Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [222]
The timing of his offence could not have been more perversely precise. Caravaggio had managed to get himself thrown into jail on the eve of one of the most important days in the calendar of the Knights of Malta: 29 August was the Feast of the Decollato, the day on which the order gathered in the Oratory of St John to remember the decapitation of its patron saint. In 1608, it was also the day Wignacourt had chosen to unveil Caravaggio’s monumental altarpiece of The Beheading of St John. But instead of attending in his knight’s robes, the painter now languished in an underground cell.
The ‘tumult’ cast a long shadow over the celebrations of the feast of the Decollato. To make matters worse a dispute had arisen between the confraternity responsible for arranging those celebrations, the Compagnia di San Giovanni Decollato, and the musicians of the Conventual Church – including, coincidentally, Fra Prospero Coppini, the organist whose door Caravaggio had helped to kick in. The musicians were unhappy about their pay and most of them went on strike, so that on the feast day itself neither Vespers nor the solemn Mass was sung in the oratory before Caravaggio’s picture. The unveiling for which Wignacourt had planned so carefully could hardly have gone more badly wrong.
‘A ROTTEN AND DISEASED LIMB’
Caravaggio spent the entire month of September detained in the guva, an underground cell cut directly into the rock of the Castel Sant’Angelo. It is a bell-shaped chamber, eleven feet deep, sealed by a heavy trap door, and reserved for knights who had been guilty of serious offences. The traces of their presence remain in the form of several melancholy graffiti, one of which records the last-known words of a sixteenth-century Scottish Knight of Malta, one John Sandilands: ‘imprisoned forever, victim of evil triumphing over good – so much for friendship’.76
Caravaggio’s own thoughts were less mournful and more pragmatic. Few had ever broken out of the Castel Sant’Angelo, while escape from the guva itself was unheard of, but he was determined to do so. Even if he could scale the walls of the rock-cut cell, he would then need to climb the ramparts of the castle itself. After that he would have to lower himself down a sheer 200-foot precipice to the sea. To do all this he would need help.
Getting off Malta itself would pose a whole tangle of other problems. Caravaggio would need a boat, skippered by a brave and corruptible captain. But the boat would be unable to collect him at the bottom of the castle cliff, because the only way to the open sea from there lay through the narrow opening of Valletta’s Grand Harbour. Any vessel attempting to escape by that route would certainly have been spotted by the order’s patrols. The journey would have to be made from one of the island’s many small bays, and by night, to avoid detection. This meant that Caravaggio would have to swim round the promontory on which the Castel Sant’Angelo stood, then make his way to a quieter part of the island by foot, to wait for the vessel skippered by his accomplice. From there, the most logical destination would be Sicily, the nearest part of the mainland, some sixteen hours away with a favourable headwind.
Somehow, Caravaggio did indeed manage all of this. By the end of October 1608 he was in the Sicilian port town of Syracuse, some sixty miles from Malta. Bellori describes the artist’s great escape in a single terse sentence: ‘In order to free himself he was exposed to grave danger, but he managed to scale the prison walls at night and to flee unrecognized to Sicily, with such speed that no one could