Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [208]
In 1602 Costanza Colonna’s second son, Fabrizio Sforza Colonna, had been convicted of crimes considered so shameful that their precise nature was left unmentioned in the reports of the day. Following his arrest, he was taken to Rome and imprisoned while the pope considered his case. Costanza Colonna pleaded for mercy on her son’s behalf. In deference to his rank, the pope decided to give the noble prisoner a second chance. He was sent to Malta in ‘privileged exile’, on condition that he remain on the island for at least three years, placing himself at the service of the Christian faith. By 1605 this black sheep of the Colonna family was deemed to have expiated his sins, and had been elected co-Prior of Venice, a post that he shared with his uncle, Ascanio Colonna. The following year he was made a member of the governing Venerable Council of the order and elevated to the rank of General of the Galleys. There could hardly have been a better way for the grandson of Marcantonio Colonna, hero of Lepanto, to complete his return from disgrace and exile.48
A less exalted version of the same process of redemption seems to have been planned for Caravaggio. Costanza Colonna, who had seen things go so well for her son on Malta, may well have been the driving force behind the whole scheme. She had long taken a virtually maternal interest in Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, who was close to the same age as her own Fabrizio. What had worked for one difficult young man might work for the other.
A number of recently discovered documents place Fabrizio and Costanza Colonna in Naples in the summer of 1607. In fact they both arrived in the city just a matter of days before Caravaggio embarked for Malta. It has also emerged that he made the journey to the island in one of a flotilla of galleys commanded by none other than Fabrizio Sforza Colonna himself.
On his first voyage as General of the Galleys, Fabrizio Sforza Colonna had travelled to Barcelona to take delivery of a new flagship and a large number of slaves and convicts donated to the order by the Spanish crown. Discovering that the new Spanish flagship was poorly constructed, he had a replacement fitted out in the shipbuilding port of Marseilles. By the early summer of 1607 he was back in Italian waters, collecting his mother, Costanza, from the Torre del Greco near Naples, the spectacular seaside residence of the princes of Stigliano. The two of them carried on to Naples itself, where the final arrangements for Caravaggio’s journey to Malta would soon be concluded.49
So it was that on 25 June 1607, bearing with him the good wishes of his protectress, Caravaggio embarked for the island fortress of Malta. It is not known whether his faithful assistant and rumoured lover, Cecco, accompanied him. Probably, he did not: Cecco appears in no more of Caravaggio’s paintings after this date.
THE ISLE OF ST JOHN
The voyage to Malta was fraught with tension. The flotilla’s first stop was Messina, in Sicily, where Fabrizio Sforza Colonna received an urgent warning from Grand Master de Wignacourt. Seven large galleys from the Barbary Coast had just been sighted in the waters off Gozo, Malta’s sister island. Five of them had disembarked soldiers and mounted an unsuccessful attack on the order’s garrison there. Wignacourt suspected that the enemy had received intelligence about the imminent arrival of the flotilla from Naples and intended to engage them in battle. He was concerned about ‘the advantage that the enemy has because of the larger number of vessels and because our galleys are burdened and with provisions in tow’.50
By the beginning of July, the enemy vessels were still in Maltese waters, so Fabrizio Sforza Colonna continued to delay his departure for the last leg of the journey. Meanwhile, Grand Master Wignacourt sent a frigate from Malta to reinforce the flotilla. On 10 or 11 July the galleys of the order left Sicily. All on board would have been in a state of alert, fully armed for combat. In the event, the journey passed without incident. On 12