Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [243]
The correspondence is completed by a shipper’s manifest, dated the same day: ‘Sr Lanfranco Massa has loaded in the name of God and of good fortune in the present port of Naples onto the felucca named Santa Maria di Porto Salvo, owned by Alessandro Caramano, a box containing the painting of The Martyrdom of St Ursula, made by the hand of Michel’Angelo [sic] Caravaggio, very well packed, in order to consign it in the same condition upon arrival in Genoa to Sr Marcantonio Doria who will pay two and one-half libri of that money should God carry it safely.’ The manifest was signed by a certain Antonio Feraro, ‘on command of the above stated Alessandro Caramano who does not know how to write’.
God and the illiterate boatman indeed carried the painting safely to distant Genoa. According to a note of receipt in the margin of Massa’s second letter, it arrived on 18 June, precisely three weeks after it had left Naples. Three weeks after that, sometime around the second week of July, Caravaggio himself embarked on a felucca travelling from Naples to Rome.136 He left from the Colonna Palace at Chiaia. He had three paintings with him, two of St John the Baptist and one of Mary Magdalen.
The timing of Caravaggio’s departure suggests that he waited for Alessandro Caramano to return before leaving for Rome himself. He probably wanted to use Caramano for his own journey too. He was a trusted skipper, whose felucca had a sufficiently large hold to carry bulky pictures packed in wooden boxes. Caravaggio was very ill and no doubt more than a little apprehensive, so it made sense for him to choose a boatman whom he knew. But this time, the ‘St Mary of the Safe Harbour’ did not bring good luck.
According to Bellori, the painter felt confident to return to Rome because he had ‘by then obtained his freedom from the pope through the intercession of Cardinal Gonzaga’.137 The recently appointed Cardinal Ferdinando Gonzaga was the son of Vincenzo I Gonzaga, who had purchased Caravaggio’s Death of the Virgin. The family may have hoped eventually to obtain more pictures from the artist in return for their support. But the young cardinal seems not to have dealt with the pope directly, approaching him instead through the papal nephew, Scipione Borghese. Borghese was already the proud owner of the artist’s first version of St Jerome Writing as well as his David with the Head of Goliath. Insatiable collector that he was, Borghese agreed to help obtain Caravaggio’s pardon, but only if the artist gave him his entire stock of unsold pictures as soon as he got to Rome.138
A Roman avviso of late July supports Bellori’s report that Caravaggio had been granted his long-awaited pardon for the murder of Ranuccio Tomassoni some time before he left Naples, saying that the painter was travelling to Rome ‘because His Holiness had lifted the bando capitale which he was under’.139 But Baglione was not so sure: he makes it sound as though negotiations were still continuing, even as Caravaggio set out from Naples. The painter was travelling ‘on the word of Cardinal Gonzaga, who was arranging his pardon from Pope Paul V’.140 If the pardon had not yet been officially agreed, that may help to explain why things would go so badly wrong for him on his journey to Rome.
Each writer put a slightly different slant on what happened next.
In Baglione’s telling, it became the parable of a fittingly miserable death, brought on by the painter’s own impetuosity and the burning July sun:
When Caravaggio went ashore he was suddenly141 arrested. He was held for two days in prison and when he was released, the felucca was no longer to be found. This made him furious and in his desperation he started out along the beach in the cruel July sun,