Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [223]
Caravaggio was officially declared missing on 6 October, when
was heard the complaint of Lord Brother Hieronymus Varays, Procurator for the Treasury of the Order, made against brother Michael Angelo Marresi [sic] de Caravaggio who while detained in the prison of the Castle of St Angelo fled from it without permission of the most illustrious and most exalted Lord the Grand Master and departed secretly from the district, against the form of the Statute 13 concerning prohibitions and penalties: the most Illustrious and most exalted Lord the Grand Master and Venerable Council commissioned the Lord Brothers Joanni Honoret and Bladius Suarez that, through the agency of the Master Shield-Bearer, they should see that all due diligence is shown in finding out the said Brother Michael Angelo and in summoning him to appear, and should gather information about his flight …78
There is a strong implication here that an expeditionary force was sent to recapture Caravaggio and render him up to the Maltese court to face sentence both for the assault on the Conte della Vezza and for his defiance in fleeing the island. The Grand Master was known to be extremely severe on knights who transgressed Statute 13 of the order’s legal code by leaving Malta without his permission. He insisted that all fugitives be returned to Valletta at once, preferably in secrecy. It was his normal practice in such cases to write to all the order’s receivers in the major cities and ports of Europe to demand the immediate detainment of the renegade knight.79 Yet seven weeks later Caravaggio was still at large in Sicily, having evaded whatever attempts had been made to rearrest him. On 27 November, his trial on Malta went ahead in his absence. The Venerable Council determined that he had escaped from prison using ropes. It decided to disgrace him and deprive him of his habit. At the same time, the council heard and passed judgement in the case of the August assault. Four of the six guilty knights were sentenced to jail terms, while the church deacon, Giovanni Pietro de Ponte, was to be defrocked like Caravaggio.
According to Maltese custom, criminal trials and ceremonial punishments were carried out in the Oratory of St John, where Caravaggio’s Beheading of St John now hung directly over the main altar. So four days after the trial, on 1 December 1608, the ritual defrocking known as the privatio habitus took place in that very room. The archive records that ‘a General Assembly was summoned of the Venerable Bailiffs, the Priors, Preceptors and Brothers in the Church and Oratory of St John our patron, at the sound of the bell, according to the ancient and praiseworthy custom of the Holy Order of St John of Jerusalem … the information inspected and carefully read out against Michelangelo Merisi de Caravaggio …’80
Wolfgang Kilian’s mid seventeenth-century engraving of a criminal trial on Malta conjures up the scene of Caravaggio’s privatio habitus. On either side of the Oratory of St John sit the massed ranks of the order’s Grand Crosses. In December 1608 they would have included not only the artist’s most prominent patrons such as Antonio Martelli, but also many other veterans of the great sea and land battles of recent European history – survivors of the Great Siege, of Lepanto, perhaps even the Spanish Armada. Before this assembly of heroes, Caravaggio’s greatest humiliation was to take place.
In Kilian’s engraving (see p. 328), the Grand Master sits, just as Alof de Wignacourt would have done, at the near end of the church. At the far end, the guilty knight kneels, directly beneath Caravaggio’s depiction of St John’s decapitation. Because Caravaggio was to be defrocked in absentia, a wooden stool draped with the habit of a Knight of Magistral Obedience would have been placed at the