Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [244]
Bellori gives a broadly similar account, although he emphasizes that Caravaggio was still in agony from the injuries he had received in the vendetta attack. He also embellishes the painter’s detention on landing, turning it into a case of mistaken identity. The idea should not be taken too seriously, since Bellori probably just got it from misreading the phrase ‘suddenly arrested’ in Baglione’s considerably earlier account:143
he boarded a felucca, and, suffering the bitterest pain, he started out for Rome … When he went ashore the Spanish guard arrested him by mistake, taking him for another Cavaliere, and held him prisoner. Although he was soon released, the felucca which was carrying him and his possessions was no longer to be found. Thus in a state of anxiety and desperation he ran along the beach in the full heat of the summer sun, and when he reached Porto Ercole, he collapsed and was seized with a malignant fever. He died within a few days at about forty years of age …144
Mancini gives much less detail. Wrongly and a bit strangely, since he knew better, he has Caravaggio leaving for Rome from Malta. He also omits the story of Caravaggio’s imprisonment, release and desperate pursuit of the felucca, but agrees with Baglione and Bellori that the painter died at Porto Ercole:
He left with the hope of being pardoned and went to Civita Vecchia [Porto Ercole, to be precise, according to a marginal note in the text], where, stricken with a malignant fever, he died miserably and without care, at the height of his glory, being about thirty-five or forty years of age. He was buried nearby.145
Certain elements of the early biographers’ accounts of Caravaggio’s death are questionable. He certainly did not travel to Porto Ercole on foot, for example. But in essence they got the facts right. What they said happened was, more or less, what actually happened.
The true sequence of events has been confirmed and fleshed out by two contemporary newspaper reports and a remarkable letter found in the state archive of Naples.
On 28 July a Roman avviso reported that ‘There has been news of the death of Michelangelo Caravaggio, the famous painter, excellent in colouring and in drawing from nature, following his illness in Port’ Ercole.’146 Three days later, another Roman avviso confirmed the news, adding the detail that he had died at Porto Ercole ‘while he was coming from Naples to Rome, having obtained the lifting of the death sentence he was under’.147 The speed with which these reports appeared suggests that the writers may have received their information direct from Porto Ercole itself, which was a day’s fast ride from Rome.
But the papal nephew, Scipione Borghese, had heard the news even quicker than the avviso writers. He knew that Caravaggio was dead as early as 23 July. But although he got his information with lightning speed, it was not entirely reliable, because Borghese’s source wrongly told him that the painter had died not at Porto Ercole but on the little island of Procida, a day’s sail west of Naples.148 Presumably for that reason Borghese immediately wrote to the papal nuncio in Naples, Deodato Gentile, Bishop of Caserta, urgently demanding more intelligence. He wanted to know what had happened to poor Caravaggio. Even more pressingly, he wanted to know what had happened to the paintings in the dead man’s luggage. As far as Borghese was concerned, they were now his property.149
The papal nuncio in Naples was indeed able to tell Scipione Borghese what had happened. His response to the papal nephew anticipates the accounts of Caravaggio’s death given by both Baglione and Bellori by many years. Yet it turns out to match their descriptions of what happened so exactly, albeit with more detail, that it was in all probability their main source of information in