Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [278]
135. For all the documents concerning The Martyrdom of St Ursula, see Vincenzo Pacelli, ‘Caravaggio 1610: la “Sant’Orsola confitta dal tiranno” per Marcantonio Doria’, Prospettiva, vol. 23 (Oct. 1980), pp. 24–30. They are helpfully translated in John T. Spike, Caravaggio, in the CD-ROM catalogue entry on the picture.
136. The date of his departure can be inferred from the journey time by sea from Naples to Palo, where he tried to go on land with his things – roughly seven days – and the date of his death, which must have occurred sometime between 18 and 21 July 1610.
137. See Helen Langdon, The Lives of Caravaggio , p. 85.
138. The details of the deal emerge in Deodato Gentile’s letter to Borghese about Caravaggio’s death, of 29 July 1610; see below, p. 429.
139. See Walter Friedlaender, Caravaggio Studies, p. 292.
140. See Baglione’s original Italian, as reprinted in Walter Friedlaender, Caravaggio Studies, p. 233. I have given my own translation.
141. Baglione uses the words in cambio, literally, ‘in change’, a phrase that has frequently been misleadingly translated as ‘mistakenly’, on the assumption that Baglione meant to imply that Caravaggio was arrested ‘in exchange’ (so to speak) of someone else. But in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Italian usage, in cambio is most frequently a phrase of emphasis with little actual meaning, carrying more or less the same thrust as ‘in fact’. It can also sometimes imply the idea of a swift change, in which case the English word ‘suddenly’ is a good equivalent. Baglione probably meant it in this latter sense. The modern mistranslations take their cue from Bellori, who clearly based his own account of Caravaggio’s death on that of his predecessor, Baglione. He himself seems to have misunderstood Baglione’s use of in cambio, amplifying it into his own tale of a case of mistaken arrest – as will be discussed below, p. 427.
142. Apart from the word ‘suddenly’ – explained in the note above – I have used the translation given in Walter Friedlaender, Caravaggio Studies, p. 236.
143. See n. 141 above.
144. I have used the translation given in Walter Friedlaender, Caravaggio Studies, pp. 251–2.
145. Ibid., p. 258.
146. See Sandro Corradini, Materiali per un processo, document 138, 28 July 1610.
147. Ibid., document 140, 31 July 1610.
148. Much has been made of this reference to Procida, and many a paranoid theory has been erected on its shaky foundations. But whoever told Borghese that Caravaggio died there may just have been making a logical guess based on the knowledge that the painter had left from Naples. Boats from there hitting bad weather often took refuge in Procida. The English traveller George Sandys had exactly that experience when he left Naples to travel to Rome a few years after Caravaggio: he got caught in a storm and ended up making an unscheduled visit to the island before continuing on to Rome, via Nettuno.
149. Borghese’s side of the correspondence has been lost. But the content of his letter of 23 July can be inferred from Gentile’s letters back to him, which do still survive. All these documents were discovered by Vincenzo Pacelli, through brilliant sleuth work in the Neapolitan archives. They are conveniently brought together with much other archive material in Sandro Corradini, Materiali per un processo.
150. The courier must have travelled post haste, changing horses as he rode, since Naples is a little over 120 miles from Rome.
151. See Sandro Corradini, Materiali per un Processo, Document 139, 29 July 1610.
152. See, in particular, the fanciful closing sections of Peter Robb’s quasi-biography of the painter, M (Sydney,