Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [274]
68. See Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, vol. 2, p. 650.
69. Letter dated 24 Apr. 1610. See David Stone, ‘In Praise of Caravaggio’s Sleeping Cupid: New Documents for Francesco dell’Antella in Malta and Florence’, Melita historica, vol. 12, pp. 165–77.
70. See Helen Langdon, The Lives of Caravaggio, p. 80.
71. See fn. 33 to Keith Sciberras’s second chapter in Caravaggio: Art, Knightood and Malta, for the full quotation in Italian. The translation given here is my own.
72. See Walter Friedlaender, Caravaggio Studies, p. 292. The translation given there is more faithful than that in Helen Langdon, The Lives of Caravaggio, pp. 52–3. Baglione’s wording is important.
73. See Helen Langdon, The Lives of Caravaggio, p. 80.
74. I owe a debt of gratitude to Fr John Azzopardi for showing me around the Maltese archive, and allowing me to examine for myself the documents – both legible and obliterated – relating to Caravaggio’s crime and punishment on Malta. Keith Sciberras, who also generously shared much information with me on my visits to the island, first published the results of his X-ray examinations under the title ‘ “Frater Michael Angelus in tumultu”: The Cause of Caravaggio’s Imprisonment in Malta’, Burlington Magazine, vol. 144, no. 1,189 (Apr. 2002), pp. 229–32. My account of the events surrounding Caravaggio’s crime is, inevitably, hugely dependent on his pioneering research.
75. According to Malta’s Liber Conciliorum for 1608–10, less than two years after the ‘tumult’ involving Caravaggio, De Ponte was sentenced for two months for fighting ‘cum levi sanguinis effusione’ with a certain Fra Francesco Sarsale. See Keith Sciberras, ‘ “Frater Michael Angelus in tumultu”: The Cause of Caravaggio’s Imprisonment in Malta’, fn. 37.
76. I am grateful again to Fr John Azzopardi for helping to find the ladder and letting me into the guva. Keith Sciberras doubts that Caravaggio would have been kept in the guva, arguing that he would most probably have been detained in one of Castel Sant’Angelo’s semi-open prisons. But, given Wignacourt’s stated desire ‘not to lose him’, expressed in the petition to the pope for Caravaggio’s knighthood, I share Fr Azzopardi’s view that he would indeed have been confined in the guva, which was after all the most high-security of the island’s jails. It may also be worth noting that, according to a long oral tradition on Malta, the guva was Caravaggio’s place of imprisonment.
77. Helen Langdon, The Lives of Caravaggio, p. 81.
78. See Faith Ashford, ‘Caravaggio’s Stay in Malta’, Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, vol. 67, no. 391 (Oct. 1935), pp. 168–74.
79. See Keith Sciberras and David Stone, Caravaggio: Art, Knightood and Malta, p. 34.
80. See Faith Ashford, ‘Caravaggio’s Stay in Malta’, p. 174.
81. Ibid.
82. The document was published by A. Spadaro, ‘Il percorso smarrito e l’importante inedito: la presenza del pittore a Caltagirone’, in Foglio d’Arte, vol. 8, no. 2 (1984–5), pp. 6–7; I was alerted to it by Gioacchino Barbera and Donatella Spagnolo’s essay ‘From The Burial of St Lucy to the Scenes of the Passion: Caravaggio in Syracuse and Messina’ in the catalogue to the exhibition Caravaggio: The Final Years, pp. 80–87.
83. See George Sandys, A Relation of a Journey, p. 234.
84. Susinno’s manuscript containing biographies of artists to have worked in Sicily, and particularly Messina, was first published by Valentino Martelli in Florence in 1960. Susinno’s life of Caravaggio, which was included in that manuscript, was usefully reprinted and