Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [220]
It may only have been at this moment of apparent happiness and prosperity that the full implications of being a Knight of Malta finally dawned on him. Not only was he bound to the island by the Grand Master’s whim, but obliged to live in strict observance of the statutes of the order. Sexual indiscretions were liable to be tolerated as long as they were committed out of the public eye, but any other disorderly conduct would be ruthlessly dealt with under the knights’ code of law. That meant no shouting or trading of insults, no fighting, no duelling with swords. For a man like Caravaggio, that was never going to be easy, especially in a town like Valletta. The city teemed with proud young noblemen from the different national Langues, intensely conscious of the most minute differences in rank and status. As Alof de Wignacourt himself remarked in a letter to the pope, ‘It is impossible, in a place where so many are devoted to the profession of arms, and where so much importance is given to points of honour, that there should not be numerous fights and brawls.’71
Costanza Colonna and her son, Fabrizio Sforza Colonna, must have known that they were taking a calculated risk when they sent Caravaggio to Malta. Their hope must have been that the ruthless military discipline of the Order of St John would persuade him to keep his temper under control. Everything went to plan for a while, as Caravaggio painted for the central figures of the Maltese establishment. But the gamble did not pay off. The painter’s pride in his knighthood came before his greatest fall from grace. Caravaggio’s character had always been a volatile compound, an uneasy blend of Lenten piety and the raucous spirit of Carnival. This was never more true than on Malta.
It is impossible to know what triggered the outburst that undid him. Perhaps it was his shocked realization that Wignacourt indeed wanted ‘not to lose him’ – to chain him to the island, perhaps not forever, but for several more years. Whatever the cause, just weeks after admission to the Order of St John, Caravaggio lashed out against its authority. In the space of a few hours he went from hero to villain.
The early biographers are vague on the subject of what went wrong for Caravaggio on Malta. Mancini does not even mention the incident. According to Baglione, who was better informed, the cause of the trouble was an argument with a Knight of Justice: ‘In Malta Michelangelo had a dispute with a Knight of Justice and somehow insulted him.’72 Knights of Justice were higher ranking than mere Knights of Magistral Obedience. So Baglione may have meant to imply an argument over status, which was just the sort of ‘point of honour’ liable to cause the frequent fights between brothers of the order mentioned by Wignacourt in his letter to the pope.
Bellori’s account is similar to Baglione’s, except that in his version of the story Caravaggio’s mercurial nature is the driving force behind the calamity. Like the hero of a Greek tragedy, he is a man ruinously undone by a fatal flaw of character: ‘He lived in Malta in dignity and abundance. But suddenly, because of his tormented nature, he lost his prosperity and the support of the Grand Master. On account of an ill-considered quarrel with a noble knight, he was jailed and reduced to a state of misery and fear.’73
Caravaggio certainly committed an offence on Malta, one serious enough to merit imprisonment. But for centuries the exact nature of that offence remained a mystery. Generations of historians combed the archives in Malta, where the great books of statutes, crimes and punishments are still preserved in the library of the Order of St John, but to little effect. One of the volumes stored there revealed much about the aftermath of Caravaggio’s crime, but nothing about the crime itself. Tantalizingly, a number of adjacent pages in that same book had been systematically and deliberately painted out with a thick layer of opaque pigment.
It was only in 2002, after the Maltese scholar Keith Sciberras had taken the initiative of X-raying