Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [229]
After explaining all this to Caravaggio, Mirabella was struck by the acuteness of the painter’s response. ‘I remember,’ he wrote, ‘when I took Michelangelo da Caravaggio, that singular painter of our times, to see that prison. And he, considering its strength, and showing his unique genius as an imitator of natural things, said: “Don’t you see how the tyrant, in order to create a vessel that would make all things audible, looked no further for a model than that which nature had made herself to produce the self-same effect. So he made this prison in the likeness of an ear.” Which observation, not having been noticed before, but then being known and studied afterwards, has doubly amazed the most curious minds.’92 To this day, the great cave – now part of the Archaeological Park of Syracuse – continues to be known as ‘The Ear of Dionysus’.
Judging by the portrait that serves as frontispiece to Mirabella’s book, its author was a dapper and fashion-conscious gentleman with a self-consciously quizzical stare. He waxed his extravagantly long handlebar moustache and favoured the Spanish style of dress, wearing a high-necked lace ruff over a dark, finely embroidered shirt. But Mirabella was also highly respected by some of the best minds in early seventeenth-century Italy. A year after the publication of his book, he would be enrolled in Rome’s foremost scientific society, the Accademia de’ Lincei – named for that sharp-eyed animal, the lynx – after his friend Federico Cesi wrote a letter supporting his application to the great astronomer Galileo Galilei. In Cesi’s words to Galileo, Mirabella was ‘a knight from Syracuse, noble by birth and very rich, learned in Greek and Latin, man of letters and most erudite in Mathematics and primarily in the theory of Music, in which he is greatly esteemed and admired by his proposer. He has already published a worthy volume on the Antiquity of his birthplace with diligent description of the same …’93 Mirabella subsequently became a friend and correspondent of Galileo himself. They exchanged letters about ‘spots on the sun’ and the astronomer lent ‘the knight from Syracuse’ telescope lenses on more than one occasion.
Mirabella was impressed by the empirical tenor of Caravaggio’s thought, and by his evident interest both in acoustics and in the mechanism of the human ear. Their exchange gives a rare glimpse of Caravaggio not as a violent criminal, nor as a probable lover of young men and whores, but as an intellectual and sophisticate. This was the same man who, in Rome, had moved in a circle of speculative thinkers and connoisseurs such as Giulio Mancini and Cardinal del Monte – himself another correspondent of Galileo’s – and who had befriended poets such as Giambattista Marino.
But Caravaggio’s remarks about ‘The Ear of Dionysius’ seem also to have reflected his increasingly apprehensive state of mind. The tyrant’s prison grotto was a potent image of his own contracting world – a ‘speaking cave’ where every movement was monitored by spies, every remark overheard by eavesdroppers. Behind the logic of his observation lurked a paranoid fear of surveillance and recapture.
LAZARUS RISING
Typically, the most strenuous efforts to recapture an errant Knight of Malta were made in the period leading up to his trial, and in theory the ceremony of the privatio habitus diminished the urgency of Wignacourt’s campaign to get the painter back to Valletta.94 But even if Caravaggio was aware of that, he did not feel safe in Syracuse. Despite the success of The Burial of St Lucy, Susinno records that ‘the unquiet nature of Michelangelo, which loved to wander the earth, soon after led him to leave the home of his friend Minniti’. He departed more or less immediately after the work was finished, not even waiting to see it unveiled. By 6 December, a full week before the Feast of St Lucy, he was in the nearby city of Messina. There, he showed