V
We do not know why Caravaggio left Milan, but he left as a very young man and never returned. Mancini, in a barely legible note scrawled in his Considerations, says that Caravaggio was in a brawl involving “a nobleman and a whore,” during which a sbirro (policeman) was killed, and that he then spent a year in prison and was forced to sell his patrimony. Bellori seems to confirm the note, writing that “because of some sort of strife he fled from Milan.” In his copy of Baglione’s Lives of the Painters he amplified this, scribbling in the margin that Caravaggio had been forced to escape from the city after killing someone.
Bloodshed was an everyday occurrence in sixteenth-century Milan. The streets were dangerous because they were so narrow. Pious Milanese boasted that by the time Archbishop Borromeo died, crimes of violence had almost ceased in the city. If so, they seem to have been revived very quickly. A man might be robbed or murdered in broad daylight by an ordinary footpad, a starving Spanish soldier, or a bravo, one of the hired killers with whom every rich nobleman surrounded himself for his own protection.
Except for lawyers or clerics, any man with the slightest pretension to status wore a rapier and a long dagger. The swarming slum-dwellers also went armed, with knives, which they were ready to use at the least provocation. The ragged, venal sbirri (policemen) with their rusty halberds and cumbersome muskets were more of a menace than a safeguard. Much of the violence stemmed from the example set by the Spaniards, the Lombard nobility adopting hidalgismo, the outlook of the Spanish aristocrat, or would-be aristocrat, and becoming much haughtier and readier to take offense. Milanese merchants and bankers copied their arrogance, although well aware that a true nobleman regarded anyone connected with trade with the utmost contempt.
Montaigne once observed that everybody went to Italy to learn how to fence. Duelling was fashionable all over Lombardy, especially at the capital. Caravaggio’s contemporaries associated a rapier with him as much as they did a paintbrush. Made by renowned swordsmiths, Milanese rapiers were famous. When fighting, a swordsman crossed his fingers round the base of the three-foot blade to guide his aim, the newly invented botta lunga, or lunge, giving him an incredibly long reach. Normally a pugnale, or dagger held in the left hand, was used to deflect an opponent’s blade, but sometimes a cloak was held instead, to whirl into his face.
In November 1588, Caravaggio sold a plot of land for 350 imperial lire, with the option of redeeming it in five years for the same sum. The most likely explanation is that he was out of work, and the widow Caravaggio could no longer afford to support him; judging from what we know of his later years, expensive clothes, gambling, and taverns may have been responsible. In July 1590, and again in March 1591, he and his brother Giovan Battista, the future priest, sold more land, which suggests that the family was increasingly short of money. Apparently the other brother, Giovan Pietro, was dead by now. Their mother died at about the same time. In May 1592, Caravaggio, Giovan Battista, and their sister Caterina divided their parents’ estate among them, Caravaggio taking his share in cash. He received 393 lire, which he spent within a very short period, perhaps to pay his jailers. Obviously he kept enough to finance his flight from Milan.
He appears to have left Lombardy toward the end of 1592. The fact that he never went back seems to confirm Mancini’s and Bellori’s statements that he had to leave quickly after getting into serious trouble with the law. His destination was Rome, and in the document dividing up the family property, mention is made of an uncle, Lodovico Caravaggio, who lived there. But it seems unlikely that he ever intended to live with Lodovico, or that Lodovico wanted him to. According to Baglione, his motive for going to Rome was his wish “to study diligently the noble art of painting.” He may also have been encouraged by the knowledge that a fair number of people from Caravaggio had settled in the city, working as artisans, shopkeepers, sword makers, notaries, and papal officials.
The cheapest, quickest, and, on the whole, safest way of reaching Rome was to go to Genoa and travel down the coast by boat. Almost certainly, Caravaggio took this route. He would have gone by felucca, the universal ship-of-all-work until well into the present century. It was an uncomfortable voyage, lasting over a week, probably during autumn or early winter, when the Mediterranean was prone to sudden storms, and wind and rain were commoner than sunshine.
His arrival at Ostia must have been something of an anticlimax. To discourage Muslim raiders, there was no proper port for Rome, and, a day’s march southwest, this was the nearest landing place, accessible to only the very smallest ships. Although Ostia had once been the harbor of ancient Rome, it had silted up, so that the town had become a small, miserable village in the middle of a malarial, reed-fringed lagoon. After going ashore, Caravaggio had to travel another fifteen miles over land. At last, he came to the Eternal City and entered through the crumbling gate that, long before, had been the Porta Ostienses but was now the Porta San Paolo.