Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [230]
With a population of 100,000, Messina was as large and vibrant a city as Rome itself. North of Syracuse, it was separated by the narrowest of straits from Calabria on the mainland. Its port was one of the busiest in the Mediterranean. Messina was a town at the junction of east and west, Africa and Italy, and another centre of the thriving European slave trade. George Sandys described it as a stylish but dangerous place:
the meanest artificers wife is clothed in silke: whereof an infinite quantity is made by the worme … The Gentlemen put their monies into the common table (for which the Citie stands bound) and receive it againe upon their bils, according to their uses. For they dare not venture to keepe it in their houses, so ordinarily broken into by theeves (as are the shops and ware-houses) for all their crosse-bard windows, iron doores, locks, bolts, and barres on the inside: wherein, and in their private revenges, no night doth passe without murder. Every evening they solace themselves along the Marine (a place left throughout betweene the Citie walls and the haven) the men on horsebacke, and the women in large Carosses, being drawne with the slowest procession. There is to be seene the pride and beauties of the Citie. There have they their play-houses, where the parts of men are acted by women, and too naturally passioned, which they forbeare not to frequent upon Sundayes …95
Caravaggio’s situation was awkward and fraught with danger. The galleys of Malta were in the waters of Messina throughout the last months of 1608. Not only that, but some time before 4 November Fra Antonio Martelli had taken up residence as the order’s prior of the city. He is unlikely to have looked on Caravaggio’s transgressions with a fond and forgiving paternal eye, but his ability to move openly against the painter was compromised because in the winter of that year the order was in litigation with the Senate of Messina, a state of affairs that continued for the duration of Caravaggio’s stay in the city.
According to Susinno, Caravaggio’s fame had preceded him. He must have won the favour of the Senate, because his services were immediately in demand: ‘The new reputation of Caravaggio appealed to the sympathetic people of Messina, who always favoured strangers, and the impressive excellence of such a man was such that they wanted him to stay, and they gave him commissions.’96 Emboldened by Fra Martelli’s relative impotence, Caravaggio even had the cheek to present himself to his eager new clients as a fully fledged Knight of Malta. When the first of his Messinese altarpieces was consigned for delivery, the relevant document referred to the work as being ‘by the hand of fr. Michelangeli Caravagio [sic] Knight of the Order of Jerusalem’.97 Caravaggio was well aware that violation of the order’s thirteenth statute meant inevitable expulsion, so he cannot simply have been acting in ignorance of his own disgrace.98
There are suggestions that the painter still hoped to win a pardon from Wignacourt. According to Bellori, ‘hoping to placate the Grand Master, Caravaggio sent to him as a present the half-figure of Herodias with the head of St John the Baptist in a basin’99 – a work that can tentatively be identified with a painting of a similar subject now in the National Gallery, London. But by continuing to pose as a Knight of Malta, he must have damaged his cause further. The stony-faced Fra Antonio Martelli is unlikely to have been impressed and reported back, no doubt, to the Grand Master. Alof de Wignacourt’s desire to have Caravaggio forcibly extradited from Sicily can only have been strengthened by his insulting masquerade.
As Susinno suggested, the painter was soon hard at work for his new Messinese patrons. On 6 December a wealthy merchant named Giovan Battista de’ Lazzari entered into