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1998), in which the pope, Costanza Colonna and the Knights of Malta are held to have conspired to have Caravaggio assassinated. Vincenzo Pacelli, who located Gentile’s correspondence with Borghese in the first place, also believes in a plot. In his view, the Knights of Malta, Costanza Colonna and Scipione Borghese conspired to have Caravaggio killed. He told me so in conversation in 2001. The plotters’ motive, according to Pacelli, was their shared belief that Caravaggio had not only become an atheist but that he was using his most important commissions to profess, as it were, in subtle code, his heretical non-belief in God. The prime example given to me by Pacelli of a supposedly atheist painting infiltrated by Caravaggio into a Catholic church was The Seven Acts of Mercy. I am grateful to him for sharing his theories with me, but I have to say that I find them implausible.

153. I am indebted to the Maltese naval historian Joseph Scibberas for explaining how transport by felucca really worked in early seventeenth-century Italy.

154. When George Sandys went there from Naples a few years later, he went via the much sleepier port of Nettuno (see n. 148, above) to avoid detection as an Englishman and a Protestant.

155. I noticed this on a visit to Palo in 2001. The old fortress is still in existence, although nowadays it is a luxury hotel patronized by prominent Italian politicians, playboys and their supermodel girlfriends. The insignia of the old postal service can still be seen on the wall.

156. Besides, to make the journey on foot would have been to defeat its very purpose, which was to get to Porto Ercole preferably before or, at worst, at the same time as the boat. If Caravaggio had arrived four or five days after leaving Palo, the boat would already have got to Porto Ercole, unloaded and left. So if a horse or horses had not been available, there would have been no point in his even attempting the journey.

157. He refused to record any of the names of the dead for the entire year of 1610. I am grateful to Giuseppe La Fauci for showing me the book of the dead for the relevant period in the archives of the town, and for explaining the absence of records for the year in question. The death certificate that was ‘found’ in 2001 in Porto Ercole, a separate piece of paper with Caravaggio’s name on it, is entirely inconsistent with the manner in which deaths were conventionally noted down in Porto Ercole – i.e., as entries in the book of deaths. I am sure that document is a forgery.

158. In Langdon, Caravaggio: A Life, p. 388, the author wrongly takes this phrase to mean ‘high seas’, as in tall waves, and suggests that a storm was brewing and the sea was swelling, which forced the boat to pull away from shore. However alto mare does not mean that; it simply means ‘the open sea’.

159. See Sandro Corradini, Materiali per un processo, document 141, 31 July 1610.

160. See Walter Friedlaender, Caravaggio Studies, p. 293.

161. See Sandro Corradini, Materiali per un processo, document 144, 10 Dec. 1610.

162. Quoted in Carlton Lake, In Quest of Dalí (Michigan, 1969), p. 46.

163. Martin Scorsese’s remarks have been directly transcribed from his conversations with the author in December 2005, which included an interview filmed for and subsequently transmitted by The Culture Show (BBC Television, directed by David Shulman).

Further Reading

Detailed references to nearly all of the many sources I have consulted in writing this book will be found in the Notes (see pp. 447–81 above). What follows here is a short list of texts that I would recommend to any non-specialist reader wishing to pursue an interest in Caravaggio and his world.

Wietse de Boer, The Conquest of the Soul: Confession, Discipline and Public Order in Counter-Reformation Milan (Leiden, Boston and Cologne, 2001). A fascinating, highly detailed account of the religious milieu created in Milan by Archbishop Carlo Borromeo during Caravaggio’s youth.

Maurizio Calvesi, Le realtà del Caravaggio (Turin, 1990). For those who can read Italian, this is highly recommended.