Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane Read Free Page A

of 1994, Caravaggio assassino – the curate’s egg of recent Caravaggio studies – sifting the true not only from the false but also from the outright invented. Helen also set me straight at a particular crossroads in my research into the painter’s second and final stay in Naples, for which I am very grateful.
    I have not spoken to Sir Denis Mahon in the course of writing my book, but, like everyone engaged in serious study of Caravaggio, I have benefited enormously from his pioneering work. The shades of Walter Friedlaender and Roberto Longhi have given me much assistance along the way, as has that of my old tutor at the Courtauld Institute, Michael Kitson, whose wisdom I sought to absorb along with the smoke of many amiably shared packets of cigarettes. I have drawn rather more lateral inspiration from the work of John Michael Montias, whose Vermeer and His Milieu of 1989 is a truly remarkable work. The shape of my own book has been certainly influenced by his, as well as by a meeting with Montias at his home in New Haven in the autumn of 2001. Without laying any claim to Montias’s eminence as an archival scholar, I have myself tried to spin a ‘web of social history’, to use his phrase – to convey, through an account of one man’s life and milieu, some sense of an entire lost world, in this case the civilization of Italy at the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth. Charles Nicholl’s books about Marlowe and Shakespeare, The Reckoning and The Lodger , have been among my other touchstones.
    Writing about Caravaggio has been an intellectual challenge, but it has also been an adventure, one which has led me into some fairly unusual situations. With John Azzopardi’s generous help and the loan of a slightly rickety ladder, I have inspected the stone well, or guva , in which Caravaggio was imprisoned on Malta (I can now laugh at the practical joke of his pretending to lock me in and leave me there, although it seemed less funny at the time). I have duelled (after a fashion) with master-swordsman Renzo Musumeci Greco in his Roman fencing school, in an attempt to understand the sort of manoeuvres that might result in the emasculation of a man during a swordfight. I have walked along the quays of the old port at Valletta with the Maltese naval historian Joseph Sciberras, to learn about transport by felucca in Caravaggio’s time. I have been allowed to inspect the book of the dead in the parish of Porto Ercole by local historian Giuseppe La Fauci. I have spent some happy hours poring over Caravaggio reproductions with the film director Martin Scorsese, who generously gave his time to open my eyes to the artist’s importance for modern cinema. To these and all the others who have gone out of their way to help me – the boy who lowered that ladder down the guva on Malta, the sacristan who got the keys to the church of Santa Lucia in Syracuse, the librarians and archivists in London, Rome, Naples, Milan and Malta who found so many books and documents – a heartfelt thank you.
    Closer to home, I would like to thank my producer Silvia Sacco for devising a schedule for my television and other work that made the seemingly impossible possible. Without her constant encouragement, moral support and ruthless deadline-setting, I really might never have written the book at all. Without the help of my researchers, I would certainly never have been able to finish it. Opher Mansour did a first- rate job of translating Corradini’s essential anthology of archival docu ments, Materiali per un processo , from a mixture of legalistic Latin and often difficult sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italian vernacular slang. Opher also allowed me to read his enlightening doctoral thesis about censorship in Caravaggio’s Rome and unearthed several eyewitness accounts of the plague that ravaged Milan in the mid 1570s. In the very final stages of the book, Nicholas Stone Villani took time away from his own thesis