Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [97]
Costantino Spata was the next witness called by the court. ‘I am a seller of old paintings and I have a shop at San Luigi,’ he declared. He had been there for four years, since 1593, always on the same premises. He lived over the shop with his wife, Caterina Gori, and their four children, two adolescent girls and two little boys. The boys went to school, to the ‘Letteratura’. Costantino had no assistant and he did not employ members of his family in the business, so when he went out the shop was closed.
Having established these particulars, the investigator asked him to recall the events of the previous Tuesday evening, the night of the fracas. Costantino said that, having been in his shop all day, he closed up at sunset, when the Ave Maria sounded. Just as he did so, two painters whom he knew walked by.
One of them was Monsignor Michelangelo from Caravaggio who is the painter of Cardinal del Monte, and lives in the house of the said cardinal, and the other was a painter called Prospero, who comes from I know not where but lives near Monsignor Barberini over a boarding house … he is of small stature, with a little black beard, and is around twenty-five to twenty-eight years old. They asked me if I had eaten and I said yes but they said they hadn’t eaten and wanted to go to dinner at the Tavern of the Wolf [‘all’hostaria della Lupa’], where we all went together, and I stopped there with them while they ate.
After dinner the three companions left the tavern. Moments later, the trouble erupted. ‘We all heard someone coming towards us from the Piazza San Luigi, yelling out and saying “ahi, ahi”.’ Caravaggio and Prospero headed off in the direction of Sant’Agostino, while Costantino hurried homewards. As he was walking, a running man passed him. For the rest of his testimony, Costantino stonewalled the investigators. He never really saw the man who was in such a hurry. He could not judge his height or make out how he was dressed. He could not even tell if he had a cloak, or if he was wearing a hat on his head. He did not see if either of the painters had picked up a cloak. He did not have his glasses with him, and without his glasses he could not see very well. Besides, it was dark.
Prospero Orsi, the last witness to be called, corroborated Costantino’s story. He also went into more detail about Caravaggio’s decidedly marginal involvement in the evening’s events. Half an hour before the sounding of the Ave Maria, Prospero recalled, Caravaggio had come round to his place. They had gone out to eat. After dinner, they were walking along the Via della Scrofa when they heard shouts coming from the Piazza San Luigi – ‘screams and laments, someone saying “ohime, ohime” and other words’. But because they were still some way off, because it was getting dark and there was very little street lighting, Prospero could not really see what was going on. Moments later a man sprinted past him. What did he look like, this man? ‘Sir, I cannot say who that man was. I didn’t see his face, I didn’t see his clothes, because he passed like a shadow.’
After the man ran past them, Prospero and Caravaggio carried on walking in the direction of the Pantheon. They came across a black cloak lying on the ground. Prospero didn’t touch the cloak, so he could not say of what material it was made. Caravaggio picked it up and said he would give it to a neighbour. With those words, he turned around and went back to the corner of Sant’Agostino and gave the cloak to a young man at the barber’s shop there. ‘I don’t know the young man’s name because I don’t go to that barber’s shop,’ Prospero added. The two artists wandered back towards San Luigi dei Francesi, where they bumped into Costantino again. He was closing his shop for the night. Prospero parted with Caravaggio at the Palazzo Madama and went home. The investigator enquired whether