Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [98]
Caravaggio’s remark that he would give the cloak to ‘a neighbour’, and his immediate decision to hand it in at Luca’s shop, indicate that he (unlike his conveniently short-sighted and confused friends) had immediately recognized the running man. Caravaggio knew that it was Pietropaolo, because he himself went to the barber-surgeon’s shop on the corner of Sant’Agostino.53 He assumed the cloak was his and took it straight to the apprentice’s place of work – only to find that Pietropaolo had run so fast that he was there to receive it himself.
The enquiry was dropped and the case was closed, unsolved. It was a trivial matter. But the testimonies of those involved, fragmented and confused, reveal much about Caravaggio and the milieu in which he moved. He might have gone up in the world, but he had not forgotten his old friends. He still kept company with Prospero Orsi, who had pushed him to leave the Cesari workshop, and with Costantino Spata, the hard-pressed picture-seller with many mouths to feed. Taking advantage of his newfound status as member of a cardinal’s household, Caravaggio was now carrying a sword openly in the streets of the city. He was not afraid to use it. He had been to the barber-surgeon’s at least once, to have his wounds dressed, following a fight with a groom attached to another noble Roman household. History does not relate whether the groom’s injuries were worse than his.
The barber-surgeon’s account of Caravaggio’s physical appearance closely matches descriptions of the painter in other early sources. Bellori, echoing Vasari’s idea that artists resemble their own work, wrote that ‘Caravaggio’s style corresponded to his physiognomy and appearance; he had a dark complexion and dark eyes, and his eyebrows and hair were black; this colouring was naturally reflected in his paintings … driven by his own nature, he retreated to the dark style that is connected to his disturbed and contentious temperament.’54 Bellori’s Caravaggio is the epitome of the melancholy artist, born under the sign of Saturn: dark looks, dark temperament, dark art. But the evidence of the criminal archive suggests a more literal explanation for Caravaggio’s sartorial style. People who went dressed in dark colours did so to avoid detection, especially at night. To describe a man as someone who wore black when the Ave Maria sounded was to mark him out as a trouble-maker. Like the dark cloak that may or may not have belonged to Pietropaolo, Caravaggio’s black clothes were a form of urban camouflage, designed to enable him to disappear into the poorly lit streets of the city at night. He pursued the same strategy on the streets as he did in the studio. In life as in art he hid what he wanted to hide in the shadows.
Bellori also confirmed Luca’s description of the ‘disorderly’ and ‘threadbare’ state of Caravaggio’s clothing. But he added an interesting twist to it. ‘We cannot fail to mention his behaviour and his choice of clothes, since he wore only the finest materials and princely velvets; but once he put on a suit of clothes he changed only when it had fallen to rags.’ Caravaggio was one of those who liked to play the gentleman, to put on airs and graces and set himself above the people at large – even though his actual status remained highly ambiguous.
So the dark, threadbare Caravaggio was wearing a sword by night in 1597. He was evidently still doing so in spring of the following year: on 4 May 1598 he was arrested for bearing arms in a public place at eleven o’clock at night. A certain lieutenant Bartolomeo, attached to the Bargello of Rome, reported that ‘I encountered Michelangelo da Caravaggio between the Piazza Navona and the Piazza Madama, carrying a sword, without a licence, and