.
In the summer of 1607, at exactly the same time as Caravaggio chose to go to the island, two cousins of the noble Giustiniani family – avid collectors of Caravaggio’s work in Rome – were on their way to Malta to offer the Grand Master a family property in Venosa, near Naples, as a naval base for the knights on the mainland. Perhaps they were prevailed on to put in a good word for the talented artist with a criminal record.
Ottavio Costa, the banker who had recently bought Caravaggio’s second Supper at Emmaus while the artist was in hiding in the Alban Hills, also had connections with the Knights of the Order of St John. His wife’s uncle was Ippolito Malaspina, an illustrious member of the heroic old guard of Malta, and something of a living legend. A veteran of the great Siege of 1565, Malaspina had gone on to captain one of the Maltese galleys at the Battle of Lepanto, in the year of Caravaggio’s birth. In 1603 he had been appointed commander of the papal fleet, as a result of which he temporarily delegated his responsibilities on Malta and moved to Rome for two years – years during which Caravaggio painted some of his most highly acclaimed Roman altarpieces. Malaspina would certainly have known of the painter’s work and may even have met him. By the summer of 1607 he had been reappointed to a number of senior posts in the order, including Prior of Naples. He was very close to the Grand Master himself, a Frenchman named Alof de Wignacourt, having played an important part in Wignacourt’s election in 1601. The possibility that Malaspina’s advocacy might have been instrumental in Caravaggio’s acceptance on Malta is strengthened by the fact that one of the first pictures the artist painted when he got there – another depiction of St Jerome Writing – was done for Malaspina himself: the Malaspina family crest is prominently painted into the right-hand edge of the canvas.
This was not the total of Caravaggio’s contacts with the upper echelons of the order. The idea of going to Malta, to seek redemption for crimes committed, almost certainly emanated from his most constant guardians and protectors, the Colonna dynasty. A prominent member of the Colonna family had recently done