Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [249]
Deodato Gentile concluded his letter of 31 July by advising Borghese to write to Don Pedro Fernández de Castro, Conde de Lemos, who had recently taken over the post of Spanish viceroy in Naples. Don Pedro was the most powerful man in the city. Borghese followed Gentile’s advice, informing the viceroy of the prior’s false claims and appealing to him for help. But the wheels of Spanish diplomacy moved painfully slowly. It was mid August before Don Pedro swung, rather confusedly, into action. He told the impudent Prior of Capua that it was no good pretending that Caravaggio had died a Knight of Malta, and that he would have to surrender all claims to the pictures. But the Spanish viceroy had evidently failed to realize exactly what had happened. Somehow or other he had got it into his head that the paintings were still being argued over in Porto Ercole, some two hundred miles north. So he fired off a peremptory letter to the head of the Spanish garrisons in Tuscany, together with an inventory listing the works of art that he particularly wanted to secure:
Honoured Sir, I have been informed that the painter Michael Angelo di Caravaggio has died at Port’ Ercole and that you have in your possession all his property, especially the items indicated in the inventory which accompanies this letter, the property having been taken over as a spolium under the pretext that the deceased was a member of the Order of St John, and that it belonged to the Prior of Capua who has declared that he has no right to this spolium inasmuch as the deceased was not a Knight of Malta; and thus I charge you that as soon as you receive this letter you send me the aforesaid property by the first felucca available, and especially the painting of St John the Baptist, and if by chance it has been disposed of or removed from the property for whatever reason, you shall endeavour by all means to see that it is found and recovered in order to send it well packed with the other property and deliver it here to the proper authority, and you shall carry this out unconditionally, informing me of the receipt of this letter. From my desk, Naples, August 19, 1610.160
It would be another five months before anything more was heard about the paintings. By then two of them had disappeared altogether, perhaps into the hands of Caravaggio’s creditors, perhaps to Malta. The only work of art that anyone could locate for sure was a St John, which turned out to be the picture of the saint as an olive-skinned Sicilian boy painted at around the time Caravaggio had left Messina for Palermo. By the winter of 1610 it had found its way into the house of the Spanish viceroy, who seems to have become singularly reluctant to give it up.
On 12 December the beleaguered Bishop of Caserta, Deodato Gentile, was finally able to report further developments to Scipione Borghese. He apologized for still not having despatched the St John, which his lordship ‘must have given up for lost’, and explained the reasons. The viceroy had wanted to have a copy made of the painting for his own collection. In addition, there had been obscure problems with Caravaggio’s inheritors and creditors – this part of the document is barely legible – and since he had left many debts there were people who had needed to be satisfied.161 Gentile promised to press the matter and obtain the painting. Only in August of the following year did the papal nuncio finally manage to prise it from the grip of the Spanish viceroy and send it, at long last, to Rome. He apologized that it had been slightly damaged in all the toing and froing. The picture has remained in the Borghese collection ever since.
DOING JESUS LIKE CARAVAGGIO
The messy story of what happened