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132. Ibid., document 145.

133. Ibid., document 111.

134. I am grateful to Sandro Corradini for talking me through this series of archival documents, which remain unpublished. For another precis of their contents, see Helen Langdon, Caravaggio: A Life, p. 313.

135. See Sandro Corradini, Materiali per un processo, document 109. Pontoni, who was a lawyer, also appears in document 17, testifying in the case of Fillide’s knife attack on Prudenza Zacchia.

136. Ibid., document 151.

137. See Romolo Caggese (ed.), Statuti della reppublica fiorentina. Volume 2: Statuto del podestà del anno 1325 (Florence, 1921); and Volumen statutorem civitatis Maceratae, facsimile reprint of the 1553 edition, Arnaldo Forni (ed.) ([n.p., n.d.]). I am indebted to Elizabeth S. Cohen and Thomas S. Cohen for allowing me to read their essay ‘Sfregio: Facial Mutilation as Expressive Act’ when it was still in draft form. It was that essay that called my attention to the legal penalties cited in the statute books noted above.

PART FIVE: THE ALBAN HILLS, NAPLES, MALTA, SICILY, NAPLES, PORTO ERCOLE, 1606–10

1. See Helen Langdon, The Lives of Caravaggio, pp.31, 76.

2. A picture in a private Roman collection has been put forward several times as a candidate, but it is so clumsy and sentimental that it cannot possibly have been painted by Caravaggio.

3. No documents relating to this work survive. It has been romantically placed at the end of Caravaggio’s life – in the quatercentenary exhibition in Rome in 2010 it was once more dated to 1610 – but it was not among the pictures listed as being on the boat with him when he travelled to Rome for the last time in July of that year, and it is besides painted in a style quite different from that of Caravaggio’s last-documented picture, The Martyrdom of St Ursula, now in the boardroom of the Banco di Napoli. Given that the style of the David with the Head of Goliath is so close to that of The Seven Acts of Mercy of 1606–7 in Naples – compare, for example, the handling of light in striated drapery in both pictures – and given that it indeed entered the Borghese collection (it can still be seen in the Villa Borghese in Rome), I believe that Caravaggio painted it expressly for Scipione Borghese to try to secure a pardon for his crimes. The identification of the severed head of Goliath as a self-portrait has been universally accepted, on the basis of visual comparison with Ottavio Leoni’s portrait of Caravaggio in the Uffizi, and with other known self-portraits that occur within Caravaggio’s œuvre.

4. Mancini is the source for this information: See Helen Langdon, The Lives of Caravaggio, p. 31.

5. It was only in 1613 that he ordered a frame to be made for it, according to a Borghese palace inventory: see the CD-ROM catalogue entry on the painting in John T. Spike, Caravaggio.

6. Sandro Corradini, Materiali per un processo, document 106, 23 Sept. 1606.

7. See George Sandys, A Relation of a Journey (London, 1615), pp. 253–4.

8. Cited by Jeanne Chenault Porter in ‘Reflections of the Golden Age: The Visitor’s Account of Naples’, in Parthenope’s Splendor: Art of the Golden Age in Naples, published as Papers in Art History from the Pennsylvania State University, vol. 7, Jeanne Chenault Porter and Susan Scott Munshower (eds.) (Pennsylvania, 1993), p. 11.

9. See Giuseppe Galasso, ‘Society in Naples in the Seicento’, in Painting in Naples 1606–1705: From Caravaggio to Giordano, catalogue to the exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, Clovis Whitfield and Jane Martineau (eds.) (London 1982), p. 28.

10. It is probable that the open-weave Neapolitan canvases on which Caravaggio would paint some of his greatest pictures were of English origin: see Clovis Whitfield, ‘Seicento Naples’, in Painting in Naples 1606–1705, p. 19.

11. Benedetto Croce, History of the Kingdom of Naples, Frances Frenaye (trs.), H. Stuart Hughes (ed.) (Chicago, 1970), p. 116. Croce’s text was first published as Storia del regno di Napoli (Bari, 1925).

12. Quoted in ibid., p. 120.

13. Quoted in Giuseppe Galasso, ‘Society in Naples in