XXXV
Porto Ercole was close to the northern border of the Papal States, not far from Civitavecchia. Today a seaside resort, in the seventeenth century it was a Spanish garrison town, one of the presidie, a string of enclaves on the Tuscan coast from which Spain monitored shipping between France and Naples. Its only other activities were fishing and the grain trade. The Spaniards called the little port Puerto Hercules. Probably Caravaggio had never even heard of it before now.
The skipper of his felucca must have intended to sail slowly along the coast in the usual way, landing every evening to spend the night within reach of a fort. But, almost as soon as they had left Naples, a storm came up. People on shore thought the felucca might have run for shelter to the island of Procida, off the direct sea route, though only two miles out from Naples, which explains why a rumor later circulated that Caravaggio had died on the island. In reality, the gale blew the tiny ship northward and past Ostia, the landing place for Rome. At last the skipper managed to put in to Palo, still in papal territory, a fishing hamlet guarded by a fort with a small garrison.
Unfortunately, the Spanish captain at the fort had just been warned to be on the lookout for a well-known bandit. Seeing a pugnacious little man in shabby finery, armed with rapier and dagger, his face scarred by sword cuts, the captain at once assumed that Caravaggio was the banditto. “When he landed on the beach, he was arrested in error and imprisoned for two days,” says Baglione. Bellori confirms that the soldiers in the fort had been waiting for “another gentleman,” obviously the bandit. The mistake gives some idea of the impression Caravaggio made on anyone meeting him for the first time. The nuncio adds that he had to pay the captain a large sum of money before he would let him go. Baglione and Bellori both thought that the arrest occurred at Porto Ercole. Only since the discovery of the nuncio’s report has it been known that it took place at Palo. On the whole, however, they seem to be reasonably accurate, while the nuncio supplies vital details.
When Caravaggio was released, his felucca was nowhere to be seen, which sent him into a frenzy. His possessions were still on board, including his paintings. He ran along the beach like a lunatic, searching for the boat, until told that she had been blown even farther north. Learning she was at Porto Ercole, he hurried after her. Since most of his money had been stolen from him by the captain, he could not afford to hire another felucca and was forced to travel a hundred kilometers overland from Palo, possibly on foot, despite the risk of being murdered by peasants or banditti. He may have had enough funds left to hire a horse or a mule, but in the heat of the July sun, even if he rode, it would have been a grueling journey.
Already faint from painful, unhealed wounds, further weakened by his ordeal at sea and his imprisonment, and worn out by his trek from Palo, Caravaggio was exhausted and half crazy by the time he arrived at Porto Ercole. He rushed off to look for the felucca and his pictures, but soon collapsed. Baglione tells us that “he reached a place on the seashore where he was put to bed with a deadly fever, and after a few days he died miserably, with no one to care for him.” The “place” [luogo] sounds like a boathouse or a shed for nets. Mancini, too, says, “he died in want, and without treatment.” Caravaggio’s death was 18 July 1610. He was thirty-eight years old.
In 1995 Professor Maurizio Marini discovered a document in the archives of the local diocese that shed fresh light on the painter’s death and burial. He died from drinking polluted water, contracting some lethal form of enteric fever. He did not die alone as Baglione and Mancini thought, but was nursed by the Confraternity of Santa Cruz. Its members, officers of the Spanish garrison at Porto Ercole, saw that dying wayfarers received medicine and the Sacraments, took inventories of their goods, and, when possible, sent their bodies home for reburial. They owned the little chapel of St. Sebastian near the sea, next to Fort Filippo, which had a small garden with two palm trees. They interred him here, between the palm trees. Despite the fact that it was a pauper’s burial, it is unlikely that the confraternity robbed his corpse. The chapel is still standing, no longer a place of worship, and although his grave has not yet been found, Caravaggio must lie nearby, rapier and dagger by his side, wearing his cross and wrapped in a knight’s choir mantle, the shroud of every Knight of Malta.
Recently, it has been unconvincingly suggested that the traditional account of Caravaggio’s death was an official fabrication by the knights and the local authorities to conceal his murder, which, supposedly, had taken place in a dungeon at Civitavecchia in papal territory with the connivance of the Catholic Church. It is alleged that the Knights of Malta had never forgiven him for the mysterious crime he had committed at Valletta in 1608, whose details they suppressed for reasons unknown. Yet not only had their grand master helped the painter to escape from Malta, but, had they wanted to, the knights could easily have arranged for him to be murdered while he was in Sicily. It seems unlikely that they would have risked infuriating Cardinal Borghese by killing one of his favorite artists, whose pardon he had only just obtained from the pope with great difficulty. And there is no known record of the Religion murdering anybody in such a way throughout its entire history.
Certainly, no one could have been more taken aback by the unexpected news of Caravaggio’s death than Scipione Borghese, who was aghast at the loss of his eagerly awaited paintings. He immediately sent orders for the nuncio at Naples to find out exactly what had happened, in particular what had happened to his pictures. In the report, dated 29 July, the obsequious Bishop Gentile was careful to refer to the artist as il povero Caravaggio. He knew very well that he was writing about a favorite. He describes Caravaggio’s last journey in detail, mentioning the mistaken rumor that he had died on Procida. Then he deals with the paintings. “The felucca, when it got back, brought his belongings to the house of the Signora Marchesa di Caravaggio,” he states. “I at once went to look for the pictures, but found they were no longer there, except for three, two of St. John and one of the Magdalene, and these are at the Signora Marchesa’s house.” In fact, the three were the only pictures that had been on board the felucca. Borghese was determined to get possession of them.
From a copy of a document prepared by officials of the viceroy of Naples, which was destroyed during the Second World War, it seems that the inventory of Caravaggio’s effects drawn up by the Confraternity of Santa Cruz was sent to the Religion at Valletta. The Knights of Malta, however, refusing to acknowledge him as a member of their order, declined to accept even the pictures. The viceroy then ordered that all of Caravaggio’s possessions be sent to the Viceregal Palace, “especially the painting of St. John the Baptist.” But Cardinal Borghese prevailed. St. John the Baptist in the Wilderness is still in his collection at the Villa Borghese.
On July 28, the duke of Urbino’s agent in Rome sent his employer an avviso reporting, “News has arrived of the death of Michel Angelo Caravaggio, the celebrated artist, most excellent as a colorist and in imitating nature, after his illness at Porto Ercole.” On August 1, another avviso informed its readers that “Michel Angelo da Caravaggio, the famous painter, has died at Porto Ercole when traveling from Naples to Rome, thanks to the mercy of His Holiness in canceling a warrant for murder.”
Bellori relates how everyone in Rome had been waiting for Caravaggio to return, telling us, with perhaps a little exaggeration, that the news of his death “caused universal sorrow.” But Sandrart was undoubtedly echoing the Giustiniani brothers and their circle when he wrote, “His passing wasmourned by all the leading noblemen in Rome, because one day he might have done so much more for art.” Years later, his rakish old friend, the Cavaliere Marino, whose portrait he had once painted, published some affectionate verses in his memory, “In morte di Michelangelo da Caravaggio”:
There has been a cruel plot against you,
Michele, by Death and by Nature…
The Cavaliere claimed that Caravaggio had not merely painted, he had created.
An unforgiving Baglione wrote with relish that Caravaggio “died badly, just as he had lived.” It is only fair to remember that more than a few artists of the Baroque age possessed difficult temperaments, were no less violent, and had even stormier careers, yet in the end they generally settled down. An increasingly held view in seventeenth-century Italy was that most, if perhaps not all, artists and creative writers were slightly mad. Pope Paul V is credited with observing, “Everything is permitted to painters and poets: we have to put up with these great men because the superabundance of spirits that makes them great is the same that leads to such strange behavior.”
Although Caravaggio’s earliest paintings had secular themes, he was primarily a religious artist. Essentially he was a man who, when painting, became a mystic. His deepest affliction was not his violent temper but a devouring melancholy. Yet despite his misfortunes and his early death, he should not be seen as a tragic figure. Nor would he have seen himself as one. The last version of David and Goliath was inspired by his conviction that, ultimately, he would triumph over sin and death, escaping from the unhappy man he had become. Caravaggio’s portrait of his own severed head, grasped by his redeemed self, was a declaration of hope.