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What happened at Porto Ercole? He is not sure about that either, probably because the painter had died before he got there. But he does know that Caravaggio had fallen ill, and had died at that place. It had probably only just happened when the boatman arrived. He may even have been asked to identify the body, so they could bury it as soon as possible.

What about the paintings? Of course, he knows all about them. They are back at the Marchesa of Caravaggio’s house, the palace at Chiaia, the one at the edge of the city, facing the bay. He had returned them just the day before. That is where he had taken them from in the first place, when the poor man had hired him.

Deodato Gentile could have had all this information second-hand from Costanza Colonna herself, because she must have quizzed the skipper of the felucca when he came back to her house in Naples, with the pictures but without Caravaggio. But he did not. Gentile makes it clear in his letter that he had not spoken to her, that he had only sent a message telling her to keep Caravaggio’s pictures safe at all costs. Gentile’s source can indeed only have been the captain of the felucca himself – the skipper, in all probability, of the Santa Maria di Porto Salvo.

Caravaggio appears for the first time as a flesh-and-blood human being in the documentary records through the fleeting testimony of a Roman barber-surgeon named Luca. The painter had been ‘a stocky young man, about twenty or twenty-five years old, with a thin black beard, thick eyebrows and black eyes, who goes dressed all in black, in a rather disorderly fashion, wearing black hose that is a little bit threadbare, and who has a thick head of hair, long over his forehead’. That was in 1597. Less than thirteen years later, wounded and worn down, our last glimpses of Caravaggio are through the testimony of a humble boatman, Alessandro Caramano. Like Luca the barber’s apprentice, Alessandro was just an ordinary man. He could not read and he could not write. But he could tell the truth about what he had seen with his own eyes.

Caravaggio had lived much of his life close to the margins of society, surrounded by poor and ordinary people. He painted them, staging the stories of the Bible with their bodies and their faces. He painted for them and from their perspective. In the end he died among them and was buried among them, in an unmarked grave. He was thirty-eight years old.

AFTERMATH

In Naples, Rome and Malta, people in high places briefly lamented the passing of ‘poor Caravaggio’. Then they got into an unseemly scramble for his last few paintings.

Having been told by the boatman that the three pictures in the painter’s luggage had been deposited with Costanza Colonna, Deodato Gentile had immediately written to her claiming them on Scipione Borghese’s behalf. But he had been too late. The Knights of Malta had also found out about Caravaggio’s death. On the very day that Gentile wrote to Costanza Colonna, the local prior of the Knights of Malta barged his way into her palace and forcibly confiscated the pictures. Caravaggio had been dead for only ten days, but an unholy row was already brewing over his last things.

On 31 July 1610, Gentile reported back to Borghese in Rome: ‘Most Illustrious and Reverend Sir … The Marchesa of Caravaggio has informed me that the paintings of Caravaggio are no longer in her house, but have been sequestrated by the Prior of Capua … said prior is claiming that Caravaggio was a serving brother in his religious order, and that therefore all the spoils are his to take. The Marchesa says that this is all folly and vanity, and the prior is not right. I will do my best to find where they are kept, and use all diligence to secure them in the name of Your Illustrious Lordship …’159

On the death of any Knight of Malta, his possessions indeed automatically reverted to the order. Suddenly it suited Wignacourt and his prior to pretend that Caravaggio’s defrocking had never taken place, and that he had still