Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [276]
99. See Helen Langdon, The Lives of Caravaggio, p. 84. Caravaggio had made a similar plea for his head to Scipione Borghese just after the murder. The London picture is much weaker than the Borghese David and Goliath, however. It is not Herodias (or Salome) with the head, but a female servant.
100. See V. Saccà, ‘Michelangelo da Caravaggio pittore. Studi e ricerche’. Caravaggio’s name is not mentioned in the document of 6 Dec., but, given his strong association with the poor orders and charitable ministries, and given Susinno’s remark that he left Messina soon after completing The Burial of St Lucy, which must have been ready by her feast day on 13 Dec., it is a reasonable assumption that Giovan Battista de’ Lazzari had Caravaggio in mind from the start. Indeed, he may have been spurred to make his undertaking by the very opportunity that Caravaggio’s arrival provided. I take the document of 6 Dec. as a terminus ante quem for Caravaggio’s arrival in Messina from Syracuse.
101. Susinno as reprinted in Howard Hibbard, Caravaggio, from which the translation used here derives. See p. 382.
102. As George Sandys noted, the Eastern faith was tolerated in Sicily: ‘Their religion is Romish yet there are not so few as ten thousand who are of the tollerated Greeke church.’ See George Sandys, A Relation of a Journey, p. 238.
103. Susinno as reprinted in Howard Hibbard, Caravaggio, from which the translation used here derives. See p. 384.
104. Ibid. See p. 385.
105. It can be found in countless icons of the Virgin and Child, one of the most famous examples being Russia’s most sacred icon, Our Lady of Vladimir, which was painted in Constantinople in the eleventh century and taken to Kiev a hundred years later to mark the conversion to Christianity of the peoples of Russia. Caravaggio will have been familiar with the motif from icons in Sicily, or from the rich traditions of Italo-Byzantine painting of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, examples of which were to be seen all over the Italian peninsula.
106. Susinno as reprinted in Howard Hibbard, Caravaggio, from which the translation used here derives. See p. 385.
107. Ibid. See p. 386.
108. Ibid.
109. Ibid.
110. Helen Langdon, The Lives of Caravaggio, p. 84.
111. I arrive at this date by common sense. We know that Caravaggio was seriously wounded by a gang of assailants in Naples in late Oct. 1609, as will be explained below, pp. 415–20. He was very badly injured indeed. The only two paintings that can be dated to after that time, The Denial of Peter and The Martyrdom of St Ursula, are so radically unlike his Sicilian paintings that the difference can only logically be explained by incapacity and illness. We also know that Caravaggio painted a large altarpiece for the Fenaroli Chapel in Sant’Anna de’ Lombardi during his second and last stay in Naples, i.e. after arriving there from Palermo in 1609. He cannot have painted it on his first visit to the city, because the patron had only acquired rights to the chapel on 24 Dec. 1607, when Caravaggio had already left Naples for Malta. In my opinion, it is clear from the visual evidence of The Denial of Peter and The Martyrdom of St Ursula that when he painted those works Caravaggio could barely wield a brush. On the empirical evidence of the pictures, his eyesight had been damaged as well as possibly his nervous system. It is therefore inconceivable that he could have painted any kind of large and ambitious altarpiece after the assault of late Oct. 1609. In other words, he must have painted the Fenaroli altarpiece in Naples before the wounding took place. Assuming he worked flat out, and assuming it was commissoned from him the moment he disembarked from Palermo, he still would have needed at least four to six weeks to paint it. Therefore, he must have been back in Naples from Sicily some four to six weeks before the wounding of late Oct. On that basis,