Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [96]
PAINTERS, SWORDSMEN AND WHORES
On 11 and 12 July 1597 three men were summoned to appear before the Tribunal of the Governor of Rome and interrogated in connection with a case of assault. It was literally a cloak-and-dagger affair. A young man called Pietropaolo, apprentice to a barber-surgeon, had been hurt in a fight on the Via della Scrofa. Following the incident, he had been detained in prison because he refused to reveal the identity of his attacker. Violent crime was on the increase in Rome and steps were being taken to limit the unlicensed bearing of arms. Pietropaolo’s silence irked the authorities. They were also interested in the discovery of a black cloak near the scene of the crime. Someone had handed it into the barber’s shop where the apprentice worked. Who was that person? Might he be able to shed light on the matter?
The investigators would soon discover that the man who found the cloak was Michelangelo da Caravaggio, artist in the service of Cardinal del Monte. Because he had friends in high places, they decided not to call him until their preliminary enquiries were complete. Instead, they called two of the friends with whom he had been seen on the evening of the fracas, namely Prospero Orsi, the painter of grotesques, and the picture-dealer Costantino Spata. In the event, Caravaggio himself never would be asked to testify in connection with the case. But the words of those who were summoned give us vivid glimpses of the life that he led, at night, in the streets of Rome.52
It is with the testimony of Pietropaolo’s employer, a barber-surgeon called Luca, that the case records begin. ‘I am a barber, and I practise the profession of barber here by the church of Sant’Agostino,’ Luca told the court. What did he know about the article of clothing that had been handed into his shop? Luca answered that a ferraiuolo – a black cloak, fastened with iron hooks – had been given to his apprentice, Pietropaolo, on the night in question. Luca himself was busy having dinner with his father and some others, but later Pietropaolo showed him the cloak and told him that a certain painter had brought it. ‘He told me his name, but I can’t remember it.’ When pressed to say if he knew the painter in question, Luca said that certainly he did: ‘One time he came into my shop to be spruced up, and another time he came to have a wound dressed … he had been in an argument with one of the grooms of the Giustiniani or Pinello families.’
When the case investigator expressed scepticism that Luca could not remember the man’s name, he protested that it was the truth: ‘Really, sir, I do not recall it.’ Then, as if ashamed of his own memory lapse, he gave a startlingly precise physical description of the painter whose injuries he had treated, and whose beard he had trimmed. All is carefully transcribed in the spidery handwriting of a court notary. Suddenly here is Caravaggio, caught in the flashbulb glare of a barber’s memory: ‘This painter is a stocky young man, about twenty or twenty-five years old, with a thin black beard, thick eyebrows and black eyes, who goes dressed all in black, in a rather disorderly fashion, wearing black hose that is a little bit threadbare, and who has a thick head of hair, long over his forehead.’
Returning to the matter of the lost-and-found cloak, Luca remembered Pietropaolo telling him that another man had been present when it was handed in – ‘a certain Costantino, who buys and sells paintings and whose shop is attached to the Madonella next to San Luigi dei Francesi’. All this happened shortly after Pietropaolo had been assaulted, and the fact that he was looking after the shop suggests that he cannot have been very badly injured. Luca made no mention