Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [240]
That enemy was, we now know, Giovanni Rodomonte Roero, the Conte della Vezza. We also know that he left Malta shortly after Caravaggio’s escape from the island.131 That too is consistent with Baglione’s assertion that the painter was slowly but surely tracked by his enemy, who followed him to Sicily from Malta and finally caught up with him at the Osteria del Cerriglio. Since the facts to have emerged from the Maltese archive tally so exactly with the arc of Baglione’s narrative, it is only logical to believe that the rest of his account is also correct. He asked the right questions of the right people, and he established the truth: it was indeed a vendetta, begun in Malta and finished in Naples.
Whatever the painter had said or done to him on the night of the fracas in Malta, Roero had been left with a burning sense of grievance. Maltese Knights of Justice were not known for their propensity to forgive and forget. The Conte della Vezza was evidently proud and mercilessly persistent. He had a team of accomplices. This was the man who hunted Caravaggio down, who stood over him as he struggled, who cut his face.
After exacting his bloody revenge, Roero vanished from historical view. That too seems to have been part of his plan. He may have been helped by friends within the Maltese judiciary. Shortly after the revenge attack, all details of Caravaggio’s crime on Malta were carefully painted out of the archive there by an unknown hand.132 In this way, the artist’s name was obliterated from the great book of crimes and punishments. So too was the name of his victim and assailant. Having got his revenge, Roero meticulously covered his traces. Even Baglione, who plainly knew so much, never discovered the name of Caravaggio’s assailant.
TWO LAST PAINTINGS
Caravaggio seems never to have fully recovered from the attack at the Osteria del Cerriglio. Crippled and perhaps partially blinded by his injuries, he went into the limbo of a long convalescence. On Christmas Day 1609, two months after the assault, Mancini’s correspondence with his brother Deifebo communicated a solitary scrap of inconclusive rumour: ‘It’s said that Caravaggio is near here, well looked after, also that he wants to return to Rome soon, and that he has powerful help.’133 Negotiations for a papal pardon may have been progressing, but in truth Caravaggio was nowhere near Rome. Mancini had been misinformed. The painter was in Naples, presumably at the Colonna Palace at Chiaia, fighting for his life. He would remain there for at least six months.
Mancini’s letter apart, from October 1609 until May 1610 there is a striking absence of evidence about Caravaggio’s activities. He apparently does nothing, says nothing. The archive falls silent, like a cardiograph flatlining. It then flickers briefly, but only twice. Each flicker takes the form of a painting.
The seriousness of Caravaggio’s injuries is shockingly apparent in The Denial of St Peter, a melancholic and withdrawn devotional work painted some time in the summer of 1610.134 It is a terminally raw and ragged thing – an image snatched from the pit of darkest adversity, painted by a man who could barely hold a brush. The stark and pared down style evolved in Sicily has been appallingly coarsened. Three figures, two men and a single woman, confront one another in the shallowest of spaces. The conception is subtle, the composition strikingly original and the mood bitterly sad. But such is the uncertainty of the handling that the whole image looks disconcertingly unfocused. It is still recognizably a Caravaggio, but the brushwork is so broad, the definition of forms so unsure, that the painter seems to have fallen prey to some form of essential tremor, an