XIII

The Year of Murders, 1599

The year 1599, during which Caravaggio’s fame and prosperity became assured, was one of high drama at Rome. First, the city suffered a natural disaster. Next, the authorities discovered a tragic murder committed by a noble family. The killing of Count Cenci by his children enthralled the entire city, and the horror of their execution is almost certainly reflected in Caravaggio’s painting. The Romans were always thrilled by murders among the nobility, eagerly attending their executions. It is most unlikely that Caravaggio was absent from the huge crowds that watched the Cenci die, since his patron, Cardinal del Monte, had been asked by Grand Duke Ferdinand to try to secure a reprieve for them. For months, the Palazzo Madama must have talked of nothing but the Cenci case.

Romans have never been strangers to winter rain. Even so, when the Tiber suddenly burst its banks on Christmas Eve 1598, they were caught off guard. By Christmas morning, much of the city was flooded and strewn with debris, with several low-lying districts under water that was still rising. The inhabitants of many of the houses around the Castel Sant’ Angelo and in Trastevere took refuge on their roofs. There were no Christmas services in the churches, not even in St. Peter’s, and Pope Clement wept unceasingly. Nor was there any flour or bread, since all the flour sacks in the city’s cellars had been spoiled. When the water went down two days later, fifteen hundred bodies were found in the streets, some washed in from the countryside. Early in the new year, the rain returned, heavier than before, while, because of warm winds in the mountains, melting snow flowed into the Tiber. On 8 January 1599, the river burst its banks again, and everybody fled to the high ground. Even the pope left the Vatican to take refuge in the Quirinal. But at last the waters receded, the debris was cleared, and normal life resumed.

On the day before the second flood, a young noblewoman, Beatrice Cenci, had been arrested with her stepmother, Lucrezia, and taken to the dungeons of the Castel Sant’ Angelo. Her brothers, Giacomo and Bernardo, were already in the Tordinona Prison, under suspicion of having murdered their father. Count Francesco Cenci had been ruined by paying a fine of one hundred thousand scudi, to avoid burning at the stake for sodomizing his stable boys and servant girls, besides beating them till the blood flowed. He had also beaten his sons and his daughter, Beatrice, the latter with a broomstick. To economize, he had moved from Rome to the mountaintop castle of La Petrella, on the Neapolitan border, taking Beatrice and his second wife, Lucrezia, with him, and virtually imprisoning them. Several times he raped Lucrezia in front of his daughter, and on one occasion he tried to sodomize his fifteen-year-old stepson. When the women attempted to escape, he thrashed Lucrezia with a cudgel and Beatrice with a bull’s pizzle. His daughter found an ally and a lover in the castellan Olympio Calvetti, who was wanted at Rome for murder, while her brother Giacomo sent opium. In September 1598, after being drugged by Beatrice, Count Francesco was killed by Olympio and the coachman Catalano with a hammer and a rolling pin. His body was thrown off a wooden gallery into the courtyard below; a railing was broken to make it look as if he had fallen down accidentally and died in the fall. But the suspicious villagers alerted the authorities. When the Cenci came back to Rome in December, they were placed under house arrest, Pope Clement himself asking to be kept informed of the investigation’s progress. The avvisi reported regularly and colorfully about the case. Stories circulated all over Rome about the victim’s disgusting misdeeds, and it was generally agreed that he had deserved to die.

There was also another much talked of murder case in Rome in early summer 1599. Marcantonio Massimi belonged to the most august of Roman princely families. He and his brothers had already escaped the scaffold, despite having killed their stepmother. A beautiful peasant, Eufrosina Corberio, she had been the mistress of one of the Colonna, who murdered her husband to get her. He then passed her on to Marcantonio’s widowed father, who grew so infatuated that he married her. Enraged at their mother’s replacement by a low-born whore, Marcantonio and his four brothers called on Eufrosina early in the morning after her wedding in 1585 and shot her as she lay in bed. Only one of them, Luca Massimi, was ever brought to trial for her murder, and he was speedily acquitted on the plea that he had been avenging the family honor. Luca was murdered in 1599, poisoned by Marcantonio; the other brothers were already dead, and he wanted to inherit their father’s estate undivided. Falling under suspicion at once, he was imprisoned in the Tordinona, where, under torture, he confessed. On June 15 he was executed in the small piazza in front of the Ponte Sant’ Angelo, comforted, we must hope, by Pope Clement’s “holy benediction.”

Marcantonio Massimi appears to have been hanged. Montaigne has an account of such a hanging. A huge crucifix, draped in black, preceded the cart that took the condemned man to the gallows. On the way, he continually kissed a picture of Christ held up to him by two members of the Confraternity of St. John the Beheaded. “At the gibbet, which was a beam between two posts, they held up this picture before his face till the moment he was thrown off the ladder. He died as criminals usually do, without a struggle or a cry … and after he was dead they cut his body into four quarters.”

Marcantonio had no obvious links with the Cenci. But when Andrea Caproni, a member of the Duke Cesarini’s household, was arrested in August for “inflicting wounds on his own brother,” it was rumored that Caproni had been imitating the Cenci. Early in September, the Cenci’s cousin, Paolo di Santa Croce, was arrested at Subiaco after murdering his mother in her bed for refusing to leave him her estate. Outraged, the pope insisted that Paolo must die.

The Cenci’s final interrogation took place in August, all being tortured with the strappado. Arms tied behind the back, each was hoisted off the ground by a rope, dislocating the arms, then lowered, the limbs reset and the process continued till he or she confessed. Beatrice stubbornly refused to admit her guilt or incriminate her family, claiming that the entire murder had been Olympio’s work, since she knew that he had recently been killed by bounty hunters for the price on his head. She confessed only when she saw that there was no point in further denials. The duke of Modena’s agent reported, “The case has touched the heart of everybody in Rome, especially the fate of the girl. Not yet eighteen, she is of great beauty, with the most graceful manners, and very rich, with a dowry of over 40,000 scudi. She showed such extraordinary courage under torture that all were amazed.”

The executions took place on 11 September. By dawn, the Castel Sant’ Angelo’s battlements were packed with spectators, as was every window or rooftop in sight of the bridge of Sant’ Angelo. Most of the spectators seem to have come in a mood of pity, lamenting, “Poor folk, poor wretched creatures, poor unhappy people.” At about nine-thirty A.M. a procession of officials, clergy, sbirri, and pikemen emerged from the Tordinona, escorting two open carts. Giacomo Cenci stood in the first, stripped to the waist, his eighteen-year-old brother, fully dressed, in the second. As they went, an executioner tore Giacomo’s naked trunk with long, red-hot, iron pincers, methodically ripping out muscles and tendons, but he did not utter a sound. En route, the two ladies joined the procession, walking at the head. Lucrezia, “a shaking rag,” had to be supported. Beatrice was very calm.

A machine like a primitive guillotine stood on a scaffold at the end of the Ponte Sant’ Angelo. Lucrezia had to be carried up the ladder, fainting before the blade took off her head with a single stroke. Beatrice needed no one to help her, climbing up briskly and laying her head down without any fuss. When the blade dropped, a great wailing broke out among the crowd. Giacomo followed, bleeding from every pore of his mutilated body, to be mazzolato, clubbed to death with a mace. The first blow splintered his skull, then the executioner removed his head with a knife, cutting his body in four with an ax and hanging the quarters from hooks at the edge of the scaffold. Young Bernardo, deliberately left unaware that he was not to die too, fainted during each execution before being led off to become a galley slave.

When night fell, the Cenci were taken away for burial by brethren of the Confraternity of St. John the Beheaded, each to a different church. The hooded brethren lit the way with lanterns whose windows were painted with their device, the head of St. John the Baptist on a charger. A huge crowd followed Beatrice, carrying torches. When her bier was set down in the church of San Pietro in Montorio, “until midnight all the populace hastened there to weep over the corpse and place lighted candles around it.” Flowers were showered on the beautiful head.

It is hard to believe that Caravaggio would have stayed away from the Cenci’s execution, did not see their corpses exposed to public view by the Ponte Sant’ Angelo, or did not watch the brethren of St. John escorting them through the night on their last journey, with the Baptist’s head glowing on the lanterns.

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