The Caravaggio Conspiracy (3 page)

Caravaggio called out in the night but nobody heard. Three, sometimes four times a week for the last four years he had dreamed the same terrible dream. It began a little before noon on the morning of 11 September 1599. He was on the Ponte Sant’Angelo to witness the execution of Lucrezia Cenci, her daughter Beatrice and her elder son Giacomo. Following the most intense interrogation and a trial that lasted months, the three adult Cenci had been condemned to death by the Pope for the murder of Lucrezia’s villainous husband, Count Francesco. It was a decision that had aroused enromous controversy. Everybody, it seemed, had an opinion. Seated beneath the scaffold on one of the hottest days of a long, hot summer, Caravaggio was sweating profusely. He wished he hadn’t come. He need not have done so. He could have stayed away and none would have blamed him. But he had been drawn to the occasion as if by Death himself.

Directly ahead, blotting out the sky, lay the bulk of the Castel Sant’Angelo, dating back to the time of the Emperor Hadrian. If the Muslims ever conquered Rome, it would be here that the last Pope would take his stand. The sun, directly overhead, bore down on a huge crowd made up of city dwellers of every class, as well as foreign observers come to witness the reality of papal justice. One of the two executioners, a giant of a man wearing a leather mask and apron, nudged the other with his elbow and whispered something. The second man, smaller with a scar down one cheek, turned his head and grinned at Caravaggio as if to say, ‘Don’t forget to put us in the picture.’ Next to them on the scaffold, erected on the bridge, stood the instruments of their trade: a long-handled axe, its scythe-like blade glinting dully in the sunlight; a heavy bludgeon inlaid with metal studs; and a set of iron tongs in a chafing dish filled with hot coals. He tried not to look at these, but he was transfixed. To his right, several members of a well-known noble family were being shown to their reserved seats by a young priest. Nuns offered them iced water with lemon juice, and sweetmeats.

Caravaggio tried to avert his eyes from the axe but could not. Moments later, a ripple of excitement ran through the crowd. Twisting round, he was able to make out the tumbril bearing the Cenci to their doom. The cart, drawn by two farm horses, was flanked by armed men, led by a bishop and two hooded members of the Confraternity of St John the Beheaded, known as the Decollati. But it was the small family group that inevitably held Caravaggio’s attention. Lucrezia, the mother, who had devised the plot that ended in the murder of her husband, stood between Giacomo and Beatrice. Bernardo, the youngest boy, just twelve years old, forced by papal decree to witness the excecutions, buried his head in his mother’s skirts.

Attempting to escape his dream, Caravaggio tried to rise out of his seat. He knew what was going to happen: he had seen it in his dream many times before. But he couldn’t move. His legs were paralyzed. The Cenci, hand in hand, were being led past him towards the steps leading up to the scaffold. Behind, in the piazza, the crowd fell silent, as if struck dumb in contemplation of the horror to come.

Everyone in Rome was familiar with the story. The Cenci were one of the greatest noble families of Italy. But Don Francesco was a monster. No woman, nor any girl approaching puberty, was safe from his predations. As well as a rapist, he was a murderer three times over, and a thief whose brutality and greed had landed him in prison several times. In the past, he had always bought his freedom with ‘generous’ donations to the Church. It was his rape of Beatrice, his step-daughter, in front of her mother that convinced the family that it was time to act. Giacomo, with the support of one of his servants, confronted his father and in the midst of a violent argument stabbed him to death, throwing his body into the street from an upstairs window. Everybody in Rome knew the circumstances of the murder. Nobody doubted the righteousness of the act. What Giacomo and his family failed to take into account was the extreme rapaciousness of Pope Clement VIII, the former Ippolito Aldobrandini.

The Aldobrandini, with their roots in Florence, had profited hugely from their Vatican connections. The Pope’s younger cousins, pushed forward by their uncle, had married into the Pamphilj and Farnese families, becoming at a stroke key members of the ruling class. But no one joined the nobility without bringing something to the table. Power and influence were commodities like anything else, traded on the open market. Thus it was that Clement, dismissing pleas for mercy from every corner of Europe, pronounced that the Cenci must pay with their lives for the death of Don Francesco. Their estates, according to a codicil buried in the text, would be forfeit to the Aldobrandini.

No one was surprised by such a display of greed. That was how things were done in the Eternal City. It was the way they had always been done. To the victor the spoils. But the executions themselves were regarded as exceptional. Not since classical times had one entire family been sacrificed in cold blood to serve the interests of another.

By a convention dating back to the time of Leonardo, artists, including the 28-year-old Michelangelo Merissi, had been invited to record the final minutes of the condemned. Meanwhile, from the ramparts of Castel Sant’Angelo, raised above the multitude, the Pope would have an uninterrupted view of the proceedings.

Looking up at the scaffold, locked into his nightmare, Caravaggio watched, appalled, as Beatrice, her hands tied in front of her, halted next to his chair. He had been sketching the headsman and she glanced down, then caught his eye. He turned away. ‘Will you sketch me, too?’ she asked him. But he didn’t – couldn’t – reply. One of the Decollati took her gently by the elbow and urged her forward. She mounted the steps behind her mother and older brother. Young Bernardo was held back for a moment, then compelled to follow.

What ensued would never leave the artist, not even for a single day. It haunted his nights. It infused his art. Now, as he turned over and over in his sleep, he saw it all again, as red and bloody as the morning on which it happened.

The mother, Lucrezia, was first to be led to the block. She fainted, and was revived with cold water. Afterwards, she stood tall and unwavering, saying the rosary along with her assigned
Decollato
while unfastening the top of her bodice so that the axe would not become entangled with her clothing. As she knelt down and forward, the executioner looked up towards the distant figure of the Pope, poised like an emperor in his box at the Colosseum. At the same time, the masked
Decollato
placed a wooden board, on which was painted a representation of the martyrdom of St John, in front of the condemned woman’s face so that it was the last thing she saw. The Pope nodded. The axe fell and the head of Lucrezia Cenci rolled forward, spurting blood from the neck.

At the same moment, the crowd let out its breath.

The
Decollato
set down his board and from one of his pockets drew out a black silk cloth, in which he wrapped the severed head before carrying it over to a rough coffin in which the second headsman was already depositing the body.

Caravaggio paled and realized that he was trembling. But he couldn’t stop staring. Next to die was Beatrice, a famous beauty, her blonde hair tied back, her neck long and inviting, like a swan’s. She said her prayers, murmured some words to her younger brother, which the artist couldn’t hear, and took her place on the block, so that her throat reddened with her mother’s blood. Few of those watching believed she deserved her fate, and her courage in the face of death had a serenity about it that caused a hush to fall over the crowd. Someone called out, ‘Spare her! For pity’s sake!’ But to no avail. Once more, the Pope nodded. Once again the axe fell.

There was a sound of shattered bone and the thud of the axe biting into the wood. As the axeman wrenched his blade free, Beatrice’s head shot off the block and skittered towards Caravaggio, rolling over and over until it came to a halt on the edge of the scaffold above where he sat so that her eyes, frozen in shock, appeared to be staring at him. Blood ran in rich red streams from her neck. He cried out and was sick.

Now Giacomo was hauled forward. Not for him the swift end offered by the axe. For him, as the one adjudged by the Inquisition to be most culpable, the penalty would be particularly awful. With his hands already tied behind his back and his legs in shackles, he was bound by his neck and ankles to a stake and his tunic ripped from his torso so that his breast was bare. As the bishop from the Holy Office read out the details of his crime and the sentence imposed, the second executioner lifted the heavy tongs from the chafing dish and showed the red-hot ends to the multitude. A sigh went up. Giacomo, after weeks of torture, had prayed he was immune to further pain, but to Caravaggio, just twenty feet away, his eyes told a different story. The masked executioner advanced on him, baring his teeth, then, with a grunt, clamped the glowing ends of the tongs, like pincers, onto the skin and muscle of his victim’s chest. Next, he twisted the steel jaws, first one way, then the other, and jerked back, ripping off a section of flesh. The resulting scream rang out across the Tiber, scattering a group of hooded crows perched on the statues on either side of the bridge.

‘Do you repent of your wickedness?’ the bishop called out. Giacomo could not answer. He could only scream.

Unsheathing a knife at his belt, the executioner peeled off the seared flesh, threw it into the corner, then advanced again, repeating the vicious act of torture three times as the thousands looking on either urged him to greater efforts or else averted their eyes.

Caravaggio felt his stomach heave again. But he had to watch. He had to know what was being done in God’s name.

By now the planks beneath the squirming figure of Giacomo Cenci had turned scarlet and the stench of burnt flesh filled the air. It was time for the final act. Releasing the condemned man from the stake, the chief executioner grabbed him by the hair and bundled him four paces across the scaffold to the waiting block. Giacomo, delirious with pain, called out to God and all the saints to save him and show him mercy. Perceiving this to be moment of truth, the
Decollato
holding on to Bernardo jammed the boy’s eyes open, forcing him to watch his brother’s last moments. It was almost done. The headsman directed a savage kick at the back of Giacomo’s legs, forcing him onto his knees, and pushed him forward as if he were a pig in an abattoir. Then, stretching out his hand, like a surgeon, he took hold of the bludgeon. Pope Clement inclined his head almost imperceptibly, as if unwilling to take on such a terrible burden of responsibility. But the executioner did not need further instruction. Raising the bludgeon, with its metal studs, he held it high for a second, then brought it down with all the force at his command. Giacomo’s skull shattered into pieces, splattering everyone with blood and brains. His body shook for a second, and was still.

The Pope rose and turned away. It was time for His Holiness to pray for the souls of the departed.

On the scaffold, Bernardo fainted. As the executioners flayed his brother’s body and hacked it into pieces, which they hung on hooks, he was led away into a lifetime of captivity as a galley slave. The boy had done no wrong, but was condemned as a member of a wicked family, guilty by association of the crime of patricide.

In his dream, as in life, Caravaggio looked down at his sketch of Beatrice and noticed that it was streaked with real blood. His hands shook and he wept.

When he woke seconds later, still uttering small cries, he wiped the tears from his face and sat up in his bed, which as usual was soaked with sweat. His mouth was dry; he reached for a cup of water on an adjacent table and drank it down. The executions had taken place more than three and a half years before under a different Pope. But to the artist, Beatrice Cenci’s eyes still stared at him as her life’s blood spilled from her neck onto the scaffold on the Ponte Sant’Angelo. It was as if the events of September 1599 had occurred just minutes before. They would be the key to his art and the keenest point of entry into the state of his mind.

Judge Carlo Minghetti was not one of those Italian jurists who pretended
indifference
to the media. As his cases progressed, particularly those involving terrorism, he found it helped him make sense of the previous day’s proceedings to read a crisp, 400-word summary in La
Stampa
or the
Corriere della Serra
. It amused him to compare the commentaries by so-called legal experts and pundits of left and right who presumed to read his thought processes and anticipate his judgments.

As one of Italy’s top anti-terrorist judges, Minghetti had earned a reputation for upholding the rule of law even in the most difficult of cases. It was well-known that he was a conservative. He had been a member of Opus Dei, the most
reactionary
religious movement in the Catholic Church, since the year he graduated from the University of Ferrara. But not even his worst enemies – among whom he counted the Jesuits, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Green Party – had ever accused him of bigotry.

The case on which he was due to rule today was a particularly interesting one. Two men, a Moroccan and a Bosnian, charged with bombing an immigration office in Bologna, had been convicted by a lower court and sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment, to be followed by deportation. Had anyone died as a result of their actions, they would have faced a life sentence, but the blast had occurred at two o’clock in the morning and the only victim, a passing drunk, had merely required treatment for cuts and brusies. The defendants’ lawyers had appealed on the grounds that their clients, allegedly, confessed under duress – which was perfectly possible. Hearing the appeal had meant reviewing much of the original evidence and then questioning both city detectives and agents of the anti-terrorist police, DIGOS.

Speculation in the morning’s media, including no doubt the internet – on which his career received detailed, almost line-by-line scrutiny – centred not on the guilt or innocence of the accused but on the extent to which Minghetti would extend the sentence imposed by the lower court.

How little they knew him.

His front-door buzzer sounded three times. It was the signal that his official car had arrived to take him to court. The judge downed his second cup of espresso, kissed his wife and picked up his briefcase.

‘I’ll be back at three o’clock,’ he said.

‘Don’t worry,’ his wife replied, running her right hand through his silver hair while with her left patting his jacket pocket to make sure he hadn’t forgotten his mobile phone. ‘Everything is packed and ready. We’ll be on the road to Rimini five minutes after you come out of the shower.’

Her husband nodded, checked his watch and disappeared in the direction of the front door, where the police officer in charge of his personal security was waiting.

‘
Buon giorno, Giudice.’

‘Good morning, Emilio. Looks like another fine day.’

The officer smiled. The temperature in Bologna had been in the mid-thirties for six weeks. It hadn’t rained since the second week of March. Eyeing the villas opposite and the street as far as the next corner, he leaned forward to open the car door.

It was at that moment that the shots rang out.

There were four in all, fired so quickly, one after the other, that it seemed impossible they could have been individually aimed. The police forensic team would later record that they struck the brick wall behind which Minghetti was standing no more than ten centimetres above his head, forming a shallow ellipse, or crescent. Whoever was responsible was obviously an expert and the intention, apparently, was not to kill, but to make a point.

The police officer, who had spun round with commendable speed and
self-control
to pull the judge forward and down, drew his sidearm and slithered forward, waiting for a target to present itself. At the same time, the official driver got on his car radio and called for backup.

Two carloads of Carabinieri were on the scene within minutes, closely followed by an ambulance. But the incident had concluded. Whoever had fired the shots had done so from a considerable distance, using a high-powered rifle with a telescopic sight. By now there would be no trace of him. He would simply have melted into the heavy morning traffic.

Two hours later, appellate court number two of Bologna’s Palace of Justice, in the Piazza Tribunali, opened for business, Judge Carlo Minghetti presiding. A crowd had gathered outside and the public gallery was filled.

Judge Minghetti, dressed in black robes and white cravat, signalled to the clerk of the court to shut the doors.

‘This morning,’ he began, ‘an attack was made not simply against my person but against Italian justice. That attack is now being investigated by the Carabinieri and the anti-terrorist police. If the intention was to intimidate this judge, then it has failed.’

At this, everyone in the courtroom, other than the defendants and their supporters, broke into wild applause.

Minghetti brought down his gavel sharply and called for order. ‘
Silenzio
!’ he said. ‘Silence in court.’

The applause died down. Minghetti resumed. ‘The accused, here today to hear my ruling on the sentence imposed against them by a lower court, should know that the verdict I am about to deliver will not differ in any respect from the one I had intended to deliver before the incident outside my home.’

Reporters in the press box smiled and shook their heads. Two young men in the public gallery rolled their eyes. The wife of the injured drunk looked for a moment as if she was about to utter a comment, but was silenced by a glower from the bench. Once again the gavel came down hard.

Minghetti’s assertion that he had been unaffected by the shooting was not entirely accurate. Having considered the case against the accused, taking into account their claims of intimidation by investigating officers, he had decided the previous night, over a glass of grappa, to increase their sentences from seven years to eight. Now he added a further twelve months. He felt he owed it to himself and his wife as much as to the
amour propre
of civil society. And if it shocked those two bastards in the dock, and those who supported them, so much the better.

‘Be grateful,’ he told the prisoners, ‘that your case has been heard in a country where the rule of law is not influenced by the violence and intolerance which each of you represents and which will never, I trust, be tolerated in a Christian society.’

Again, the court burst into applause. This time, Minghella did not intervene.

Three hundred kilometres south, far from the clamour of events, Cardinal Bosani and Father Visco watched the evening news on Italian state television. They were relaxing in the Camerlengo’s private sitting room in the Governorate.

‘Whose idea was it that the bullet holes should form a crescent?’ Bosani wanted to know. ‘That was a nice touch.’

‘Not mine, Eminence,’ Visco replied. ‘I regret to say that it would never have occurred to me. But I trust that the incident overall met with your approval.’

Bosani patted his secretary’s hand reassuringly. ‘You did well, Cesare. The righteous anger of a Christian people was on display in that court today. Minghetti came across as an avenging angel, yet one acting within the law, guided by high Catholic principle. The cardinal electors will have taken note. It will be their duty to elect a pope whom those who praise Minghetti as a man of principle – and an officer of Opus Dei – can equally well respect.’