The Caravaggio Conspiracy (17 page)

But the uplift that came from the restoration of his freedom and the
satisfaction
of living in Europe’s biggest city soon palled. Though his career flourished, Caravaggio was plagued by the persistent belief that he was a sinner destined for hell. He wished desperately for absolution. More than that, he longed to forgive himself. His shifting dispositions became a talking point among Neapolitans of all classes. No one who knew him could be sure from one minute to the next what mood he would be in or how long it would last. He could be laughing and joking in the tavern, with his hand running up the thigh of a young whore, then, abruptly, fly into a rage or be consumed by self-pity. Friends learned to be circumspect. It was one thing to be a bosom companion of ‘the greatest painter in Italy’, it was another to be the object of his scorn.

Governing his mood were his ‘voices’, which still spoke to him, though he tried earnestly to block them out. So long as he was working, he held on to his sanity. But he couldn’t paint twenty-four hours a day. The consequences of his continuing, uresolved dialogue became a matter of public scandal. Mindless of his personal safety, he got into a wearisome series of fights in taverns and
whorehouses
. He also drank too much, hoping to dull the pain that drove him on.

Prince Luigi despaired of his guest. But then, one evening, he looked in to his studio and watched for an hour as the artist laboured over a vast
Flagellation of Christ
. After that, he would not hear a word of criticism.

All the while, Caravaggio knew that Battista would not rest. The Camerlengo, he was convinced, would hunt him down. At some point, when he least expected it, an assassin would come up behind him and drive a blade between his shoulders. Perhaps, like the priest, he would leave his head grinning in the gutter. But it wasn’t only apprehension that moved him. Grief-stricken over his misspent life, he was consumed increasingly with a need to atone and do some service for Christianity. The fact that he had fled Rome after the business with Tomassoni preyed on his mind. He should have stood his ground, he told himself. He should have denied the charges against him and taken his chances in the papal court. Here in Naples, surrounded by luxury, able to indulge his talent to an extent previously impossible, he was sickened by himself. Worst of all was his knowledge that the future of Christian Europe could be altered by Battista and that he had done nothing to prevent it. An honest Muslim was one thing. Everyone had heard the stories about the nobility and tolerance of Salahadin. In Spain, it was said, the Moors had allowed Christians and Jews to follow their religions unmolested. But a traitor, who concealed his intentions, was something very different. An insidious man like Battista was a blot on the affairs of men. Caravaggio knew that he couldn’t hide for ever. He had to rescue his good name with the one person whose opinion he truly valued: himself. Yet the question was, what could he hope to achieve? He had left it too late. No one would believe him if he made an accusation without evidence. They would say that he was slandering the reputation of an honoured prince of the Church simply to save his neck and win favour with the Pope. Not only that. To press a charge at all, he would have to return to Rome, which meant that first he must receive a guarantee of safe conduct. But how would he achieve that with a
banda capitale
hanging over his head?

One possibility remained. He had still not given up the idea of becoming a novitiate of the Knights of St John, in Malta – a proposal he had once discussed with the Holy Father. But how could he hope to achieve such an ambition? In Prince Luigi’s private chapel, he prayed for guidance.

Two weeks later, in the middle of the afternoon, his prayers were answered. His studio, on the second floor, had windows on two sides, one overlooking the street, the other the main courtyard. Alerted by a combination of horses’ hooves, carriage wheels and men shouting, Caravaggio looked out of his courtyard window just in time to see the gates swing open to admit, first, four armed horseguards, in uniform, then a carriage bearing on its side the arms of the Marchesa di Caravaggio.

Overjoyed, he threw down his brushes, telling his models to take the rest of the day off, and ran down the stairs two at a time. Prince Luigi was already there to welcome his aunt, the unquestioned matriarch of the Colonna, daughter of the great Admiral Marcantonio Doria, the victor of Lepanto.

‘Luigi,’ she said, as a footman rushed to place a stool beneath the door of the carriage. ‘Let me take your arm, for I am no longer as young as I used to be.’

‘You are forever young in our hearts,’ said Don Luigi with a flourish. ‘But I had no idea you were coming and have not prepared.’

‘I came as quick as a letter ever would. And I have no doubt, nephew, that your generous household will prove more than adequate to my needs.’

Don Luigi bowed. As he did so, the Marchesa could see, standing behind him, shifting impatiently from foot to foot, the artist Caravaggio. Striding towards him, she held out her hand, which he kissed with as much gallantry as he could muster.

‘My lady,’ he began. ‘I had thought never to see you again.’

‘You should not underestimate me, Michelangelo, nor my family. Word came to me from my cousin Don Marzio that you were in trouble and I have hastened to be by your side.’

‘I do not deserve the honour, but I am deeply grateful.’

The Marchesa nodded before turning approvingly to her nephew. ‘And you, Luigi. I know that you have already played your part. That is as I would expect. But now, it is much too hot to be standing outside. In this heat it is little wonder that your famous birds are not singing. Let us go inside, where I hope I may have a drink of clean water followed by a glass or two of the estate’s most excellent wine. After that, it is my intention to retire until it is time for supper. It has been a long journey from Rome.’

‘Of course, aunt,’ said Don Luigi, smiling. He turned to lead the way inside. At the same time, his major domo clapped his hands and a variety of servants came running.

Moments later, the prince turned to Caravaggio. ‘This must be your lucky day, Michelangelo,’ he said. ‘If my aunt has decided to take you into her embrace, who would dare stand against her?’ 

Later, over dinner, the Marchesa revealed the cause of her visit. ‘I have with me a letter signed by the Pope in which His Holiness grants Michelangelo the promise of his pardon.’ She paused. The prince and Caravaggio waited respectfully. ‘But,’ she went on, ‘there are two conditions. The first is that you, Michelangelo, should repent fully of your sins and over the next year perform work in the service of the Church. The second is that you should present yourself in person to obtain the Pope’s absolution. I shall place in my nephew’s safekeeping the laisser-passer provided by the Vatican, in the name of Cardinal Gonzaga. In the meantime, you must give yourself to God.’

Caravaggio could hardly believe what he was hearing. It was the second chance he had prayed for so earnestly ever since arriving in Naples.

‘But what work should I do, my lady? I have fallen so far from grace.’

The Marchesa sipped from her glass of wine, then dabbed at the corners of her mouth with her napkin. ‘I remember the day you were born – just three days after Lepanto. It was the feast day of Saint Michael the Archangel and it was I who suggested to your father that you be given the name Michelangelo.’

Caravaggio knew the story but listened as if hearing it for the first time. ‘Your contribution to my life, my very survival, is something for which I shall always be grateful,’ he said.

Still elegant on the brink of old age, the Marchesa looked at him and smiled. ‘Do you believe in fate?’ she asked him.

‘I believe that each of us has a role to play, given us by God.’

‘And what is yours, Michelangelo?’

‘That is a question I ask myself every day.’

‘Then let me provide the answer. You were born to paint. You were born to make the world see with new eyes. You were born for greatness. I knew it the first time I saw you. On the day your mother went into labour, as I walked down the steps of the palazzo, a rainbow appeared in the sky, and as I watched it came down just in front of the house in which you had been born only hours before. It was a sign. It was as if Christ himself had anointed you.’

‘I don’t understand.’

She stretched a hand to his face and stroked his cheek. ‘When the rest of us are long forgotten, you, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, will be remembered. Your art and your struggle will live for all time.’

‘That is flattering, my lady. But look at me. I am a fugitive, on the run from justice. Anyone who chooses may kill me. Every day I must look round me for the assassin who may be out there. When I go for supplies, or to the tavern, or to …’

‘… or to the brothel?’

Caravaggio looked down, unable to meet her eyes. ‘As you say, my lady.’ 

‘Then listen to me. In life, there are many who never know persecution. They come to no one’s attention. They are not even important enough to have enemies. Others are hounded by the fates. You are one such man, Michelangelo. My son Fabrizio is another. Both of you have a destiny to fulfil, and those of us who are less troubled have a duty to see to it that you are not robbed of your achievement.’ She found herself examining his hair, his beard and his clothes and concluding that time spent in her nephew’s household had done much to civilize him. Eventually, she said: ‘I am told that you have expressed a desire to join the Order of St John, in Malta.’

‘That is correct, my lady … if they will have me.’

‘Oh, they will have you, Michelangelo. I have already taken soundings and am informed that the Grand Master would be more than happy to benefit from your genius. In return, he will consider you as a Knight – or at least as a novitiate. But only if you show a willingness to live a pure life and place your art at the order’s service.’

‘I should be honoured.’

‘Then it is decided. I am sure my nephew will add his voice to mine in this matter.’

Prince Luigi nodded. ‘Of course, aunt – and I shall also be pleased to write to the Grand Master, pleading your case.’

The Marchesa murmured her approval and patted her nephew’s hand. Then she turned back to the artist, whose eyes, she noticed, were more deeply sunk in his head than she remembered when he was a young man setting off to conquer Rome.

‘Join the Knights, Michelangelo. Learn discipline and attain peace. But most of all, paint! Will you promise me that?’

‘I will, my lady.’

‘Very well. Now go. I have business to discuss with my nephew. We will meet again in the days ahead. In particular, I wish to see what paintings you have made in the last year. But be assured, arrangements will be made.’

A month later, word was brought to Caravaggio that he should present himself the next morning, 21 July, with such goods and chattels as he intended to bring with him, to the quayside in Naples. There, he was told, he would be met by the general of the galleys of the Knights Hospitaller, who would convey him to Valletta for an audience with the Grand Master himself, Alof de Wignacourt.

It was everything he had dared to hope and Caravaggio wasted no time. Having packed up his few possessions, and leaving behind him a magnificent portrait of his host, he made his farewells to Prince Luigi and set off for the port.

The Marchesa accompanied him to wish him God speed and
bon voyage
. But she had another reason for venturing into the stink of the harbour. She wished to speak with her errant, yet illustrious son. For there on the quayside, waiting to greet them, was a man almost as infamous as Caravaggio: Fabrizio Sforza Colonna. 

O’Malley’s encounter with Cardinal Bosani had convinced him that the Camerlengo was a dangerous adversary pursuing an obscure and intensely personal agenda. He was alarmed and deeply uneasy, but none the wiser. What possible reason could the highest-ranking cardinal in the Church have for meeting in secret with Yilmaz Hakura, a known terrorist? It made no sense. Hakura, by all accounts, wasn’t a man to be reasoned with. He wasn’t like Martin McGuinness, the one-time IRA commander, who had famously done a deal with his lifelong enemy the Reverend Ian Paisley to bring peace to Northern Ireland. Hakura didn’t understand
compromise
; he believed in suicide bombers, assassination and Jihad.

A thought, unbidden, had taken root in the Irishman’s mind. It was dark and disturbing, like a storm still far off that you knew was coming. He tried to summon the thought to the forefront of his brain, but couldn’t get hold of it. It kept sliding away. He was reminded of the summer when he was ten years old and used to spend hours every day at an amusement arcade in the Galway resort of Salthill. Inside a glass box, next to a booth housing a mechanical gypsy fortune-teller, was a heap of toys, one of which, a plastic GI Joe, he really wanted. To win it, he had to manipulate a small, chromium-plated crane, lowering its grab into position, then hoisting the prize towards the delivery point. Again and again, over six weeks, he had failed. The prongs of the grab always sprang open at the last moment. But in the end, on the last day of the summer, he had done it, slowly lifting the elusive toy soldier, then inching it towards the slot. It had been one of the highlights of his childhood – a triumph that had lived with him over the decades since. 

He concentrated. Again and again he tried to recover the thought that was eluding him. Over and over again, he almost got hold of it, only to see it slip back into the darkness of his unconscious.

He shook his head and screwed up his eyes. Maybe Rüttgers had got it wrong about Bosani and Hakura. Maybe it just a simple case of mistaken identity. The trouble with detective work, O’Malley decided, was that it threw up as many
questions
as answers. He needed to know more and there was only one way to find out.

Descending during his lunch break into the cavernous archive of the Curia Generalizia, he called up the Society’s files for the reigns of Popes Clement VIII and Paul V, who, between them, save for the 26-day reign of Leo XI, reigned from 1592 to 1621. To his astonishment, there was hardly anything about Cardinal Orazio Battista. A former prosecutor with the Inquisition, he was awarded his red hat in an addendum to the first and only list of cardinals created by Pope Innocent IX at the Consistory of 18 December 1591. The Pope himself died shortly after and Battista, according to the Jesuit record, remained in Rome until sometime in 1610 or 1611, when he apparently died of the plague. O’Malley next consulted the official archive of the Catholic Hierarchy and was surprised to discover that, apart from the date of his creation as a cardinal priest and the date of his death, there was nothing in the record to mark his passing. Whereas the Jesuit account placed Battista as Camerlengo for eleven years, from 1599 to 1610, the official account, updated
annually
, granted the title to Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini, the cardinal-nephew of Clement VIII, who, as it happened, was a well-known patron of Caravaggio.

Why the discrepancy? Digging deeper, O’Malley pulled up the Society’s official calendars for 1599 and 1610. These were dusty volumes, bound in leather, in which the events of each day were recorded in Latin, by means of a quill pen dipped in a mixture of soot, wine and walnut oil, held together with gum. It was pretty dismal stuff, he had to admit: a list of Masses held and who the celebrants were, plus comings and goings … the Father General to Brindisi; a visit by the French Provincial General; the admission of novices; a new coadjutor agreed; three deaths. But there were other references, too, in faded red ink, recording events in the Church outside the Society, including the creation of seven cardinals on 31 March 1599 and the death, on 13 December of that year, of the Camerlengo, Cardinal Enrico Caetani. A week later, on 20 December, the same hand noted the appointment as Caetani’s successor of … His Eminence Orazio Cardinal Battista.

There was no mention of Aldobrandini. And yet, if memory served, the cardinal-nephew had been the most important figure in the Curia of his time. Elsewhere, in the official record of the Sacred College, against the name of Aldobrandini, was the information that he had been Secretary of State – a new post in those days – who had also served as Camerlengo from 1599 until his death, on 10 February 1621. The cardinal’s funeral oration, O’Malley couldn’t help observing, was delivered by Father Angelo Galluccio, SJ.

It was bloody odd. Turning back to the Jesuit archive, he eventually found an entry for Gallucio, who turned out to have been a papal lawyer, consecrated a priest in 1597, attached to the office of the Secretary of State from 1614 until his death in 1635. Several of his papers were available in a grey box last opened, O’Malley
imagined
, at the time of Galileo. He unfastened the small metal clip and slowly drew back the lid, sneezing as he did so. The interior of the waxed box was surprisingly dry. The papers themselves, four in all, were yellow with age, but still decipherable. One was an account of a trip to Venice during the interdict imposed on the city by Paul V. Another addressed a jurisdictional dispute between the Archbishop of Paris and a leading Benedictine abbot. The third looked to be even drier than the paper on which it was written: an account of the processes used to distribute the income from the Lateran cathedral during the pontificate of Gregory XV. But it was the last, the oration given by Gallucio at the Requiem Mass for the soul of Cardinal Aldobrandini on 10 February 1621 in the Basilica of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, that caused O’Malley to utter an impatient grunt.

His practised eyes skipped down the florid encomium. Aldobrandi,
unsurprisingly
, turned out to have been a paragon among men, raised to the cardinalate by his uncle, who early on recognized his nephew’s sterling virtues and Christian calling. Yes, yes, but where were the references to the offices he held?

Ah! At last. There it was. Archbishop of Ravenna, Abbot commendatario of Rosazzo, prefect of the Office of the Apostolic Signature, governor of Ferrara, cardinal nipote, or cardinal-nephew, and head of the diplomatic service – the man who in 1598 had triumphantly negotiated the incorporation of the Duchy of Ferrara into the Papal States.

Nothing about being Camerlengo of the Holy Roman Church from 1599 to 1621. It could be that he had subsumed the office into that of Secretary of State, rather as Bosani had done. But in the 1600s, the office of Camerlengo was the most powerful job around. Gallucio, an obvious bureaucrat and yes-man, would never have left it out.

No. It was now clear to O’Malley that someone else – most obviously Battista – had been Camerlengo for at least part of the time generally ascribed to Aldobrandini. At some point he had obviously been airbrushed out of history. But why? Who would have benefited? And what possible connection could there be to Bosani?

He was not done yet. Turning finally to the personal papers of Father Claudio Acquaviva, Superior General of the Society from 1581 to 1615, O’Malley
discovered
a letter received from a Father Alfonso di Conza, SJ, dated May 28, 1606. He adjusted the ancient Anglepoise lamp fixed to the study table at which he was seated and peered at the text, realizing with a tremor of excitement that it had probably not been read by anyone other than its intended recipient. It was written in the formal Italian of the period, but the author’s meaning was clear.

O’Malley was overwhelmed by his discovery. In the days when he used to read his
Irish Times
in the parlour of the Jesuit House in Dublin, the depiction of the fleeing man in Caravaggio’s then unrevealed masterpiece was all but obscured by centuries of tobacco smoke and grime. But once restored by Benedetti, the painting – now hanging in a place of honour in the National Gallery - had been as remarkable to him for its harrowing portrayal of the figure running terrified from Gethsemene as it was for its rendition of Judas’ betrayal. Now he knew the reason why.

There was still one missing piece in the story. He turned to the card index and looked up the entry for Di Conza. This referred him to the calendar for the year 1606, in which was another entry in red ink: Father Alfonso di Conza, born Siena 25 March 1544; died 30 May 1606 – apparently from food poisoning. That was all. He had been a member of the order for forty-one years, since 11 August 1565, but, like Father d’Amboise, he had survived his curious encounter with Cardinal Battista by less than forty-eight hours. It was incredible: two murders of two priests, each of whom had fallen foul of Battista, and no one seemed to think it strange.

As he absorbed the significance of this latest information, his mobile phone began to vibrate in his pocket. It was Father Giovanni, reminding him that he had an urgent appointment with an insurance broker – something about health care costs for the staff of Boston College.

‘Yes, yes, Giovanni, don’t worry, I’m on my way. Just give me five minutes.’

‘Your taxi’s waiting.’

‘Very well, then …
two
minutes.’

He glanced back at the files. Acquaviva was in the view of many the most dynamic leader the Jesuits ever had. He’d brought in thousands of recruits and expanded the order across Europe and South America. He was also remembered for his part in the long-running dispute with the Dominicans over grace and free will, which became so bitter at one point that there were even fist fights and the Pope had to order both sides to desist. But no doubt Acquaviva had meetings as well. According to the accounts for 1606, he had been summoned to Venice on urgent business on the morning of 30 May and probably wouldn’t have read Di Conza’s letter until weeks, even months, later, by which time the poor man was long dead. Acquaviva could well have reasoned that there was nothing to be done. Caravaggio to him would have been a lost cause – possibly an artist whom he viewed with suspicion. Or perhaps he was overwhelmed with business and simply chose not to take a view. Then, as now, Vatican bureaucracy had a lot to answer for.