Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [236]
From this moment on in the painter’s story, the light is diffused among a great many shadows. But certain facts are clear. As Bellori said, Caravaggio left Messina for Palermo, sometime around the height of summer 1609. Once again, he painted an altarpiece for the Franciscans, this time for an oratory in the possession of a confraternity known as the Compagnia di San Francesco. Perhaps in deference to the sensibilities of its members he painted a rather sweeter version of the heartbreakingly bare Adoration in Messina. The Virgin is still weary, still seated on the ground, but without the same sense of desolation and isolation. Comparison between the two works is no longer possible, since the Palermo version was allegedly stolen by order of a Sicilian Mafia boss in 1969, and has never been recovered.
Caravaggio did not stay long in Palermo. Within two months, at most, he was on the move again. By the middle of September 1609 he was back in Naples.111 Baglione says he left because ‘his enemy was chasing him’.112 Bellori agrees: ‘he no longer felt safe in Sicily, and so he departed the island and sailed back to Naples, where he thought he would stay until he got word of his pardon allowing him to return to Rome.’113
On his return to Naples, Caravaggio stayed in the Colonna Palace at Chiaia.114 With its vast terraced gardens, close to the sea, it was an idyllic retreat from the cares of life, with the added bonus of thick walls. The fact that Caravaggio had evidently been accepted back into the Colonna fold suggests not only that Marchesa Costanza had forgiven him, yet again, but also that she had negotiated some kind of truce with Alof de Wignacourt and the Knights of Malta. Her own son, Fabrizio Sforza Colonna, remained in post as admiral of the Grand Master’s galleys. He owed both his liberty and the rescue of his reputation to Wignacourt. In such circumstances, it would have been inconceivable for Costanza Colonna to have protected a known fugitive from the order. Whatever it involved, a deal must have been struck on Caravaggio’s behalf. He would presumably have been required to send some paintings to the Grand Master, as well as putting an end to the absurd pretence that he was still a Knight of Magistral Obedience.
News that Caravaggio was back in Naples soon got around and offers of work followed. ‘In Sant’Anna de’ Lombardi he painted the Resurrection,’ Bellori wrote.115 The picture does not survive, because the chapel that once housed it in the Neapolitan church of the Lombards was destroyed by an earthquake at the turn of the nineteenth century. But documents and eyewitness accounts confirm that Caravaggio, himself a Lombard by origin, did indeed paint a large altarpiece of The Resurrection of Christ for Sant’Anna. To judge by the praise heaped on it, it was a strange and morbidly enthralling picture, the lost masterpiece of Caravaggio’s later years.
Caravaggio’s patron, Alfonso Fenaroli, had obtained the rights to the third chapel on the left side of the church on 24 December 1607, six months after the painter had left for Malta at the end of his first stay in Naples. Fenaroli must have commissioned the new altarpiece as soon as the artist arrived back from Palermo, probably sometime around the beginning of September 1609. Working in the abbreviated and fluent style of his Sicilian altarpieces, Caravaggio finished it before the end of the following month.116 Nearly a hundred and fifty years later, the