TABLE OF CONTENTS
Guest Editor’s Introduction
The studies brought together in this issue mark a significant turning point in scholarship on the final days of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. They integrate into a single analytical framework documentary sources of different kinds, including diplomatic, administrative, military and notarial records, which are reassembled and restored to their historical context and examined in relation to one another. The picture that emerges differs markedly from the long-established narrative, which for centuries has oscillated between biographical simplification and romantic myth-making.
The starting point of this enquiry is the annotated critical edition, prepared by Carla Rossi, of the letter sent on 29 July 1610 by the Apostolic Nuncio in Naples, Deodato Gentile, to the Papal Secretariat of State. Although the document has long been known, it has never previously been subjected to rigorous philological and palaeographical analysis. As the earliest contemporary testimony concerning the circumstances of the painter’s death, it allows for a reassessment of the text’s evidentiary status, making it possible to correct imprecise readings and to distinguish clearly between facts, information reported indirectly and statements formulated with deliberate caution.
From this reappraisal emerges a first substantial novelty: the nuncio’s letter is not a summary account, but a complex document drafted within a specific political and administrative context, presupposing local expertise, official procedures and an institutional reconstruction of events. When correctly interpreted, the text yields a coherent sequence of facts, in which the episode of the restato pregione no longer appears as a marginal incident, but as a decisive junction in the chain of events that led to Caravaggio’s death.
A second, highly significant novelty lies in the examination of the documentation relating to the Fortress of Palo, including the identification of the captain mentioned by the nuncio. This makes it possible to situate the painter’s arrest within a clearly defined network of responsibilities, linked to the military administration of the territory and to the mechanisms of control governing movement along the Tyrrhenian coast. This evidence requires a reassessment not only of the dynamics of the arrest itself, but also of its immediate consequences, in terms of timing, physical condition and the painter’s actual capacity for movement in the days that followed.
The issue then introduces a completely renewed reconstruction of the painter’s final movements, achieved through cross-referencing with documented itineraries of members of the Colonna family. The maritime journey undertaken on 3 July by Marzio Colonna from Naples to Gaeta, on the occasion of the delivery of the Order of the Golden Fleece, and the overland journey begun on 13 July by the young Constable Marcantonio IV Colonna from Bracciano to Florence, are not incidental data. Their analysis allows Caravaggio to be placed within an active but not all-powerful network of protection, articulated yet vulnerable, characterised by timing constraints, imperfect coordination and evident points of fragility.
In this way, the now stereotyped image of a solitary and chaotic flight is definitively superseded. On the contrary, the studies show that Merisi was expected to move within a system of complex relationships involving aristocratic families, military authorities and local officials. It is precisely the malfunctioning of this system – rather than a vague notion of adverse fate – that emerges as the key factor in the final sequence of events.
A fundamental contribution to the understanding of the context is provided by L. Fusini’s reconstruction of the territorial and military configuration of Porto Ercole at the beginning of the seventeenth century. The historical, cartographic and topographical analysis demonstrates that the fortress, an integral part of the Presidios of Tuscany, was a rigorously controlled space, both by land and by sea. Every point of access was regulated, monitored and recorded. This often neglected or overlooked fact renders untenable any reconstruction that presupposes free movement, casual entry or unobserved presence.
The picture is further enriched by an investigation addressing the immediate reception of the painter’s death. The fundamental discovery by V. Minniti of the document recording the purchase, at the end of August, of crespone – the black mourning cloth – by the Marchesa of Caravaggio, alongside previously known attestations of the purchase of funerary cloths, unequivocally confirms the formal elaboration of mourning for Merisi.
Far from encouraging new speculation, these data make it possible to grasp the complexity of the informational moment, in a summer marked by health emergencies, military controls and political tensions. Caravaggio’s death thus emerges at the intersection of structural and contingent factors, which this issue reconstructs with methodological rigour and precision.
The most significant novelty of this work lies not only in the discovery of new documents, but in the method itself: reading documents in their context, reconstructing the networks within which individuals moved, and restoring to events their true historical density. Only in this way is it possible to approach, without myth-making or reductive simplification, the historical truth of the final days of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio.
A. Cortese