Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [6]
Writing about Caravaggio has been an intellectual challenge, but it has also been an adventure, one which has led me into some fairly unusual situations. With John Azzopardi’s generous help and the loan of a slightly rickety ladder, I have inspected the stone well, or guva, in which Caravaggio was imprisoned on Malta (I can now laugh at the practical joke of his pretending to lock me in and leave me there, although it seemed less funny at the time). I have duelled (after a fashion) with master-swordsman Renzo Musumeci Greco in his Roman fencing school, in an attempt to understand the sort of manoeuvres that might result in the emasculation of a man during a swordfight. I have walked along the quays of the old port at Valletta with the Maltese naval historian Joseph Sciberras, to learn about transport by felucca in Caravaggio’s time. I have been allowed to inspect the book of the dead in the parish of Porto Ercole by local historian Giuseppe La Fauci. I have spent some happy hours poring over Caravaggio reproductions with the film director Martin Scorsese, who generously gave his time to open my eyes to the artist’s importance for modern cinema. To these and all the others who have gone out of their way to help me – the boy who lowered that ladder down the guva on Malta, the sacristan who got the keys to the church of Santa Lucia in Syracuse, the librarians and archivists in London, Rome, Naples, Milan and Malta who found so many books and documents – a heartfelt thank you.
Closer to home, I would like to thank my producer Silvia Sacco for devising a schedule for my television and other work that made the seemingly impossible possible. Without her constant encouragement, moral support and ruthless deadline-setting, I really might never have written the book at all. Without the help of my researchers, I would certainly never have been able to finish it. Opher Mansour did a first-rate job of translating Corradini’s essential anthology of archival documents, Materiali per un processo, from a mixture of legalistic Latin and often difficult sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italian vernacular slang. Opher also allowed me to read his enlightening doctoral thesis about censorship in Caravaggio’s Rome and unearthed several eyewitness accounts of the plague that ravaged Milan in the mid 1570s. In the very final stages of the book, Nicholas Stone Villani took time away from his own thesis to travel to Italy on my behalf, where he found out the seedy truth about the Osteria del Cerriglio. My principal researcher throughout has been Eugénie Aperghis-van Nispen tot Sevenaer, who has been unfailingly helpful, resourceful and thorough in carrying out what must sometimes have seemed a daunting series of tasks. She also did the picture research for the book and secured the reproduction permissions. While running her marathon, Eugénie was ably assisted by Kasja Berg, who on more than one occasion responded to my plaintive demands for particular texts or documents with exemplary calm and efficiency. My mother and father, far more knowledgeable about music than I ever will be, kindly brought their considerable erudition to bear on Caravaggio’s early paintings of musicians and lute-players, greatly to my advantage.
I will always remain affectionately grateful to Roger Parsons, with whom I first began to explore the complexities of Caravaggio’s world such an absurdly long time ago. Stuart Proffitt has made extremely valuable