Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [267]
56. See Maryvelma Smith O’Neil’s entertainingly revisionist study, Giovanni Baglione: Artistic Reputation in Baroque Rome (Cambridge, 2002), p. 17. I am indebted to her lucid account of the libels and their consequences, although not convinced by her suggestion that Baglione was an injured innocent in the affair.
57. These transcriptions of the poems are taken from Anthony Colantuono, ‘Caravaggio’s Literary Culture’, in Caravaggio, Realism Rebellion, Reception, Genevieve Warwick (ed.) (Newark, 2006), p. 58.
58. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s verse play The Cenci was inspired by these events.
59. See Maryvelma Smith O’Neil, Giovanni Baglione: Artistic Reputation in Baroque Rome, p. 13.
60. The libel trial documents were first published in full in G. A. Dell’Acqua and M. Cinotti, Il Caravaggio e il sue grandi opere da S. Luigi dei Francesi (Milan, 1971), pp. 153–7. The translation offered here is by Don Var Green and can be found in full in Maryvelma Smith O’Neil, Giovanni Baglione: Artistic Reputation in Baroque Rome, pp. 337–62. I have made a couple of slight alterations, to match my own translation of the two poems at the centre of the case, and in one or two instances have preserved the original Italian usages.
61. The document is printed in full in Maryvelma Smith O’Neil, Giovanni Baglione: Artistic Reputation in Baroque Rome, pp. 357–8.
62. See Sandro Corradini, Materiali per un processo, document 26.
63. See Maryvelma Smith O’Neil, Giovanni Baglione: Artistic Reputation in Baroque Rome, pp. 358–62.
64. Salini added the detail about the punch in the chest in a slightly later piece of testimony; I have inserted it here for the sake of clarity.
65. The document is reprinted in full in Maurizio Marini, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio ‘pictor praestantissimus’ (second edition, Rome 1979), p. 472.
66. See Tullio Lazzari, Ascoli in prospettiva (Ascoli, 1722), p. 40.
67. The document is dated 6 June 1605. It is quoted, and photographically reproduced, in Maurizio Marini, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio ‘pictor praestantissimus’, p. 53.
68. See Sandro Corradini, Materiali per un processo, document 57. The translation is from Catherine Puglisi, Caravaggio, p. 420.
69. Nowadays many people have books they do not read, but books were so expensive in Caravaggio’s time that ownership of a volume can be taken as an indication of familiarity with its contents.
70. See Helen Langdon, Caravaggio: A Life, p. 279.
71. See Walter Friedlaender, Caravaggio Studies, p. 280.
72. Ibid., p. 260.
73. Ibid., p. 249.
74. The translation is from ibid., p. 281; the fullest transcription of these documents is in G. A. Dell’Acqua and M. Cinotti, Il Caravaggio e il sue grandi opere da S. Luigi dei Francesi, p. 158.
75. G. A. Dell’Acqua and M. Cinotti, Il Caravaggio e il sue grandi opere da S. Luigi dei Francesi, p. 158.
76. See Walter Friedlaender, Caravaggio Studies, p. 281.
77. These officials were drawn from the lay population and elected to their posts by the noble families of the city. Hence they reflected the factionalism and competing dynastic ambitions that existed at the highest level of Roman society. During the so-called Vacant See, the interregnum between one pope’s death and another’s election – but only at that time – the caporioni were allowed to act as judges in the districts under their control. Trouble often ensued during these periods. See Laurie Nussdorfer, ‘The Politics of Space in Early Modern Rome’, Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome, vol. 42 (1997), pp. 161–86.
78. All this testimony is in Sandro Corradini, Materiali per un processo, document 41.
79. Ibid., document 47.
80. See Walter Friedlaender, Caravaggio Studies, p. 282.
81. The term ‘house-scorning’ was coined by Elizabeth S. Cohen. The discussion that follows is heavily indebted to her pioneering work in the field of seventeenth-century social history, especially the essay ‘Honour and Gender in the Streets of Early Modern Rome’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. 22, no. 4 (Spring