Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [264]
67. See ASR, TCS, reg. 1438, testimony of Onorio Longhi, 4 May 1595, cc. 20v–22v.
68. See Christopher Breward, ‘Fashioning the Modern Self: Clothing, Cavaliers and Identity in Van Dyck’s London’, in Van Dyck and Britain, Karen Hearn (ed.) (London, 2009), pp. 34–5.
69. See Tommaso Garzoni, La piazza universale di tutte le professioni del mondo (Rome, 1996), pp. 1,263–83, for the following quotations.
70. ASR, Tribunale del governatore (TCG), reg. 483, witness statement of Anna Bianchini, 22 Apr. 1594, c. 144v; cited (reliably) in Riccardo Bassani and Fiora Bellini, Caravaggio assassino, p. 74, n. 5.
71. ASR, Archivio Sforza Cesarini, s. xii, b. 1b, filza 1, interrogationes et testes 1596–7, cc. n.n; cited (reliably) in Riccardo Bassani and Fiora Bellini, Caravaggio assassino, p. 53, n. 5.
72. Inventories show that she owned a painting of the Magdalen repenting by Caravaggio. The banker Ottavio Costa also owned a version of the same subject. Scholarly opinion is divided about who originally owned the Detroit painting but the balance of evidence currently available favours Olimpia Aldobrandini.
73. See Gregory Martin, Roma sancta, George Bruner Parks (ed.) (Rome, 1969), p. 143.
74. For Ranuccio Tomassoni, see Riccardo Bassani and Fiora Bellini, Caravaggio assassino, pp. 55–73.
75. For all the following testimonies see Sandro Corradini, Materiali per un processo, document 17.
76. Such figures appear with great frequency in northern European genre painting, especially Dutch art. Her tough, harsh face was probably modelled on a male Roman portrait bust.
77. See Carlo Cesare Malvasia, Le vite de’ pittori bolognese, edition of 1678 (Bologna, 1841), vol. 1, p. 344.
78. His methods might be described as a kind of empirical Tintorettism, in the sense that they are the techniques a painter might evolve if he wanted to emulate Tintoretto but had never been trained in Tintoretto’s actual methods – which were rather different, and certainly involved drawing.
79. See Walter Friedlaender, Caravaggio Studies, p. 264.
80. See Helen Langdon, The Lives of Caravaggio, p. 64. The idea that Caravaggio also used some kind of lens or camera obscura is a red herring. Caravaggio had plenty of enemies who would have no doubt taken pleasure in exposing him as a cheat, but no such device is mentioned by any of the early writers. Nor does anything like it appear in the only known inventory of his possessions.
81. Ibid., p. 33.
PART FOUR: ROME, 1599–1606
1. The document is reprinted and translated in Walter Friedlaender, Caravaggio Studies, p. 297.
2. See Herwarth Röttgen, Il Caravaggio: ricerche e interpretazioni (Rome, 1974), pp. 20–21; the translation is from John T. Spike, Caravaggio. The contract in question is the one signed by Giuseppe Cesari on 27 May 1591. As Cesari’s successor, it seems highly probable that Caravaggio would have been made aware of Contarelli’s wishes.
3. Quoted in Walter Friedlaender, Caravaggio Studies, p. 265.
4. See Helen Langdon, The Lives of Caravaggio, p. 69.
5. See for example Catherine Puglisi, Caravaggio (London, 1998), pp. 157–60.
6. See G. Urbani, ‘Il restauro delle tele del Caravaggio in S. Luigi dei Francesi’, Bollettino dell’Istituto Centrale del Restauro, vol. 17 (1966).
7. See Franca Trinchieri Camiz, ‘Death and Rebirth in Caravaggio’s Martyrdom of St Matthew’, Artibus et Historiae, vol. 11, no. 22 (1990), pp. 89–105.
8. See E. Cecilia Voelker, Charles Borromeo’s ‘Instructiones fabricae et supellectilis ecclesiasticae’, translation with commentary, dissertation, Syracuse University, 1977, pp. 250–51.
9. See Anti-Nicene Christian Library, Translations of the Writings of the Fathers Down to AD 325. Volume 9: The Writings of Tertullian, I, 25. Cited in ‘Death and Rebirth in Caravaggio’s Martyrdom of St Matthew’.
10. Titian’s painting is lost, destroyed by fire, but its design can still be studied from prints.
11. See Walter Friedlaender, Caravaggio Studies, p. 300.
12. See, in particular, his thunderously inept