XXIV
We do not know exactly how Caravaggio became a Knight of Malta, but the circumstances suggest that Fra’ Ippolito Malaspina, Prior of Naples, had a good deal to do with it. Although there is no documentary evidence that he supported the artist’s candidacy, he was the logical person in the city to advise him about how to join the order. His head may have been the model for that of another St. Jerome, painted by Caravaggio either at Naples or on Malta. If so, we have a remarkable idea of the impression he made on Caravaggio, who, presumably working from memory, portrayed a tough veteran in his sixties, with very strong features and impressive serenity.
Caravaggio could well have met him at Rome, in the company of his brother-in-law, Ottavio Costa, and would have noticed his voluminous black “choir mantle” with a large, eight-pointed white cross on the shoulder, and his cloth-of-gold surcoat. He was called “Fra’ ” because, like all his brethren, he had taken the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Not a Neapolitan but a Tuscan marquis from the Lunigiana, born in 1544, he had entered the Order of Malta when very young yet, despite fighting heroically at Lepanto, he had only recently emerged as one of its most influential members, after the election of his friend Alof de Wignancourt as grand master in 1601. Appointed prior of Naples the following year, he had relinquished his priory on taking command of the papal fleet, but was reinstated in October 1606, less than a month after Caravaggio reached the city. Neapolitan grandees took care to be on good terms with him, since, as prior, he ranked among the great dignitaries of Naples.
Throughout Italy the knights were popular to the point of adulation as the finest fighting seamen in the world. They guarded the peninsula’s coastline against Turks and North African slave raiders, their galleys patrolling the Mediterranean and attacking Muslim ships wherever they found them. Crusading ideals still meant something in the seventeenth century, and it was no accident that Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata should have been a poetic evocation of the First Crusade. What made the order even more imposing was that its warrior-monks were nearly all aristocrats, admitted as Knights of Justice only after providing cast-iron proofs of patrician ancestry. Even the few non-noble knights, or Knights of Grace, had to be men of distinction.
Sandrart and, by inference, Vincenzo Giustiniani, were both convinced that Caravaggio had planned to become a Knight of Malta before leaving Rome. Bellori, however, has a different story. “Caravaggio was desirous of receiving the cross of Malta, which is generally given by grace to men who are thought worthy because of their merit and quality. So he decided to go to the island, where he was presented to the Grand Master.” But it seems most unlikely that Caravaggio would ever have gone to Malta without an assurance that he would be accepted for the order’s novitiate.
The idea of an artist entering the order was not such a fantasy as it sounds. Caravaggio’s friend Ludovico Cardi, “Il Cigoli,” joined the order in 1613, and later Mattia Preti was a triumphant success as a painter-knight. Significantly, Il Cigoli owed his admission to Cardinal Borghese, who wanted to reward him for decorating his Roman villa. The grand master was always anxious to oblige the cardinal secretary, and Borghese could easily have done Caravaggio the same service. Although no firm proof exists, it is likely that he played a much greater part in Caravaggio’s career than has been realized. He was certainly the right person through whom to obtain a papal dispensation for a murderer to enter the order.
Caravaggio had much to offer the knights, who wanted the best paintings in Europe. They did not wish their churches to be in any way inferior to those of the Jesuits or the Oratorians, and they had more ready money. The grand master knew all about the killing of Ranuccio Tommasoni, but did not see it as an obstacle. He was used to dealing with duelists. Given the customs of a violent age and the fact they were professional soldiers, more than a few of his knights besides the Marchesa Costanza’s son had killed an opponent in a duel. As for Caravaggio’s notorious temper, Fra’ Alof had plenty of experience in handling the haughtiest and most pugnacious body of men in the entire Mediterranean.
Caravaggio’s lack of pedigree was a much more serious problem. The knights had recently become stricter about “noble proofs,” since too many young men were trying to join. Fortunately, the statutes allowed the grand master to let a few non-noble candidates enter the order as Knights of Grace (or “Obedience”). He did so sparingly, because admissions often infuriated the nobly born Knights of Justice. Their wrath was however generally reserved for blatant social climbers, especially those who were Genoese. In Caravaggio’s case, as Francesco Susinno put it, the aspirant knight “was admired by everyone in the Order on account of his skill with a brush, and they all wanted his pictures.”
There must have been a lot of paperwork concerning Caravaggio’s candidacy. At some stage, Fra’ Alof agreed formally to his coming to Malta and trying his vocation. Although he was thirty-five, for a year the artist would have to submit to all the petty restrictions of a novitiate and obey a novice master. His readiness to do so shows just how anxious he was to become a Knight of Malta.