He who was so distant from sacred mysteries may have believed in the protection of a benevolent demon during the long periods he spent playing cards. When he painted Bohemian fortune tellers, was it an allusion to a personal experience, in that he did not mind giving them his own hand to have his fortune told, or was he addressing a theme of which he was questioning the meaning?

 

The period of his life that Caravaggio spent in Rome – little more than ten years between the end of the 16th century and the beginning of the 17th – was marked by frequent brawls, scandals surrounding his principal paintings, and disagreements with the authorities. He rubbed shoulders with disreputable people and his reputation as a violent and quarrelsome man began to spread. Incapable of controlling his language and his behaviour, he once composed a defamatory satire against the painter Giovanni Baglione. Another time, in an inn, he petulantly threw a plate of artichokes in the face of the waiter; one night he attacked a certain Spampa de Montepulciano with a stick and a sword cane; on other nights he shouted insults at the police or hit a sergeant guard at the prison of Castello Sant’Angelo, or even threw bricks at the shutters of a certain Bruna Prudenzia. He appeared before the courts several times for not honouring his debts, for going out armed with a sword at night without authorisation, and for having perpetrated criminal acts in the shop of Diome de Ferrucci, the student of Cresti Dominico nicknamed the Passignano. He attacked the assistant to a notary over a woman, and in a fit of jealousy he could not prevent himself from seriously threatening the painter Guido Reni. The latter, frightened by such a formidable adversary, got some formidable-looking men to intimidate Caravaggio, getting him to back down. Another time, Caravaggio sent a hired Sicilian killer to injure the face of the painter Niccolò Pomarancio who had succeeded in obtaining the commission of a large fresco in the dome of the Basilica Santa Maria in Loreto.

 

His life in Rome was therefore rather tumultuous, and a number of documents recall these criminal and other moral affairs for which he was imprisoned. In 1606, at the end of an inevitable criminal descent, he injured with his sword the thigh of the young Ranuccio Tomassoni who died from the wound. The reason for this action seems to have been a quarrel over a game of court tennis or a difference in opinion over the merits of the ambassador of the Grand Duke. Caravaggio was condemned to death for this murder. Documents found long after the fact imply that, in reality, it would have been Tomassoni who would be the first to challenge Caravaggio and not the latter who would have attacked him.

 

The artist then had to run away from Rome and try to obtain a pardon from the Pope, but without showing any remorse or any desire to change his ways. Immediately after his stay in Rome, Caravaggio attended to his wounds, probably contracted during the fray, and worked for a short time in Zagarolo near Palestrina, where the artist had sought protection with Duke Marzio Colonna[62]. According to Baglione’s report, he painted the Magdalene here[63]. The painting, of which there seems to be a copy in a private collection in Rome, shows the artistic style of the final works that Caravaggio had created in Rome[64]. According to Bellori he is also said to have painted a portrayal of The Supper at Emmaus for the Duke of Colonna[65]. As mentioned above, Baglione reported that Caravaggio had painted a picture of the same subject for Ciriaco Mattei in Rome, which, in all probability, is the version in the National Gallery in London[66]. In this case, as with that of the paintings in the Capella Cerasi in Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome, we can hardly suppose that Caravaggio occupied himself with copies of the same representation. In order to evaluate this correctly, Bellori’s information of an original composition of the Emmaus scene for Colonna must therefore be doubted; in reality these are copies produced by a school, which, in the case of the copy in the Ferdinandeum in Innsbruck suggest a Flemish successor.

 

It is tempting to compare a different work of art our painter created to the Roman paintings mentioned. This is The Crowning with Thorns which can now be found in the Kunsthistoriches Museum in Vienna. Certain commentators have mentioned the existence of other versions of the subject[67], but nothing has been proved. The painting, which measures 127 cm high and 166 cm wide, shows the Saviour from the waist up with tied hands between two half-length figures of armoured and turbaned soldiers. In comparison with the description in the Gospel, Caravaggio accentuated the brutality of the scene in his depiction. Matthew (27:30) tells us only that the soldiers hit Christ on the head with a cane. But in his own, unfinished The Flagellation of Christ, now in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, Titian already has the crown of thorns pressed onto Christ’s head in the Nordic manner, with the soldiers holding clubs, a motif that Caravaggio used even more brutally as a result of his soldiers’ realism. The modelling of the figures in the painting, which is yellowish in tone, reflects the artist’s complete mastery of his tools. The dexterity of the armour’s reproduction, reminiscent of The Conversion of Saint Paul in the church of Santa Maria del Popolo, points to an increased artistic method of portrayal, whose exemplary effect is still recognisable in the works of Caravaggio’s Roman pupils, the Venetian Carlo Saraceni and the French painter Valentin, who show national and personal differences in their manner of painting. Back on his feet after his convalescence, and having sketched several paintings, Caravaggio then went to Naples.